Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In one of his books, Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote that he feels whale guilt — not guilt that he’s not doing anything to save the whales per se, but guilt that he doesn’t feel guilty about not doing anything to save the whales.
It took several days for the mainstream media to find a way to focus on the religious element of tsunami tragedy in South and Southeast Asia. This often happens with events that are simply too stunning and too important for the leaders of major print and electronic media to see them as “religion stories.”
The editors of Arts & Letters Daily state it bluntly: “If God is God, he’s not good. If God is good, he’s not God. You can’t have it both ways, especially not after the Indian Ocean catastrophe.”
Here’s a quick way to take the theological pulse of churchgoers. Imagine you’re attending an urban parish with a reputation for liberal theology and political activism. Your new senior pastor begins the Lord’s Prayer with “Our Mother and Father in heaven,” baptizes children in the name of “the Creator, the Redeemer and the Sustainer,” attends an anti-war rally in Washington and offers unequivocal support when the associate pastor announces from the pulpit that she is a lesbian.
The Christian Science Monitor reports today on the important and sometimes troubling intersection of church and commerce, but correspondent G. Jeffrey MacDonald’s compact article sometimes omits important points.
So the lavish Sawbridgeworth, England, estate of soccer megastar David Beckham and his wife, Victoria — formerly known as pop tart “Posh Spice” — contains its own private chapel. Who knew?
Many of the mainstream obits today for the Rev. Reggie White contain a photograph taken at one of the high points of his Hall of Fame career. In the photo — which I wish we had the rights to show you — White is kneeling near mid-field moments after his team has won the Super Bowl and the man they called the Minister of Defense appears to be preaching a mini-sermon before he leads a circle of players in prayer.
Pick up the newspaper on a typical Christmas morning and you know that certain items are sure to be inside.
A confession: I have no idea how to answer Bob Carlton’s call for my top five posts of the year, which, in this case, also means we are trying to select our favorite work in the (almost) first year of this still experimental and not even in a permanent format blog.
