Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Normally I don’t look at book reviews since they’re just opinion pieces, more or less. But this New York Times review of books about Wal-Mart had some problems with how it handled religion. One of the books is To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton.
The Los Angeles Times has a daily front page feature under the name “Column One.” The column is for “interesting” news and is designed to give people surprising or provocative information.
The New Yorker‘s Joan Acocella writes elegantly. Her recent article on Michael Jackson as a dancer was one of the finest non-mawkish reflections that followed Jackson’s sudden death early this month.
I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”
Architecture is one of the more neglected corners of religion coverage, but occasionally a conflict about historic preservation revives the theme. National Public Radio’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty reported in 2008 about the battle between Third Church of Christ, Scientist, and city officials over the church’s desire to replace its Brutalist-style facility. (That battle rages on, and this website tracks the latest developments, from the perspective of church members.)
A couple of weeks ago, there was quite a bit of coverage regarding the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the most important ancient Christian manuscripts. Nobody flagged any stories as being particularly bad and it was during a pretty busy news cycle — so we didn’t look at coverage here at GetReligion. But a reader pointed me to another critique of the media coverage that is worth considering.
Which is more newsworthy? Well, the answer very much depends on the lens journalists are using to cover the nomination of Dr. Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health. President Barack Obama’s nomination of the renowned geneticist and public Christian hasn’t flooded the news pages — but it is making waves on the opinion pages and the blogosphere.
Because we’re seeing so many stories about bioethics, I’ve been trying to learn a bit more the field of thought. I recently read G.K. Chesterton’s “Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State.” It’s a collection of essays written in the 1920s at the height of the eugenics movement. One of the things I found so interesting about the book is that if it were read in the 1920s, one would think that Chesterton was fighting a lonely and losing battle. But a few more decades of eugenics — punctuated by the Nazi embrace, of course — and people began questioning and rejecting it.
So I was wandering around the internet, as one does, and came across a couple of stories involving curious goings on at a couple of grave sites. Some of the stories were really poorly written.
