a review of religion and media
Don’t miss my interview on WBAI’s “Healthstyles,” with Barbara Glickstein. Tonight at 11 pm on 99.5 FM. I’ll be discussing Catholic hospitals and end of life care, issues discussed in my last article for The Nation, found here.
It’s a two part series so check out the second segment on August 25th, same time and place. Continue Reading →
It’s been a great week for readers, thanks to a suite of articles by members of The Revealer‘s family of writers. Covering issues from reality-based food to women’s travel, from the health care crisis to Zionist activism to religious compounds in Missouri, we’re proud to have such talented and diverse writers’ names to drop!
Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has an important article, “Escape from Missouri,” in the July/August issue of Mother Jones. Read more about it here. Buy it on newsstands today.
Our books editor Scott Korb has a new piece in the special food issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “It’s What’s for Dinner.” You can read the article here. Read Nathan Schneider’s comments on the article here.
Former managing editor Meera Subramanian has contributed to a new book, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011. Get your copy here.
Kiera Feldman–and we admit it’s a stretch to claim her as one of our own, but we will–has an article at The Nation this week, “The Romance of Birthright Israel.” Read it here; read Jeff Sharlet’s comments on it here.
Your editor truly has a piece at The Nation this week on the Catholic Church’s renewed focus on aid in dying and the implications for health care in the US. Read it here. Continue Reading →
Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has a new article in the May 9 print edition of The Nation. You can read it online here. You can listen to Nation editor Betsy Reed and Kathryn talk about the evangelical adoption movement here. An excerpt from the article:
As a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message from liberal churches, adoption is a perfect storm, too, seemingly defining antiabortion activism as more truly “prolife”—or “whole life,” as one Bethany staffer coined it—while providing a new opportunity, as recent orphan theology texts explain, to spread the gospel. In Reclaiming Adoption, Cruver bluntly declares, “The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel.”
From Richard Kim’s recent editorial at The Nation, “Obama’s ‘War on Terror’“:
And so we now see clearly a kind of social cancer: the exercise of inhumane and abusive power simply because it is the state’s prerogative. Recall that this is what happened in Abu Ghraib—not torture for purpose but torture for fun, for petty retaliation, for no reason other than that the uniform allows it. The treatment of Manning in Quantico, as well as the incarceration of inmates in CMUs for no apparent penological purpose, demonstrates that the poisonous shards of Abu Ghraib are still with us.
by Ann Neumann
Reposted from The Nation.
Last week a regulation to provide Medicare coverage for advance care planning counseling—that is, offer reimbursement to doctors for time spent talking to patients about end-of-life care—was abandoned… for the second time.
Section 1233 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) died a first death in the summer of 2009 in the debate over healthcare reform, during which healthcare opponents characterized the provision as a call for government-run “death panels.” Former Lieutenant Governor of New York State Betsy McCaughey, who consulted with Philip Morris while working on the hit piece against the Clinton healthcare plan “No Exit,” coined the “death panel” moniker; Sarah Palin popularized it. Then John Boehner, at the time the House minority leader, claimed that the provision would lead the country down “a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.” Fox & Friends repeated the “death panel” meme dozens of times, and soon, the provision was stripped from the healthcare bill. But last November, the Obama administration quietly inserted it into Medicare’s annual regulations—after the customary public review period. The New York Times‘s Robert Pear broke the news on Christmas Day that end-of-life counseling was to be covered by Medicare. Immediately, right-wing think tanks, some with legal cases against the healthcare bill, leveraged the “death panel” rhetoric to bolster their arguments. Continue Reading →