Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You may wonder, in a few seconds, where this post is going and why it features photographs from recent Soulforce Equality Ride events. Hang in there with me. I have my reasons.
Susan Stamberg of National Public Radio recently sent an audio valentine to singer-songwriter Susan Werner of Chicago. Werner’s latest recording is The Gospel Truth, which NPR described as gospel music for agnostics and (in a less accurate headline for its website) “A Songwriter’s View from the Pew.”
This week’s long (2,000-plus words) and much-discussed Wall Street Journal feature about the growing militancy of atheists in Europe raises a lot of questions. Sadly, it is available only to subscribers, but let’s not let that little detail keep us from talking about it.
Thank you to all the readers who sent along their favorite or least favorite stories published this past weekend. There are too many to get to, but I’ll begin with The New York Times Sunday Magazine‘s cover story on Pope Benedict XVI. Good timing on that piece, as it ran on Easter Sunday. The author is Russell Shorto, who has written previously for the magazine on people who oppose contraception and people who oppose gay marriage. Both of those pieces took a liberal view not out of place in the Sunday Magazine. But Shorto is a good writer who researches his topics better than, well, the average New York Times Sunday Magazine author. Not that that’s saying much.
William Frey, the Episcopal Church’s retired Bishop of Colorado, has often said his fellow Episcopalians can confuse Anglicanism’s celebrated via media with merely finding the synthesis of a thesis and an antithesis. As tmatt has mentioned before, Bishop Frey explains the impossibility of this approach by joking that, for some, the via media between a Christian and an atheist understanding of Jesus is “Jesus is occasionally Lord.”
Are any of the media reports on the Middle East visit by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi going to tell us why America’s highest-ranking woman political leader is wearing a scarf and a black abaya robe? The scarf and abaya are of course mandatory in some Muslim countries, and Pelosi was photographed wearing the abaya while entering the Ommayad Mosque during her tour of downtown Damascus on Tuesday.
For nine years, Bowling Green State University professor Victoria Ekstrand lived in New York City and, for most of that time, she worked for The Associated Press. Then she moved to North Carolina to do her doctorate in order to go into teaching.
So the big it is mentioned within first three paragraphs of all the major stories on this week’s announcement that the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops rejected a demand from the Anglican Communion’s primates to establish a separate leadership structure for dissenting U.S. dioceses and parishes.
Everyone out there who is tired or reading the following quotation, raise your hand? This is taken from the lede of a Newsweek piece by Eleanor Clift and Sarah Childress:
