Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As the popular vote in California relating to how marriage is defined continues to meet with disapproval from Hollywood and others, the Associated Press has an article about where to place the blame for how the vote went down.
Conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. once mentioned how difficult he found it to discuss his Catholic faith in the social circles in which he moved. I had trouble imagining Buckley, who was so clear about his beliefs in God and Man at Yale and in the fortnightly National Review, having difficulty ever expressing his convictions, regardless of his dinner companions.
Vikki Ortiz of the Chicago Tribune picked up a pleasant romantic story about a couple who committed to each other that they would not kiss until the wedding day. More precisely, the couple could and would kiss on the cheek (as demonstrated in the article’s photo), but that was where it ended. The purpose of the kiss limitation was to keep the couple from breaking an abstinence pledge.
My educational background is in economics, not journalism or religion. Which means I had to sit through approximately eleventy billion hours of math and statistics coursework in college. I think reporters and editors could use a dose of math themselves — if only to avoid their ever present confusion about percentages.
Late last month, GetReligion considered the work of Marilynne Robinson — especially in response to an ill-founded claim by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic that Robinson is a fierce opponent of predestination.
Martin Luther said the meaning of the eighth commandment (Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor) is that we “should fear and love God that we may not deceitfully belie, betray, slander, or defame our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and put the best construction on everything.”
The cover story on this week’s Washington Post Sunday magazine was a 7,000-word treatise on a medical student deciding whether to become an abortion doctor.
Let me confess, right up front, that I am not a big fan of first-person celebrity interviews in the Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair style.
For public schools in Washington, despite their spending an average of $25,000 per year on each student, the educational results are abysmal. Some people have high hopes for the new chancellor Michelle Rhee but there’s a long way to go.
