{"id":5835,"date":"2005-07-04T09:05:56","date_gmt":"2005-07-04T09:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/cant-we-all-get-along.html"},"modified":"2005-07-04T09:05:56","modified_gmt":"2005-07-04T09:05:56","slug":"cant-we-all-get-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/cant-we-all-get-along.html","title":{"rendered":"Can’t We All Get Along?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much commentary over the past few days about Noah Feldman’s NYTimes Magazine article about Church and State<\/a>, including MIrror of Justice<\/a>, naturally.<\/p>\n

A rather different comment is found at The Revealer<\/a>, where the Times<\/em> is roundly mocked for deciding that this new book on religion is worth excerpting, when the Times<\/em> would never, in a million years, think about excerpting a religion-themed book that people were actually reading<\/em>. (Defense of the Times<\/em>: Fourth of July weekend, thinking about Who We Are as a Nation and all that. Fits the moment.)<\/p>\n

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The Times Magazine<\/em> isn’t normally in the business of excerpting books about religion. Karen Armstrong has never been deemed newsworthy, and neither has Richard John Neuhaus. Atheist Sam Harris’ bestselling The End of Faith <\/em>was surely too controversial, as was Rod Parsley’s bestselling battlecry for theocracy, Silent No More<\/em>. How about the wildly popular, quirky Christianity of Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies<\/em>? Nope. Or hell, if really want to know what’s going on, what about an excerpt from The Purpose-Driven Life<\/em>? No way. Each of these authors, and many others, have done more to shape the debate on religious life in America than Feldman can ever hope to. <\/p>\n

So why Feldman? Because his sober, reasonable voice, calibrated to a kind of educated, middle class populism, sounds like the Times<\/em>, and the Times<\/em> tends to report most on those who sound like the Times<\/em>. That he’s a smart man who has devoted time and brainpower to these questions — just like Neuhaus, or Harris, or Parsley — is probably not as relevant as tone. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Much commentary over the past few days about Noah Feldman’s NYTimes Magazine article about Church and State, including MIrror of Justice, naturally. A rather different comment is found at The Revealer, where the Times is roundly mocked for deciding that this new book on religion is worth excerpting, when the Times would never, in 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-5835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCan't We All Get Along? - 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\/cant-we-all-get-along.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can't We All Get Along? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Much commentary over the past few days about Noah Feldman’s NYTimes Magazine article about Church and State, including MIrror of Justice, naturally. 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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\/5835","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=5835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}