Do you believe in God? Do you promise to follow him and forsake sin? And do you endorse God’s one-and-only approved stance on this latest piece of legislation? Then (and only then) may you be counted among the elect!
A very Jewy box office
If you’re looking to hit the movies after sundown Saturday, there is a really good, really Jewy option out there. It’s the Coen brothers’ latest film, “A Serious Man,” which Steve Rabey mentioned last month. Until sometime in the past few weeks, you also could have gotten a Jewish perspective on Nazis from “Inglourious Basterds,” though I wouldn’t have recommended taking the kids to that one. In fact, there have been a handful of good, Jewish-themed films in theaters in the past year: “Defiance” immediately comes to mind.
A case of mistaken photography
Slate has an awesome annual feature called 80 over 80. It ranks the country’s most powerful politicians, businessmen, and cultural leaders who are in their ninth decade. Ranked according to their power and importance, look who comes in at #1:
The great omission
I’m not sure GetReligion has ever highlighted a gap in religious coverage before. But I think I’ve find just the occasion. And my blind hope is that the reasoning behind this omission was a collective decision to ignore the problem — in this case, Jon Gosselin, the former co-star of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ and a fallen hero for American evangelicals — and pray he will just go away.
NYT getting Judaism
You don’t have to look far on the Internet to find discussion of The New York Times as a Jewish paper. I’ve had some fun with these beliefs — often closer to conspiracy theories — but that’s because they’re pretty ridiculous.
'That' really bad Scalia edit
I thought that I was done with the Mohave Desert cross story until I started digging a bit deeper into the Washington Post. That’s when I ran into an interesting collision between two different accounts of the same pivotal statement by the ever quotable Justice Antonin Scalia.
Clericalism? If the shoe fits ...
Anyone out there in GetReligion reader land who wants to read a truly depressing A1 feature story? That’s what the Baltimore Sun gave us the other day and, truth be told, I have a sense that there is much more to this story than made it into the newspaper — but I don’t think there is much that reporter Nick Madigan could have done about that (with one or two exceptions).
American idolatry
This past June, I commented on the popular use of the word “icon” to describe Michael Jackson. In a way, the story below is a fitting follow-up to the summer stories of the deaths of other icons, such as Farrah Fawcett and Ted Kennedy. (Don’t forget this Wall Street Journal piece that made fun of how low the “icon” bar had been set.)
Journalism's teshuvah on Yom Kippur
As a religion reporter, I always hated the holidays. Christmas, Ramadan, Yom Kippur — they all meant coming up with new stories for centuries-old traditions.
