Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I wanted to revisit the Rolling Stone article on Scientology from earlier this week, partly because it generated a tremendous amount of discussion, but also because I want to highlight an aspect of the article that I overlooked the first time around.
Another cartoon controversy involving religion has popped up in the news. This time it involves an American educational institution (Radford University in Virginia) and a student-run Internet magazine (Whim). There’s been no talk of censorship, according to administration officials, despite some protests from students. Another installment of the cartoon tilted “Christ On Campus” is supposed to be launched Friday by sophomore Christian Keesee.
Give me your first guess. What publication would devote nine months to report on a super-secret, cult-like group that claims millions of adherents along with some of Hollywood’s most famous people, namely Tom Cruise?
In high school, I was often terrified to play in organized basketball games. Don’t get me wrong, I loved to play basketball and to this day it is one of my favorite activities. But something made me go stiff the moment a referee and a coach were involved. The primary reason I survived four years of high school basketball was because of prayer and the support of my family and friends.
How significant was Tuesday’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling — allowing a New Mexico congregation to use a hallucinogenic tea in its religious rituals — in establishing precedent in religious-freedom law? If you read Wednesday’s Washington Post article, you would come away thinking the impact was minimal, but thankfully, the Internet gives us other sources of information. (GetReligion’s original post on the issue is here.)
I’ve noticed a shift in the cartoon coverage and in many bloggers’ attitudes toward the image-inspired violence and arguments over whether the images should have been published by media organizations. This shift has been driven largely by events on the ground that are just too huge to ignore, particularly as the “Furor Over Cartoons Pits Muslim Against Muslim,” as a New York Times headline writer phrased it Tuesday.
I wanted to bring to attention this item in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Staff writer Lorenza Muñoz jumped on a tremendous Hollywood story of how Tyler Perry‘s Oprah-inspired journal writing about childhood physical abuse turned into plays and movies that are now taking the entertainment industry by storm.
Much has been made of the Republican Party’s relationship with evangelical Christians. Who is truly in control of that relationship? Is it people like James Dobson, or is the White House (Karl Rove) playing evangelical religious leaders in order to gain access to their followers for votes? Of course, then you get bogged down into the debate over exactly who is an evangelical. Go figure.
Kudos to National Public Radio’s On the Media team for last week’s episode (available here in transcript and mp3 form) that focused in-depth on the media in the Middle East and their coverage of everything from the political situations to the violence between Muslims and Israel.
