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 some of GetReligion’s readers have observed in our Comments feature, gay marriage is a frequent topic in this space. It’s a topic I would love to set aside, were it not such an inescapable talking point in religion circles and, by extension, on the Godbeat.
I happened to sit next to a hero, a wise elder of religion writers, as the Anglican Church of Canada selected its new archbishop last week. He observed that few of Canada’s major dailies had sent reporters to cover the meeting, and that this reflected on how Canadian culture sees the church as largely irrelevant. I said a few reporters were present from dailies, but I had dismissed his point too glibly: the National Post depended on Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun; the Globe and Mail relied too much on telephone interviews; the Toronto Star let Canadian Press handle most of the week’s news.
Poynteronline’s Book Babes wonder how much significance lies in editor Sam Tanenhaus’ decision not only to review a spiritual memoir in The New York Times Book Review, but even to open the review on the cover. Granted, various readers may consider either decision equally blasphemous to the Times’ orthodoxies.
As Terry has indicated in this space, I spent the last week in St. Catharines, Ontario, covering the Anglican Church of Canada’s 37th General Synod for Anglican Essentials Canada.
I first heard N.T. Wright in 1993, at a conference of Episcopalians called Shaping Our Future. (The Rev. J. Stephen Freeman, whose essay of the same title prompted the conference, edited a collection of essays from that conference before converting to Orthodoxy.)
A news report by The Washington Post‘s Caryle Murphy and a column by Frank Rich of The New York Times both explore the question of whether pornography helped create the atmosphere of abuse and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison.
Journalists and Catholic politicians alike have protested that some Catholic bishops are advocating Eucharistic discipline only on the issue of abortion. Now Francis Cardinal George of Chicago has expanded the scope of such discipline — but not in a way that would please the bishops’ critics.
Nobody could accuse singer-songwriter Richard Thompson of being a pawn of the religious right. Thompson expressed standard-issue contempt for fundamentalism in an October 2003 interview with writer Greg Kahill of metroactive.com. Discussing Thompson’s album Old Kit Bag, Kahill wrote:
Thomas Chu of the Los Angeles Times has written a vivid feature about the copyright battle involving the 125-foot Christ the Redeemer statue that looms over Rio de Janeiro. Chu explains:
