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Have you interviewed God today?
While The Prayer of Jabez continues to dominate the book bestseller lists, a different kind of "prayer" has become one of the Web's most popular sites. Jupiter Media Metrix says that Reata Strickland's Interview with God site was visited by more than 2.4 million people in June—and that number's likely to climb even higher this month. Strickland hasn't advertised the site, and it has received almost no media attention, but traffic continues to increase through word-of-mouth (Weblog has received dozens of reader encouragements to visit the site).

What kind of church is she the pastor of!?
Elsewhere online, the mighty have fallen—and fallen hard. Years ago, the American Bible Society's Houses of Worship was supposed to be an online supersite: every church in the U.S. and Canada was offered a free Web site (this was years before Beliefnet and other sites started offering the same thing). Many churches signed up, but the site itself never really caught on. The American Bible Society moved on to create the very similar ForMinistry.com, leaving the site relatively abandoned. Some churches, however, still had sites on HousesofWorship.com, and bookmarks and links continued to point to the site. The American Bible Society let the URL fall back into the public domain, and a pornography site picked it up. (Weblog will hate to be around when those pornographers get their interview with God … )

Nice try, Vatican says, but stem-cell research is still "absolutely unacceptable"
"If taken very literally, the president could rule in our favor and side with the pope," Elisabeth Bresee, executive director of the Parkinson's Action Network, told The Washington Post earlier this week. She was, of course, talking about Bush's meeting with Pope John Paul II, where the pontiff again pushed for a "culture of life" that opposes "evils such as euthanasia, infanticide and, most recently, proposals for the creation for research purposes of human embryos, destined to destruction in the process." (Bush also had words about the "gospel of life," saying it "welcomes the stranger and protects the weak and the innocent," but offered no specifics.) Bresse and other advocates of embryonic stem-cell research went into full spin mode, suggesting it was only the creation of embyros for research purposes that Pope John Paul II opposed—not the use of "spare" embryos originally created for in vitro fertilization. This spin got loud enough that the Vatican quickly issued a clarification, quoting from the pope's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae:

This moral condemnation also regards procedures that exploit living human embryos and fetuses—sometimes specifically 'produced' for this purpose by in vitro fertilization—either to be used as 'biological material' or as providers of organs or tissue for transplants in the treatment of certain diseases. The killing of innocent human creatures, even if carried out to help others, constitutes an absolutely unacceptable act.

Slate's William Saletan (who has written some brilliant articles for the online publication about stem-cell research, abortion, and other life ethics issues) notes that the prolife side also went too far in spinning the pope's statements, saying he had equated stem-cell research with infanticide. But such spinning is inevitable, Saletan writes.

This is the way popes talk. They give you the concept, and you figure out how to apply it. … Such abstraction gives the pope's adversaries a big advantage in the spin game. … The poor pope. He was trying to draw distinctions and connections, trying to convey that some things are worse than others but that the lesser evils must be shunned because they lead to the greater. If only he could fit that into a sound bite.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45