Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I’m fairly new to motherhood, with a 2-year-old and an infant. I recently wrote my take on the Mommy Wars — that term used to describe everything from whether women should work outside the home while raising young children to whether to use cloth or disposable diapers — over at Christianity Today. So I was intrigued by this front-page Washington Post story that looks at a new Census report dealing with stay-at-home moms.
I have two questions that I need to ask about the following CBC report, which I find stunning. One question now and one question later on in the post.
Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA TODAY caught our attention with this recent story: “People with ‘no religion’ gain on major denominations.”
Let’s return to one of my favorite hot-button topics, the role of religion in the public schools. Whether it sets a precedent or not, the question of how to teach religion in the Texas schools is roiling the State Board of Education, schools, and activists concerned either that religion isn’t getting a fair shake or that a certain viewpoint (read: Christian) is being promoted.
Get out your party hats and reading lights. If it’s the last week of September, it’s Banned Books Week. This is the annual awareness campaign that draws attention to censorship. From the American Library Association:
As the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has been demonstrating, the mainstream press has shown quite a bit of interest in the religious roots of the anti-ACORN video reporter Hannah Giles and, in particular, the social and political views of her minister father and, to a lesser degree by inference, their home Clash Church.
For years there’s been a move among some in the emergent and evangelical churches, conservative churches reaching out to the young, and some mainline congregations to adapt and retool (if that’s not too irreverent) ancient liturgical practices in a way that reaches contemporary congregants. (See the late Dr. Robert Webber’s work on this topic.)
Sometimes we seems like a society that has a desire to major in the minors. Why spend more than five minutes (OK, 10) discussing whether it was appropriately presidential (in fairness, he thought his words were off the record) for President Barack Obama to call rapper Kanye West a “jackass”? Why focus on some nondenominational pastor’s sexual misbehavior when so many other churches are grappling with issues around mission, doctrine or social justice?
The New York Times started its nearly 2,2,00-word obituary of the “Green Revolution” pioneer on A1, and the first graf of the obit explains the prominent placement:
