Books

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Betrayed with a translation

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Readers of GetReligion are familiar with that mainstream media holiday tradition of releasing news stories that are supposed to shake the foundations of Christianity. Easters over the last few years have featured stories that Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water), that he wasn’t crucified in the manner in which people think, that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera, not Joseph, and that Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up.


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Watching the Dallas watchdog

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When I highlighted media coverage of a Senate investigation into televangelists, I excerpted a bit from an interview of Ole Anthony, who heads the Trinity Foundation. The foundation investigates televangelists and publishes The Wittenburg Door, a magazine of Christian satire. Most of what I know about Anthony, apart from occasionally reading the Door, comes from a lengthy profile in The New Yorker a few years back:


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Antony Flew brings deism back

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In The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Mark Oppenheimer built a lengthy case that the philosopher Antony Flew is, amid painfully documented memory problems, being exploited by a few evangelical authors. Oppenheimer argues that There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, “a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese,” bears far more editorial fingerprints by Varghese than by Flew.


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5Q+1 as David Crumm shifts into overdrive

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GetReligion’s friend David Crumm sent email this week with the news that he will take a months-long leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press to develop a project called Read the Spirit. To call Read the Spirit a blog focused on religion news would be an understatement.


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Take that, Christian Harry Potter fans

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I am well aware that many Harry Potter fans want GetReligion to help them answer this question: If Albus Dumbledore had a gay skeleton in his closet, why didn’t reporter Rita Skeeter of the Daily Prophet include that information in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, her tacky, unauthorized, tell-all biography of the Hogwarts headmaster? Doesn’t that make his dark, dangerous and ultimately deadly relationship with the evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald all the more scandalous? Or not?


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MTV: Rowling answers God question

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Many theories have been tossed around for why Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling avoided discussing religion and her books. One of the more popular theories was that she didn’t want to be typecast or shunned for any personal views that could affect books sales.


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