Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
GetReligion apologizes for being so late on the story about Buddhist monks leading peaceful protests for democracy in Burma and being shut down by the military junta. Religion and its relation to government is at the core of this story, and that raised an interesting questions in opinion pages around the country.
My first reaction, when I read the bold Washington Post headline, was negative. I am not fond of religious labels, but this looked like a futile attempt to avoid one. It said: “Anti-Syrian Lawmaker Killed in Beirut Blast.”
It isn’t very shocking to pick up the newspaper and learn that there has been (a) another clash between Rome and a progressive Catholic theologian and that (b) this scholar teaches at Georgetown University.
There just has to be a ghost in here somewhere, seeing as how this story is about the soul of the nation of Spain — which has to be some of the most religion-haunted soil on earth.
As longtime readers may have noticed, we GetReligionistas think it is rather important for basic religious facts to be included, from time to time, in stories about major religious events and trends.
Maybe it’s appropriate to write about this on the morning of Sept. 11. How different would things be today if the terrorist attacks of six years ago had never happened?
It’s time for an update on the status of one of the other blogs that tries to monitor life on the Godbeat (or, perhaps, the beat of the gods). That would be the Jeff Sharlet (5Q+1 file here) project at New York University called The Revealer. Thanks to the omnipresent Ted Olsen over at CT‘s Liveblog for his tip on this one.
Long ago, when I was a graduate student in Baylor University’s church-state studies program, one of our professors liked to cut to the chase by saying the following: “Your religious liberties have been purchased for you by many people with whom you would not necessarily want to have dinner.”
Let’s start with the classic Martin Marty quote, which is always good when talking about religion and the news. Marty has been known to say that, for many people, the word “ecumenical” seems to boil down to someone saying, “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
