Today’s Reading List – May 1, 2007
ON THE HEELS of "The Mormons," this ought to be interesting.
…a plan by Public Broadcasting Service stations to begin showing later this week a three-part television documentary series on atheism, calling it "demagogic and propagandistic."
"This series is about the disappearance of something: religious faith," British producer and narrator Jonathan Miller says at the start of "A Brief History of Disbelief," which was originally shown by the BBC in 2005. "It's the story of what is often referred to as atheism, the history of the growing conviction that God doesn't exist."
Maybe it will help to demonstrate how much creedal Christians and Mormons have in common — it is far more than they have in difference.
Lowell interjects: I hate to say it, but watching the first episode of "The Mormons" made watching paint dry sound fun. Additional thoughts here.
I have not read Madeleine Albright's latest book, but I have heard her interviewed on it. I was less than enthusiastic. But this review of it says something rather enlightening. It concludes:
And I hope her book will warn many of us Christians, in every aspect of our lives, of the sin of dogmatic intolerance.
USAToday writes about "How little we know about religion". The book it comments upon Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — And Doesn't is in my pile waiting to be read. Says the piece:
The book cites research showing that even Christians are poorly acquainted with the Bible. Familiar with Benjamin Franklin's aphorism "God helps those who help themselves"? Three-quarters of us, Prothero reports, wrongly believe it comes from the Bible. Only one-half of us can name one of the four gospels of the New Testament. (For the record, they are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.) Only a third can identify who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. (Answer: Jesus.)
It dawns on me how terribly biased it is to dismiss another religion if we know so little about our own. This means we are not really talking about religion or faith here, but just labels. I honestly thought that as a nation we had outgrown the "you're not in my group" sort of thinking. I guess not.
Best lead ever written for a Romney story:
This political season, there's been a lot of talk about Republican Presidential contender Mitt Romney's Mormon faith — very little of it by the candidate himself.
Finally, someone in an actual newspaper gets it!
The NYTimes looks at Obama and faith. They describe Barack's church's pastor, "who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons." Now that is definitely far from the mainstream of creedal Christianity. Yet this piece reads unlike almost any other MSM piece written on Romney and his religion. Having more the tone of Hugh Hewitt's book, the piece examines Obama and how his faith affects him rather than simply putting his faith on trial or endlessly asking if his faith can be accepted by "mainstream Christians." The MSM bias is so obvious.
Lowell adds: As I read the New York Times piece, I certainly was struck by the warm feel of it. It was like reading Arthur Schesinger writing about Jack or Bobby Kennedy.
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macfan1950 on 01 May 2007 at 10:53 am #
Lowell states: “I hate to say it, but watching the first episode of “The Mormons” made watching paint dry sound fun.”
From what I’ve seen so far, a better title for the series would be ‘Mormon Issues That Really Don’t Tell You Anything About The Mormons As a People’. To be fair, I only saw the last hour, but if I were to describe the that part in one word, it would be ‘unbalanced.’ After all, spending a full hour on the MM Massacre and Polygamy seems just way out of whack.
CarlH on 02 May 2007 at 3:47 pm #
Looks like someone at LDS Church headquarters is following Article VI Blog, and quoting Lowell besides.