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 can’t remember when, exactly, the mainstream media decided that it would stop with the unilateral caricature of evangelicals as the Christian Right, but I’m not sure the new caricature is much improved.
Several readers have written in to let us know about a new feature over at Poynter.org entitled “New Frames Needed for Religion Reporting,” written by Bill Kirtz of Northeastern University. This is a short summary of a recent forum on the subject at Northeastern and it offers some timely advice from veterans on the beat and some very good links to information.
One of the things I love about the religion beat is that valid and even interesting religious content can show up literally anywhere in the newspaper. If you needed evidence of that, check out this chatty little story from the Washington Times, focusing on the highs and lows of celebrity parenting.
Here’s a quick follow-up post on the conflict free Baltimore Sun piece on the election of the amazingly controversy free bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. You just knew that the local, regional, national and global Anglican wars couldn’t stay out of the Washington-Baltimore headlines for long.
It appears that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston has a new co-cathedral, which is the kind of thing that happens when a little inland town called Houston grows into a megacity and you need a giant new sacred space to symbolize that. It’s formal name is the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
With all the coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States, some of it seems to just blur together. So I had to highlight a completely fresh take on the trip from the Washington Times‘ Julia Duin:
There is a church in my neighborhood that has some bizarre combination of names like Mt. Calvary Holy Trinity Apostolic Church for Believers. My friends and I like to imagine what strange set of events led a church to have that name. Was that its original name? Was it a merger of multiple churches?
As I mentioned the other day, I haven’t been seeing a lot of mainstream coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., that spends much ink on the religion side of this story. Politics continue to rule the day (surprise, surprise).
In recent weeks, I’ve tried to point out some of the better and worse coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s upcoming visit to the United States.
