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Time‘s headline of “Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess” does an injustice to David Van Biema’s brief and informative update on prosperity theology’s march through the contemporary church.
In reviewing Bill Maher’s new film, Religulous, Stephen Holden of The New York Times has achieved an unusual thing: A written reflection that is even less informed than the film it discusses.
Actor Paul Newman did not need steady film roles to stay in the spotlight. Choose your favorite Newman: unpretentious neighbor in Westport, Conn.; octogenarian race-car driver; entrepreneur and philanthropist; political activist and financial supporter of The Nation. One chapter has proven more difficult to flesh out: When and why did he become interested in Unitarian Universalism, and what did it mean to him?
I’m back in this forum, at the request of tmatt, just long enough to kick off a retrospective celebration of GetReligion’s fourth anniversary. Terry has asked us all to list the five favorite posts we’ve written in this site’s history, so cue John Coltrane.
The winter issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review features an essay by blogger RJ Eskow (a regular at The Huffington Post) about the challenge of balancing blog-inspired activism with Buddhist disciplines. Both the promise and the limits of Eskow’s vision appear in his lede:
I’ll say this for Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury: He communicates directly and accessibly when speaking with broadcast journalists. Indeed, people who care deeply about the conflicts of the Anglican Communion might wish that Williams would grant a monthly one-hour interview to BBC Radio 5′s Simon Mayo.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s cover story on what the magazine calls “A New American Holy War” reads less like a news report than a sometimes exasperated prep-school instructor’s departmental memo about a pair of bickering students named Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. A quick aside about Newsweek‘s headline: Calling a lively religious debate in primary season “A New American Holy War” is like referring to door-to-door evangelism — whether by Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Southern Baptists — as “Spiritual Waterboarding.”
Our founder tmatt is too busy today to do an end-zone backflip, so I will comment on the news of Mitt Romney’s impending speech about his faith.
In a cover story for the Dec. 3 Time, Jeffrey Kluger quickly jumps into a collective voice, oddly crediting humanity as a whole for the most noble behavior while also blaming it for the worst horrors. As early as the second paragraph, he’s revealing a tone of scientism that weaves throughout the piece:
