During this busy week, I have been watching to see if two men’s names showed up, at any point, in Google News.
Who are Hakan Tastan and Turan Topal?
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Covering two stories at the same time
Due to a busy class schedule, I have not had the time to address much of the new coverage of the liturgical meetings between Pope Benedict XVI and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, celebrating the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle. I think most of the symbolism and the substance in those meetings will be included in the major stories tomorrow and I should be able to catch up a bit.
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Time, Newsweek in early schism over the pope
Wow. Reader Janette Kok dropped us a note noting the radical difference taken in the Time‘s article on the papal trip to Turkey, in comparison to that in Newsweek, which, in fairness, was written by a ringer — Catholic scholar George Weigel.
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Christ-free Christmas? Don't blame Islam
I heard something interesting last summer while I was over in Oxford helping lead a seminar on press freedom and blasphemy.
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Sports reporters turning to God
The domain of sports reporting often overlaps into religion, and appropriately so. The best sports reporting focuses on people, and people are often religious.
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Breeding is believing
Molly Moore, who writes about France for The Washington Post, filed a report on French fertility. It is an anecdote-driven, uncritical look at French regulations’ effect on working mothers. It’s a bit light on data for being so heavy on conjecture, but here’s the nut:
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Yankees and Red Sox: Which league are they in?
If the leaders of the United States don’t understand the basic differences between Shiites and Sunnis, then what should one expect from the average American?
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Modern Russia does have its ghosts
Dang it, that’s what I get for waiting an extra day or two before writing about that sprawling Los Angeles Times series, “The Vanishing Russians.” I was waiting until the last day to see if reporter Kim Murphy elected to dig into the religious questions raised all the way through this fascinating and depressing set of four articles.
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LAT dips toe into moderate Islam
Imagine profiling a moderate Muslim in Copenhagen for the expressed purpose of understanding the life and outlook of a secular Muslim and failing to ask a question about religion. Well, Jeffrey Fleishman’s Los Angeles Times piece on Sunday comes close to accomplishing that feat. Issues of religion come up incidentally as if they were minor matters to be brushed aside in a quest to portray the subject as absolutely secular.
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