Mollie Hemingway

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Numbers on nones

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Earlier this week, Steve looked at media coverage of the American Religious Identification Survey and it’s finding that the percentage of Americans that claim no religious affiliation is on the rise. Commenter Martha directed readers over to the web site of Paul Zachary Myers. He’s the University of Minnesota biology professor who was last discussed here at GetReligion for media coverage he received after asking folks to send him consecrated Hosts in order to publicly desecrate them. And then he posted photos of the desecration.


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Another salvo in the Mommy Wars

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I’m fairly new to motherhood, with a 2-year-old and an infant. I recently wrote my take on the Mommy Wars — that term used to describe everything from whether women should work outside the home while raising young children to whether to use cloth or disposable diapers — over at Christianity Today. So I was intrigued by this front-page Washington Post story that looks at a new Census report dealing with stay-at-home moms.


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Religious diversity in the newsroom

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For weeks I have been meaning to take a look at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (“Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low“). It didn’t deal specifically with religion reporting — or any other particular beat — but it showed that only 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight and only 26 percent felt that news organizations tried to avoid political bias.


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Banned Books Week in the 21st century

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Get out your party hats and reading lights. If it’s the last week of September, it’s Banned Books Week. This is the annual awareness campaign that draws attention to censorship. From the American Library Association:


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Roman Polanski and Roman Catholics

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Jim Lindgren over at the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy has excerpted a fascinating George Orwell essay from 1944 about what a morally depraved yet talented artist Salvador Dali is. It discusses how the fans of his art claim “a kind of benefit of clergy” where they exempt him from the moral laws that constrain ordinary people. Here’s the line that got me:


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Cocktails and the caliphate

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Last week the man who would have been the 45th head of the continent-spanning Ottoman dynasty, founded by Osman I in 1299, died. Ertugrul Osman instead lived in a rent-controlled flat in New York City.


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Mind your Qs and As

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There’s something I just like about the Q&A format. It’s nice to just see the particular questions that reporters choose to ask their sources as well as how those sources respond. There are two that I would like to highlight. The first comes from the Washington Post‘s “Voices of Power” series. That’s where reporters sit down with inside-the-beltway power players for a videotaped chat.


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Lutherans on the brink

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Last month the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to roster partnered gay people as clergy. Not everyone in the denomination is happy about this doctrinal change in how the church now treats sex outside of the lifelong union of one man and one woman in matrimony. Among those is a group called Coalition for Reform. Terry noted some funny business in how the Associated Press handled the news of an upcoming meeting of this group and how the same news was handled better at the Washington Times.


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May the force be with you

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Boston University religion professor Stephen Prothero asked his Twitter followers this week if atheism was a religion and whether it should be protected under the First Amendment clauses dealing with legal protection. I thought of those questions when coming across coverage of how the founder of the Jedi Church was treated at the Tesco supermarket.


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