I’m going to break some news to you. It’s very difficult and you’ve probably never heard about it. Certainly the Washington Post hasn’t.
Media discovers Mormon views on sex
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Lost Tanakh in Zuccotti Park
Now that we’ve hit two months of Occupy Wall Street protests, let’s look at a few recent stories with religion angles.
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NYTs shows admirable restraint, this time
As strange as it sounds, I think it’s time to offer praise to the editors at The New York Times for showing admirable restraint in their early coverage of Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls.
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The politics of religious liberty
As U.S. Catholic bishops met in Baltimore this week, this was the headline from the National Catholic Reporter:
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The Sun cheers for modest swimming
The newspaper that lands in my front yard has ventured into an important topic that has, in some parts of the country, caused controversy. The issue at hand: whether public organizations should tweak some of their policies in order to cooperate with religious groups that stress modesty.
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Getting serious about bullying
I never suffered too terribly from bullying but I had friends and family members who certainly had it worse. My brother was my hero for how he took on bullies who were several years older — and much bigger — than him. He had been assaulted for weeks by this gang of yahoos who made fun of my brother for how smart he was. They kept threatening to beat him up and, in fact, had shoved him around a bit. The school was of absolutely no help in the matter, which infuriated my public school teacher mother. My dad and a few other men gave my brother the news: he’d have to stand up to the bullies. And that is how my bro went from being being bullied to not having to worry about being bullied. He took on four dudes by himself and won. He earned the nickname Rocky. Oh, and he — not the bullies — got suspended.
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Mitt Romney's faithful life
Being that he’s arguably the country’s best known Mormon and much has been made of the political impact of his religion, there has been comparatively little reporting on how Mitt Romney has actually lived his faith. To some extent this is because it’s easier for reporters to reduce Romney’s faith to just another variable in the political calculus. But it’s also true that reporting on someone’s religious life is a deeply personal matter, and it requires great effort and understanding to do it right.
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For Baptists, "Southern" is important
Anyone who knows anything about mainstream American religion knows that the Southern Baptist Convention is our land’s largest non-Catholic flock. Despite the word “Southern” in the name — and SBC leaders are thinking about changing that — this is an increasingly national church and one with significant ethnic presence, as well.
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Free speech meets firebombs
Last week, the great George Conger reflected on the cover of the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, which featured a cartoon image of Mohammad. He used that incident to discuss two press related issues — the inaccurate claim that Islam prohibits representations of Mohammed and the moral cowardice displayed by many press outlets that respond to terrorist threats with censorship or calls for censorship. He added:
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