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Were you enjoying the fact that the media had more or less dropped any coverage of the proposed Islamic Center near ground zero? Well, it’s back in the news with a couple of updates. There’s the rumor that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia might want to buy shuttered St. Vincent’s Medical Center and move the Park 51 mosque to a new Islamic cultural center he would build on the site (story in the New York Post).
As is our practice this time of year — everyone say “Duh” — your GetReligionistas like to roll out some of the “year’s top religion stories” lists and allow readers to join us in making comments.
To fully appreciate The Dallas Morning News’ Texas-sized profile of Baylor University President Ken Starr, one must accept its basic premise.
Even in a health care bill that was unpopular, the panels that would make end-of-life recommendations in order to save the government on health care costs (said recommendations being passed on by paying doctors to share them with patients) were even more unpopular. Some people call these panels that make end-of-life recommendations “death panels.” Others, thought the term inaccurate and prefer terms like “end-of-life planning” and “consultation” and “directives.”
In 2009 and the first part of 2010, I did a four-part series on Churches of Christ in Canada for The Christian Chronicle, reporting from Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver and a small town in Saskatchewan.
In the wake of the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a few mainstream journalists are still trying to get a handle on what happens next with issues of religious liberty in the U.S. military.
When I saw the headline, I got nervous: “Obama, in shadow of worrisome polls, embraces ‘Christian’ label.”
GetReligion readers who pay close attention to church-state issues this time of year — also known as the “Christmas wars” — just knew that this story was coming. Actually, in this case we are talking about a specific battle in the larger war that breaks out every year in mid-November, or thereabouts. It’s the battle over the creche in the public square (usually a civic lawn).
On Saturday night, Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly tried to murder as many Swedes as possible by blowing up his car and himself in crowded areas where people were busy shopping for Christmas gifts. Amazingly, and perhaps due to an inadvertent early detonation, he was the only person killed. Two others were severely injured. All signs point to radical Islam as the motivator for the deadly violence. It’s interesting to see how different media outlets lead their early stories on the terrorist once his identity was established. Here’s the Telegraph:
