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On the same day that Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput was critiquing media coverage of the church, we got a real time example of some less-than-stellar religion reporting. Pope Benedict XVI landed in Africa this week and received breathless coverage because, as Amy Welborn put it over at Beliefnet, “the Pope has not booked a seat on the condom train.”
I don’t watch American Idol, but I think that if I lived in a foreign culture, that country’s version of the show would be a great place to learn about that particular society. This rather amazing Guardian story on Afghanistan’s Afghan Star television show gives readers a glimpse into a society that we generally only hear in the news when it relates to war, terrorism and international politics. As a reader noted, how often do we hear about the regular people from Afghanistan, the ones who have put up with multiple invasions, governments and a bleak future.
Yesterday Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput addressed a gathering of top religion journalists at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life in Washington, D.C. His speech was billed as a discussion on the political obligations of Catholics but he also spent a great deal of time discussing the strengths and weaknesses of media coverage. I had the privilege of attending, while also getting to put the names of reporters we discuss here with their faces.
Now here is one of those matches that seems to have been made in new media heaven. The New York Daily News notes:
For Christians in the West, Easter is not that far away and a strange combination of politicos and professional pew observers inside the DC Beltway are turning up the heat on the Obama family church watch.
I just finished watching this season’s second to last episode of HBO’s Big Love soap opera, and I believe there may be another hidden reason that the show makes Mormons uneasy. Much of the media’s attention has been on the fact that this episode portrayed a scene in a Mormon temple, however, the show did have one line that caught me: the main character expressly claimed that the Mormon church was just as corrupt as the show’s main antagonists who are practicing polygamy and generally in trouble with the law.
There was one part of a Rasmussen poll about President Barack Obama’s decision to expand stem cell research that destroys embryos that I found particularly interesting:
Mary Jordan of the Washington Post Foreign Service reports in today’s Post that Pope Benedict XVI wrote an “unusual letter” to “quiet” protests after his “embrace” of excommunicated bishop and conspiracy theorist Richard Williamson.
The world’s economic troubles have many journalists writing articles about how the global society is changing as a consequence of the recession. For example, the Atlantic had this cover story on how communities like New York City will benefit from the financial crash (not exactly original or surprising considering the author). The Economist writes about how we may see a return “of economic nationalism.”
