{"id":5072,"date":"2005-07-21T09:22:05","date_gmt":"2005-07-21T09:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/first-off.html"},"modified":"2005-07-21T09:22:05","modified_gmt":"2005-07-21T09:22:05","slug":"first-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/first-off.html","title":{"rendered":"First off…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone wrote me earlier this week and asked how many of readers were lawyers.<\/p>\n

Heh.<\/p>\n

As long-time readers know, that’s a running joke around here. I’m always wondering if some of these voluminous legal-related comments threads are billable hours. My explanation is that lawyers are generally smart, verbal people who are at their desks a lot, with the computers running. Because of their facilitiy with language, they can dash off a couple-hundred word closely reasoned comment in three minutes because, well, that’s their job. <\/p>\n

Maybe if Mirror of Justice had comments, they’d have someplace else to go..<\/a> (not that I want them to!) By the way, MOJ has many good entries today about Roberts and rule of law issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone wrote me earlier this week and asked how many of readers were lawyers. Heh. As long-time readers know, that’s a running joke around here. I’m always wondering if some of these voluminous legal-related comments threads are billable hours. My explanation is that lawyers are generally smart, verbal people who are at their desks a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nFirst off... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/first-off.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"First off... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Someone wrote me earlier this week and asked how many of readers were lawyers. Heh. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}