A Fair Hearing

GetReligion , a site which is perhaps the most astute watchdog of the media’s coverage of religion today, highlights a recent example of remarkably solid reporting. Calling it a refreshing change of pace from the raft of screeds which have populated editorial pages over the past week, Mollie Hemingway commends a roundtable discussion of the Vatican’s recent document on Women Religious that was hosted by Judy Woodruff of PBS.

Though the two guest interlocutors, theologians from Christendom College (Donna Bethell) and Fordham University (Jeannine Hill Fletcher), respectively, “disagreed with each other, they were cordial, articulate, thoughtful and thought-provoking.” It is a bit unfortunate that Fletcher gets away with a misleading deployment of the historical ‘development of doctrine’ thesis in the closing minute. But still, and perhaps more importantly, the bulk of the debate actually engaged the substance of the issue at hand using precise terms and studied language, a fact which ultimately allowed the orthodox position to sound quite reasonable and coherent.

Watch the eight-minute discussion here: