Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
But when you cruise through an entire year of GetReligion posts, it really is amazing how much can happen in a year. There’s just so much stuff in this here weblog (and most of it still “works,” even though flaws in the cyberspace concept of a “permalink” creates some holes).
Behold this observation, offered in the comments pages the other day in the wake of this weblog’s 4000th post:
For our fifth anniversary, we’re picking our top five posts from the last year. So I’ve reviewed all of my posts, a fruitful exercise that reminds me I’m still partial to stories about doctrine, the liturgical calendar and unlikely stories of how faith changes religious adherents. Even though these are my favorite topics to write about, they rarely elicit as much feedback as political posts. I normally dislike writing about politics but this last year was a huge exception.
It seems like just a few months ago that I was compiling my list of top stories from the previous year. Regardless of how quickly I would like to see time fly by, what follows is my summary from the past year and a celebration of this blog’s five years in existence.
Not just a religiously rich, important and awesome movie, Groundhog Day is also a great secular holy day. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday, meaning six more weeks of winter. Slate took the occasion of running a previously published piece on the origins and meaning of the day, written by Timothy Noah.
There’s no avoiding the fact that sexual abuse of children is an unbelievably sordid and distressing topic-particularly when it occurs in in what should literally be a sanctuary.
One of the big stories of last year was President Barack Obama’s religious outreach efforts. And yet the rise of politically liberal religious groups was horribly undercovered. Instead we saw a lot of stories about how evangelical Christians were broadening their areas of interest. It’s a weird blind spot considering that the religious groups supporting President George W. Bush and Republicans in general are always well noticed by the media.
It would be hard to write a more angry, snarky headline than the one atop that piece by Ken Shepherd that the Newsbusters crew shot over the bow of the nation’s best known evangelical magazine.
