Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
(Personal note: Doug and I have been at a GetReligion.org planning meeting and are both in transit back home. We have some improvements we hope to make in the weeks ahead, so please be patient with us!
If the New York Times is the Bible of elite journalism, then we can now say that questions about whether Sen. John “Call me JFK” Kerry should be receiving Communion at Catholic altars are officially legit. The New York Times has written about this topic, even if the paper elected not to make this a photo op.
Jimmy Breslin and the Rev. Lou Sheldon may have more in common than either man realizes — beginning with their rhetorical styles. Sheldon makes sweeping statements about gay activists, while Breslin uses a remark of doubtful merit to make sweeping statements about Sheldon (and about political and religious leaders seen in Sheldon’s presence).
In the April issue of Wired, Joshua Davis delivers an amazing report on Yitzhaq Hayutman, an English-born architect with a high-tech solution to Middle East conflicts: using lasers to project a restored Temple above the Dome of the Rock and, thus, to “induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth.”
If politicians are going to wade into the faith vs. works debates in the book of James, then it is going to be a long, long campaign on the God beat. And what if the Vatican steps in as a referee?
Jeffrey Rosen’s lengthy profile of John Ashcroft in the April Atlantic is testimony to what makes this magazine essential reading. Let Vanity Fair propagate the urban legend about Ashcroft’s fear of calico cats and express its horror that Ashcroft’s father once anointed him with Crisco. Rosen has better work to do: Engaging Ashcroft as a politician and a thinker.
Will Sen. John Kerry allow himself to be photographed taking Holy Communion in a Roman Catholic Church in the coming months?
Gayle White and Tom Baxter of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution report on how much the church-and-politics atmosphere has changed since 1960. When John F. Kennedy ran for president 44 years ago, he had to assure skittish Protestant ministers that he wouldn’t let his Catholicism influence his political decisions.
