Politics

"Far right" or "mainstream" angst?

I get most of my foreign religion news from Reuters. They consistently report on stories of global interest with an eye toward religious details. But this story left me a bit cold. It promises a lot with the headline “In France, far right seizes on Muslim street prayers.” But I never quite understood what that meant, much less whether “far right” was an accurate description of who we were talking about. It begins by describing how streets and intersections in Paris are flooded with Muslim worshipers on Fridays. They don’t have room in buildings so they pray in the street, rain or shine. No big deal to the locals, we’re told:


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Tunisia's Islamist-free revolution?

Al Jazeera was the only outlet heavily covering the growing protests in Tunisia over the last month. But the news that its president had fled the country on Friday night has been widely reported. If your knowledge of Tunisia doesn’t extend past something related to Carthage or Star Wars, there’s a lot of catching up.


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Asking questions about Sarah Palin, 'blood libel'

Americans received a nice little history lesson this week, thanks to Sarah Palin’s video reaction to the shooting in Arizona. We were quickly informed by just about every national news outlet that the “blood libel” is generally used to historically mean the accusations that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.


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Chaos, alternate realities and media narratives

Some of the journalism being produced in the wake of the Tucson tragedy had been terrific. Much, of course, has been abysmal. I’m still trying to wrap my head about just what went wrong and why it continues. To that end, a few thoughts on how the media choose to frame different issues.


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Pod people: Baby names and political obsessions

In the latest Crossroads podcast I talk about how the media invented a papal war on celebrity names out of whole cloth. That led into a broader discussion of how the media lost a bit of credibility this week with some poor decisions about how to cover the tragedy in Arizona.


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Religious liberty threats rise?

Christians are by no means the only ones targeted by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Agence France-Presse informs readers that an imam and his son were recently convicted under the law:


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Connecting Arizona's dots

As the media continues to feed us play-by-play updates from Arizona’s shootings, we’re reading about the endless calls to civility, the confusing ties to Sarah Palin and the (predictable?) reaction from Westboro, we’re seeing some further religion coverage within profiles of some of the victims.


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Analyzing Pakistan's religious divides

When Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province, was assassinated by one of his body guards, we looked at some of the coverage. The big problem seemed to be the overuse of the term “moderate” without any explanation of what that meant. The problem was further compounded when “moderates” were praising the assassination. There was a story last week on NYTimes.com that did provide some additional details (and provoke some additional questions). “The Islam That Hard-Liners Hate,” by Huma Imtiaz and Charlotte Buchen looks at the political significant of 2010′s attacks on Sufi shrines.


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Struggling to 'get' religion in South Sudan

Obviously, oil and, thus, big oil money plays a major role in the tensions between Sudan and South Sudan. Most of the current nation of Sudan’s oil reserves are in the South.


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