I don't recall Time Magazine ever being all the deep in its coverage, and I have been reading it since the 60s.

"the kind of vacuous crap that" Time has always published.

Time always sucked, yeah. I do think it does suck more as of the last decade or so, though. A quick flip through some old ones is a good demonstration of that.

THis is a very faint, vague gesture toward describing Mormonism.

Oddly enough, as I type this, I am sitting two blocks from the Mothership - the Mormon temple complex in Salt Lake City, UT. I'm looking forward to taking some tours and going through the visitors' center. I've already visited the all-Mormon all-the-time bookstore, Deseret Books, and will head back shortly for some souvenirs. Interestingly, they have many things for "sale" that are free, but you have to check out at the register. One is the daily checklist page for women where you check off your Personal Progress on your womanly virtues.

We made a couple of friends this year who are Mormon, which means I'm a lot less likely to openly mock this religion. But it's not a garden variety faith by any means, and doesn't have your usual mainline type of ambition. It's worth looking into, because the worldview is.....darned specific.

Time may well be worse than it was. The last time I opened one it had Anwar Sadat as man of the year.

I don't expect much from the newsweeklies. But hey, I figured if they're writing an article about Mormonism, surely they can accurately describe what Mormons believe and it would be interesting, wouldn't you think?

I almost get the feeling that in a misguided attempt to be "even-handed," Time intentionally pussyfooted around the more interesting beliefs of Mormons, stuff about other worlds, Mormon rituals and Mormon cosmology, etc.

I almost get the feeling that in a misguided attempt to be "even-handed," Time intentionally pussyfooted around the more interesting beliefs of Mormons, stuff about other worlds, Mormon rituals and Mormon cosmology, etc.

HEre's the thing: it's a total third rail. And Romney's campaign is absolutely banking on that. If anyone outside his campaign brings up some of the specifics of Mormon belief and presses Romney on them, he can easily retreat to "it's unAmerican to go after my religion!" So his campaign can continue to say only the vaguest generalizations about God, faith and family, and be pretty safe, meanwhile trotting out Catholic cardinals and other people of the cloth to provide additional "good religious folks vs. suspicious heathens" cover. The Obama campaign can absolutley not press the Mormon issue without destroying themselves. And the popular press doesn't seem interested in doing so, either.

It's a bit of a Catch-22: because most Americans don't know very much about Mormonism, they lump it in with other, more familiar mainline religions, and would be angry if people tried to take it on critically. But it's precisely that no one takes it on critically that the majority of Americans can go on believing that it's just a little bit of a slightly different flavor of Christianity - when it's a very, very different, prescriptive, hierarchical, political and controlling kind of faith from most mainline Christian faiths.