Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Here at GetReligion we’ve protested when writers draw glib connections between religious belief and heinous behavior. “Follow the Mullahs,” Stephen Grey’s report in the latest Atlantic, is a refreshing exception to that pattern. Writing about efforts to authenticate a message attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Grey introduces the phrase forensic theology:
The Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker (not yet available online) includes an eight-page article about Creflo Dollar, who preaches what is widely called prosperity theology. The article, by New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, mines some of the rich details a reader would expect in a New Yorker profile, such as these:
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church has responded to Archbishop Peter Akinola’s description of a private conversation with Griswold. (Today’s picture shows Griswold, Akinola and Desmond Tutu together at a U.S. House of Bishops meeting in 2002.)
I returned late Tuesday from a last-minute trip to Washington to hear Peter Akinola, the primate of the Church of Nigeria, discuss his plans to launch a U.S. alternative to the Episcopal Church. (The picture shows Akinola greeting Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold at a meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops in 2002.)
The comments section on Jeremy Lott’s post, The Gauche That Haunts Me, has been active all week, and for that we are grateful.
“He is the conservative bastion of the US supreme court, a favourite of President Bush, and a hunting partner of the vice-president. He has argued vociferously against abortion rights, and in favour of anti-sodomy laws. But it turns out that there is another side to Justice Antonin Scalia: he thinks Americans ought to be having more orgies.”
Many writers pursue consistent themes in their work. Mark Steyn has his campy references to show tunes. Paul Greenberg works in journalists’ inside joke of “It was as if an occult hand had.” GetReligion’s editors chafe at glib references to fundamentalism. And Jon Meacham of Newsweek chips away at “certainty” and “literalism,” which means he managed to find a theological angle in last night’s presidential debate about foreign policy.
Nova: Origins host Neil deGrasse Tyson is an agnostic and, according to People magazine in 2000, “the Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive,” Ellen Gray reports in the Philadelphia Daily News.
Alex Johnson of MSNBC writes: “George Bush has not said directly that he was ever born again. He has often said he was pointed on the path to God after a discussion with evangelist Billy Graham in 1985. . . . There is a second story about how Bush started on the road to salvation, one that is more in line with the common narrative.”
