Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Another item from the GetReligion assignment desk: I’ve said it before, religious conflicts are by far the most interesting ones. We’ll get to my specific suggestion in a minute, but first, a news story.
Pundits belittled Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in the 1980s, when their book and film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race? predicted that euthanasia and infanticide were the logical companions of unrestricted abortion.
The headline and deck in the Dec. 6 BusinessWeek (Economists Are Getting Religion: Can organized faith be explained by supply and demand? They think so) might create dread among believers. Are some pointy-headed intellectuals going to reduce the complexity, mystery and wonder of faith to something so mundane as commerce and “product”?
Dawn Eden, a longtime music writer and now a copy editor at the New York Post, today celebrates her first appearance on an op-ed page with her witty piece “The Grinch Who Stole Messiah.” Eden criticizes the South Orange/Maplewood School District’s policy of banning religious music — now including instrumentals — during students’ holiday concerts.
The Washington Post has published a follow-up to its two-article series on Michael Shackelford, a gay teenager living in the very red locale of Sand Springs, eight miles west of Tulsa. When the Post concluded its second article on Sept. 26, Shackelford had decided he would feel more at home by joining his older sister in Las Vegas.
Yasser Arafat was laid to rest Friday at his former West Bank headquarters. As Reuters related the story, "A chaotic crush of mourners filling the air with gunfire forced a hasty burial." In response to this mob action, "only a small clutch of beleaguered senior officials and security officers in a tight circle saw his casket lowered into a black marble grave."
I was stuck in a Southern California airport for a few hours the other day and, of course, this meant spending some quality time with a dead-tree-pulp edition of the Los Angeles Times.
Well now. Please note that almost nothing in the current torrent of debate about the Rod Dreher column has anything to do with the purpose of the original blog article, except that this is a demonstration of how hard this kind of bitter debate is to cover in a newspaper.
Even as disaffected American liberals consider moving to Canada in the wake of the last week’s elections, many Canadian journalists are trying to figure out what the heck happened. Some of the early attempts at deciphering the results are not promising.
