Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
At The New York Times, the simple act of publishing a book review can lead to a news story. As noted on GetReligion in early June, Andrew Sullivan praised Tony Hendra’s confessional book Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul in a cover article for The New York Times Book Review. (Hendra is on the left in the photo from This is Spinal Tap.)
Thursday’s religion news provided a few troubling examples of church leaders who have a less than firm grasp of reality.
An essay by the Rev. Dr. Giles Fraser in Monday’s Guardian begins on a promising enough note: he criticizes BBC2 host Nick Page for describing Prime Minister Tony Blair as a Christian fundamentalist.
Richard Dujardin of the Province Journal reported Sunday (free registration required) about a Lutheran pastor trained by a rabbi who is helping address conflicts between an Episcopal bishop and her priests.
John Rather of The New York Times has written an intriguing roundup about the protracted conflict between Bishop Orris G. “Jay” Walker of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island and some of his clergy. (I apologize that the story is now available only in the Times’ electronic archives.)
Ruth Gledhill of The Times of London has suffered a rhetorical lashing from an academic who accused her of not understanding contemporary New Testament scholarship. The benighted Gledhill is one of those journalists who seems to believe that words have meaning, and that certain ways of changing words invariably change meaning.
S.C. Gwynne of Texas Monthly has turned in a tour de force article about the current struggles of the Episcopal Church, marred only by a liturgically informed but sneering headline (“Peace be with you. And also with you. Unless you’re gay”).
Chris Rock jokes in his latest HBO special, Never Scared, that he favors gay marriage because “gay people have a right to be as miserable as anybody else.” That pretty well sums up the consensus in a forum by The Nation called “Can Marriage Be Saved?”
In the June 28 issue of Time, David Van Biema writes four sharp mini-profiles of women in “tall-steeple” ministries. Women’s ordination remains a volatile issue in many denominations, fraught with feminists’ charges of discrimination and traditionalists’ charges of compromising the faith.
