Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Some people say this country is one White House Bible study away from a Christian theocracy, but President-elect Dwight Eisenhower may have summed up the religious sentiment of the nation best when he said, in 1952, “Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”
I graduated from Birmingham-Southern last year. I am completely offended by any suggestion that these students burned churches because of BSC’s “liberal” label. They were just pyros — or at least I’m told from friends on campus. Don’t make this an issue of sectarian violence — please.
Here is a short update on that Today showdown between Katie Couric and Thomas Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza founder who is now building Ave Maria University down in southwest Florida.
The powers that be are saying it early and often down in Alabama: The three students held in connection with that wave of fires at rural Baptist churches were just a bunch of wild guys who were having some fun and things got out of control.
How busy have things been around here lately? Earlier this week I was quoted in a mainstream newspaper about GetReligion’s response to recent news coverage (as opposed to old coverage) of Ave Maria University in Southwest Florida. If you don’t recall this blog’s response to that, there’s a good reason — I haven’t had the time to blog on that yet. I think the Oscars thing jumped in there.
As GetReligion readers know, I am about as pro-free speech as you can get, even pro-offensive speech in the tense world of religion and politics. I even think that the U.S. military doesn’t need to mandate a kind of lowest-common-denominator Unitarianism, funding with tax dollars. I’m a radical.
I realize that I have started seeing the “pew gap” factor all over the place. Nevertheless, that is what I thought of this morning when I read the Wall Street Journal‘s “Black Flight: The exodus to charter schools” piece by Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten.
According to Latter-day Saints, the Book of Mormon was brought forth when God provided 22-year-old church founder Joseph Smith with special glasses and seer stones that enabled him to translate writings — from “Reformed Egyptian” — on golden tablets found in New York. Mormons believe these scriptures restored the church and left the rest of Christianity in apostasy.
Political events in the Muslim world have taken a decidedly extremist turn. As we’ve said repeatedly on this site, those in the Western world must understand the Islamic world if a Clash of Civilizations is to be avoided. Some would say this is inevitable, but I would prefer the optimistic viewpoint and hold that this clash is avoidable.
