Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Our friends at Beliefnet.com (we are linked through Blog Heaven) have this strange little blog/graphic device going right now called the “God-o-Meter,” which they are insisting is pronounced “Gah-DOM-meter.”
This is one of those GetReligion topics that I struggle not to write about day after day after day. I’m talking about the role of religion in the Iraq disaster.
OK, we’ve waited long enough. Nearly a week after the news from EthicsDaily.com that Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, described Mormonism as “the fourth Abrahamic faith,” little has been said of this rather significant statement.
I was too slow to express my interest in posting about David Kirkpatrick’s epic New York Times Magazine essay, so Terry beat me to it, and with greater thoroughness. Still, Terry graciously invited me to write an additional post if I had a different perspective on Kirkpatrick’s reporting.
We’ve established that The Washington Post Style section likes to be snarky. In the Post‘s effort to cover substantive news and issues, the snark will often get in the way. It’s almost like they’re trying to entertain us, rather then inform us. Since when does an important, serious, American news organization behave that way? Oh wait, never mind.
If you needed more evidence that not all cultural conservatives are true political conservatives, all you need to do is read the tea leaves on page one in today’s Washington Times. If you needed more evidence that many of the populist Christians from the old Democratic Bible Belt have not been fully integrated into the country clubs of the old Republican guard, you can click on that same link. Because here is the news from reporter Ralph Z. Hallow:
In celebrating its 150th anniversary, The Atlantic invited writers and artists to discuss the future of the American idea. The results, while not entirely disheartening, leave the impression of a people largely ill at ease with their nation’s future and, in a few cases, openly contemptuous of the country’s elected leaders (or, in the words of Greil Marcus, “those who presume to rule the nation”).
The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion section has a solid review of what appears to be a solid book on the growth of evangelical, seeker-friendly megachurches. The growth of megachurches, along with the decline of the traditional mainline churches, is one of the biggest stories in religion these days, and this reviews highlights some important aspects.
The news in the Newsweek cover story about the chaos that is Pakistan is that it does not add more confusion (or much more) about the whole “moderate” Muslim mystery. In fact, there isn’t much content on the progressive side of Islam at all — which I guess tells us quite a bit about the state of things in what the newsweekly calls the “most dangerous nation” on earth.
