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Try to imagine reading novelist Jonathan Dee’s New York Times Magazine essay — on Christians who develop video games — before last November’s presidential election. Dee is an elegant writer, but his topic has a Parachuting Into Red State America flavor, especially because he misses some basic connections.
The New York Times follows up on The Stranger‘s story about the Rev. Ken Hutcherson, the pastor who believes his pressure made Microsoft back away from its support of a gay-rights bill before Washington’s legislature.
Kathy McCabe of The Boston Globe reported this week that the TV Land cable network wants to honor Elizabeth Montgomery’s Bewitched character, Samantha Stephens, with a statue in Salem, Mass.
It’s always a pleasure to see an independent weekly breaking news of national importance, which The Stranger (Seattle) is doing in a story involving Microsoft, an African American megachurch pastor and a proposed gay-rights bill in the state legislature.
Ernesto Cardenal’s time in the media spotlight was brief but iconic. The bearded poet of the Sandinista revolution removed his beret and attempted to kneel when greeting Pope John Paul II in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1983. John Paul not only stopped Cardenal from kneeling but also delivered a finger-wagging scolding about the priest’s volunteering his talent for verse to the Sandinista cause.
I know this may sound too crazy to be true, ladies and gentlemen, but some university professors had their doubts about the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Try to wrap your head around this: Some adult Roman Catholics who had earned degrees and were paid to teach young people held on to the quaint notions that moral and theological truth flow from a transcendent source; that sex outside of marriage is a moral wrong and will harm people spiritually and, often, physically; that shouting down your professor is boorish and anti-democratic; and that, while the church favors democracy in secular governments, the church’s dogmas are not subject to a popular vote.
Diane Knippers was a friend of this blog, in that I worked with her (and other conservative Episcopalians) during the Lambeth Conference of 1998 and the Episcopal Church’s General Conventions of 1994, 1997 and 2003. I was not so close to Diane as to be overwhelmed by grief as she is buried today, but I feel keen sorrow for her husband, Ed.
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