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Most of the time, when I encounter a religious reference in a mainstream news story I can figure out what it is doing there. However, I hit something the other day in Newsweek that really puzzled me and it still does.
Longtime GetReligion readers will know that my favorite place in the world is the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, where my family flees from time to time to escape telephones, offices, commuting and, to a lesser extent, weblogs and email. If you can find Pensacola, N.C., on a map, then you own a really good map.
During the Culture Wars era, the U.S. Supreme Court has been forced to wrestle with this question: Can a government-supported advocacy of “secular humanism” (scare quotes were the norm) become a form of religion? I think the more important question is whether government-supported advocacy of Universalism is a form of doctrinal entanglement, but the hot-button phrase “secular humanism” was what grabbed the headlines.
If you type the word “evangelicals” into Google Images, the art attached to the top of this post is the very first thing that turns up. This tells us quite a bit about how most Americans now define the vague word “evangelical.”
The entire Mid-Atlantic region is in a terrible drought right now, although we got a few showers this weekend. It was most strange to visit Central Texas a week ago and see the fields a deep, rich green, while Maryland looks parched and dry.
One of the greatest challenges that journalists face, in my humble opinion, is knowing how to handle a strong, newsworthy statement of fact by a person of authority that simply cannot be verified as accurate.
The newspaper that lands in my front yard — that would be the Baltimore Sun — has just completed a major overhaul of its online edition. Click here if you want to see its guide to this project.
From time to time, we receive emails from people concerned about a lack of mainstream media coverage of the persecution of the ancient churches inside Iraq, an already tragic situation that is getting worse as Iraq begins to fly apart into competing Islamic states, or tribes, or whatever. This is, of course, part of a wider story in the region — as I learned during my recent visit to Istanbul.
