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Brother Mattingly has implored me to keep GetReligion in mind while I am here in Columbus, Ohio, reporting on the Episcopal Church’s 75th General Convention. My report on Sunday’s election of the first woman primate in the Anglican Communion should appear sometime Monday on Christianity Today‘s website.
The Religion Newswriters Association’s ReligionLink service has posted a mostly helpful roundup about several denominations’ debates regarding homosexuality. But the roundup fumbles on a few details that are readily apparent to me as a longtime activist in the Episcopal Church’s debates:
The cover story of the May 29 Newsweek is an oddity. Much of the story is driven by the popularity of The Da Vinci Code (both as pulp fiction and as popcorn movie), although Newsweek dispenses with most of Dan Brown’s alternative reality in a handy sidebar.
Franklin Foer became the editor of The New Republic in March, and this already seems to be good news for people who seek lively and opinionated coverage of religion. Only a few weeks after publishing a lengthy cover-story attack on Richard John Neuhaus, it has now published a lengthy cover-story attack on Harold Bloom.
The Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee is trying to find a successor to Bishop Bertram Herlong, and its 14-ballot roller coaster of an election, still unresolved, shows the profound divisions within the diocese.
The media relations staff at Focus on the Family may soon have to create a form letter for requesting corrections from Newsweek (which, as tmatt noted earlier this month, published one of the funnier corrections in recent Godbeat history).
A busy time of travel prevented me from seeing “Darwin in the Dock,” Margaret Talbot’s crackling New Yorker narrative of the intelligent-design debates in the courtroom of federal judge John E. Jones III.
I’ve spent a few weeks now pondering what it is in the temperament of Lewis Lapham, the soon-retiring editor of Harper’s, that prompts him to devote the December issue’s cover to an essay celebrating “Jesus without the Miracles.”
In the Dec. 12 issue of The New Yorker, Steve Coll shows how it’s possible to write about the student years of Osama bin Laden without larding up one’s manuscript with cheap-shot adjectives. After all, when a reporter has uncovered enough troubling details, it’s best to let the details speak for themselves. Here’s what Coll turned up about a soccer and study club that met at the Al Thagher Model School in Jedda, which bin Laden graduated from in 1976:
