Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As longtime readers may have noticed, we GetReligionistas think it is rather important for basic religious facts to be included, from time to time, in stories about major religious events and trends.
Susan Hogan/Albach of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a wonderful article Sunday on how a conservative congregation, Resurrection Episcopal Church of West Chicago, separated itself from the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago without rancor or threats of lawsuits.
You don’t see many mainstream newspaper stories focusing on architecture, let alone one that digs into what church architecture might say about the people who worship under a particular roof.
My old new local paper, The Indianapolis Star, took the effort to send reporter Robert King to the suburbs of Chicago to cover the Islamic Society of North America’s annual convention. Reporter Robert King’s initial story in Saturday’s newspaper surprised me a bit since it seemed somewhat random. Then I realized that the organization is based in another suburb, this one near Indianapolis.
There is an irony in the story of South Korean missionaries taken hostage by the Taliban. Dr. Leroy Huizenga sent us a note about this CNN story on the Taliban’s statement that the hostages will be released. Here’s the key section:
Much of my writing on CNN’s God’s Warriors has focused on the promotion for the series. Many of you readers have agreed that lumping all religious extremists together with a term that implies violence is not very good journalism. While this is very likely a decision of CNN’s marketing department, not the journalists behind the three-part series, it’s still bad journalism.
The second episode of CNN’s God’s Warriors series aired Wednesday night. I wasn’t able to follow the show as closely as on Tuesday night, so I’ll provide some general comments rather than “live blogging” the show. Please give feedback since commentary on television news programs isn’t something we do that often.
As promised, here is a review of the first installment of CNN’s series God’s Warriors hosted by Christiane Amanpour. The topic for tonight is “God’s Jewish Warriors.” I raised the question Monday of whether the series would engage in moral equivalency by lumping together extremists (or God’s warriors) from Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As one reader asked, where are the Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism?
The email is starting to come in asking when GetReligion is going to have something to say about that New York Times Magazine cover story from this past weekend, the massive piece called “The Politics of God” by Mark Lilla. The sad thing about it is that I am three time zones away from my office and involved in some long, long meetings in which a circle of journalists and academics are, during the break times, talking about this piece.
