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As a believer, I am not quite sure how a nonbeliever would react to Thursday’s story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about an interstate billboard intended to reach out to atheists and nonbelievers in the area. See here how the story introduces the billboard:
So I’m reading Washington Post reporter Rob Stein’s article on the latest frightening report to come from the Centers for Disease Control and Research. The latest report is that efforts to get teenagers to delay sex and use condoms is “faltering.” But by frightening and faltering, they mean that the data suggest we’ve hit something of a plateau after years of improvements.
There’s been something of a trend among a certain subsection of evolutionary anthropologists to explain religion as the product of a gene. Not that there is any evidence of a religion gene, mind you. Heck, not that there’s any evidence that such a gene is possible! But if there was, you see, it could explain Methodists.
A news story from across the pond about Christian preachers being told by police officers not to preach in a predominantly Muslim area is an example of how a news organization slant can present a relatively simple factual situation in any number of different ways.
Being in the media criticism game, I like to read the various ombudsmen and press critics out there. I’m pretty sure Jack Shafer at Slate is my favorite. His criticism is unconventional and thought-provoking. His latest column looks back at novelist Michael Crichton’s 1993 prediction that mass media would die within a decade. When the decade came and passed and media remained strong, people thought Crichton misguided. But now that the media giants are faltering, Shafer revisits the issue with Crichton.
When my wonderful wife first told me about the mother fighting a church’s legal ban on her autistic son attendance at Catholic Mass, I worried the news coverage would be rather shallow. On Sunday, Dave Kolpack of the Associated Press was able to publish a longish well developed update of this ongoing story that has important Catholic theology at its heart.
Back in March, we criticized some of the stories that came from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that one in four teenage girls had a sexually transmitted disease. Many of the stories were thinly veiled advocacy pieces. They argued that this sad statistic was the result of a national policy of abstinence education.
From time to time, I have been known to use a strange adjective in my posts about conflicts inside the wide, wide world of Roman Catholicism.
No wonder millions of young, biblically conservative young people no longer want to be known as “evangelicals.” You have to keep asking the question that your GetReligionistas have been asking since the dawn of blogging: What in the world does “evangelical” mean, anyway?The Washington Post ran yet another piece this week that perfectly illustrates that “evangelical” is quickly becoming the new “fundamentalist.”
