Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Two of the most interesting stories that readers sent along this week didn’t come from mainstream newspapers. The first was reported by The Living Church News Service, which covers Anglican news:
The day that Redskins safety Sean Taylor was declared dead, Leonard Shapiro of The Washington Post wrote a column exploring the reasons for Taylor’s murder. Shapiro wrote that he could not say ultimately why Taylor was killed.
It has been a long, long, long time since I have been inside the imposing sanctuary of the Broadway Baptist Church in Ft. Worth, Texas.
People read different newspapers for different reasons and, here in Beltway land, one of the main reasons people read The Washington Times is to be able to listen to some of the inside conversations in the conservative establishment — including its discontents. It’s kind of like centrist, churchgoing Democrats trying to read between the lines in E. J. Dionne Jr. columns in The Washington Post.
Newsweek‘s cover story this week about the roots of Rudy Giuliani’s worldview was like a one-sided, incomplete version of 1985′s Heaven Help Us. Both depicted Catholic schools in the 1950s and ’60s in New York City as authoritarian and rigid. But in contrast to the movie, which pointed out that many priests were holy, compassionate, and down to earth, Newsweek stressed that parochial schools were a breeding ground for autocrats like “America’s Mayor”:
This weekend, I went out of my way to praise a Washington Post story covering the Anglican property and doctrine wars here in the greater Washington area. The discussion of that post rolls on and you can follow that by clicking here.
This is the rare day in which a very important national story in The Washington Post and The Washington Times features the very same opening paragraph. It’s even a story that took place right here in the greater D.C.-Baltimore area and has national political implications.
For various reasons, journalists have rarely done even an adequate job covering the decline and fall of the African-American family. The share of black babies born out of wedlock in the last four decades has soared to around 70 percent from 25 percent.
