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Good, if shallow, piece in The Washington Post this weekend about a Washington and Lee University course on apocalypticism. Reporter Susan Kenzie is present on the last day of class, which Professor Eduardo Velasquez closes out with the memorable line “Leave.”
Those, according to the always interesting religion writer Mark Tooley, are what the National Council of Churches’ Bob Edgar told Religion News Service he wants to redefine the term “moral values” to transcend. In a fun piece for The American Spectator, Tooley tries to broaden our understanding of the religious dimension of the filibuster debate. Worth a read:
I was alerted via e-mail by several people that — lo and behold — the FBI had now weighed in in the fake Koran flushing incident (previous GetReligion items here and here) in favor of claims that the flushing had, in fact, occurred.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my cold black heart for The Washington Times’ refusal to run the term gay “marriage” without the scare quotes. That’s not the editorial call I would make were I in charge (and God help us all if that happens), but there’s something about the stubbornness to concede a point by accepting the usual terms of debate that I admire.
At a humble, green-domed mosque in the heart of Baghdad, a grizzled preacher named Sheik Ahmed Yassin stood his ground. Gunmen had killed five of his followers and kidnapped two of his sons. Threats had thinned his congregation, and the worshipers who still came rushed to their cars after prayers to avoid becoming the latest victims.
From an interesting, fairly even-handed report in The Washington Post. A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would expand government-funded embryonic stem cell research. The president’s response?
There is a point at which media criticism becomes rather censorious, and I think we’ve crossed it in the Newsweek scandal. Jonah Goldberg, in his latest column for National Review Online, writes of Michael Isikoff’s motive for breaking the story, “my guess is that [he] was more motivated by a reporter’s desire to break a story than by some Left-wing anti-Americanism.” Then he gets to the argument:
Newsweek is in full retreat amid the fallout from its Qur’an shredding story. In the current issue, editor Mark Whitaker admitted that there were some problems with the sourcing and signed off with this:
