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The Secular Coalition for America generated a bit of news on the left West Coast by announcing that Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. , does not believe in God. The Los Angeles Times picked up the story and played it in a way that confirms for conservatives everything they thought about liberals. Take, for instance the headline, the subhead and the lede:
Evangelicals are going at it again over the environment, and the media have hardly sparred us a detail in covering the blow-by-blow in this round. For starters, Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times laid out the fight Saturday as an attack by “leaders” such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family on those who have “strayed too far from their signature battles against abortion and gay rights.”
So I was talking to my wonderful mom last night and she mentioned an article about the Episcopal Church she read in “the newspaper” that had a notable error. I asked her which paper (Denver has two papers and they also subscribe to or receive other local papers) and she didn’t remember. Neither did she remember what day it ran or who wrote it. I asked her if she remembered that I write about the problems mainstream media reporters have with writing about religion. She did and said she meant to mention it to me earlier. So this is just a reminder to my mom and all other readers that we love it when you point out good and bad articles you read or segments you watch or listen to. Within a few hours or days at most.
For those still watching the Anglican wars, there is a crucial story unfolding down in Charleston, S.C., where conservative Episcopalians in the Diocese of South Carolina are waiting to see if the man they elected as bishop — Father Mark Lawrence — can be consecrated.
We’ve ranted and raved about the lack of knowledge important Americans like senators and Congressmen have about Islam, but now it’s time to have a fit about how little most Americans know about the religion that is all around them.
I was going to ask young master Daniel Pulliam to write about this very GetReligion-oriented article over at the evangelical flagship Christianity Today, but then had second thoughts.
Happy news abounds here in GetReligion-land. First of all, we are only days away (perhaps even hours) from being able to roll out the new design for the website. I am not sure when the tech crew at Pierpoint Design & Branding will push launch, but it should be very soon. It’s a very clean, newsy look that should make the site even easier to read and use. This has been a long time coming.
A long time ago, in a post about the Grammy Awards, I raised a basic question about God-talk in The Associated Press Stylebook. Here is what I wrote at that time, in reference to a Los Angeles Daily News story quoting diva Mary J. Blige expressing thanks to “Father, God, lord and savior Jesus Christ.”
If there is anything that sets the hearts of the GetReligionistas a-twitter, it’s reading a really interesting news feature and, lo and behold, running into a solid, relevant dose of religion.
