An interesting reflection: (c/o ALDaily)

Of all the charges of bias leveled against the news media (including anti-Catholic bias), I think class bias may be the one most worth taking seriously. Blue-collar workers, poor people living in neighborhoods journalists are gentrifying and political candidates from the wrong side of town are among the many affected by this bias. Since there is no Al Sharpton (or Bill Donohue) to organize the disaffected against this bias, it tends to go unnoticed.

But I don’t think it was a factor in the way Sarah Palin was covered. The initial reaction to her “hockey mom” persona was positive. Her candidacy failed when she couldn’t demonstrate to the public that she was qualified for the vice-presidency. It’s not the news media’s fault.

A smart analysis if it was class bias that made people not like Palin:

Of all the charges of bias leveled against the news media (including anti-Catholic bias), I think class bias may be the one most worth taking seriously. Blue-collar workers, poor people living in neighborhoods journalists are gentrifying and political candidates from the wrong side of town are among the many affected by this bias. Since there is no Al Sharpton (or Bill Donohue) to organize the disaffected against this bias, it tends to go unnoticed.

But I don’t think it was a factor in the way Sarah Palin was covered. The initial reaction to her “hockey mom” persona was positive. Her candidacy failed when she couldn’t demonstrate to the public that she was qualified for the vice-presidency. It’s not the news media’s fault.

This is a good article that shows the debate between those who want to save nature for its own sake and those who just think it’s a dumb idea for humans to mess up the planet where they live.  The author (Johann Hari) traces the tension back to the Romantics v. Enlightenment, and I think you can see a similar tension in Catholic environmental work (I wrote about this for America).

American environmentalism was midwifed into the world by a romantic, Henry David Thoreau. His decision to live for two years, two months, and two days alone in the woods—to hear the earth—has become part of American mythology. He scorned the supposed inauthenticity of the city and its technologies: Appalled, he said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. This tendency ripples on through the following centuries of environmentalism as an ache and a lodestar. You don’t have to spend long among the lead-belching factory-cities of China—or on a snarled-up freeway in Los Angeles—to feel the tug of these back-to-the-trees tropes.

McKibben includes a close-to-parody piece by Alice Walker taking this tendency to its logical extreme. As part of an “intense dialogue” with them, she “feels” the trees angrily shout: “That we are alive and have feelings means nothing to you!” The trees tell her Americans should return to being a hunter-gatherer society: “The new way to exist on the Earth may well be the ancient way of the steadfast lovers of this particular land,” they mutter through their leaves.

I am both impressed and convinced you will soon die, or at least get in an accident, or at the very least run over a certainly cute and defenseless animal, you evil person.   This is why people want to ban cell phones in cars, period:

No state has completely banned cell-phone use while driving, though 23 have passed some form of restriction, according to John Ulczycki, the NSC’s executive director of communications and public affairs. The group believes it will take years to reach its goal, but it has gone through similar efforts. The NSC has spent years pushing for stronger laws on seatbelt use and drunken driving, he said.

The group said cell phone use contributes to 6 percent of all crashes, referring to a study by the Harvard Center of Risk Analysis. That represents 636,000 crashes, 12,000 serious injuries and 2,600 deaths each year, plus a financial cost of $43 billion, the NSC said, citing the Harvard study.

A priest son and a priest dad.  Anglican converts make for good copy!

Fr Dominic Cosslett, who has begun work as a curate at St George’s Church in Worcester, joins his father Ron Cosslett, 70, in the ministry.

Although the tradition of sons following their fathers into the ministry is well established in protestant denominations, the Catholic requirement for priests to be celibate rendered it impossible for centuries.

But a special dispensation from the Vatican allowing former Anglican clergy to continue to minister after defecting to Catholicism has allowed hundreds of married priests to serve within the church for the first time since the 12th Century.

Although 36-year-old Fr Cosslett junior - himself a former Anglican - is celibate, his father, who is Priest-in-Charge at St Joseph’s, Darlaston in the West Midlands, remains married to his wife Kath.

Pinker is darned smart, and for a big-deal scientist, a really good writer.  I think he’s taken Gould’s spot as the most eloquent scientist in America.  Anyways, a very smart, nuanced reflection about genes and identity:

A firsthand familiarity with the code of life is bound to confront us with the emotional, moral and political baggage associated with the idea of our essential nature. People have long been familiar with tests for heritable diseases, and the use of genetics to trace ancestry — the new “Roots” — is becoming familiar as well. But we are only beginning to recognize that our genome also contains information about our temperaments and abilities. Affordable genotyping may offer new kinds of answers to the question “Who am I?” — to ruminations about our ancestry, our vulnerabilities, our character and our choices in life.

Not just abortion folks.  It was used regarding slavery and now it’s being considered for drug cartels.  That’s a big public embarassment to some drug dealers who are sometimes prominent members of their Churches (though a lot–most–would not care).  It’s an interesting question, and I wonder how many liberals who would have a problem with Eucharist politics re: abortion would not have a problem with this:

Decrying the violence that Mexicans are enduring, the Vatican has suggested excommunication as a possible punishment for drug traffickers whose war with the government has led to the deaths of thousands of people in the last year.

But the Roman Catholic Church’s severest form of rebuke would probably have little effect on traffickers and killers who lack a religious conscience, the Vatican’s No. 2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, acknowledged.

This article is actually pretty fair, I think.  Usually discussions of conservative churches, particularly if they’re at all similar to evangelicals, tend to be stereotypical, but I don’t think members of this parish would have too much problem with the article.  Obviously, I disagree with a lot of the theology, and I completely reject the gendering of religion (or the insistence that a “weak” Christanity is a feminine Christianity).  Still, I can’t deny that I’m glad to see megachurches getting some sort of rigor and not being afraid of culture.  I just wish it was a very different kind of rigor.  Read the article here:

At a time when the once-vaunted unity of the religious right has eroded and the mainstream media is proclaiming an “evangelical crackup,” Driscoll represents a movement to revamp the style and substance of evangelicalism. With his taste for vintage baseball caps and omnipresence on Facebook and iTunes, Driscoll, who is 38, is on the cutting edge of American pop culture. Yet his message seems radically unfashionable, even un-American: you are not captain of your soul or master of your fate but a depraved worm whose hard work and good deeds will get you nowhere, because God marked you for heaven or condemned you to hell before the beginning of time. Yet a significant number of young people in Seattle — and nationwide — say this is exactly what they want to hear. Calvinism has somehow become cool, and just as startling, this generally bookish creed has fused with a macho ethos.

An exciting turn:

“As a Christian, I can’t be satisfied knowing there are people living in such a condition,” says Mercer, 37, a onetime youth pastor at an evangelical church near Portland and the founder and director of a fledgling non-profit called Compassion First. “As a Christian, I’m a steward of the image of God. And every person on the face of the earth bears that image. I became responsible for Eka the day I met her.”

Mercer, as he befriends sex slaves such as Eka and works to establish a rehabilitation and education network for them, is showing what evangelical Christianity increasingly looks like in the new century, and in the new paradigm.

If you’re a Southeast Asian brothel keeper or an American retailer benefiting from slave labor — and, yes, slavery flourishes today in both forms — this face of Christianity is most inconvenient. These are the people who refuse to look away and keep their mouths shut.

Good News:

These appointments, therefore, mark a shift in political attitudes towards scientific advice. When he announced his selections Mr Obama said that promoting science is not just about providing resources (though he has promised to double the budget for basic science research over the next decade), but also about promoting free inquiry and listening to what scientists have to say, “especially when it is inconvenient”. Remarks such as this are causing excitement among researchers, particularly those who have had difficulty making their voices heard over the past few years.