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The Tampa Bay Times reports the Pinellas County Florida Board of Education has revoked the license of a charter school that uses a religion-based curriculum after its students tested poorly in the state-wide FCAT exams (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test).
OK, readers, it’s time for a quiz about Catholic higher education. I don’t think that any readers will remember this column I once wrote for the Scripps Howard News Service (that would be a bit scary if anyone did), but I will provide enough of the content to help readers answer this question: Can you guess within five years when the following was written?
It’s safe to say that several major themes continue to manifest themselves in most — but not all — of the mainstream news reports about the religious liberty cases linked to those Health and Human Services mandates on religious organizations.
Time to catch up with a recent story that got buried in all of the coverage of President Barack Obama’s evolution on the definition of marriage and Mitt Romney’s adventures in Moral Majority territory.
If you are interested in religion news (as opposed to pure politics), and you are willing to look at Mitt Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech from the point of view of the audience, then it’s pretty clear which paragraph deserves the most attention. Here it is:
Before we get to the coverage of Mitt Romney’s visit to Liberty University, I’d like to flash back to the scene-setter story that ran in The Washington Post on the day before that commencement address.
It’s one of the questions that veteran religion writers hear all the time in their newsrooms and usually struggle to answer.
So there’s this college in Provo, Utah, that’s run by a socially conservative church. All of the students who choose to attend the school agree to adhere to a pretty strict honor code that governs the way they dress, forbids them from drinking alcohol, and explicitly bans students from having sex. I am, of course, talking about Brigham Young University and it shouldn’t exactly be news that the place exists or that students there are held to pretty strict moral standards.
You know it’s sad when both the general public (57 percent) and reporters (52 percent) agree that the media does a poor job explaining religion to the broader public. And then two-thirds of the public think religious coverage is scandal-driven, compared to 30 percent of journalists who say the same thing, according to a new study from the Knight Program in Media and Religion at USC and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
