Politics

Shameless plug for friends of Godbeat

As I keep mentioning, no organization in Washington, D.C., is having a greater impact on serious coverage of religion news than our friends over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. They keep turning out waves of information, including large chunks of the kind of media analysis work that is catnip to your GetReligionistas.


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Why Oprah left and Obama stayed

News reporters are starting to step up to the challenge of exploring the complicated issue of why a person joins a church. A pair of articles published this week explore both sides of the coin that is a person’s decision to attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.


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Silence about Obama, Catholic vote

Demography is destiny. For the most part, this apothegm has defined this year’s Democratic presidential election results. It sure characterized last night’s results in Indiana and North Carolina. As Christi Parsons and Mike Dorning, my old colleague at The Chicago Tribune, wrote,


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Expelled: No media coverage allowed

Ever since I saw the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed last month, I’ve been waiting for some mainstream media coverage of the film. Other than surprisingly few reviews — some by reviewers who didn’t bother to actually watch the film — I haven’t really seen anything.


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Angry debates about holding debates

Pick a survey, any survey, and it’s easy to see that the moral status of homosexual behavior remains one of the most divisive issues in American public life.


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A Methodism to the madness

It never ceases to amaze me how much media coverage of denominational politics we get for The Episcopal Church vis-a-vis all other denominations. It seems like every time an Episcopal clergyman sneezes, it’s worthy of massive coverage. But a major church body — the United Methodist Church — holds its quadrennial convention in Fort Worth over the last two weeks and we get nothing. Or at least something close to nothing.


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