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Was I out of the country when the decision was made to turn the presidential debates into the Hour of Power? In round two, Kerry tried to offset some of the damage he was about to incur with his answer on the Silent Scream issue by saying that he was an altar boy back in the day and that that “faith” still leads him today.
Word Spy rightly honors journalist Alex Heard as the father of the word hathos, which he defined as “a mixture of hatred, disgust, embarrassment, and pathos” (The New Republic, Feb. 11, 1985).
Ruth Gledhill of The Times of London has suffered a rhetorical lashing from an academic who accused her of not understanding contemporary New Testament scholarship. The benighted Gledhill is one of those journalists who seems to believe that words have meaning, and that certain ways of changing words invariably change meaning.
On Friday the Rt. Rev. John Bryson Chane welcomed retired Senator John Danforth as celebrant and homilist during the national funeral for Ronald Reagan. In this interview with Nan Cobbey of Episcopal Life, Chane discussed the elaborate advance preparations for the funeral. Some of Chane’s fellow bishops, who have shown certain imperious tendencies in recent months, would have behaved more like this.
Christopher Johnson of Midwest Conservative Journal had great fun last week in exposing the boilerplate style in two letters by Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Many paragraphs that first appeared in a letter Griswold wrote to his fellow primates of the Anglican Communion (Aug. 19, 2003) found a new life in his letter to Alexey II, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church (Dec. 19, 2003).
