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Let’s face it, the mainstream press did everything but cue the theme from “Jaws” this weekend, during the initial coverage of the strange news out of Palmdale, Calif. Consider the top of this early New York Times report, which ran under a rather ordinary headline about a “religious group.”
For such a dramatic story, the New York Times headline does not do justice to a recent tragedy in the local news: “Bronx Church Mourns Death of Its Leader.” The pastor, his wife and four congregants from the Bronx were killed when their church van flipped several times.
You know how The Screwtape Letters was written from the perspective of a senior demon to his nephew demon? This article on the Pope’s visit to Britain by Washington Post foreign service writer Anthony Faiola reads better — and much funnier — if you imagine it written by someone pretending to be a demon.
If you’ve read GetReligion for any amount of time, you know that context means everything. Circumstances matter, too. And, of course, geography.
The last time Molly Norris was in the news was July. She’s the Seattle cartoonist who responded to censorship of South Park by declaring April 20 to be “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
Pastor Terry Jones’ decision to call off his September 11 Koran burn has not stopped violent protests among some Muslims across the world. A Lutheran church in Pakistan was destroyed by a bomb. Kashmir protests left 13 dead. In Tehran, protesters are calling for the death of Jones.
Peter J. Boyer deserves GetReligion’s “rock star religion reporting of the month” award, an honor that I just made up on the spot. In all seriousness, Boyer has produced yet another thoughtful, thorough, compelling piece for The New Yorker, this time on the Fellowship, a secretive religious group inside the DC Beltway. (Earlier, we looked at his piece on Francis Collins.)
Today’s gay-marriage story in the Washington Post (the newspaper really needs to develop a logo for this regular feature) focuses on another complication in this major change in the laws of the District of Columbia. What happens when one of the two partners is not a citizen of the United States?
