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One of the bigger religion stories yesterday was the killing last weekend of seven Christians by Muslim Pakistanis. Many more were wounded in attacks on the Christian community of Gojra. Here’s how the New York Times began its story on the attack, headlined “Hate Engulfs Christians in Pakistan“:
I grew up riding BMX and that meant spending a few days each summer watching the X Games. Once when the X Games were in San Diego County, I crashed grinding a handrail at a high school near the competition, fractured my skull and had to be medevacced — but that’s a story for another day.
Gosh, did everybody see that wave of coverage of the United Methodist Church’s recent General Conference, the one in which evangelicals won two very important victories — moving in precisely the opposite direction as the course taken by the Episcopal Church?
While it may surprise GetReligion readers who reside in some parts of the United States, there are thousands of evangelical Christians — millions, globally — who worship in United Methodist pews week after week. That is certainly true down in the Southeastern corner of the Sunbelt, where there seems to be a United Methodist congregation in every small town and in almost every zip code.
There are some stories that you know are even more complicated than they seem. The so-called “Wafer-gate” controversy out of Canada assuredly falls into that category. It’s not only Byzantine, but mysterious. While the flap raises some very important issues about eucharistic fellowship, there’s also a delicious element of political skulduggery to it.
I came across an interesting quote over at Beliefnet editor Steven Waldman’s blog. It comes from an essay written by the founder of the Interfaith Alliance, C. Welton Gaddy, and published on the Huffington Post. In it, Gaddy shares memories of newsman Walter Cronkite, a former chairman of the Interfaith Alliance. The Alliance exists to fight groups that it believes are part of the omnipresent religious right:
Terry highlighted one of the more glaring holes in some of the stories covering the public health insurance debate. There have been some other problems with the media’s look at the abortion debate.
A reader passed along two stories appearing on the Fox News website. One, about a Liberian immigrant family shunning their 8-year-old daughter because she was raped by four other children, managed to completely avoid any discussion of religion. (Liberians tend to be Christian, animist or Muslim.) Another, about an alleged murderer put religion front and center in the headline and lede:
I think I am going to have to create a GetReligion list of “Big Ideas,” the concepts that drive what we do here. These two ideas would certainly be near the top, “Words have meaning” and “Ideas have consequences.”
