Newsweek published an interesting but uneven cover story about Barack Obama’s relationship with his father and father figures.
Unmade in Detroit
You don’t read this everyday. Detroit Free Press columnist Rochelle Riley writes that an influential Christian minister in Detroit is calling on the city’s embattled mayor to resign. Her story explains why the Rev. Edgar Vann joined a growing list of pastors to urge Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to step down.
Revisiting race and religion
Yesterday we looked at that Pew report which criticized the mainstream media’s coverage of Obama’s speech on race and religion. The report claimed that the media got the race angle at the expense of the religion angle.
Quantifying religion news
We never run out of stories to analyze here, but election years seem produce even more media coverage of religion than normal. Considering mainstream media’s trouble with getting religion, I am confident the religion beat would be doomed if not for the media’s great love of politics and the prominent role that religion plays in political fortunes.
An abused story
I was in high school 20 years ago. It was an age of great pop music, mullets, and impending U.S. victory in the Cold War. If that sounds like a long time ago, it was.
"The most segregated hour ..."
Every serious student of recent American history and religion knows Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about racial segregation and Christian churches. But few surely know the ways in which little has changed from King’s day. They would do well to read a CNN article on the subject.Reporter John Blake’s story was one of unusual power and honesty. Rare is the mainstream newspaper article that tells uncomfortable truths about both black and white Christians. This is one of those stories. Consider Blake’s lede:
