Alan Jacobs

Pope Francis has done a big, big thing: he has made it dramatically easier for women who have had abortions to be reconciled to the Church. But take a look at this NBC News headline: “Pope Francis: Priests Can Forgive Abortion If Women Are ‘Contrite’" — as though before this papal statement contrite women could not have received forgiveness!

The distinction between making forgiveness — more accurately, reconciliation and restoration to Communion, but even I won’t be a stickler for that — easier and making it possible is an important one and easy to grasp, but a reputable religion journalist insisted to me on Twitter this morning that such headlines are perfectly accurate and that my questioning them shows my ignorance of Catholic doctrine.

Apparently the BBC doesn’t agree with him, because the headline and article they posted earlier —

Pope Francis temporarily allows forgiveness for women who have had abortions http://t.co/vYWpxK4Tqe pic.twitter.com/fPHis5rJHM

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) September 1, 2015

— has been revised: “Pope on abortion: Francis relaxes forgiveness rules." Which is a big improvement in accuracy, though at least one, ahem, reputable religion journalist will think it wholly unnecessary.

Why defend the indefensible? The NBC and the original BBC headlines are plainly and simply wrong, and the stories accompanying them are factually wobbly at their best and in several places incorrect. So why say otherwise? An ideological axe to grind? Misplaced professional solidarity?

Who knows? What matters is that religion reporting in the MSM continues to be astonishingly poor, and that won’t be fixed if people in the business who know better won’t be truthful about the problem.

As a senior at Wheaton, Craven struggled with the neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome. For most of the year he was paralyzed from the chest down, unable to attend classes. "I remember feeling terribly down," he said in the 1997 Tribune interview. "The illness set back my graduation by nearly a year, but the support I received from students and faculty members through that period was so moving to me. People  I didn't know came to visit, to pray for my recovery. To me, their thoughts and prayers represented the best side of Christianity. I'll never forget that side of Wheaton College. Never."

— Wes Craven appreciation - Chicago Tribune

He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best — there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.

— Willliam Hamilton. I quote this because Oliver Sacks has died.

One piece of evidence that preregistration can act as a strong corrective comes from clinicaltrials.gov, a registry of publicly and privately funded clinical studies involving human subjects. Before 2000, when the site was established, 57 percent of large clinical trials funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute showed a significant benefit of drugs or other intervention, according to a recent analysis published in the journal PLOS One. After the registry was put in place, only 2 percent of such trials found a clear benefit.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1920”]Thai people protesting a military takeover of their government borrow a gesture from The Hunger Games

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I woke up in the middle of the night last night with an inexplicable but overwhelming craving for a food that I haven’t eaten in nearly 25 years. Suya: marinated, highly spiced slices of beef cooked over a wood or charcoal fire and served with sliced onions and, when I had it, anyway, plum tomatoes. (It turns out, comically enough, that the Wikipedia page for suya links to an article I published in 1992.) It’s a Nigerian treat, especially favored by the Hausa people in the north of the country, but I first tasted it in the city of Ilorin in the heart of Yorubaland.

It was early evening, and the suya vendor had set up his cart at the side of a road on which the chief government building of Kwara state stood facing the sharia court building, in a kind of standoff. I don’t know that I’ve ever smelled anything more mouth-watering than the aromas wafting from that cart, and though I haven’t thought about the experience in years, probably, when I woke up last night everything about that evening came back to me with an uncanny clarity — spreading the suya on its bed of newspaper out on the hood of a minivan, eating and talking quietly with my friends as others drifted to and from the cart … how wonderful that was. So many moments in life get lost in the jumble of everyday busyness, it’s a gift when something small and sweet makes a gentle return to memory, to presence.

In the days after my grandmother’s graveside funeral, I returned to a lecture given in Andover Chapel at Harvard University in 1955 by the then-famous Swiss New Testament scholar Oscar Cullmann. Eventually published as a small book titled The Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, Cullmann’s lecture opens by contrasting the deaths of Socrates and Jesus. “Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure,” Cullmann notes. “The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror.”

The reason for Socrates’s serenity in the face of death, Cullmann proposes, is the Greek belief in the immortality of the soul. Since death frees the soul from the body, then death can be welcomed as a friend. We can attain a state of “acceptance,” as some counselors tell us, borrowing from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous typology of the multiple stages of dying. Such, apparently, was Socrates’s experience.

In sharp distinction from this portrait, for Cullmann, lies the stark horror of Jesus’ death. “In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day.” And yet the contrast between these two figures’ responses could not be greater. Whereas Socrates maintains his equilibrium, Jesus “trembles” and becomes distressed (Mark 14:33). “Jesus is so thoroughly human that He shares the natural fear of death,” says Cullmann. “Death for Him is not something divine: it is something dreadful.” It leads Jesus to offer up “loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7). He utters the “cry of dereliction” from the cross (Mark 15:34), protesting death’s most pitiless feature — its insistence that each person must endure it alone, with no prospect of a reprieve or rescue. “Death in itself is not beautiful, not even the death of Jesus,” Cullmann concludes. We might well say about the four Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s final hours what Rowan Williams once said in a slightly different context: these stories “are about difficulty, unexpected outcomes, silences, errors, about what is not readily accessible or readily understood.” That’s what death means, even for the Lord himself.

— Wesley Hill

We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.

— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

But this is the nature of modern hacks. An inscrutable data dump draws in helpful technologists who want everyone to have access to information, not just sophisticated computer users. Their tools, in turn, attract rubberneckers who can’t help but peek. In the future, other big hacks will almost certainly follow the same pattern. First comes the leak. Then, the tools to parse it. Then, the panic.

— Kashmir Hill

It seems that books—with their combination of physicality and otherness, quietness and intellectual confrontation—present the best way for us to combat the toxic echo chambers of social media. They pull us out, give us a place of escape, confront our intellectual and spiritual weaknesses, then send us back into the online community better than when we stepped out of it.