Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It isn’t very shocking to pick up the newspaper and learn that there has been (a) another clash between Rome and a progressive Catholic theologian and that (b) this scholar teaches at Georgetown University.
I am headed to Amish country today with a bunch of Orthodox men for a kind of old-fashioned guy’s day out adventure — various bonding rites planned, including something involving hot-rod tractors and lots of noise. However, I will keep my reporter’s hat on and I’ll let you know if I meet any Amish people who are speaking in tongues. OK?
As longtime readers may have noticed, we GetReligionistas think it is rather important for basic religious facts to be included, from time to time, in stories about major religious events and trends.
One of the crucial principles in Associated Press style is that, when in doubt, reporters are supposed to let groups of people define themselves.
I meant to post this flashback last night, but was caught up in that server crash that shut GetReligion down for several hours.
You don’t see many mainstream newspaper stories focusing on architecture, let alone one that digs into what church architecture might say about the people who worship under a particular roof.
How would you like to try to write a standard, newspaper-length obituary for the Rev. Billy Graham? How would you like to cover his entire life in somewhere between 600 and 2,000 words?
Long ago, when I was a graduate student in Baylor University’s church-state studies program, one of our professors liked to cut to the chase by saying the following: “Your religious liberties have been purchased for you by many people with whom you would not necessarily want to have dinner.”
I am tempted to think that the word “evangelical” and several words connected to it have become too vague to be of any use to mainstream reporters. I know that’s impossible. There are simply too many people who use “evangelical” as a noun or an adjective these days.
