Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I am sure that all of you GetReligion readers were caught up in the Hollywood excitement about the release of the latest film from one of the most daring and independent (and profitable) filmmakers of these times. What? You weren’t racing to the local multiplex to check out Why Did I Get Married? After all of that buildup in the mainstream press, like the screaming reviews and ads for Michael Clayton?
There is no religion in it and, again, that is what interests me. There are legal question. There are questions about medicine and even therapy. There are life and death questions. There are even hints that moral questions may be involved. But that’s it.
Evangelicals were on the front page of the Sunday New York Times again. The story — about how “hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants” are using the massively popular, hugely entertaining and quite violent video game Halo 3 as a recruiting technique — is well-rounded, gives a paragraph to theological issues and quotes a nice variety of people. But something about this story seemed so unfresh, especially when it compared this trend to bingo games in churches during the 1960s:
In the discussion of a previous post about coverage of the Kathy Griffin brouhaha, Religion News Service reporter Kevin Eckstrom says the following about his piece:
Let me note, following the gentle snark from the Divine Mrs. M.Z. the other day, that her GetReligionista comrades had, in fact, noted the pronouncement from the public intellectual Kathy Griffin. We simply were waiting for M.Z. to return with her soft, nuanced touch on the keyboard in order to address this weighty topic.
What is it with my fellow GetReligionistas? It’s as if they’re completely disinterested in celebrity news. I just searched to see how we handled media coverage of the Kathy-Griffin-at-the-Emmys debacle (I was attending to other matters at the time) and see that we didn’t discuss it at all. For those who have more interesting lives, Griffin is a comedienne — and host of the 2007 gay porn awards! — who made scandalous remarks about Jesus when she accepted her Emmy for her Bravo reality series. There was so little substantive coverage of what she said that religion reporter Gary Stern hadn’t even heard about it last week:
I meant to post this flashback last night, but was caught up in that server crash that shut GetReligion down for several hours.
Frappa Stout of The Washington Times wrote a tasty feature story about Burning Man this year, concentrating on the wide variety of believers she found there.
About the time that I was finishing up my studies at Baylor University, a remarkable young football player arrived on the campus named Mike Singletary.
