Mainline

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Who made her a Catholic bishop?

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Another day, another mainstream news report on the Womenpriests movement that seems to have been written with the assumptions that (a) people are Roman Catholics if they say they are Roman Catholics (as opposed to being believers who are in sacramental Communion with the Church of Rome) and (b) that the Church or Rome is, or should be, operating on organizational principles that are much looser than, say, the Church of England.


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No mainline Protestants in GOP field?

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Despite my best intentions to avoid the Internet last week, news of Sarah Palin’s bus tour and her Star of David pendant still somehow seeped into my vacation. Speculation over the 2012 presidential candidates takes up much of the media’s excitement as you can imagine reporters preparing to either flock to Palin’s campaign or write the campaign obits.


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God, god and Oprah's good-bye

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Click here if you want to read the dead-tree-pulp Washington Post story about the final show by Oprah Winfrey. Or don’t. It really doesn’t matter, because this story is about a television event — not a signpost event in the development of pop and/or civic religion in American culture. Ditto for this news report in the New York Times.


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Study: nonbelievers have small brains

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OK, so Religion News Service has a provocative story on a provocative study that I’ve seen in a few papers. But the headlines that are running with the story are curious, to say the least.


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Unitarian ghost and a new Dr. Death

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If there is a list of GetReligion’s deadly journalism sins that affect religion coverage, one of the top items has to be this one: Don’t play the God card unless you intend to follow through and offer the reader some facts about the actual role that faith played in the story.


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The power of generic public prayer

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Suffice it to say that the Newspaper That Lands in My Front Yard has a complicated church-state story on its hands. It’s one of those stories that takes place when civil religion collides with free speech (and old local traditions) and the usual suspects start getting mad.


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Not the Dungy way

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During the NCAA tournament, a religion reporter asked me about the faith of Butler University’s basketball coach Brad Stevens. A few of my siblings attended Butler and one of them has a bulldog so surely one of us would know Stevens’ religion, right? We did some Googling and asking around, but it took a while to figure it out. No one had really thought to ask because he didn’t exactly point to the sky after they continued to plow through the tournament.


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