Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the most important things that journalists get to do is pick the right words to describe complex situations, especially when defining what religious believers do or do not believe.
I generally like lists. But only if they’re good lists. And by good I mean lists that generally agree with how I see things. In other words, this week’s Washington Post “Ranking the League” (about the National Football League) is a bunch of garbage. The Indianapolis Colts are not #1. Somehow the geniuses over on 15th Street think that the San Diego Chargers and the Chicago Bears are better than the Peyton Manning’s Colts. Go figure.
You knew that when Gayle Haggard wrote the following words, there would be reporters as well as church members who took her at her word.
As I have explained before, I rarely get to linger over a dead-tree-pulp edition of The Washington Post, the newspaper that looms over the city in which I work. The reason is that I live in an old blue-collar suburb just south of Baltimore, one that is not considered worthy of Post home delivery, like the high-class suburbs not far from here.
In a previous post today, I referred to Time and Newsweek competing with each other for the best religion-centered cover story last week. Newsweek offered a package of articles (here’s the mainbar) about the Religious Right, while Time offered a more tightly focused debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.
For the second time in a week, I am about to get on an airplane and head out to the Los Angeles area, which means testing the battery life on my iPod video again.
When the Ted Haggard sex scandal broke, Lexington Herald-Leader religion reporter Frank Lockwood posed an interesting question:
It’s a topic that comes up every now and then when mainstream reporters try to figure out the foreign policy implications of all of those bizarre evangelical beliefs about Israel and the end of the world.
Of the topics that are both universally experienced and wildly controversial, procreation has to rank near the top. Kudos to Eileen Finan at Newsweek for a remarkably balanced piece about a landmine-prone issue. (And thanks to reader Jon Swerens for letting us know about the article.) In an online-only piece, she looks at a movement of Protestant Christians opposed to birth control of any kind:
