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You know, I laughed out loud when I popped open the first email asking me what I thought of this story. Then I did what any news junkie would do in this day and age. I slapped a silly headline on it and sent it to some of my friends.
The Associated Press wrote an interesting man-bites-dog story about religious conflict in Israel. According to the wire service, Orthodox Jews burned hundreds of copies of the New Testament:
Nobody doubts that religion plays a big role in the Iraq War. Yet few reporters, or at least the ones I have read, have shown the extent to which religion plays a role in the conflict.
It’s a saying that I have heard repeated time and time again by people who study China or work there on issues of human rights: Anything that you want to say about religion in China is true, somewhere in China.
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.
How often does a reporter get to write about the 100th birthday of a religion? The Miami Herald, no stranger to covering off-beat religions (at least from the perspective of a reader in the United States), has a rather unusual story on the “uniquely Brazilian religion” of Umbanda.
Regular GetReligion readers will not be surprised to know that I noticed the New York Times story that ran with the headline, “Kremlin Rules — At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church.” I noticed it and other people made sure that I noticed it, too.
A long, long, time ago — before that Pope Benedict XVI person came to town and took over the lives of your GetReligionistas (with some help from a controversial sect in Texas) — the Los Angeles Times ran a short educational feature entitled, “Muslim true/false — What you think you know about them is likely wrong — and that’s dangerous.”
