Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
News reporters are starting to step up to the challenge of exploring the complicated issue of why a person joins a church. A pair of articles published this week explore both sides of the coin that is a person’s decision to attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
The University of Tennessee’s men’s basketball program now has a couple of religion ghosts following its rather successful hoops program. In addition to the team’s coach Bruce Pearl, who is said to be passionate about his Jewish faith, one of its best players, prolific 3-point shooter Chris Lofton, has suggested that his faith helped him beat a cancer that he has kept silent about until now.
Sometimes media coverage of issues involving religion is so bad that there is just not much left for us to say at GetReligion that hasn’t already been said. Case in point is the media stumbling in an attempt to cover the resignation of Wheaton College professor Kent Gramm.
Last weekend GetReligion received a nice hat tip from one of the pioneers and leaders in the world of blogging, Andrew Sullivan. The post Sullivan linked to was hardly one of the more exciting we have had lately, but for some reason analysis of a Vermont’s newspaper’s coverage of church-going atheists caught The Daily Dish’s eye.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama gave journalists throughout the United States a challenge in his press conference Monday, where he “forcefully” broke with his ex-pastor the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In his short 5-minute opening remarks, Obama said that Wright does not represent the black church in America. Is this true?
The YFZ Ranch story was supposed to be about child abuse. No one will argue that when children are being abused, the state has broad powers to step in and stop the abuse no matter what justification is used to try to legitimize the abuse. No religious belief justifies any type of child abuse.
How often does a reporter get to write about the 100th birthday of a religion? The Miami Herald, no stranger to covering off-beat religions (at least from the perspective of a reader in the United States), has a rather unusual story on the “uniquely Brazilian religion” of Umbanda.
Religion reporters covering atheism should approach the subject as straightforward as any other group of individuals who believe in similar ideas about God, an afterlife, the reason for evilness in the world, and the need for community and morality. To assume that atheists come down on the same side of all those issues would be to engage in gross stereotyping and fail to give significant depth to covering a complex minority in the United States.
