Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Passover, a time of family gatherings and a myriad of rituals, comes once every year. Birchat HaChama, the blessing of the sun, comes once every 28 years on the Jewish calendar. Owing to the journalistic principle that the rare story is often the better story, Birchat HaChama has been getting an inordinate amount of coverage this year. Both arrive on Wednesday and it looks like Birchat HaChama has already outshone Passover.
In the wake of EEE’s post on the latest nonNewsweek sermon from the Rt. Rev. Jon Meacham, please allow me to jump in with a comment or two on the Wall Street Journal counter-statement — before several dozen readers send me the URL.
If reporters want to get their telephone calls returned promptly, all they have to do is ring a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Journalists may not get the information that they’re seeking or the full cooperation that they need — especially if they are working on a story linked to doctrine, the faith’s many critics or accusations by ex-Mormons — but that call is going to get returned.
Of all the stories written about the defrocking of Ann Holmes Redding, an Episcopal priest who converted to Islam, the most widely disseminated seemed to be this one from CNN. That’s unfortunate, since it was remarkably shallow and one-sided. No one from The Episcopal Church, much less the diocese that disciplined her, is quoted:
There’s something quentessentially American about Elizabeth Gilbert’s winsome 2006 quest memoir Eat, Pray Love. The bestselling book, which details Gilbert’s trek through Italy, India and Indonesia, has many ingredients U.S. audiences seem to love: the search for spiritual enlightenment, healing, lasting love, and a great dinner.
I thought I had heard everything about the deep, deep roots of the sexual abuse scandals — plural — in the Roman Catholic Church. I say “plural” because they really go back to the early 1980s and the waves of acid have been rolling in ever since.
Life has rescued and published a haunting series of 11 photographs taken by Henry Groskinsky in the grim hours after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. Two of the images include legendary Baptist preacher Will Campbell, whom Life identifies as William Campbell and Bill Campbell. Life describes Campbell, author of the acclaimed Brother to a Dragonfly, only as a longtime friend of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in a photo showing the two men embracing as they grieve.
Lisa Miller is the religion editor at Newsweek. You may remember her from that very unjournalistic cover story she wrote purporting to advance a religious case for same-sex marriage.
So the ever snarky team at the Washington Post Style section decides to do a feature story about male circumcision.
