Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Letter from Europe: The Pope and Islam: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

The "sources" for this article are overwhelmingly Vatican correspondents. It's a little like the New York Times sending a reporter to cover Hugo Chávez and relying largely on the Venezuelan correspondents for the Washington Post and CNN for the story. This article is reliably hostile to religion and the Catholic hierarchy. But what makes it really reprehensible is just what a patchy job of reporting it represents. As Marty Peretz has noted at the New Republic, it resembles a term paper more than journalism.