Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I’ve spent a great deal of time researching media coverage of the Air Force Academy scandal that erupted last April. The press accounts, woefully one-sided, indicate that evangelical Christians are running roughshod over the rights of everyone else at the Academy.
One of the things that I have always been fascinated with is archaeology. Especially archaeology that uncovers things we did not know or could not confirm about the past. Such is the case here in an article on the China Daily Web site that describes an artifact that could be used as evidence that Christianity spread to China as earlier as 100 years after the death of Christ. The reporter Wang Shanshan has the details:
The 2005 end of the year wrap-up stories are starting to bloom. With New Year’s Day falling on a Sunday — massive newspapers — look for tons then.
Greetings from Crawford, Texas, home of my professor brother and, from time to time, of someone named George W. Bush. I wonder if I could get arrested for Christmas caroling out at the ranch tonight? After all, it is still Christmas.
I have a friend who makes fun of the stories that repeat every year on local news stations. His favorites are “Grocery scanners rip you off!” and “Our blacklight shows hotel comforters are dirty!”
A long, long time ago, the journalist Stephen Bates wrote a stunning book entitled “Battleground: One Mother’s Crusade, the Religious Right, and the Struggle for Control of Our Classrooms.” You knew it was an amazing book because the back cover was full of praise from scholars, journalists and acitivists on the left as well as the right. His thesis: Our public schools have become so biased against traditional forms of religion that they are, ultimately, undercutting the foundations of America’s heritage of public education. They are driving away millions of parents and, thus, their children.
A few weeks ago a mini-scandal broke out surrounding Ridgeway Elementary School in Wisconsin. It seemed that some official with the school play had secularized the words to the beautiful “Silent Night” (or as we Lutherans call it: “Stille Nacht“) to “Cold in the Night.” Various groups got enraged and sent out press releases and television networks ate it up and ran breathless segments about the war on Christmas.
Anyone who knows anything about church growth in America knows that, when it comes to studying big churches, all roads lead to Texas (surprise, surprise) and sooner or later (surprise, surprise) you’re going to end up in Dallas, which some people call the capital of American evangelicalism. If you doubt me, click here.
A priest and six laymen at a Roman Catholic church in St. Louis have been excommunicated by Archbishop Raymond Burke and St. Louis Post-Dispatch religion writer Tim Townsend has been doing excellent coverage, even winning an award for one of his earlier stories.
