Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Not to bury the lede or anything, by when it comes to religion writing, Prof. Ari L. Goldman of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been there and done that. During his two decades at the New York Times, he was one of the nation’s most trusted bylines on the religion beat and I have heard that judgment voiced by a stunningly broad range of clergy and Godbeat critics.
I’m wondering if syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant shouldn’t resist the urge to use his acid brush to depict religious angles. Last time we discussed his work, he was demonstrating his ignorance and hatred of Pentecostalism on the pixelated pages of the Washington Post.
How do you explain the religious complexities of a foreign culture not only to those who have a pretty deep understanding already, but to your most ignorant reader? And do various commonly used terms, like “religious right” and “religious left” mean the same thing “over there” (in this case, Israel) as they do over here? Not that we neccessarily even agree on what they mean over here.
If you’re one of those rare individuals who is interested in the topic of sex, you may enjoy Patricia Leigh Brown and Carol Pogash’s story in the Sunday New York Times about a co-ed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm.
For those of you who haven’t had the experience of attending a mainline seminary or studying the Bible in an academic institution, the Essenes are almost as much a matter of contemporary Biblical orthodoxy as the historical-critical method.
Mary Jordan of the Washington Post Foreign Service reports in today’s Post that Pope Benedict XVI wrote an “unusual letter” to “quiet” protests after his “embrace” of excommunicated bishop and conspiracy theorist Richard Williamson.
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. preached at Washington National Cathedral in March 1968. Robert Wright agrees, sort of, writing in the April Atlantic that “whether or not history has a purpose, its moral direction is hard to deny.” Wright’s essay is an 8,000-word argument that the three great monotheistic faiths may help create a more beneficent world through globalization.
Since the day this blog opened for business, your GetReligionistas been saying the same thing over and over about the structure of modern American religion.
One would think it might be a challenge to write about the subject of death and dying without discussing religion and faith. Of course, the absence of religion or faith in the subjects’ lives could limit the range or scope of the discussion. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t part of the story.
