Don’t call it a comeback … But after a month-long sabbatical, during which I completed my first semester of law school, I am, indeed, back.
Not Jewish, but what?
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God and man at the box office
NEWSFLASH: Sometimes movies deal with religion and, sometimes, lots and lots of Americans buy tickets to see them.
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Search: 'Obama' and 'baby Jesus'
I know that I do, especially when I am trying to read about a subject that (a) the mainstream press doesn’t care that much about and (b) hot-headed partisans in the media care too much about. Thus, you get these short incomplete reports about subjects that “aren’t really news,” only that to some people the events are symbolic and, thus, transcend news (so they tend to scream about them at advocacy sites online).
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Nightmare on Capitol Hill
Despite polls showing a majority of Americans do not support the current legislative proposals being voted on in Congress, the Senate took us one step closer to passage this weekend. One of the interesting subplots to this unfolding national drama is the role that abortion has played in shaping the bills. Over on the House side, Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., managed to insert language prohibiting taxpayer funding of abortion under the proposed plan — either directly or through subsidies of the planned exchange.
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NYTimes: 'Oops!' on orphanages?
After publishing a one-sided A1 attack on African orphanages on December 6, The New York Times has now partly corrected its reporting with a shorter A14 story on December 17 that says orphanages may not be so bad after all.
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'60 Minutes' visits a persecuted patriarch
There is much to praised in the “60 Minutes” profile of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and his tiny, yet historically significant, flock of persecuted Orthodox Christians in Istanbul. It’s worth watching, if only for the remarkable videos taken at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mt. Sinai in Egypt and the remarkable city of churches and monastic cells carved into the mountain cliffs in Cappadocia (video link here) in Eastern Turkey.
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Memory eternal: The death of Job
The first time I saw Archbishop Job of the Orthodox Church in America, he was singing the simple, yet haunting, hymn that the Orthodox sing during funerals — Memory Eternal.
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Is yoga religious?
At the beginning of November, Missouri began a sales tax on yoga studios. The only state in the nation to do so, the move is controversial because many folks in the Show Me State’s yoga community believe yoga is not just exercise but, rather, a spiritual practice.
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On the banks of the Yamuna
The Washington Post foreign service — which thankfully still exists –Â sent out this story on Thursday: “New Delhi’s filth continues to choke once-sacred Yamuna River.” It’s a very interesting and well-timed piece in light of all the talk this week at the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen about getting better environmental controls in rapidly industrializing countries, particularly in China and India. The story does an excellent job illustrating the environmental problems and challenges in contemporary India. Can’t fault it there:
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