Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In many ways, I’m pleased by the way that religion journalism has improved over the years, even with large cuts in newsrooms and other pressures. But if there’s one example of how religion journalism has not improved — indeed, gotten worse — it would have to be the way that the Roman Catholic WomenPriests stories are covered.
Who says the Germans don’t do comedy well? An article in a recent issue of Die Welt — “Koran-Offensive alarmiert Deutschlands Parteien” shows this not to be so. As I read the article, which tip-toes round the issue of radical Islam in Germany, my mind harkened back to an episode of the television series Seinfeld.
A news story published this week by a number of leading Texas newspapers â from Abilene to Dallas to San Angelo â reports on a suggestion that Texas abolish its state lottery.
The Pulitzer Prizes came out yesterday and you can see the whole list of winners here. A few of the prizes dealt with religious themes.
Over the weekend, I mentioned in passing that I wrote a column on the Mormon moment, since Mitt Romney will probably be the Republican nominee and the LDS Church is building Indiana’s first temple. My well-educated friends asked, “Wait, Romney’s Mormon?”
I’m not Catholic, but I’m part of a religious tradition that embraces children and affirms large families. I had absolutely no idea how counter-cultural this was until I became an adult and was surrounded by contraceptive messaging. When I got married, my girlfriends gave me copies of books such as the one pictured here. They told me stories about how they spaced out their children or learned how to get pregnant. I think, in fact, that as many people who use what is frequently called “Natural Family Planning” are doing so in order to achieve pregnancy as to avoid it.
As anyone who has read GetReligion over the last three or so months might have picked up, I occasionally disapproved of the way many media outlets took serious concerns that some folks have over Planned Parenthood or religious liberty and turned them into a non-stop meme regarding a “War on Women.” I was pretty subtle about it, but you may have noticed me bringing it up once or twice (OK, two dozen at last count).
Sometimes a story is too good to be true. A story with sympathetic victims, righteous heroes, dastardly villains and an issue that all agree is important, but yet is remote to the reader — something that doesn’t touch me — makes a reporter’s day.
