Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Breaking news from the Telegraph … the newspaper’s Rome reporter reports that one Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. the Bishop of Rome, Pontiff of the Catholic Church alias Benedictus PP. XVI, claims Jesus was not born December 25, in the year 1.
I wonder if any of our readers have read Thomas Nagel’s new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. I’ve been reading the reviews and they’re fascinating. The New Republic review says Nagel, a devout atheist, has “performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age.”
Suffice it to say that I started working my way onto the religion-news beat in the late 1970s, precisely the era in which the Southern Baptist Convention — the mega-denomination in which I was raised, as part of a family active on all levels of SBC life — veered into a civil war that took very few prisoners.
The New York Times published an interesting story about the Atlanta Jewish Book Festival (“Jewish Book Event in Atlanta Cancels Authorâs Talk on Zionism, and Uproar Follows“). It’s a great piece with the weirdest missing element. Here’s the top:
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.Â
These words close Vladimir Mayakovskyâs 1924 poem “Vladimir Ilych Lenin“.â Written in the months after Leninâs death, âVI Leninâ is the greatest of Mayakovskyâs works and the apex of the socialist realist style of poetry that flowered in Russia in the decade after the Revolution. “VI Lenin” is also the template through which some in the press construct the person and works of Jesus Christ
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of journalism, the task that terrifies my students the most is attempting to paraphrase the complicated words of experts into prose that can be understood by the proverbial average American sitting at his or her breakfast table with a cup of coffee.
If people have long had trouble defining the word “evangelical” — the Rev. Billy Graham once told me he had no idea what the word meant — it only made matters worse when the principalities and powers of Christian publishing started adding the word “emerging” or perhaps “emergent” in front of the already vague “evangelical.”
