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If you were looking for a newspaper article on what other African-American preachers thought about Barack Obama’s former pastor’s fiery sermons from a religious perspective (and not exclusively related to politics), look no further than Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News.
The Pew Form on Religion & Public Life had a great forum the other day for journalists preparing to cover the upcoming visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Washington, D.C., and New York City. The speakers were two of the world’s top English-language Vatican watchers, John L. Allen, Jr., of the National Catholic Reporter and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. If you have any interest in the pope and what he might have to say during this visit, you really need to check out the transcript.
I can’t remember when, exactly, the mainstream media decided that it would stop with the unilateral caricature of evangelicals as the Christian Right, but I’m not sure the new caricature is much improved.
A recurring problem with stories about lawsuits is that only one side of the story is presented. Due to understandable hesitations, the party that is being sued is unlikely to comment on the lawsuit until they are able to formally respond to the lawsuit. You generally don’t win lawsuits on the news pages.
This is a strange moment for Black America. A major black celebrity frets about its values, while black Christian ministers worry about structural problems. Bill Cosby scolds black men for not being responsible fathers, while civil-rights era preachers encourage their flock to attend job training classes.
Surrogate pregnancy was the focus of Newsweek‘s cover story last week. Its angle was on the women who are surrogates as opposed to the medical advances of assisted reproductive technology or the laws and regulations governing the practice.
The Dallas Morning News had a compelling story last week that dealt with the closing of a 118-year-old neighborhood church that draws on local, regional and national religion trends. Locally, dwindling membership and declining revenues have challenged the church. In addition, the church has struggled as a “predominantly Anglo church in a largely Hispanic area.”
Pardon me while I take a quick trip into my GetReligion guilt folder. This is an Anglican warfare story from last weekend that I have been trying to find the time to write about all week.
On the night before he was assassinated, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the now famous “Mountaintop” speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn.
