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I keep meaning to highlight two stories from earlier this week that dealt with female ordination. The first was a very well-written and interesting profile of the Rev. Marsha Foster Boyd by David Crumm in the Detroit Free Press. She was ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and will be taking over as the fourth president of Detroit’s Ecumenical Theological Seminary in October.
For some time now, the Los Angeles Times has been running a feature, Outside the Tent, in which the editorial page invites the newspaper’s critics to take their best shots at specific issues.
Altering photographs is nothing new, especially in this digital era. When applied to the news business, it is a Jason Blair-style crime along the lines of plagiarism and fabrication — maybe worse because altered images are sometimes difficult to detect and images are so powerful. The media watchdogs have largely failed in covering this issue of altered and staged photographs, and they are failing the public.
As a rule, GetReligion limits itself to dissecting the work of mainstream journalists when they wrestle with news stories about religion. But, every now and then, you see a story in which your heart really goes out to the journalists who are trying to do this difficult job.
An August 5 article in the Los Angeles Times brought to our attention that Jews and Muslims are not the only ones caught up in Middle East conflict. Christians live there too.
Anyone who paid close attention during the EWTN interviews with Mel Gibson, released during that Christian-media PR wave before The Passion of the Christ, could read between the lines.
When I was in college, about the time that the Earth’s crust cooled, there were two kinds of moviegoers at Baylor University, the world’s largest Southern Baptist institution of higher learning. There were the people who went to Woody Allen movies and the people who did not.
Naveed Haq was anything but an Islamic radical. He was a recently baptized convert to Christianity, and he expressed interest in Mormonism. His father, on the other hand, is a leader in the Muslim American community in Richland, Wash. It’s fair to say that the entire story line of a crazed Islamic radical shooting up a Jewish organization has been turned on its head.
Six shot in an apparent hate crime. One person dead. One man, antagonistic toward Jewish organizations, acting on his own.
