Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The other day, I wrote a post about the fact that many journalists struggle to understand, to be perfectly honest about it, the role that Christian faith plays in the African-American church. There is a tendency to see the black church as a political institution, and that’s that.
Whenever your GetReligionistas pick on the Style gods at The Washington Post — primarily with our pronouncements that alternative points of view are good things in features about controversial issues (perfect example here) — there is always someone out there in comment-pages land who tells us to lighten up and get real.
Anyone who has been paying attention to debates about the future of the Boy Scouts of America knows that, when it comes to issues linked to homosexuality, there is no one “religious” perspective that journalists need to cover. Even within individual religious traditions — such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Roman Catholic Church — there are people who read the same texts and come to slightly different, or glaringly different, conclusions.
It’s a basic fact of life in American politics that nothing fires up the non-profit sector on the political right like the election of a strong president whose voter base is on the religious, cultural and political left.
Much like his friend (historian, not theologian) Martin Marty, the prominent sociologist (not theologian) Father Andrew Greeley of Chicago lived a long and astonishingly productive career in which he had few unpublished thoughts.
Let’s face it. The mainstream press really struggles when trying to cover life in African-American churches.
It is my experience, through my decades on the religion beat, that liberal Catholics genuinely love talking to mainstream news reporters.
While I have not lived in Nashville (yet), I have spent a lot of time there and know quite a bit about the town.
Day after day, the stunning story of young Morgan Lane Arnold has unfolded in the pages of The Baltimore Sun, with each revelation only making key elements of this bloody crime more and more mysterious.
