There’s this New York Times feature called “Room for Debate.” The name alone, and its presence on the opinion pages, led me to believe that maybe there would be, I don’t know, a debate between the featured participants. The topic yesterday was “same-sex families,” the hook a new movie about a lesbian couple and their children. But there was no debate that I saw. Featured opinions ranged from those of Dan Savage to those of an Evergreen College professor. It was just a given that society should have no qualms about same-sex parenting. The end. The ruling class marches on.
Homey church
Believe it or not, not all evangelicals attend a megachurch. In fact, if you check out this top graph from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, you’ll see that 59 percent of churches nationwide have an attendance of seven to 99 people.
Murdoch meets Oprah, kills Beliefnet?
Today is a big day in the ongoing story about the status of Beliefnet.com and what that says about the world of mainstream religion news and commentary.
A cut and paste fail
Whenever I come across a particularly puffy story, I might say it reads like a press release. But a reader sent in a story that really was just a slightly modified press release.
The fundamentalists are everywhere
There’s a certain irony in the relationship between atheism and Christianity and this ABC News story highlights that. It’s about some subset of atheists adopting a debaptism rite modeled on the Christian baptism rite.
About those flying monkeys
It’s such a simple thing, I guess, but I love the way Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Ann Rodgers previews upcoming religious events. It doesn’t matter what my level of interest is going into one of her stories, I always come away something to think about.
What Berger said
This isn’t exactly hard news, but I thought that GetReligion readers would want to know about (I mean, readers other than those who have sent us notes requesting a post on the topic).
Arguments that shed light
I’m not entirely certain how significant the new Vatican norms are for the treatment of crimes considered to be “most serious” within the Church. But I thought it worth looking at just one example of how the church and the secular media exist in two distinct universes.
It's hard out here for a Jew
At this point I am basically waiting for a barn burner focusing on the relatively new religion known as Judaism that is gaining ground and has even spawned a splinter religion called Christianity.
