Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Once upon a time, it appeared that most mainstream journalists had rallied around the use of the word “Islamist” to describe the brand of Islam that has been linked to violence and terror around the world.
A report about Delta airlines refusing to fly Jews to Saudi Arabia lit up the internet yesterday. But within hours, some of the stories were altered or pulled and I’m still trying to sort out not just what happened but what it all means. I’m going to try to reconstruct things as best I can and then ask some questions at the end. You may not need all this reconstruction, so feel free to skip to the end.
Anyone who knows anything about the decades of bloody conflict in Sudan knows that it is impossible to take religion out of the mix — especially the conflicts between Muslims in the north and the Christians and animists of South Sudan.
I love all most of our reader submissions, but the other day we received one that sounded pretty surprising. It comes from Hasan Hakeem, a member of the Ahmadiyya Community and the Chaplain of the Kenosha County Jail in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I’ll go head and just quote it:
In case you have not heard, the U.S. State Department has a new ambassador at-large for international religious liberty. She is the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook and, during her decades of ministry as a Baptist pastor and chaplain, she has had a solid history of activism on a number of interesting public issues.
A Pakistani journalist was found murdered this week. I wanted to highlight that tragedy here because his beat involved a lot of religion coverage. Here’s how the San Francisco Chronicle explained it:
If generic New York Times readers know anything at all about Anglican bishops in Africa, surely they know that most of them are quite conservative on matters of faith and practice. For example, they are opposed to homosexual activity of any kind — a position that is very common on a continent in which their growing churches often directly clash with conservative Islam.
CNN is up with a horrifying story about what female protesters went through during the recent Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt. A senior Egyptian general has admitted that women were subjected to “virginity checks.” Amnesty International had alleged as such in a report following the protests. That group claimed that females “were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.” Those reports were denied. Things have changed:
