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 part of a Los Angeles Times series on homelessness, faith and values reporter Stephanie Simon spent some time in Denver looking at a government program that involves a Democratic mayor and a challenge to the area’s churches, synagogues and mosques to work with the 600 or so homeless families in the community in a mentorship program begun two years ago.
The business section of any newspaper should contain a religion story every now and then. An ad for Grapes of Galilee Wine in Catholic Digest caught the attention of Los Angeles Times staff writer Alana Semuels, who put together a short, quippy article that covers all the necessary bases when one is writing about Christians and alcohol:
Molly Moore of The Washington Post Foreign Service had a dramatic and tragic story in Tuesday’s paper that shows the surge of immigration — and racist attitudes — in the suburbs of Zurich, Switzerland.
Little mention of religion appears in the coverage by The New York Times of a lawsuit filed by three former Oral Roberts University professors. According to the article, the professors are alleging “financial, political and personal irregularities” by Richard Roberts, the president of the Christian liberal arts university in Tulsa, Okla.
This may be one too many sports-related posts for some of you (and a good start for others), but after reading ESPN The Magazine‘s profile of Detroit Lions quarterback Jon Kitna I couldn’t let it pass. Thank you to all of you who sent us this story, and I agree with the most recent submission that this is one of the most substantive attempts to look at faith and football in a very long time.
Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
The Major League Baseball playoffs are upon us, and Kevin Baxter of the Los Angeles Times has done a great job of reminding us that football isn’t the only sport in which religion can be prevalent.
Herb Brasher sent us a note about a recent story in The State (Columbia, S.C.) about Barack Obama’s visit to two local churches. The article does a quality job raising the racial issues at play — one of the churches is predominantly black and the other predominantly white — but the religious issues are unfortunately nearly absent from the pieces.
Yet another high-publicity autobiography is out, and once again the media are giving short shrift to religious aspects in the author’s life.
