Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It’s time to take a trip deep, deep into the tmatt folder of GetReligion guilt. You see, with the Iran explosion and a bunch of other major news, I don’t think we made a single reference to coverage of the Southern Baptist Convention meetings in Louisville.
It’s very appropriate that the New York Times highlight one of the developing, perhaps major religious news stories. And it’s even better, most of the time, when that story is told by religion writer Laurie Goodstein, who has a gift for nuance and ability to give her readers revealing details about her subjects in a way that is spare, usually undramatic, but enlightening.
When I was criticizing that awful Washington Post piece about how morally confounding Mark Sanford’s love life is, it just seemed odd to me that no media outlet has really explained the Christian view of love. For being a country that is majority Christian, it’s shocking how little we read about some of the basic tenets of the theology.
The Associated Press report is very, very, very short and raises many more questions than it answers. Here is a typical version (or click here for a longer version in the Los Angeles Times):
One of the things my pastor told my husband and me in premarital counseling is that we should think of love as a verb, not a noun. The Christian couple, he said, should know that love is what you do, not what you feel. On a somewhat related note, my father told me that he had counseled couples for marriage who wanted their vows to read “as long as we both shall love” instead of “as long as we both shall live.” Dad pointed out that they’d need something to keep them going after their first week of marriage.
Whatever Vanity Fair pays its national editor, Todd S. Purdum, he earns every dollar with expertly crafted hit pieces. His lengthy takedown of Bill Clinton last year was satisfying for readers long troubled by Clinton’s various indiscretions, political and otherwise.
Does a saint’s intercession heal? Or are the faithful in the Roman Catholic Church praying with the saints to Jesus Christ?
I was stunned the other day by the total lack of interest in the religion elements of the big story here in Washington, D.C., as in the tragedy on our Metro subway system. The coverage has been major league, as you would expect, and the story on which I focused was one out of many worthy of discussion.
As interesting as South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s bizarre and tormented press conference was — the one where he announced he had something going on with an Argentinian woman, it was his wife’s statement about the matter that I found the most intriguing. In her statement, she overtly references her Christian faith, even quoting scripture.
