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Benoid Denizet-Lewis had yet another a fascinating story in the New York Times this past weekend. This time it was about Michael Glatze, a former gay rights activist who has since renounced his past. The two used to be friends and colleagues at XY, a San-Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men.
In most of our recent posts about coverage of the Womenpriests movement, such as this piece by the Divine Ms. MZ Hemingway, we have ended up discussing how journalists often struggle to grasp basic historical facts about the Roman Catholic priesthood. In particular, journalists just can’t seem to realize that the Church of Rome is a voluntary association and that to be a priest in this body one must, first and foremost, be in Communion with the pope of Rome and the bishops of that Communion.
In a way, that recent New York Times essay about the lives of Brother Julian and Brother Adrian Riester — twin Franciscan friars who died, on the same day, at age 92 — seems like the perfect example of a religion story that gets it, that shows faith as a powerful factor in the lives of these intriguing people.
Katherine Stewart is the author of an upcoming book with one of those calm, reasoned, fair-minded titles that have become so common in the American marketplace in the past few decades — âThe Good News Club: The Christian Rightâs Stealth Assault on Americaâs Children.â
CNN.com features a story about popular phrases that are wrongly attributed to the Bible. At the time I’m writing this, it has 111 pages of comments. That’s like 6,200 comments. And to think that editors sometimes wonder if religion stories have enough appeal.
As a journalism professor, one of the toughest challenges that I face is helping students learn how to avoid what I call “buried pronoun disease.”
The other day we looked at the way the media handled a study that showed that Protestants who don’t identify a “born-again” experience had less hippocampal atrophy than Catholics, non-believers and those who do claim a “born-again” experience. I noted that all the headlines I could find highlighted that “born-again” Christians had “smaller brains.”
Yesterday I pointed out the curious manner in which journalists wrote up a study showing that non-believers, Catholics and evangelical Christians have smaller brains than Protestants who don’t claim a “born-again” experience. But at least that study, though having a small sample size, was done by real academics at a real university using typical methods of analysis.
