Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As a culture, we are still in the midst of the great secular holy season called the NFL playoffs. That means GetReligion readers will have to put up with a few more reports about faith and football, as opposed to the civil religion built around faith IN football.
The Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education completed its report on the health of U.S. seminaries and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops posted the report this week. The in-depth look at seminaries was prompted by the sexual abuse crisis that received so much attention a few years ago. The report was generally positive and said that the situation at seminaries had improved in certain areas. The Catholic News Service sums it up this way:
The following bit of local news may not be the best evidence of a declining newspaper industry, or the media’s overall challenges in covering religion, but I must say a word about The Indianapolis Star‘s decisions to cut the short prayer on page A2 next to the chuckle and horoscope and then bring it back a couple of weeks later.
The fate of embryos and treatments to screen them for disease made news in England last week — but few apparent ripples over here.
I live in the same neighborhood as the U.S. Capitol where we will inaugurate Barack Obama as our next president. You would not believe the chaos — some real, some manufactured — as we head into this Tuesday. There are massive parking restrictions, road closures and bridge closures not to mention restrictions on what even pedestrians can carry within the security perimeter.
As we’ve seen in press coverage over the past couple of months, the 50 billion dollar fraud allegedly perpetrated by financier Bernard Madoff has sparked debate and some soul-searching about Jewish identity in the Jewish community.
The Washington Post ran one of those stories the other day that was so sad, so heavy with fact and detail, that at the end of it you just wanted to sigh or cry or scream and throw something at a wall.
Two basic kinds of stories have been written about the retirement of Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy. The first are about Dungy’s results on the gridiron, his record-setting 10 straight playoff seasons, and six in-a-row seasons of 12-plus wins. The second story is about Dungy’s faith and his personal impact on the world around him.
Remember when President-elect Barack Obama picked the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver an invocation and all hell broke loose? The rioting and the pillaging and swastika-painting and what not? I couldn’t begin to quantify how many stories I’ve read on the pick and its response in the gay community.
