Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The Kabbalah Centre has spent more time on tabloid covers than in the daily newspaper. The reasoning is obvious, what with all those fancy celebrities who like to make a big deal about frequenting (or at least occasionally appearing at) the the centre’s worship facility on Robertson Boulevard.
Suffice it to say that the Newspaper That Lands in My Front Yard has a complicated church-state story on its hands. It’s one of those stories that takes place when civil religion collides with free speech (and old local traditions) and the usual suspects start getting mad.
What we have here is the kind of commentary on the news that GetReligion tries to avoid, since the purpose of this blog is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of actual religion-news coverage in the mainstream press.
It was just a week ago that we all got news about the killing of Osama bin Laden. On Sunday night, crowds of people came out to celebrate this victory in the war on terror. And while many people understood the impromptu reaction, others felt a bit uncomfortable by the celebration. I think we all probably had mixed emotions in our reaction to Osama’s death. Almost immediately, many of my (mostly) Lutheran friends and family discussed what our reaction should be and it was an interesting example of how theology influences our day-to-day behavior.
The New York Times reports that faith groups are campaigning to block gay marriage in the state of New York:
I was sad to see on Twitter the other day that Poly Styrene had died. I’d been a big fan of her music. Not much later, I read that Phoebe Snow had died. I’d kept up with news about Poly but realized that I hadn’t heard what was going on with Snow in a few years. I came across the CBS morning news video embedded here on Roger Ebert’s blog at the Sun-Times. It’s several years old but it was full of detail and I was sobbing by the end. If you’re at all a fan, you will be well served to check it out.
As the daughter of a public employee union member, I was inclined to look at this Associated Press story about religion and unions. Its headline in the USA Today version was “Churches wrestle with God’s stand on union rights.” I was hoping the story would discuss, well, churches wrestling with the issue — or with each other — but it was actually just a long, but shallow, look mostly at what a few mainline clergy have to say about collective bargaining battles:
One of the reasons so many big stories in our mainstream press are “haunted” by religion ghosts is that many reporters are confused about what is and what is not “religious.”
