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The news of senseless shootings last Sunday at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church has unfortunately quickly drifted to the back pages of many newspapers across the country. The Knoxville News Sentinel continues to be the best place to go for hourly updates on the case. Overall their coverage has been solid, as would be expected from the local newspaper.
Faithful GetReligion readers will remember the story of William Lobdell, the Los Angeles Times scribe whose first-person account of how covering the religion beat cost him his faith ran on the front page of that newspaper.
Every serious student of recent American history and religion knows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about racial segregation and Christian churches. But few surely know the ways in which little has changed from King’s day. They would do well to read a CNN article on the subject.Reporter John Blake’s story was one of unusual power and honesty. Rare is the mainstream newspaper article that tells uncomfortable truths about both black and white Christians. This is one of those stories. Consider Blake’s lede:
The media is starting to cover the ironies and excitement of President Bush’s visit to China for the 2008 Olympics. The New York Times has already appropriately played up the fact that Bush attempted to go to worship at a house church but was denied by the Chinese government.
One of my favorite religion reporters is Robert King from The Indianapolis Star. A certain amount of my enjoyment reading his pieces comes from the fact that he writes about my local Hoosier Heartland community, but I think I can say objectively that King generally gets religion in his work as a journalist, and I’ve heard others around the community reflect similar thinking. He also knows the Indianapolis community.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did not live the kind of life that fits easily into a 700-word wire service story.
As I wrote a few months ago, I appreciate any serious newspaper profile of the local Catholic bishop or cardinal. Not to bash my hometown press unnecessarily, but I don’t remember the Bay Area media in the 1980s or ’90s ever doing so. And this in a region where not too long ago, the San Francisco bishop could name the city’s police chief or captain of the fire department.
As you would expect, I am still following the coverage of the Radovan Karadzic case, still looking to see if anyone is going to provide on-the-record information to back up all of those charges that the world’s most infamous war criminal had, at some point, been hiding in Orthodox churches or monasteries.
A couple of years ago, Eric Gorski — then at the Denver Post — ran a a three-part series on a local preacher of the Prosperity Gospel. What I loved about the piece, which exposed the pastor’s financial success, was that it also explored prosperity teaching in detail.
