Linked, but not limited

As long as there's room to speak out, there's room enough | Joel Belz

As usual, my desk is cluttered today with four letters from various readers taking me to task for basically the same problem-but from impossibly different perspectives.

"Don't you understand," one asks gently, "how dangerous your quasi-endorsement of Promise Keepers was in your recent column? PK's doctrinal problems are deep, and WORLD needs to keep its distance." But in the same mail was a letter not-so-gently taking us to task for being so hard on Promise Keepers in the same edition of WORLD.

One reader threatens to cancel because of our sentimental pro-Mother Teresa bias, while the other actually does cancel because of our anti-Catholic bias.

Some publishers and editors respond by saying, "I guess we're just about where we ought to be, seeing as how we've got so many people so mad on both sides." I've been tempted to respond that way myself-except that it's not fair to the readers who express their concerns in the first place. To stake our claim on such relativistic and pragmatic grounds would be a copout.