Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
For years, our missing co-founder Douglas LeBlanc was the GetReligionista who was officially in charge of posting “hathos” alerts linked to mainstream media coverage of religion news. He’s still out there, lurking, and he sent us an alert this morning for the first hathos alert of 2010 and it is a goodie.
GetReligion readers likely are familiar with John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter‘s ace Vatican reporter. His latest column analyzes the biggest Vatican stories of the last 10 years. An aside: is anyone else annoyed at all of these “best of decade” lists coming a year prior to the end of the actual decade?
I rarely disagree with the results of the Religion Newswriters Association poll that selects the year’s Top 10 stories on the religion-news beat.
Editors like easy stories. Holiday stories, awful as they often are, tend to fit that bill. And this time of year we always have a few intersecting holiday storie like Christmas and college football bowl season.
The first time I saw Archbishop Job of the Orthodox Church in America, he was singing the simple, yet haunting, hymn that the Orthodox sing during funerals — Memory Eternal.
At the beginning of November, Missouri began a sales tax on yoga studios. The only state in the nation to do so, the move is controversial because many folks in the Show Me State’s yoga community believe yoga is not just exercise but, rather, a spiritual practice.
I’m a big fan of the Reuters religion team and love that reporters there are given time and freedom to really explore stories. But I have to admit that this story about a Muslim revival in Chechnya didn’t exactly delight me from the get go. Here’s how it begins:
I sit on the side of the cultural divide that is more familiar with MC 900 Ft. Jesus than Oral Roberts and his 900-foot Jesus. But it’s hard to forget Roberts’ dramatic televangelism, his faith-healing, the travails of his various ventures, his contributions to the world of direct mail and database management. The man’s a legend and many people are mourning his death.
Obviously, one of the major religion stories of the day is the death of the Rev. Oral Roberts at the age of 91. I would imagine that the major newspapers have had obituaries ready for a decade or more.
