International News

Massacre in a generic Iraqi church

One of the first things that your GetReligionistas do when preparing a post in our WordPress software is to head over to the “Categories” function box and click all of the relevant choices for how we want this item stored in our archives. It’s a far from perfect process that keeps raising questions. For example, “Are Pentecostals really evangelicals?” Or how about, “OK, I know that Jordan is in the Middle East. But how about Iraq and Iran? How close is close enough? Do I really need to create ANOTHER new category?”


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Pontificating on immigration

We’ve had an interesting discussion after a post yesterday about an article on a group that monitors Muslim extremism. One of the last commenters, Irenicum, had a few interesting parts, such as noting how often “we’re stuck in a false dichotomy of ‘every Muslim is a potential terrorist’ to ‘there is no radical Islam.’” His last line, though, made me think of another news story:


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Something borrowed, something Hindu?

Pop singer Katy Perry and comedian Russell Brand married this weekend in India. Katy Perry began her career as a singer in the Contemporary Christian Music market so I was a bit surprised to read that it was a traditional Hindu ceremony. Maybe. I read that in the Washington Post, the Boston Herald, Entertainment Weekly, ABC News, Telegraph, Daily Mail, New York Daily News, MTV, and so on and so forth (this is a story of international importance). Here’s a snippet from a typical news report:


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Do all readers speak Arabic?

For anyone who paid attention to the news last year, the words shouted by the gunman responsible for a rampage that killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Food Hood, Texas, come as no surprise.


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Learning to pray -- in a mine

The late Peter Jennings of ABC World News Tonight was a remarkably candid man, when it came to talking about the perils of asking mainstream journalists to cover religion news and trends.


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Got news? Bible studies (plural) in mine?

I don’t know about you, but I had assumed that the spiritual leaders of the trapped miners in Chile would be Catholics. That was true of some, but not all.


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Attack of the Evangelicalists!

On September 28, we noticed a Time magazine story with some glaring errors. The caption alone managed to misspell and misuse the word “diaconate.” As of this writing — October 11 — the spelling and other errors haven’t been fixed. Reader joye commented on a thread a few days ago:


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