Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Since 2004, eight Episcopal congregations have split apart or left the Central Florida Diocese because of the direction of the national church body. Mark Pinsky, the Orlando Sentinel‘s ace religion reporter, wrote that 500 members and the ministerial staff of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach are leaving their historic church building to form a new congregation separate from the Episcopal Church.
When the Jeremiah Wright scandal first broke, I was one of the voices here calling for more context. Well, I’m done with contextualizing. Sometimes it’s nice to just get a news story that asks hard questions while treating a subject fairly.
It never ceases to amaze me how much media coverage of denominational politics we get for The Episcopal Church vis-a-vis all other denominations. It seems like every time an Episcopal clergyman sneezes, it’s worthy of massive coverage. But a major church body — the United Methodist Church — holds its quadrennial convention in Fort Worth over the last two weeks and we get nothing. Or at least something close to nothing.
For the world’s 250 million or so Orthodox Christians, this is Bright Week. And if it is Bright Week, that means that last Sunday was Great and Holy Pascha. Which means that I was so busy this week, as my students wrapped up their work here at the Washington Journalism Center, that I didn’t offer a post on some of the Pascha coverage. I did, however, work in a Pascha column of my own for Scripps Howard.
For over a year, I’ve been intrigued by Chemistry.com commercials that go on the attack against the internet dating site eHarmony. It’s only mildly surprising for an upstart company to go after a major player in the market by trying to squeeze out some niche audience.
I am completely confused by the media coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. I feel as if the media went from providing a bit too much context for his incendiary remarks to completely abandoning the man. Is there any substantial difference between what he said this week at the National Press Club and what we saw in televised snippets from his sermons? Has he said anything different about his famous parishioner Barack Obama than he did in his old interviews with the New York Times or Rolling Stone?
As Mark noted earlier, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., came right out and made a statement — a statement about religion — that reporters should be able to investigate and challenge. In a way, Wright focused on the very angle that GetReligion has been trying to focus on from the start of this media firestorm.
In a story for CNN, reporter Eliott McLaughlin dove head first into a discussion of the religious views of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The hook for the piece is the group’s decision to open up and permit some public scrutiny of its lifestyle. They’ve started a Web site and a handful of polygamous wives have been doing a ton of interviews.
