Cathy Lynn Grossman at USA Today offers a short and sweet summary of Sarah Pulliam Bailey's takedown of Lisa Miller's ridiculous "Saint Sarah" feature in Newswreck:
Ow! Ow! One of the crew of media critics at Get Religion has whacked Newsweek's Saint Sarah Palin cover by Lisa Miller to smithereens.Update: Lisa Miller was a guest on "The O'Reilly Factor" Monday night and discussed her Newsweek piece with host Bill O'Reilly. A transcript of that segment is here.
By the time Sarah Pulliam Bailey, an editor for Christianity Today and one of the writers for Get Religion, was done laser highlighting massive holes in Miller's reporting, unfounded assumptions in the writing, and the lack of authoritative sourcing all around, you almost felt sorry for Miller.
Almost.
- JP
Lisa Miller's wikipedia entry makes you wonder exactly why Newsweak appointer her to write about religion:
ReplyDeletePersonal life
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Miller was raised in a secular Jewish home. [3] She attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, graduating in English in 1984. She worked at the Harvard Business Review, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. [4]
Miller was married to her Catholic husband in an interfaith ceremony performed by an Episcopalian priest and a rabbi. [3] After the birth of her daughter, Miller joined a Jewish Temple for reasons of "blood and history and culture". [3] She describes this religious community as a "progressive, inclusive congregation" [3], which her husband rarely attends, "partially because he's ambivalent about God, and partially because this is not his tradition and he feels like a foreigner there". [3]
Relationship to religious tradition
As exemplified by her interfaith wedding, her primarily emotional response to the Shema, and her stated reasons for religious affiliation, [3] Miller's relationship to religious tradition can be described as tenuous, reconstructionist, sentimental, and folkloric. Her understanding of tradition is distinctly not apostolic or halakhic.