Douglas LeBlanc

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Robert Novak finds peace

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Late last year I thought about blogging on a Q&A with Robert Novak in Washingtonian magazine. Now, with Novak’s death after a long battle with brain cancer, I’ve found that the reporter in that Q&A, Barbara Matusow, also deserves credit for recording one of the best quips about Novak. Matusow did this in a remarkable — and at times painfully candid — 5,000-word profile published in the June 2003 Washingtonian. She describes Novak’s baptism at St. Patrick Catholic Church in downtown Washington:


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Gingrich as anti-evangelical icon

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When a story’s headline is as ambitious as “Why Newt Gingrich Converted to Catholicism,” a reader might hope for a meaty report that addresses the question with insights from friends rather than with speculation. Amy Sullivan’s report for Time mostly does not deliver, except for a few good quotations from the convert himself and from his third wife, Callista.


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That was the decade that was

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Hats off to Robert Pigott, religious affairs correspondent of the BBC, who takes on the ambitious question of how God has fared during the first decade of the 21st century. The series title of “What Have the Noughties Done for God?” may be too precious by half, but I cannot dismiss it as being forgettable.


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Apocalyptic fun

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Josh Levin, senior editor of Slate, wrote an epic series this week on the theme “The End of America.” The series begins here, and rolls on in eight segments and about 23,000 words. That’s not counting Slate’s embedded notes and thousands more words in The Fray. Slate also offered discussions on Facebook and Twitter, so the most obsessive readers easily could have devoted an entire week to debating Levin’s reporting.


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What would Markos do?

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Andy Doyle, who became bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas in June, recently granted a substantial interview to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly (free registration required). The conversation rolled along fairly well until Smith raised the delicate question of the Episcopal Church’s decades-long discussion of human sexuality:


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Corazon Aquino and the ultimate resource

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Summing up a life as eventful as Corazon Aquino’s is a talented obituary writer’s dream. In these early hours after the death of the former president of the Philippines, I think Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle has done the finest job.


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George Tiller and a vague They

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David Barstow of The New York Times has written a 5,600-word report on the decades-long tensions between the late Dr. George Tiller and the protesters who worked to shut down his abortion clinic, Women’s Health Care Services, in Wichita, Kansas. A lone gunman murdered Tiller on Pentecost Sunday while Tiller served as an usher at Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.


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