I just got a heads-up about a student reporter for the Ohio University student newspaper, The Post, who is doing a story about "the new mortal sins as released by the Vatican". The reporter, one Ashley Lutz, sent an inquiry to the faculty members of the Department of Classics and World Religions here at Ohio University asking them for comments on these "new mortal sins" because she "was hoping to get some general comments from someone in the department about how this demonstrates flexibility on the church's part and how often sins are added."
One shudders to contemplate how a student reporter might think the phrase "flexibility on the church's part" ought to be parsed, but just as worrisome is the fact that the inquiry was addressed to the faculty in a department where there is only one practicing Catholic and several faculty who are openly hostile not only to Catholicism but to Christianity in general. (This is not to suggest that she would have fared any better had she addressed her inquiry to the faculty in the philosophy department!)
For the real scoop on this issue, there was an interesting story on NPR's Day to Day about a month ago. You can listen to it here.
4 comments:
I hope, Scott, that you will volunteer to set this student reporter straight. The very idea that the Church goes around "adding" new sins, and maybe (just maybe!) "deleting" old ones, betrays so many misunderstandings that one hardly knows where to begin.
Then again, if this was the annual Easter "debunk or malign Christianity" story for 2008, we got off pretty easy.
I was tempted to contact the reporter myself, but my experience with the good people at The Post has not been very encouraging! I'm hoping that she'll get mostly "no comments" from classics, and we'll be off the hook.
Actually, now that I think about it, the amazing thing about this article is that the NYT wrote about the Catholic Church without working in a mention of pedophilia!
...my experience with the good people at The Post has not been very encouraging!
Some things never change. You'd think a school with such an esteemed journalism school would have a better paper.
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