Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Our colleague Jeremy Lott will not post as often for the next few days as he fills in for one of our favorite bloggers, Charlotte Hays at Beliefnet. (Bloggers Charlotte Allen, Domenico Bettinelli Jr., Rod Dreher, Barbara Nicolosi, Kathy Shaidle and Mark Shea have filled in for her on other days.)
The headline and deck in the Dec. 6 BusinessWeek (Economists Are Getting Religion: Can organized faith be explained by supply and demand? They think so) might create dread among believers. Are some pointy-headed intellectuals going to reduce the complexity, mystery and wonder of faith to something so mundane as commerce and “product”?
There’s been no mainstream media coverage of the moment yet, but Bono threw down another gauntlet for the FCC on Saturday Night Live this weekend. During the show’s closing credits, and while riffing on U2′s chestnut “I Will Follow,” Bono mounted an audience member’s lap and began thrusting.
Longtime New York Times television writer Bill Carroll has applied the blue America vs. red America motif to TV programming, finding that “choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar.”
Thursday’s dedication ceremonies for the Clinton Presidential Center offered some stirring images — including the presidential families all standing to watch Bono and the Edge performing (Windows Media) — and generous examples of presidents seeing the best in one another.
Dawn Eden, a longtime music writer and now a copy editor at the New York Post, today celebrates her first appearance on an op-ed page with her witty piece “The Grinch Who Stole Messiah.” Eden criticizes the South Orange/Maplewood School District’s policy of banning religious music — now including instrumentals — during students’ holiday concerts.
The Washington Post has published a follow-up to its two-article series on Michael Shackelford, a gay teenager living in the very red locale of Sand Springs, eight miles west of Tulsa. When the Post concluded its second article on Sept. 26, Shackelford had decided he would feel more at home by joining his older sister in Las Vegas.
William Lobdell of the Los Angeles Times touches all the right bases in his report about churches that think of more than their address and service times when they design advertising.
Saturday’s edition of A Prairie Home Companion was called a Bonus Joke Show and it followed the presidential election, so the mind naturally turns to Christian-bashing — or, to use host Garrison Keillor’s more specific target, "born-again Christian"-bashing. Keillor poured himself into fundraising for the Democrats this year, as the Associated Press reported in September, so his indignation about the election’s results is not surprising.
