Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Nearly 20 years ago, I thought my habit of cursing was under control. Then I went to work at a daily newspaper, and I soon tumbled off the wagon. I usually give up cursing for Lent, but I spend the rest of the year in such verbal decadence that I have something to give up again by the next Lent.
Back in June, I took issue with a Time cover story by Nancy Gibbs that included this sentence: “It is as though Bush can’t allow the possibility that the enemy is motivated by its understanding of God’s will lest his critics note that he believes the same of himself.”
Chris “The Cosmopolitan,” one of GetReligion’s most frequent voices of dissent, has now delivered a “God’s Official Party” quote.
Bill Clinton can be eloquent in the pulpit, as he was in the Memphis Speech in 1993 (excerpts here). Like so many politicians, however, Clinton is not above using a weighty moment to attempt some score-settling, as in his remarks yesterday at The Riverside Church.
The millionaire entrepreneur John Sperling attracted some Big Media attention for his new group-project book, The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, with a series of visually hip ads depicting Mel Gibson and Newt Gingrich (Retro) and Michael Moore and Hillary Clinton (Metro). The book is still another version of explaining the cultural divisions that GetReligion usually describes as Red and Blue America.
That triumphalist remark is the heart of an energetic New York Times report about a massive new church built at San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, in honor of the Catholic mystic and stigmatic Padre Pio. The new church was designed by Renzo Piano, the architect of the modernist Pompidou Center in Paris. (Click here for fine photographs of the church’s exterior, and related text for architecture buffs.)
Ted Olsen of Christianity Today Online delivers some of the best news prolifers have heard in years: Around the world, even in the once abortion-enthusiastic China, nations are stepping back from unrestricted access to abortion.
GetReligion tried to find humor in the story of the Kerry campaign’s unfortunate choice of a liaison to churches, so fair is fair: Joe Feuerherd of the National Catholic Reporter has written a devastating profile of Deal Hudson, editor of Crisis and the Bush campaign’s newly resigned adviser on Catholic issues.
William Saletan is one of the great contrarian journalists of our time, and last week in Slate he cut through the thick growth of hype surrounding stem-cell research. In his address to the Democratic National Convention, Ron Reagan cast the debate in much the same light as the early post-Roe debate about abortion: enlightened science in favor of such research, mere religious humbuggery in opposition to it.
