Godbeat

5Q+1: Adelle M. Banks at your service

We spend a lot of time here emphasizing the importance of considering religion when journalists cover a beat (ghost anyone?). But there are reporters out there who dig for and pounce on those religion angles, either in national news stories, denominational news or maybe in an entrepreneurial story.


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Grace, karma and Boy George

When you think of someone doing right by the Church of Cyprus, you probably don’t think of Boy George. And yet there he was, returning an icon he’d bought (without realizing its origin) in 1985, years after the Turkish invasion. The BBC writes:


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A Vatican smoking gun?

Irish broadcaster RTE and the Associated Press broke news this week regarding a two-page 1997 letter from the Vatican’s diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero. From there, the story traveled quickly. The letter communicates the opinion of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy about a set of proposed Irish policies for how to deal with priestly sexual abuse.


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Whatever happened to papal infallibility?

The Atlantic has a “flashbacks” feature, where the magazine highlights previous pieces. One of the more recent ones was a reflection on what the magazine had written about Pope John Paul II. Here’s the set-up:


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Correction? That picky fact about Isaiah 40

Join me, please, in meditating on our journalism question of the day: When publications make an error of fact and correct it, should they (a) change it quickly and move on or (b) change it and run a correction notice? Some of you may want to add a qualifying clause that says something like, “It depends on how important the error is, yada yada.”


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"Far right" or "mainstream" angst?

I get most of my foreign religion news from Reuters. They consistently report on stories of global interest with an eye toward religious details. But this story left me a bit cold. It promises a lot with the headline “In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers.” But I never quite understood what that meant, much less whether “far right” was an accurate description of who we were talking about. It begins by describing how streets and intersections in Paris are flooded with Muslim worshipers on Fridays. They don’t have room in buildings so they pray in the street, rain or shine. No big deal to the locals, we’re told:


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The Herod in all of us?

Last week we discussed the invention of a quote and related fraudulent framing of a story so that Pope Benedict XVI’s words on the importance of baptism became a treatise on celebrity baby naming trends. Some readers were surprised that journalists might stray so far from reality when composing their stories. Others pointed out that it happens often when the subject of the story is the Pope.


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