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Another meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops begins this week, and Neela Banerjee of The New York Times has written a concise preview of what is at stake. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, will attend this meeting, and will bring the calmest voice to to the discussion.
Susan Hogan/Albach of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a wonderful article Sunday on how a conservative congregation, Resurrection Episcopal Church of West Chicago, separated itself from the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago without rancor or threats of lawsuits.
In the Sept. 10 edition of The New Republic, Bruce Bartlett complains about the response to his pointing out that Scientologists once led the fight for replacing all income taxes with a national retail sales tax:
It’s too bad that “Contrarian” is already taken as the name of a standing column in Time, because contrarianism has been Michael Kinsley’s default setting for decades. During his years as one of the hosts of Crossfire, Kinsley regularly dismissed pro-lifers with a Frenchman’s wave by insisting that they either should advocate jailing all women who had abortions or they lacked the courage of their convictions.
Frappa Stout of The Washington Times wrote a tasty feature story about Burning Man this year, concentrating on the wide variety of believers she found there.
“Hitchens Takes on Mother Teresa,” Newsweek‘s website proclaims this week, which is about as fresh a bulletin as Saturday Night Live‘s standing gag of “Generalissimo Francisco Franco Is Still Dead.” That Newsweek would invite Hitchens to write an online essay is no great surprise. Even when Hitchens’ purpose is to whistle a happy tune over Mother Teresa’s grave, he does it with a certain flair. Here is a crucial point in his argument:
I’ve given up trying to keep track of Entertainment Weekly‘s many annual lists. EW may be the most list-happy publication in pop culture, although it’s not as ambitious as Rolling Stone. For sheer pomposity, it’s hard to beat “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
“The Iconoclasts,” Jason Zengerle’s New Republic report on evangelicals who have become Eastern Orthodox, is a largely commendable effort to let a few of these converts speak for themselves, but it presents an overly political picture of evangelicalism.
It’s easy to treat Mother Teresa as a plaster saint, a symbol of unattainable holiness. Contrary to the example of Teresa’s life, some pampered souls (speaking for myself, at least) turn her into an escape clause from Jesus’ call to die to ourselves: “I’ll never be another Mother Teresa, so I’ll just stay where I am, thanks.” Teresa’s posture and countenance suggested a soul deeply at peace with God, and thus better able to do heroic works of compassion.
