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Of the many articles written about the death late Sunday of Barack Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham, nothing expressed Christian hope quite so well as these pithy words from blogger Andrew Sullivan:
Compared to the primary election, the subject of the religion and faith of Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama’s has largely been absent from the pages of Midwestern newspapers and magazines. Some of this can be justified by the fact that the Midwest is reeling in an economic slump that is seeing people threatened with the loss of their jobs and homes and the collapse of the auto industry and other manufacturing industries that make up a substantial portion of the region’s economy. People want to hear the candidates talk about their economic plans more than their spiritual backgrounds.
Usually I groan when I come across an Associated Press piece marked “analysis.” I like my AP reporters to report, not analyze. But in a year like this, when reporters have dropped most pretense of reporting in favor of overtly playing politics, it’s actually kind of a breath of fresh air to have something clearly identified as analysis. On this note, if media outlets’ horribly misnamed “fact checks” could go the way of the Dodo bird, I’d be most happy.
The big story in Friday’s Washington Post was headlined “God, Country and McCain.” The article was less on those three subjects and more an attempt to demonstrate the current mindset of young conservative evangelical Republicans on the eve of what could be for many of them their first electoral defeat as active voters.
Matters of the spirit were not among Studs Terkel’s higher priorities as a left-wing agnostic writer. Writing on Friday afternoon, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra noted that Terkel died in the same week that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was born, and described their “spiritual connection”:
Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times is a columnist and, thus, tends to produce the kinds of opinion-driven pieces that we don’t deal with a lot here at GetReligion. However, we will mention op-ed pieces and work in advocacy journals (you know, like Newsweek) when we think the topic will be of interest to journalists who cover the religion beat.
I’ve been anxious to read more stories about how religious voters are being courted or which camp they’re ending up in. The Washington Post had an article titled “My Son, the Senator” that discusses how Sen. Joe Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is helping the campaign of Sen. John McCain. After alluding to Joe the Plumber, the article says another Joe is on the scene:
The Detroit News and Baltimore Sun recently produced two shockingly non-news worthy articles about the role or religion in this 2008 presidential election.
