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December is crunch time for charitable giving, with many nonprofit organizations taking in a third or more of their yearly income during the last month of the year. Perhaps that’s why Sunday’s New York Times featured not one but two A1 stories on charities?
The religion reporters at the Washington Post used to run a great blog called God in Government. A few weeks ago they merged that blog with Under God, the fantastic news blog written by On Faith editor David Waters. We’ve been somewhat less than enamored with the Newsweek/Washington Post On Faith section in general but Waters represents what is best about that site — provocative questions with balanced coverage. The new blog is called Under God: Religion, government and politics in the news.
Yesterday, the National Institutes of Health announced 13 new embryonic stem cell lines would be added to the NIH Human Embryonic Stem Cell Registry. President Barack Obama received a lot of coverage for his decision to change President George W. Bush’s policy limiting federal funding for embryonic-destroying stem cell research. The media coverage earlier this year was pretty bad on that point. To review, prior to President Bush there were no federally funded lines. Bush began federal funding of the research — controversial because it destroys human embryos — but ordered that only those lines already in existence prior to August 2001 were eligible for said funding.
Bob Casey Jr. must be really irritated with father-son comparisons by now. In 1992, the Democratic Party denied a speaking slot to his father, then-Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey Sr., at the national convention. Casey Jr. spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention but merely mentioned his “honest disagreement” with President Obama on abortion.
Having spent part of the 1990s covering Colorado’s controversial gay rights limitation measure Amendment 2 (which was passed by voters but declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court), I know there are always more than two sides to these debates. That’s part of what makes a recent Washington Post story so intriguing.
Steve already looked at some of the media coverage of the story about Switzerland banning the construction of minarets on mosques. For those of us accustomed to First Amendment-protected religious freedom, the vote probably comes as a shock and disappointment. Nairobi reader William Black wrote about a couple of the problems he saw in the coverage. He was disappointed with the vote saying that, as a Christian, he sees no reason to fear Muslim voices in the marketplace of ideas or Muslim presence in his neighborhood. And he worried that this vote would set a dangerous precedent for limiting the freedom of other religious groups in Europe.
I haven’t been following Swiss politics, so the headline on top of page A6 of Monday’s New York Times, “Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques,” was surprising, as was the lengthy (800+ words) article:
<a href=It’s odd to see some of your former classmates quoted in The New York Times as if they are newsworthy. Don’t get me wrong–many of them are doing cool and interesting things. Samuel G. Freedman profiles one of these classmates in a nice, upbeat story to show how young evangelicals are taking up interests in climate change, AIDS and poverty in his On Religion column for the Times.
We received a note the other day from a priest asking us to call attention to a South Bend Tribune editorial marking the retirement of Bishop John D’Arcy from the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. Even though GetReligion focuses on news reports, not editorial, this correspondent thought we would appreciate the respectful and balanced tone in this piece — especially considering the bishop’s role in the events surrounding President Barack Obama’s visit to the University of Notre Dame to received an honorary doctorate in law, in clear violation of a policy statement by the U.S. Catholic bishops.
