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’ll say this for Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury: He communicates directly and accessibly when speaking with broadcast journalists. Indeed, people who care deeply about the conflicts of the Anglican Communion might wish that Williams would grant a monthly one-hour interview to BBC Radio 5′s Simon Mayo.
Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s cover story on what the magazine calls “A New American Holy War” reads less like a news report than a sometimes exasperated prep-school instructor’s departmental memo about a pair of bickering students named Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. A quick aside about Newsweek‘s headline: Calling a lively religious debate in primary season “A New American Holy War” is like referring to door-to-door evangelism — whether by Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses or Southern Baptists — as “Spiritual Waterboarding.”
A brief unscientific survey of Utah newspapers’ coverage of Mitt Romney’s speech on Thursday shows that reporters were quite aware that Romney hardly delved into his church’s teachings.
As the early coverage of the Mitt Romney address continues, I would like to ask a basic question: Are most mainstream reporters assuming that the Christians — Catholic, Orthodox, evangelical and mainline — who do not consider Mormonism “to be Christian” are those who know little or nothing about the details of Mormon doctrine or those who actually know quite a bit and disagree with it?
Suppose American politics were a colas war, with conservatives representing Coca Cola and liberals Pepsi. A reporter tells you that a top presidential candidate drinks neither brand. That would be a real insight, right?
Our founder tmatt is too busy today to do an end-zone backflip, so I will comment on the news of Mitt Romney’s impending speech about his faith.
Unless you are a sports fan, you may not know that the Washington, D.C., area has headed into that strange zone in which people gather in the public square for prayer meetings that end with emotional renditions of “Hail to the Redskins.”
Judging by The Sunday Times of London, a reader might conclude that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was a smart man’s Thomas More or Thomas Beckett. Blair, who is expected to convert to Catholicism, said in an interview that his Christianity “played a hugely important role” during his decade-long tenure, but he feared saying so lest he be known as a “nutter.” As Dipesh Gadher reported,
Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., resigned over the long holiday weekend over a series of allegations of misspending the institution’s funds to support expensive shopping trips and trips to the sunny seas of the Caribbean. Only a handful of news agencies have picked up the story, but a few are worth highlighting.
