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I was going through some email from last week and found a note from a reader about coverage of the one-year anniversary of the death of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who was killed after he challenged Turkey’s official teachings on the early 20th-century mass killings — or genocide — of Armenians.
Long ago, during my days in the Church-State Studies program at Baylor University, I took a course on contemporary religious movements and “cults.”
Every now and then, I read a really interesting story and I think to myself, “You know, the minute someone covers that story in the New York Times or it shows up on National Public Radio, then all heckfire is going to break loose.”
For being on page A1 in The Washington Post, the article earlier this week on a high school athlete disqualified from a track meet for wearing clothing intended to be modest for religious reasons is missing a few things. Fortunately, we have the Internet, and the captions on the online photo gallery fill in a few details that were lacking from the story.
One of the nastiest campaign tricks in recent memory was the Louisiana Democratic Party’s attempt to derail the candidacy of Roman Catholic Bobby Jindal by quoting — out of context — statements he’d written about Protestantism. The thing I remember about the attacks is that Jindal seemed surprisingly theologically literate for a politician. Jindal explained his adult conversion from Hinduism in the New Oxford Review and the Democratic Party quoted some of it to give the impression that Jindal was a bigot. I know it’s Louisiana and all, but that’s cold.
Here is another example (click here for previous discussion of a similar case) of a major story from Britain that needs — somehow — to be confirmed at a level great than the voice of one person who wields great authority. Consider the lede in the Telegraph report by Jonathan Wynne-Jones:
Wendy Hundley of The Dallas Morning News had a fascinating story on her hands: two teen-aged daughters were found shot to death and their father was considered the most likely culprit.
For political junkies like myself, tonight’s Iowa caucuses is kind of like the first day of Christmas. Finally, after so much waiting, we finally get to find out what is in those political Christmas presents.
If you are a Western reader, don’t be surprised if this Al Jazeera story on the increasing presence of radicals in Indonesia doesn’t fit your typical Associated Press or Reuters news story. But the cultural and religious presumptions provide insights are worth looking at briefly. Also buried within the story is a bit of news that probably could use some more reporting and explaining.
