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Year after year, the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has — as our resident liturgical Lutheran — played the role of liturgical enforcer here at GetReligion. This is not a small role, since so many of the traditional holidays in various faiths (can you say Chanukah? Or Hanukkah?) have been turned into secular festivals or twisted into forms that have almost nothing to do with their historic meanings.
We joke about the overuse of “fundamentalist” to describe people that reporters don’t like, but I think we need a special award for whatever happened in this Associated Press report filed from Paris:
I’m munching on a jack-o-lantern-shaped Butterfinger as I type this, so I suppose I’m not one of those “conservative and fundamentalist Christians” who think “Halloween is a celebration of evil and has no place in the life of a believer.”
As a woman takes the helm at The New York Times for the first time this fall, many will be watching whether Jill Abramson takes the paper in a new direction editorially. The New Yorker‘s profile of Abramson has been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a while, and it was worth a weekend read to consider future issues the new executive editor will face.
Yesterday I mentioned that I had been thinking about how we cover stories about suspected terrorism. A couple of weeks ago, a reader submitted a story about a disrupted flight that seemed to have a bit of a ghost. I thought I’d wait for more details to come out and revisit it. Here’s the original story from the Amarillo Globe-News:
The Baltimore Sun — the newspaper that lands in my yard — has done another story related to the vocations crisis in the modern Catholic Church. Regular GetReligion readers know what that means.
I was writing a post about how we cover suspected or actual terrorism (which I’ll save for tomorrow) when word came that a gunman fired shots at the United States Embassy in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. As snippets of news came out about this on Twitter, I saw a picture of the gunman (seen here) and it appeared, because the picture wasn’t of great quality, that the man was wearing shorts. That seemed odd attire for a gunman in October. Sarah Schlesinger, a research fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute, explained:
That was the stylish headline this week as the Old Gray Lady devoted 1,800 words to cool Mormons â as opposed to the regular, stuffy kind.
Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is up to his old tricks and has angered the European Council of Rabbis with his remarks about the Jews’ role in the crucifixion of Jesus. The bishop believes Jews are Christ-killers — and his latest words on the subject come as Pope Benedict XVI begins an inter-faith summit in Assisi. Among his many attributes, I must say Bishop Williamson has great timing.
