John Allen reports that the format of his online presence at NCR(eporter) will soon change a bit:

The new format, however, is the tip of the iceberg. In fairly short order, there will be an entirely new "John Allen" page on the NCR Cafe which will contain three distinct elements:

• Daily filings Monday through Friday, and more often when big news breaks, to help put Catholic stories in context in real time;
• The regular weekly "All Things Catholic" column, which will more closely resemble a traditional column, tightly written and focused on a single idea;
• Podcasts drawn from my lectures, interviews, media appearances, and other sources.

The daily feature, I hope, will be helpful, because in my experience the problem with most media coverage of the Catholic church is not so much text as context. It’s no trick to churn out 500 words on whatever’s happening today, but reliable accounts of why it happened, what it means, what the back-story is, and what its consequences might be are usually in much shorter supply. That’s what "All Things Catholic" was always intended to provide, and now we’ll be able to do so more quickly and flexibly.

NCR has been redesigning and rearranging things a bit, trying to direct people who come to read Allen to other parts of the site, including their NCRCafe discussion board. We’ll see. I’ll be glad to see Allen posting every day – that’s for sure.

Also in this week’s column, an interview with Cardinal Dulles on Islam:

In your book, you said one failure of the medieval apologists was that they didn’t approach Islam as a living religion. What did you mean?
Their writing was largely based on books they had read, rather than actual contact with Muslims. This was especially true in the later period, when you had people in France and England who were writing about Islam but who really didn’t have any contact at all with Muslim communities. So for them Islam was largely an abstraction, without much complexity.

Some would say that this tendency to approach Islam almost exclusively from its texts, not as a living religion, is true of Benedict XVI as well. Is that fair?
Probably, yes. Of course, it’s often not very easy to have dialogue with some Muslims. They generally consider dialogue a sign of weakness, to admit that they might have something to learn. They will confront you with the teaching of Islam, but they won’t engage in what we would consider dialogue. Often they won’t even show up at meetings.

Isn’t there a related problem, in that some of the Muslims who do show up at dialogue meetings aren’t representative of mainstream Islam?
Yes, that can be a problem. I remember back in 1968, there was a Christian/Muslim meeting at Woodstock that I attended. [Note: From 1966 to 1973, Dulles served as a consultor to the Papal Secretariat for Dialogue with Non-Believers]. One of the Muslims had obviously read a lot of Kant, and the whole thing struck me as a little phony. He had studied in the West, and clearly didn’t represent the Muslim tradition in a normative way. That happens fairly often in these sessions. It’s going to take time for real dialogue to develop — there’s an internal process that has to happen.

…and more.