Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
There is a fascinating religion story developing right now out in cyberspace, one in which Hollywood crashes into the Internet, while bloggers and journalists (and journalists who are bloggers) square off once again with the crack legal team from the Church of Scientology.
As likely is the case in most communities around the country, there are abandoned churches in neighborhoods that used to be vibrant and alive. I know this is true in my neighborhood (I can see the abandoned church pictured in this post from my window) and I have seen it in other cities, particularly off the coasts where there is plenty of cheap land and the geographic cores of cities have gone through a several-decades long transformation from life to death.
Reporter Molly Ball of the Las Vegas Review Journal scooped the national press on a major political story Sunday. While covering the presidential campaign of Democratic candidate Barack Obama, Ball reported that a pastor endorsed Obama from the pulpit (Hat tip to Spiritual Politics):
If you are interested in Huckabee’s efforts to woo evangelicals, you could do worse than read the latest from the Washington Post‘s Perry Bacon and Juliet Eilperin. In a straightforward account, they explain how Huckabee isn’t just an economic populist, but a religious one, too:
Good for USA Today‘s By Cathy Lynn Grossman for writing about an important survey from the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Research group that showed that people who do not go to church are finding religion elsewhere. Not many mainstream news organizations picked this one up, but it is significant and worth a closer look than what is possible the day after the numbers are released.
While reading the voting breakdown of the New Hampshire primary, I noticed two trends among Catholics. One trend was that Hillary Clinton won a large plurality (44 percent) of those Catholics who voted in the Democratic primary. The other trend was that Mike Huckabee underperformed among those Catholics who voted in the Republican primary; he got 7 percent of the Catholic vote, compared to 11 percent overall.
I will offer no comments at all. I assume there will be more than enough commentary over at Poynter.org on this one.
Of all the stories readers and friends sent along to me today, the one headlined “Man Sees ‘Mark of the Beast’; Cuts Off, Microwaves Hand” is the most memorable. There’s really no way to get into this so I’m just going to post the entire story:
