Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Journalists in Colorado have a really hard, hard religion-related story on their hands. At the heart of it is the question of what to do when you are dealing with inflammatory, even terrifying quotations and they are, to pour gasoline on the fire, second-hand quotes.
This past week saw two excellent examples of the American media’s efforts at finding and portraying in the most positive light possible Muslims that make claims of being moderate. These two examples, one in The Los Angeles Times and the other in The New York Times, both portray Islamic preachers. Both reach their audiences primarily via the television. And both articles keep the basic beliefs of both preachers fairly obscure.
We normally focus on covering news in our posts, rather than commentary about news. After all, everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
One of the best quirks about journalists, at least on the print side of things, is our general obsession with words.
Time magazine’s Person of the Year feature rightly focused on President-elect Barack Obama. Unfortunately, while the magazine managed to slip in an unremarkable (but first-person) look at Obama’s basketball skills and its influence on his life, none of the magazine’s four articles on the Person of the Year Obama touched on the influence of religion on the campaign of the influence faith has had on Obama’s life.
Inspired by David Gibson on his Pontifications blog, I will float these predictions for the Godbeat in 2009. I lack the courage to commit myself to any one answer, or the insight to write every item with serious intent.
Unlike all other Americans (give or take a few) I’m not a big fan of civil religion. I dislike the way it forces a syncretism and watering down of sacred beliefs in service to political goals. But there is a long-standing tradition of civil religion in America — invocations at political events, mentions of religious texts in inaugural speeches, veneration of Lincoln and other great politicians, interfaith events for political causes, etc. And so we will be witnessing a tremendous amount of civil religion in a few weeks when President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office to lead our country.
I’m always amazed when I read a piece of journalism that takes what I call the “anthropological approach” to some weird religious group. It seems particularly odd when the group in question is Christians in America. Usually it’s evangelical Christians who get this special treatment.
Charles Blow fills a niche so precise that The New York Times is one of the few daily papers that could maintain it in these lean times. He is the Times‘ “visual Op-Ed columnist,” which means that Blow, drawing on his long experience as graphics editor and then graphics director for the Times, supplements his concise remarks with graphics.
