Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It’s not front-page news that Billy Graham has enjoyed varying degrees of access to every president since Harry Truman. The latest issue of Time, which publishes excerpts from the new book The Preacher and the Presidents by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, reports some interesting new details:
Everyone back in Washington is getting all excited about The Atlantic‘s article on President Bush’s former speechwriter Mike Gerson by a former colleague of Gerson’s, Matthew Scully. Scully’s main point is that Gerson sucked up to reporters, promoted himself over his colleagues and took credit for work that wasn’t solely his.
At some point, the whole “moderate evangelicals are starting to care about Creation” story is going to get old, but it sure does not seem that this will happen anytime soon.
Bruce Tomaso at the Dallas Morning News‘ fine religion blog highlights a horrible Reuters story that Christianity Today‘s Ted Olsen found.
I think the day has passed, here inside the Beltway, when powerful mainstream, hard-news reporters can actually sit in the Oval Office and informally offer advice to a president about this or that speech or this or that public policy (think JFK and the likes of a young Ben Bradley).
Two of the biggest political stories of the year, so far, have been the rise of the Godtalkers — old and new — in the Democratic Party and the ever-larger online power base that most liberal leaders call the Netroots.
So candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had a debate at 9 a.m. Sunday. I could be completely wrong about this, but I can’t help but think that if Democratic candidates held their debate on a Sunday morning during the middle of worship for a vast group of Americans, people would snipe about how it was further evidence of their godlessness. But maybe Sunday mornings are officially just like any other day.
The New York Times’ blog The Caucus reports on the juicy conflict between the presidential campaigns of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback that is steeped in religious issues and language.
The kidnapping of 21 South Korean aid workers by the Taliban in Afghanistan is one of the most neglected international stories by the American media. There are several reasons for this. Primary among them is that Afghanistan plays second fiddle to the conflict in Iraq and that there just are not that many American reporters in Afghanistan. But this story still matters in America.
