Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Pardon me for taking a long-needed trip into my GetReligion folder of guilt to deal with a riveting Washington Post story. Several readers sent me notes about and I promised I would get to it sooner or later. This is later and I know that.
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).
So former Sen. Rick Santorum has dropped out of the GOP side of the horse race for the White House, which is a pretty big deal here in DC Beltway land. After all, nothing in life matters as much as the fine details of political horse races. That’s what average Americans wake up in the morning wondering about. Right?
One of the defining rituals of my young life was watching the Masters with my father, who was almost as good a golfer as he was a Baptist pastor and hospital chaplain. I drove home from college several times to keep that ritual intact.
I’ve mentioned my desire for more information on the brutal killing of Shaima Alawadi. And new information we are getting. First, let’s review some of the recent stories about her murder.
I’ve been mildly obsessed with the horrific beating of an Iraqi-American woman in Southern California. Shaima Al Awadhi succumbed to her injuries on Sunday. She was 32 years old and a mother of five children. Her oldest daughter is 17.
Anyone who has followed American politics since, oh, roughly 1973, knows that one of most consistent patterns, election after election, is this: The more people attend worship services, the more likely they are to vote for candidates who are moral and cultural conservatives. This is a clear pattern among white voters and if you are looking for conservative voters among African-American and Latino voters, you are most likely to find them — as a vocal minority — in their churches.
There are, of course, no references to religious faith in the recent Atlantic Monthly business section report that ran under this promising headline: “Europeâs Real Crisis — The Continentâs problems are as much demographic as financial. They wonât go away soon.”
