Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
There are so many positive things that I want to say about the gripping Time news feature that ran under the following double-decker headline: “Mexico’s Meth Warriors: Fueled by Evangelical zeal and America’s appetite for meth, a provincial Mexican gang breaks into the big time.”
One of the first tasks that young journalists face when they arrive at a mainstream journalism internship is having to write a bunch of those short news stories that newsroom folks call “briefs.”
Religion News Service has a story about Southern Baptist chaplains opposing reversal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. An edited version ran in the Washington Post on Saturday. They aren’t terribly different but I’ll be working from the Post version for this post. Here’s how it begins:
There’s been a lot of political coverage lately of Nikki Haley and the South Carolina gubernatorial primary. That race has been rife with religious ghosts ever since a state senator called Haley, a former Sikh who converted to Christianity, a “raghead.” Ever since then, supporters of her primary opponent Gresham Barrett have been trying to raise the issue of her religion in a rather slimy fashion.
So if American football is almost a religion, especially on the high holiday called the Super Bowl, what does that make the real thing, the real sport that is played with the feet? If the World Cup isn’t a religious event — in terms of civil religion, sociology and global myth — then I would be hard pressed to find on.
Did you read about the American who was caught in Pakistan attempting to hunt down Osama bin Laden? As soon as I heard the man was from my home state of Colorado, I became more interested in the details. Dr. Scott Faulkner spoke in defense of his brother, the 52-year-old Gary Brooks Faulkner, to Denver NBC affiliate 9News:
Surely by now you’ve seen the news that an enormous statue of Jesus was burnt to the ground in Ohio Monday. There were only 1,000 or so Google news links about it.
