Did the Pope Bless Darwin?
A Sidebar in John Mark Reynolds’s “Afraid of Reason”
by Terry Mattingly
No one will ever accuse Pope John II of being a master of the media-friendly “sound bite.” Thus, his highly nuanced theological pronouncements often produce two quite different, or even contradictory, waves of information. First come the headlines and video clips, as reports crunch complex texts into clusters of words. Then, days later, the pope’s actual text circulates via fax machines and the Internet.
A case in point: John Paul’s recent speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences inspired headlines such as “John Paul II Embraces Darwin” and . . .
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