Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
New York City does not seem to be a very welcoming city. Certain people belong there, while the presence of others that fail to fit a certain stereotype are considered by a major media institution in the city as “jarringly out of place.”
This is one of those weeks when one of my more personal posts here at GetReligion evolved into a rare first-person column for the Scripps Howard News Service.
Late last month, GetReligion considered the work of Marilynne Robinson — especially in response to an ill-founded claim by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic that Robinson is a fierce opponent of predestination.
In a brisk 830 words, Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic explains some of the smoldering tensions that led to this past week’s slaughter in Mumbai.
Long, long ago, in a discussion of mainstream media coverage of trends in Iran, Bill Moyers told me that most journalists are “tone deaf to the music of religion.” He has used that same image in other settings.
After Michael Crichton’s death last week, a few different obituaries hinted at his iconoclastic questioning of global-warming certainties. What’s striking is that Crichton’s criticisms of global warming attracted more hostility than his attacks on religion — a generic religion that stands as the enemy of all things scientific. New York Times science columnist John Tierney quotes from a speech, “Environmentalism as Religion,” which Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
When I started thinking about a career on the religion-beat, the first professional that I met was another Baylor University graduate who was on the rise at the Houston Chronicle.
Whatever would the world of religious journalism do without noted British evolutionary biologist — and even more famous atheist — Richard Dawkins?
The New Republic and The Washington Post have paid tribute recently to novelist Marilynne Robinson. Both articles — a 4,100-word essay-review in TNR by Ruth Franklin, a senior editor, and a 2,400-word profile by Post reporter Bob Thompson — are informative and well-written. In one major respect, Thompson understands Robinson with greater precision.
