I know that this item has already been bouncing around the blogosphere, but somehow I feel that I should be the one to take note here of New York Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane's final column, with the following rather bald judgment on Timesgeist:
When Brisbane took up his invitation
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Did anyone notice? Another one of the seven instances supposedly demonstrating that our religious freedom is endangered has just bit the dust. Last week a federal judge permanently enjoined New York City officials from barring worship services in public schools. Religious groups, Judge
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My friend Kenneth Woodward, former religion writer at Newsweek, has sent me a brief notice that I am happy to pass on. It reflects Ken's love of exposing the secular blinders at my former employer, The New York Times. I have a different view of the matter, especially in this instance, but
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Politico reports that Health and Human Services has a new deputy assistant secretary for public affairs. He is Tait Sye, media director for Planned Parenthood for the last four and a half years. At HHS, according to Politico, he will handle communications for the public health portfolio--the
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The New Republic once amused readers, or at least this reader, by running the contradictory headlines that appeared over different newspapers' reports on the same events.
The practice deserves revival. Here's today's nominee:
Solid Results At 2 Banks Bode Well For Industry
By Nelson D.
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For the umpteenth straight year, the New York Times's massive "Holiday Books" edition of the Sunday Book Review gives no attention to books about religion. This makes perfect sense. Isn't the "Holiday Books" edition a very commercial effort oriented toward gift-giving? And
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Now that wasn't so bad, was it?
Or was it?
The choir processed in with the pastor and our fine troupe of altar servers. The congregation was a bit sparse, which I attribute to Thanksgiving weekend and not the new translation. We did pretty well by Bach and "Wake, O wake, and sleep no
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Three additional thoughts in what is already a rich, although very depressing, discussion about the new English translation of the Roman missal.
First, I have read, very carefully, the many examples quoted in MWO'Reilly's post below, of prayers from the new translation. I have declaimed them
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I was the moderator for the evening session of “Learning to Listen: Voices of Sexual Diversity and the Catholic Church,” the first of the series of “More Than a Monologue” events discussed below. I had nothing to do with planning or organizing this conference at Fordham or the coming
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Yesterday a friend and I exchanged emails on the topic of newspapers’ use of unnamed sources and the tactic of trying to compensate for that by providing a brief (and often ridiculous) explanation for their anonymity. My friend had alerted me to one of the sillier of these formulas appearing in
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Richard Gaillardetz has delivered a noteworthy summary and synthesis of where the Catholic church in the U.S. stands today. It's worth reading here
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By and large, I try to resist commenting on this blog’s frequent references to the New York Times, burdened as I am by actual knowledge of the place, of many people who work there, and of its culture – actually I should say cultures because they vary from one department or section of the paper
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Dark. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 is “dark,” the “darkest” of the Harry Potter movies. Reviewers used the adjectives to describe but also to praise. That is not unusual. I might not have even noticed except for wondering whether certain youngsters in my circle would be
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When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected pope, I read Salt of the Earth, one of the previous volumes of interviews with Peter Seewald, and was very struck by what Ratzinger, circa 1996, had to say about contraception. You can find it on pp. 200-203 of the English-language edition published by Ignatius
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In this season of distributing Nobel Prizes, I wish one could go to Bernard D. Sadow, truly one of humanity’s great benefactors. For years, as I quickly roll my suitcase the length of airport concourses, I have been quietly blessing the man who thought of equipping it with wheels.
Mr. Sadow, I
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When it came to assuring a favorable reception of the recent Vatican document on church law governing clerical sex abuse, the inclusion of a provision listing forbidden ordinations of women among “grievous crimes” was a stroke of genius.
Keep that person at work, and we can look forward to
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In A People Adrift, I warned that the Catholic church in the U.S. faced "thoroughgoing transformation or irreversible decline." Yes, the gates of hell will not prevail but that did not guarantee the church's flourishing or even existence in any given time or place.
In the latest
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"How did the Roman Catholic Church maintain its grip on European hearts and minds for so long? Judging by this exhibition, the answer seems to be by artfully managing the fear, ignorance and superstition of the faithful. The rise of humanism from the Renaissance on came as an
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James Davison Hunter, the University of Virginia social theorist known for his books on the culture wars, has written a new book, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford). It questions, to put it mildly, the ways that many
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The biggest story about health care this morning appears in the business pages, not the political section, of the New York Times. It is headlined “A Rising Hospital Threat: Infections Unfazed by Antibiotics Become More Common.” A new category of bacteria is “already killing tens of
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Perhaps Paul Baumann is too hard on many of those commenting on Benedict’s Freising remarks. Like me, most probably didn’t read the full text but were simply touched by the image of the cathedral spires and what Benedict, who really has a gift for this kind of preaching, did with it. The point
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Out with the old, in with the new. Enough about the Big Stories of 2007. Here are the big religion stories of 2008.
January: Retooling his successful Iowa campaign for New Hampshire, former Baptist pastor Michael Huckabee expresses previously unnoticed interest in becoming a
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I followed the earlier discussion of hiring Catholics at Notre Dame with great interest. Now John McGreevy has shed further light on the issue in Commonweal and asked for reactions here.
My own thoughts on “hiring for mission” in Catholic higher education are spelled out at
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The Economist recently published an interesting article on church and state in Italy. It probably reflects the traditionally secular outlook of the Economist. Note the assumption that if Italian Catholics take a position agreeing with the bishops they
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What morals will be drawn from Rupert Murdoch’s last-minute decision to scrap the shameless O. J. Simpson book and television interview that his News Corporation’s subsidiaries were about to peddle to the public.
Yes, it does sound odd to include the words “Murdoch” and “morals”
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