Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Back in December of last year, a federal judge ruled against a Dover school board including intelligent-design theories in curriculum. The ruling basically said that intelligent design is religion-based and therefore false science. Mainstream coverage pounced on this. I raised a question about the coverage then:
The Los Angeles Times did us all a favor earlier this week by posting the text of a sermon given in 2004 that has All Saints Episcopal Church under an Internal Revenue Service investigation. In the age of the Internet, all reporters need to follow this practice because there is really no reason not to.
I like to believe my reading comprehension skills are adequate. But my confidence was dampened when I read The New York Times Magazine‘s advocacy journalism piece on gay parenting. The mash note ran 8,000 words, which was at least 2,000 too many.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across an article about the United Church of Canada and its move to add drinking bottled water to its list of “immoral” acts. While it seems trivial, it’s actually a very significant story, particularly from a business perspective.
As I have explained before, I rarely get to linger over a dead-tree-pulp edition of The Washington Post, the newspaper that looms over the city in which I work. The reason is that I live in an old blue-collar suburb just south of Baltimore, one that is not considered worthy of Post home delivery, like the high-class suburbs not far from here.
Following on the tails of last week’s post on pagans was this news story involving the widows of two U.S. combat veterans suing the federal government for refusing to let them place Wiccan symbols on their husbands’ headstones. As a side note, if you’re interested in more information on pagans, peruse the comments on that post. We received a surprising number of responses with links and info on the wide variety of pagan beliefs in the world these days.
In a previous post today, I referred to Time and Newsweek competing with each other for the best religion-centered cover story last week. Newsweek offered a package of articles (here’s the mainbar) about the Religious Right, while Time offered a more tightly focused debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins.
The editors of GetReligion have commented frequently on Jon Meacham’s work, in part because he has shown such a frequent and keen interest in religion coverage. To his credit, Meacham has kept that interest keen since becoming the editor of Newsweek. Indeed, last week offered a fine competition between Newsweek and Time for best religion-based cover story (about which more in a subsequent post).
For the second time in a week, I am about to get on an airplane and head out to the Los Angeles area, which means testing the battery life on my iPod video again.
