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This is going to be a tough one. My assignment is to give some comment on Jeff Sharlet’s “here come the virgins” piece from the last issue of Rolling Stone, and I suddenly wish that magazine hadn’t taken this blog’s advice.
Good, if shallow, piece in The Washington Post this weekend about a Washington and Lee University course on apocalypticism. Reporter Susan Kenzie is present on the last day of class, which Professor Eduardo Velasquez closes out with the memorable line “Leave.”
There isn’t a strong religion-news hook to this next item from the Chicago Tribune, unless one assumes that any story involving U2 and Bono has a neo-messianic theme in there somewhere between the lines.
I have had some readers email me asking if I would post my Scripps Howard News Service column for this week, which can be found here.
The religion-beat pros at the ReligionLink.org project have read the signs of the Hollywood times and released a newsroom-friendly guide to the God-talk elements in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other similar summer flicks. So why do these movies matter? Preach it:
In the book Boiling Point: Monitoring Cultural Shifts in the 21st Century, the evangelical pollster George Barna and writer Mark Hatch make the following observation about the awesome power of mass media:
Maybe it’s just the mass-media professor in me who is used to chanting “technology shapes content.” But, you know, I sort of see a link between the following two stories in those radically different Washington, D.C., daily newspapers.
OK, it’s official for me now: Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times is essential reading for keeping up with the intersection of religion and pop culture. (Her blog, The Dude Abides, provides a helpful archive back to December 2003.)
Let me assure readers that I am not writing the following post in another attempt to lure search-engine hits by linking the words “Jessica Simpson” and “GetReligion.” Honest. That’s the naked truth. I just had to get that off my chest and make a clean breast of things.
