Welcome to your daily report and commentary from the intersection of Faith &
Media.

Pope Benedict speaks out against using God to justify violence. “All religions should encourage the correct use of reason and promote ethical
values to build civil coexistence,” Benedict said. “Religions can never justify
intolerance and war.” Story. Amen.

False equivalence between the right and left? Jon Stewart goes on Rachel Maddow to defend his Rally for Sanity and the notion that there’s unproductive verbal extremism on both sides of the political divide. See interview. Never have I agreed more with a guy with whom I disagree so much. Stewart’s right. We’ll never solve our problems if we’re constantly labeling policy differences, and even personal failings, as “evil.” Most people aren’t evil — but evil does exist in the world. To truly confront the truly evil we’ve got to stop defining evil down. (Hint: Support Obamacare or don’t, neither side is evil.)

A writer in Newsweek suggests that the cancellation of NBC’s Undercovers (an action-adventure series with two African-American leads) is a sign of America’s racism. Story.  See above. We need to stop defining racism down too — the better to fight real racism.

Undercovers was a brand-new show leading off a struggling network’s Wednesday-night lineup. It was up against CBS’ Survivor. The odds were against it for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with race.
BTW, in this would-be programmer’s humble opinion, NBC actually should have flipped the show with The Apprentice which has been struggling in the Thursday10:00 PM (ET) slot. There it might have found a compatible lead-in from the network’s comedy bloc. But, that’s a disagreement involving programming strategy, not racism.