Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It seems like just a few months ago that I was compiling my list of top stories from the previous year. Regardless of how quickly I would like to see time fly by, what follows is my summary from the past year and a celebration of this blog’s five years in existence.
When the Episcopal Bishop of Washington participates in a conference on religion and politics, it’s not necessarily newsworthy. When that conference takes place in Tehran, Iran, and the same bishop has a private meeting with the theocratic nation’s top spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei, it deserves more attention.
A move to create publicly funded schools that are secular in name, but offer education in Islamic, Jewish and Catholic culture raises complicated questions — ones that don’t seem to have gotten an overwhelming amount of attention in the mainstream media.
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I had the privilege of attending the inauguration yesterday and sitting in some ridiculously good seats. As in, eighth row. As in, Beyonce was many rows behind me. I have to say, if you’re going to see an inauguration, you can’t get closer than the press area. Or at least the press area I was in.
My sick daughter/frozen pipes/burst pipes trifecta-of-chaos this weekend prevented me from fully enjoying the pre-inaugural festivities here in Washington. But I watched a bit of the celebrity concert that got things going (I can’t get enough of Mary J.) and was sorry to see that HBO did not broadcast the opening prayer by Bishop Gene Robinson.
In recent years I have had quite a few opportunities, during seminars with the Oxford Centre for Religion & Public Life, to talk with journalists from some very interesting and very tense corners of the world. Most of the time, we have focused on issues where the freedom of the press intersects with freedom of religion. At some point, free speech is free speech — whether one is a journalist, an evangelist or a political activist.
The Washington Post ran one of those stories the other day that was so sad, so heavy with fact and detail, that at the end of it you just wanted to sigh or cry or scream and throw something at a wall.
