Another post on open book pointing to John Allen's latest column. It's interesting to try to figure out what exactly Allen's appeal is. He certainly writes interestingly, provides some hard-to-come-by access to what's happening in Rome, and is knowledgeable about how the Vatican works. Yet for all that I find his columns relentlessly single-viewed, and ultimately tiring. Everything is captured through only a political frame. One would hardly imagine that anything religious was ever happening. If he were writing in the 1st century AD, I imagine that a hypothetical Word From Jerusalem would be just knowledgeable about the courts of the Pharisees and Sadducees, feature interviews with Caiaphas and Pilate, and provide access to the ideas of the more forward-looking scribes. Yet Jesus……?