Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who became the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, died from cancer on Sunday. Here’s how the New York Times explained her significance in its obituary:
Writing a provocative, timely, compelling profile is tough. How do you write a profile without becoming enamored with the successful book sales, the dynamic speeches or the captivated audiences? You want to describe and elaborate on why an individual is so successful or effective in his or her work, so it’s difficult to remain completely objective.
Even though I receive the dead-tree-pulp Washington Post at my office on Capitol Hill, one of the first things I hit each day in my home email is the digital, push-edition of “washingtonpost.com: Today’s Headlines & Columnists.” I want see that line-up (along with the push versions of The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and others) before I leave my wifi zone and board that commuter train.
A couple of years ago there was a scandal involving the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Somehow, a decade’s worth of emails between scientists there were leaked to the world. The whole “hide the decline” scandal. Some of these emails suggested that scientists were going to take extreme measures to limit participation by anthropogenic global warming skeptics in academic discourse. Phil Jones, a climatologist there, sent an email that said, in part:
I realize that stories about Galileo Galilei and the Vatican are like catnip to some journalists who are anxious to portray the Catholic Church as several centuries behind the time on this or that cultural issue.
NPR featured a meaty, intriguing religion story this week on what might be considered old news but really is not.
Like many other Americans, I paused Friday afternoon to watch the liftoff of Atlantis Mission: STS-135. This will be the last Space Shuttle mission and the end of an exciting era of space exploration. As a kid, I used to go with my family to Edwards Air Force Base to watch shuttle landings. The early 1980s in California were so cool and fun. I still recall my spotting of Ricky Schroeder in the gift shop. But the landings were a huge party. Families from all around came and camped out and when the shuttle landed it was exhilarating. My husband and oldest daughter and I joined his family a few years back to watch a launch piloted by a friend of the family. Even though we allotted a full week in case the take-off was rescheduled, it took off after we had left.
The latest cover of the New York Times Magazine looks at religion, gay orientation/identity, and therapy, and the reporting from Mimi Swartz is pretty straight forward.
The other day we looked at the way the media handled a study that showed that Protestants who don’t identify a “born-again” experience had less hippocampal atrophy than Catholics, non-believers and those who do claim a “born-again” experience. I noted that all the headlines I could find highlighted that “born-again” Christians had “smaller brains.”
