Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Sunday is the much-overlooked Christian feast of Pentecost and we live in an era in which the global rise of Pentecostalism is simply — this cannot be debated — one of the most important religion stories of our time. Ask the experts at the Pew Forum on the Religion & Public Life.
In a different media environment, I suspect that the big Catholic news of the week would be the Opus Dei affiliation of Archbishop Jose Gomez, named to succeed the archbishop of Los Angeles.
In the nation’s smallest state, a big controversy is brewing over the keynote speaker for the inauguration ceremony of the new University of Rhode Island president. The reason for the furor: President David M. Dooley has asked a Christian minister to deliver the keynote address at Thursday’s ceremony. The Providence Journal reports that the decision “has triggered a campus-wide discussion about the separation of church and state, tolerance and free speech.”
On the surface, a recent report by the San Antonio Express-News on an atheist student organization urging classmates to trade in religious texts for pornography seems harmless enough.
Joel Osteen is “the new face of Christianity.” That breaking religion news out of Houston — published 4,845 miles away in London — arrives courtesy of a 3,800-word profile in The Observer, which boldly declares:
If you’ve heard about the exclusive story that will be in tomorrow’s Haaretz’s Weekend Magazine, the news that for more than a decade a Hamas founder’s son served as a spy to Israel’s security agency, then you’ve almost certainly heard a component of the story that’s two obvious for the media to miss. In fact, this element of the story was its own story — and a good story at that — in 2008.
Years ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about a pagan mother and some of the parenting choices that she was making during an age in which pop-culture was becoming increasingly fascinated with its own glitzy few of witchcraft and wizardry. It was a Mother’s Day column.
I still have my dried, rotting wedding bouquet in my house that I’m almost ready to part with, but after watching Kate Gosselin, South Carolina First Lady Jenny Sanford, and other marriages unravel last summer, I feel the need to cling to anything that symbolizes my recent marriage.
