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The terrible story out of China of a toddler run over by a van as she wandered alone through a market has seen extensive news coverage. As two-year old Yue Yue lay in the street badly injured, a security camera recorded 18 people passing by before a woman stopped to help. There has been an outpouring of outrage on blogs and social media, some of it prompted by the passers-by making excuses for their behavior.
One of those news outlets that does consistently great religion coverage, most of it of the global variety, is Reuters. Its Faith World blog is one of the best ways to stay on top of big news from around the world. Case in point — this fascinating story about Macedonians being pressured to convert to Islam in Pakistan. Elswhere on Reuters is a good discussion of how newsrooms should approach graphic image distribution when it comes to showing the corpses of men who’ve died as Moammar Gadhafi did. (Confused about all the spellings for Gadhafi? See here.)
OK, gentle readers, raise your hand if you thought — after years of mainstream news consumption — that the Roman Catholic Church is opposed to all stem-cell research?
In my post the other day on the indictment of a Roman Catholic bishop in Missouri, I acknowledged that I am not an expert on the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandals.
Joshunda Sanders of the American-Statesman in Austin has a fascinating and compelling story about a local man. It begins with a great vignette:
Here we go again. In the past few days I have received a mini-wave of emails asking why GetReligion hasn’t commented on the mainstream news media’s alleged refusal to cover some of the controversial religion and anti-religion stories linked to the whole “occupy” movement.
Remember back, way back, to August 2010 when the mainstream media was obsessed with the proposed mosque near Ground Zero? It was so fun how nuanced the coverage was, where everyone with even the slightest question about the propriety of its location was labeled an Islamophobe?
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote for the Wall Street Journal editorial page about how The Episcopal Church had upped the ante in property disputes with departing congregations and clergy. While the church and its dioceses had long been litigating against departing congregations, they added a new feature in recent months: departing congregations who wished to pay for their church property and remain in it also had to disaffiliate from anything Anglican. They couldn’t have a bishop in an alternative polity, they couldn’t contribute financially or otherwise to any alternate Anglican group and they couldn’t call themselves Anglican.
