Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It’s time for an update on the status of one of the other blogs that tries to monitor life on the Godbeat (or, perhaps, the beat of the gods). That would be the Jeff Sharlet (5Q+1 file here) project at New York University called The Revealer. Thanks to the omnipresent Ted Olsen over at CT‘s Liveblog for his tip on this one.
About the time that I was finishing up my studies at Baylor University, a remarkable young football player arrived on the campus named Mike Singletary.
I’ve given up trying to keep track of Entertainment Weekly‘s many annual lists. EW may be the most list-happy publication in pop culture, although it’s not as ambitious as Rolling Stone. For sheer pomposity, it’s hard to beat “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
Over the past few days, anyone interested in American politics has read more than a few stories about U.S. Sen. Larry Craig, a Republican stalwart from Idaho, and his adventures in a men’s bathroom in Minnesota. It will be some time before people in this town are able to talk about a politician taking a unique “stance” on a tricky issue without thinking about him.
It should be clear to just about anyone who reads major newspapers that we live in an age in which it is is safer to use religious language when describing secular sins than when describing what used to be called religious sins. It’s safer to talk about the sin of burning too much gasoline than the sin of lust. It is acceptable to judge certain secular forms of behavior, but not other forms of behavior that we have said are purely religious and private.
Michael Linton of First Things‘ blog, Public Square, has highlighted an emerging story that touches on a favorite theme of GetReligion’s editors: The intersection of faith and commerce. In “The Malling of Mecca,” Linton describes the construction of Abraj al Bait, which will offer space for 600 retail outlets, hotel rooms and posh apartments, all towering over the holiest site in Islam.
Eileen Flynn of the Austin American-Statesman had a huge package of stories on the emerging Christian church movement, both in Austin and throughout the country. The four-story series (here, here, here and here), along with solid photos by Laura Skelding, covers the emergent church movement that started in the late 1990s by a group of young Christians who worried about the gap between traditional churches and young people without formal church backgrounds or were frustrated with traditional churches.
Have you ever been reading a news story and hit a paraphrased quotation — as opposed to a verbatim direct quote — that made you stop and mutter, “Now wait a minute! Did that person really say that? Does the reporter actually have a recording of that?”
Michael Paulson of The Boston Globe has written one of the most poignant feature stories about the Episcopal Church’s sexuality debate that I have seen in more than 15 years of writing about the topic. In writing about two brothers who are priests, Paulson reveals their deep division on sexuality (“Bill Murdoch calls homosexual activity a sin, while Brian Murdoch calls it a gift”) and persuades the brothers to talk about how they have remained close.
