My latest B&C blog:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030505.html
April news in review, plus a clip about autonomy in television writing and quips from New Yorker cartoons. And a roundup of stories on SARS media coverage, poetry, the Middle East, and disappearing African apes.

Trimmed from my news roundup...

What a month for governmental pride and corruption. Chicago's Mayor Daley had city crews destroy the lakefront Meigs Field during the night to avoid a political battle. Four Miami cops were convicted of planting a gun on a homeless man. They could have been helping the Coast Guard, which packed 1.7 tons of cocaine into a speedboat after making 13 arrests off the Colombian coasts (that's right, just a few more raids now and we'll have this drug problem licked...)

Religion provided some unpredictable stories in a month in which President Bush's faith-based initiative was derailed. Retired flower shop owner George Kelley's mission to give people 10 bucks in exchange for memorizing the ten commandments was suspended last month, "until the Lord provides additional money." (And still you have to think that waiting for God to drop ten dollar bills from the sky is more fiscally reasonable than believing tax cuts will spur the economy.) An atheist won the right to pray at city council meetings in Murray, Utah. (I'm no atheist--see below--but I love how this flies in the face of people who believe God is wearing an American flag T-shirt.)

And it doesn't matter if you're atheist or devout, the most reliable indicator of whether you'll have a happy marriage, a study found last month, is ... whether you are a happy person going into it.

Finally, Tom Dennin, former voice of Notre Dame football who appeared as himself in Rudy, died last month. I just watched Rudy a week or two ago and, not knowing who it was, was struck by how acutely the announcer seemed to be focused on the field, rather than letting on to being a performer being filmed, as most announcers in movies do.

- My B&C blog archive