Saturday, November 15, 1997

This week on the web

News

- Humanity's relationship to the natural world has been tangled through western theology for thousands of years - with proponents of dominion often carrying the argument. But over the past few years, explicitly religious environmentalists have organized themselves and their message.

- She may not have a clerical collar. She may not wear priestly vestments. But she and a few hundred other sisters are running churches across the country. At a time when the Roman Catholic Church is experiencing a severe shortage of priests, nuns are helping the church grow.

- "Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity," by Bruce Bawer (Crown, $26). For one who so passionately calls upon his readers to turn to a God of love and to build up a Church of Love, Bawer displays a remarkably uncharitable attitude toward those whom he sees in that other camp: the conservative, fundamentalist Church of Law.

A look at recent books and magazines from the staff at the Dallas Morning News

- Bob Briner has been a conservative Christian since boyhood, so when he tried his hand at writing religious books several years ago, one might have expected the TV sports producer and agent to crank out the kind of rhetoric that would do right-wingers like Ralph Reed proud.

Instead, the outspoken Briner has established a track record for going against the grain of mainstream evangelical thought.

Columns

- Harold Fickett: Now that I spend my time telling people what I think about everything under the sun, I live with an increasing sense of absurdity. I state my opinions as clearly and forcefully as I know how, and I write out of my deepest convictions.

At the same time, I'm conscious, in a way my audience cannot be, that these convictions are more often the product of my own past mistakes than native insight. These mistakes brought me to recognize the wisdom of the Christian faith and its tradition only after I had proved the unwisdom of my own notions.

- Clark Morphew: In every part of the Palestinian population, Christian and Muslim alike, there is a continuing agony as they continue to live in captivity without hope and always behind the barricades of hatred and malice.

For 10 years, ever since the Palestinian uprising known as the Intifada, the Israeli government has systematically oppressed an entire people. To complicate matters, the international media have done little to convey the squalid conditions of the Palestinian refugee camps, the injustices against working people or the brutality of living without hope.

- Ken Garfield: I've gained new respect for Promise Keepers founder Bill McCartney. He had an extramarital affair and ignored his wife's emotional problems.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think better of McCartney because he committed adultery and roamed the nation preaching family first, unaware that his wife was home alone contemplating suicide. But I do think mistakes make a person better able to articulate the hurts of other people.