Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
So, this pope vs. pope theme has been building, in mainstream coverage, during the amazing early days of Pope Francis. Have you noticed? One of the world’s top reporters on all things Catholic has noticed, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
Readers who have been following GetReligion for some time, or even reading my Scripps Howard News Service columns, may remember that I have been keeping up with the debates about the Shroud of Turin since the mid-1980s, when I worked at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver. That meant that I wasn’t that far from some of the key American players in this lively field, both in Colorado Springs, Colo., and in Los Alamos, N.M.
Yes, I know that we’re talking about a report on Fox News. That fact alone, for many readers, will mean that GetReligion is once again venturing into the world of alternative, niche, “conservative” news.
Let me be honest here and say what I truly want to say about the following New York Times stories: It’s about freaking time. Now, I say that both as a journalist and as one of those old-school supporters of human rights who still likes to quote, every now and then, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from that right-wing think tank, the United Nations.
No one on the national religion-news scenes writes with more vigor and enthusiasm about America’s sharp turn away from religious doctrine and traditional religious institutions than veteran scribe Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today. Her journalistic glee is completely justified, in my opinion, because this is one of the most important religion-beat stories of our age, especially on the religious left.
Trust me when I say that I am very, very aware, after nearly a decade in this niche in cyberspace, that GetReligion readers are stunningly uninterested in sports news. However, I am a sports fan and I have noticed, as a religion-beat reporter through the years, that religion and sports often get shoved into the same blender in the American marketplace.
It has been quite some time since I have used an old GetReligion term (Cheers!), so I think it might help for me to pause and explain the “tmatt trio” to new readers.
So, in one level, my primary task in this post is to point GetReligion readers toward a very interesting business story in The New Orleans Times-Picayune. It is also interesting to note that this business story focuses on an important collision between big business and the free exercise of religion.
So I’m sitting in a restaurant eating my lunch and, up on the wall, the large-screen television is tuned to CNN, where a lengthy report is unfolding about a European Union plan attempt to raise the corporate tax rates on Cyprus, a land in which wealthy Russians have funneled billions into tax shelters.
