It's a new week and there's already plenty to read despite the fact that not much of anything is happening today. A few suggestions with brief comment:
1) New York's profile of Tim Keller, which goes beyond the typical tough-but-fair approach most New York publications with local evangelical endeavors into almost unfettered positivity. Since Redeemer isn't news to me, I'm mostly interested in the media angle: who got New York interested in this story, who the reporter is, etc. The prose feels a lot like what a savvy Christian journalist might write about a church he respects, with some mild devil's-advocate thrown in for the required due diligence. What I'm really waiting for is a piece that digs into the Christian artist/writer/academic/church/social world in New York and sizes up its signficance. I guess if no one else writes it, maybe I'll have to.
2) Chelsea Clinton's new fiancee's father is much more of a criminal than her own. Former representative Ed Mezvisky just finished his prison sentence for a lifetime of Bernie Madoff-esque swindling. Funny the things that attract people to one another.
3) Still looking for a satisfactory position on health care reform? Try this Oct. 18 Ross Douthat column, which explains what we need to fix, why the current bill doesn't fix those things, and what might work better: radically restructuring the way we pay for everyday medical care. But thereagain we run into the fact that we need something radical, and the bill we're likely to get will not shake things up enough. At the very least, we can hope it makes the need for more fundamental reform impossible to ignore.
4) I was throwing around the idea of writing something introspective about the difficulty of coming to any firm conclusion on messy, lose-lose political issues. But Fred Kaplan, Slate's foreign policy columnist, has done it for me, in a column explaining why he has no idea what to do in Afghanistan. It's focused on this miserable conflict, and I'm sympathetic to the sentiments on that issue and much more broadly.
5) Thanks be to God, however, when there is a clear position on a controversy. If you're a global warming truther, don't depend on those supposedly-scandalous leaked emails to make your case. And congratulations on being a part of the denial industry.
And finally, to capture the mood of this rainy day in New York:
David Sessions
David Sessions is the founding editor of Patrol. He covers religion for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, and is a graduate student in the Draper Program for Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. He can be reached at hdavidsessions at gmail dot com.
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