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When I highlighted media coverage of a Senate investigation into televangelists, I excerpted a bit from an interview of Ole Anthony, who heads the Trinity Foundation. The foundation investigates televangelists and publishes The Wittenburg Door, a magazine of Christian satire. Most of what I know about Anthony, apart from occasionally reading the Door, comes from a lengthy profile in The New Yorker a few years back:
Yesterday media outlets announced the news of a breakthrough in stem-cell research. The details were published in the prestigious journals Science and Cell (PDF).
Peggy Fletcher Stack has been all over a story coming out of Utah, where she reports on religion for The Salt Lake Tribune. A week and a half ago, she wrote about an interesting change being made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
So a reader sent along an interesting story headlined “Burnout on the God beat — second top religion writer calls it quits.” Written by Reuters’ Tom Heneghan, the piece explains that Stephen Bates, who recently left his post at The Guardian, published an account of his time on the beat in an article for New Humanist magazine:
So yesterday I was working on a big post about news coming out of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Baltimore when tmatt posted about the curious difference in edits of the Associated Press’ story. But there’s so much out there, I think another post is in order.
I’m not sure if it’s GetReligion policy or anything, but we try our best to avoid giving hatemongering Westboro Baptist Church any more publicity than that which its members so desperately crave and receive. But this month’s $10.9 million judgment against the group makes it a bit hard to ignore. The Baltimore Sun‘s Matthew Dolan went to Topeka, Kan., to see how Westboro has affected its hometown:
For days, one of the top stories on CNN.com was “Romney’s faith pitch recorded behind closed doors.” The story, by Peter Hamby, was about how CNN had obtained a secret recording of Romney discussing his faith with alumni of Bob Jones University. The recording was made by a disgruntled alumnus. What earth-shattering things did he say behind closed doors that we haven’t heard in the mainstream media? Let’s see:
Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is investigating six powerhouse prosperity-gospel televangelists to determine whether they are complying with federal tax laws. On Monday he sent letters to Benny Hinn, the fantastically named Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer and three others who flaunt the earthly wealth provided to them by their followers.
I know we always claim we’re going to stop talking about Pat Robertson but he keeps making it difficult. We just don’t know how to quit you, Pat! Whatever his other merits, the televangelist has an amazing ability to make news. Such as today when he gave Rudy Guiliani his endorsement for president. Even more newsworthy, Guiliani took the endorsement! Here’s how The Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza wrote it up:
