Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
There are few things that journalists in Washington, D.C., like to talk about more than this subject — journalists in Washington. I am sure that this surprises GetReligion readers, especially those inclined to belief in the utter depravity of man.
Here we go again. Newsweek has another one of those think pieces about trends in modern Islam that show movement toward a day when moderation will rule and extremists will be be disgraced as the fake Muslims that thinkers in the West hope and pray (if many Western thinkers pray) that they are.
One question my students always ask is this: “How do journalists decide what parts of a speech are most important? How do you know what goes at the top of the story?”
Conflicts between the various streams of American Judaism have always fascinated me, all the way back to my graduate school days at the University of Illinois in Urbana. There are so many parallels with similar conflicts between traditional and liberal Christians, between pre-modern doctrines and the believers who are rooted in the modern and, I guess, the postmodern.
From time to time, I have been known to use a strange adjective in my posts about conflicts inside the wide, wide world of Roman Catholicism.
One of the biggest problems that your GetReligionistas face week after week can be stated this way: We know that many problems on the religion beat would vanish if reporters had more time to write and were given longer story lengths.
No wonder millions of young, biblically conservative young people no longer want to be known as “evangelicals.” You have to keep asking the question that your GetReligionistas have been asking since the dawn of blogging: What in the world does “evangelical” mean, anyway?The Washington Post ran yet another piece this week that perfectly illustrates that “evangelical” is quickly becoming the new “fundamentalist.”
I should go on the record and admit that, in the long run, I think it’s about time for a divorce between the British government and the Anglican establishment, as a simple nod to the reality on the ground.
Several years ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about one of the more obscure disputes linked to the death, or death by starvation, of Terri Schiavo — whether or not her body should be cremated, against strong opposition of her devout Roman Catholic family.
