Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As a rule, people on the academic left tend to become angry or disturbed when books get shredded. Throw in questions about academic freedom and religion and you have a combination that can inspire the spilling of seas of ink.
Paul Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has written a lengthy and sometimes well-informed profile of Rowan Williams for the March issue of The Atlantic.
News coverage in this country tends to focus almost exclusively on American happenings. A review of the Religion Newswriters Association’s top 10 stories from 2008 confirms this.
GetReligion celebrates its fifth anniversary this week, and contributors will mark the occasion with lists of our five favorite posts from the past year. I’ll kick this off.
John Updike, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist known for his detailed portrayals of life — the mundane and the ecstatic — died this week. I didn’t get the chance to read him until about 10 years ago when one of my best friends introduced me to his prolific work. But I really enjoyed his prose and also what seemed to be a distinctly Lutheran approach to sin and justification.
It would be hard to pick up the big newspapers right now and try to argue that the major, elite media are not trying to “get religion” right now. It’s like the editors have all walked the aisle at the President Barack Obama revival and made professions of faith.
Christopher Hitchens is most engaging when he’s showing indignation, but he’s most endearing when paying tribute to a courageous friend. His portrait of novelist Salman Rushdie, appearing in the February issue of Vanity Fair, opens with some of the warmest and most affectionate words I’ve seen from Hitchens in quite a while.
What we have here is the first positive review of “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion” that grasps the mission of the book, yet rejects our — or to be specific, my — proposal to address the problem. To cut to the chase, Herb Denenberg’s review in The Bulletin (Philadelphia’s Family Newspaper) argues that reporters in the mainstream media are so blind, dumb and biased that it is time — you guessed it — to kill off the idealistic concept of an “American model of the press” and move on to alternative, niche publications.
Here’s the perfect Christmas and holiday season gift for that local editor that you’ve been meaning to call about the quality — good or bad — of the religion-news coverage in the newspaper that lands in your front yard each morning.
