Douglas LeBlanc

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Let's split the difference

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William Frey, the Episcopal Church’s retired Bishop of Colorado, has often said his fellow Episcopalians can confuse Anglicanism’s celebrated via media with merely finding the synthesis of a thesis and an antithesis. As tmatt has mentioned before, Bishop Frey explains the impossibility of this approach by joking that, for some, the via media between a Christian and an atheist understanding of Jesus is “Jesus is occasionally Lord.”


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Text education

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In a mostly winsome cover story for this week’s Time, David Van Biema quotes the important players in the humble but growing movement to teach the Bible in public schools — not as a tool for proselytism but as a topic of cultural literacy. This is his key paragraph:


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Ave Maria delivers (headlines)

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Alan Cooperman was understated on Sunday in covering conflicts between Thomas Monaghan and Joseph Fessio, S.J., the founding chancellor of Monaghan’s Ave Maria University in southwestern Florida. Monaghan abruptly dismissed Fessio (a former student and longtime friend of Pope Benedict XVI) as chancellor of the school, then brought him back within 24 hours as theologian in residence.


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Andrew Sullivan's scary bedtime stories

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Like any journalist who has worked for an opinion journal, Andrew Sullivan is entitled to some favorite themes. One of his favorites for the past few years is the insidious threat of what he calls Christianism, or theoconservatism. In his 7,400-word New Republic takedown of Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11, that theme is so prevalent that it calls to mind one of those outrageously large American flags favored by car dealerships (at least in the Deep South), popping defiantly in the wind.


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Where Barack Obama kneels

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If anyone is hoping that the loud relationship between politics and personal faith is merely a freakish and temporal effect of George W. Bush’s presidency, simply observing the candidates and reporters warm up this year should dispense with that fanciful wish.


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Battle of the God covers

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In a previous post today, I referred to Time and Newsweek competing with each other for the best religion-centered cover story last week. Newsweek offered a package of articles (here’s the mainbar) about the Religious Right, while Time offered a more tightly focused debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.


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Discuss: Are discussions like ours possible?

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The editors of GetReligion have commented frequently on Jon Meacham’s work, in part because he has shown such a frequent and keen interest in religion coverage. To his credit, Meacham has kept that interest keen since becoming the editor of Newsweek. Indeed, last week offered a fine competition between Newsweek and Time for best religion-based cover story (about which more in a subsequent post).


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