Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The other day, I wrote a post about the fact that many journalists struggle to understand, to be perfectly honest about it, the role that Christian faith plays in the African-American church. There is a tendency to see the black church as a political institution, and that’s that.
Headlines over the Boy Scouts of America’s decision to allow openly gay members are still flying fast and furious.
Above is a nice little snippet of an Ira Glass interview. Interview of Ira Glass, I should say. The popular host of public radio’s This American Life reflects on why the show does so much good coverage of Christians. It’s because the media do such a bad job of covering them otherwise, he says. He says the Christians he knows and works with — including the “fundamentalists” — are nothing like how Christians are portrayed in the media.
Godbeat pro Bob Smietana wrote a story this week exploring whether churches will keep sponsoring Boy Scout troops or drop their affiliation given the organization’s new gay-friendly membership policy.
Let’s face it. The mainstream press really struggles when trying to cover life in African-American churches.
In my first-person account of the Moore, Okla., tornado last week, I predicted that the faith and resiliency of the state’s residents would be a major theme in media coverage.
When considering the forces pulling at the Boy Scouts of America, one thing journalists really needed to consider was a simple statistical chart that can be found (.pdf) on the organization’s homepage. Here are the crucial numbers found at the top of this file:
Truth be told, I still think that the question I asked a few weeks ago remains one of the most interesting questions one can ask about that big story that keeps unfolding down in Waco: “So, how did Brittney Griner end up at Baylor?”
Joe Carter, our newest GetReligionista, referenced Southern Baptist name-change discussions in a post earlier this week. It’s a topic that GetReligion has tackled a time or two before â or more.
