Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the threads I rarely see covered in our larger American media outlets is what I’d call a “meta-theme” — the way that religion and politics, an oft-incendiary combo, are twinned in our national history. My colleague Mollie is much more of an expert in this arena than I am, but as a historian’s daughter, I am steeped in the tension between American sacred and secular voices, one that goes back to the Puritans and the Quakers.
As you would expect, your GetReligionistas have received quite a few breathless emails asking us why this site has had nothing to say about President Barack Hussein Obama’s plans to address the nation’s public-school students about the importance of discipline and education in their lives. Haven’t we noticed all of the protests by parents from sea to shining sea?
I do not think that I have ever read a story about Catholic leaders making decisions to close a bunch of Catholic parishes (or Catholic schools, for that matter) that did not leave me profoundly frustrated.
Two studies about the influence of higher education on faith have been released in the past month. One, presented by two professors at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, looked at attitudes among college-educated evangelicals about gay people and atheists. They argue that the data show that education is linked to higher “tolerance” for both groups.
Some sex scandals are sad but exciting and some are just unseemly. This Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino one is a doozie. The married father of five had unprotected sex six years ago with a woman he had just met earlier in the evening and when she claimed to have gotten pregnant from the encounter he gave her $3,000. He says the money was for insurance. She says it was for an abortion. And then years later he went to the FBI after, he says, her extortion attempts got out of hand.
The August cover story for Christianity Today, a magazine I write a column for (here’s the latest) has been making a bit of a splash. Mark Regnerus’ “The Case for Early Marriage” discusses how the chastity advocates forgot to mention that waiting until you’re old to get married might not be the most effective strategy for abstaining from sex until you’re married.
Earlier today we looked at some of the mainstream media reports of the American Psychological Association’s resolution on treatment for those dealing with same-sex attraction. The Wall Street Journal took a completely different approach than almost every other report out there. Religion reporter Stephanie Simon writes on a new therapy for people whose faith and sexual identity are in conflict and how the APA changed its treatment guidelines to allow counselors to help clients reject their same-sex attraction. It was certainly different than the headlines over most of the AP reports. Here’s how she began:
Josh Levin, senior editor of Slate, wrote an epic series this week on the theme “The End of America.” The series begins here, and rolls on in eight segments and about 23,000 words. That’s not counting Slate’s embedded notes and thousands more words in The Fray. Slate also offered discussions on Facebook and Twitter, so the most obsessive readers easily could have devoted an entire week to debating Levin’s reporting.
I meant to highlight this good example of skepticism last week by USA Today‘s Cathy Grossman. It all comes out of an interesting study showing that states with more Catholics tend to favor expanded rights for homosexuals. Grossman highlights the finding and discusses a bit of it in context:
