Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I’m sorry to return so quickly to the pages of the Wall Street Journal, but I do live in Maryland only a few miles up the highway from Annapolis. Thus, the new James Taranto profile of the controversial GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate caught my eye.
Well now, it seems that I was not alone in thinking that the Katie Couric announcement was a landmark event or even a sea change for the network nightly news shows.
A long time ago — nearly a quarter century ago, alas — I had a long conversation with a young songwriter named Bono about a question that fascinated both of us: Why is most Contemporary Christian Music so lame? Bono had, at that point, all but given up hope of finding work by other believers that really fired him up.
Reader Charlie Lehardy sent in a story from his local paper, the Arizona Daily Star. The paper regularly runs prominent articles on alternative spirituality, he said. Erin White’s interesting profile of a shamanic energy healer begins with the story of a woman, Susan Luzader Prust, who bought a piece of land to run a resort for dogs but felt that parts of the property were “a little spooky and scary.”
You know, you just know, that the powers that be at the CBS Evening News have been focus-group testing this big move for months.
We know presidential wannabe Rudy Giuliani is trying to get religion. Is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)?
Every now and then you see a news feature story that makes you slap yourself on the forehead and say, “Shoot, that story is so obvious, but I have never seen that story before. Why didn’t I think of digging into that one?”
I saved this lovely little Baltimore Sun piece from earlier in the week, with the idea that I was going to run it on Friday, about the time that the events described in it would be unfolding. Then it hit me that this was not a wise thing to do — if Orthodox Jewish readers and bloggers were going to see it. I guess I should have posted it on Thursday.
When I was a junior in high school, I took an independent study from the resident journalism teacher. I was supposed to study something about feminism and write a lengthy report on it. Well, I was also the yearbook editor and involved in a gazillion other things and I never really understood my assignment so when I still had another few pages to write and a deadline looming, I plagiarized significant passages from one of the textbooks I was using. It took her months to figure out where I stole the words from, but when she did, she promptly changed my grade to an F and called my parents. My mom was a fellow public school teacher and my dad was a pastor in our small town.
