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Newsweek‘s Lisa Miller has some advice for journalists covering people who “were taught that homosexuality is an abomination and that Adam and Eve cavorted with dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden”: Be compassionate and avoid stereotyping.
“The Iconoclasts,” Jason Zengerle’s New Republic report on evangelicals who have become Eastern Orthodox, is a largely commendable effort to let a few of these converts speak for themselves, but it presents an overly political picture of evangelicalism.
I am tempted to think that the word “evangelical” and several words connected to it have become too vague to be of any use to mainstream reporters. I know that’s impossible. There are simply too many people who use “evangelical” as a noun or an adjective these days.
I first heard of the “booming business” of corporate chaplains in American companies on The Economist‘s podcast Friday afternoon. I hadn’t heard a word about this trend for years. Since when does a British magazine break news on American business and religion trends?
I wrote a post here the other day about the resignation of Karl “Boy Genius” Rove in which I noted that the mainstream coverage of his exit did little to dig into his relationship with conservative Christians. This gap was really strange if you stopped and thought about it, in light of that voting bloc’s strategic role in the Bush era.
Let’s start with the classic Martin Marty quote, which is always good when talking about religion and the news. Marty has been known to say that, for many people, the word “ecumenical” seems to boil down to someone saying, “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
Much of my writing on CNN’s God’s Warriors has focused on the promotion for the series. Many of you readers have agreed that lumping all religious extremists together with a term that implies violence is not very good journalism. While this is very likely a decision of CNN’s marketing department, not the journalists behind the three-part series, it’s still bad journalism.
The second episode of CNN’s God’s Warriors series aired Wednesday night. I wasn’t able to follow the show as closely as on Tuesday night, so I’ll provide some general comments rather than “live blogging” the show. Please give feedback since commentary on television news programs isn’t something we do that often.
As promised, here is a review of the first installment of CNN’s series God’s Warriors hosted by Christiane Amanpour. The topic for tonight is “God’s Jewish Warriors.” I raised the question Monday of whether the series would engage in moral equivalency by lumping together extremists (or God’s warriors) from Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As one reader asked, where are the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism?
