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How often do you read that the Southern Baptist Convention is to the left of a theological debate? For many, that fact alone is the story’s lead. Such is the situation when a reporter must cover a theological/academic spat at a religiously fundamental institutions.
Voodoo, in its New World form, is a syncretized religion. It blends religion native to West Africa and Central Africa with Christianity. Reporter Marc Lacey wrote about the new Port-au-Prince-based head of Voodoo in a profile for the New York Times:
The Dallas Morning News had a compelling story last week that dealt with the closing of a 118-year-old neighborhood church that draws on local, regional and national religion trends. Locally, dwindling membership and declining revenues have challenged the church. In addition, the church has struggled as a “predominantly Anglo church in a largely Hispanic area.”
On the night before he was assassinated, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the now famous “Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn.
Jonathan Martin, a great reporter for Politico, had a lengthy story looking critically at the lack of religious rhetoric coming from Sen. John McCain.
Jacqueline L. Salmon of The Washington Post wrote what I consider a very regrettable story about Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl. Salmon’s mini-profile of Wuerl, written in preparation for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, was shallow and unfair, the sort of story that the Archbishop detests and rightly so.
With all the coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s trip to the United States, some of it seems to just blur together. So I had to highlight a completely fresh take on the trip from the Washington Times‘ Julia Duin:
There is a church in my neighborhood that has some bizarre combination of names like Mt. Calvary Holy Trinity Apostolic Church for Believers. My friends and I like to imagine what strange set of events led a church to have that name. Was that its original name? Was it a merger of multiple churches?
What role did journalists play in the fact that one out of every ten Americans believes Illinois Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama is of a religion other than Christianity? A depressing poll from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that ten percent of Americans mistakenly believe that Obama is a Muslim.
