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Last February we looked at an intriguing First Amendment story in the Tacoma News Tribune. Reporter Ian Demsky looked at the fallout from a Washington State Department of Corrections settlement decision that gives inmates the right to adhere to two religions at the same time. One priest in particular took a voluntary leave of absence because he couldn’t support the state decision.
It’s a saying that I have heard repeated time and time again by people who study China or work there on issues of human rights: Anything that you want to say about religion in China is true, somewhere in China.
Everyone knows that few Christians in Britain worship regularly. But The London Times revealed the severity of this trend. As Ruth Gledhill reported,
Anniversaries are anniversaries and several tumultuous events of 1968 have already been rehashed (see here) by reporters this year. You can bet that more (such as this one) stories of this kind are on the way. What angles should reporters look for?
In a story for CNN, reporter Eliott McLaughlin dove head first into a discussion of the religious views of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The hook for the piece is the group’s decision to open up and permit some public scrutiny of its lifestyle. They’ve started a Web site and a handful of polygamous wives have been doing a ton of interviews.
Could there have been two more dramatically different religion stories last week than Pope Benedict XVI’s first trip to the United States and the ongoing drama with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints? It is completely understandable that almost all religion reporting resources focused on papal coverage, but I keep hoping that we’ll see some really good coverage of the ins and outs at the Yearning For Zion compound ranch in West Texas.
How often does a reporter get to write about the 100th birthday of a religion? The Miami Herald, no stranger to covering off-beat religions (at least from the perspective of a reader in the United States), has a rather unusual story on the “uniquely Brazilian religion” of Umbanda.
Regular GetReligion readers will not be surprised to know that I noticed the New York Times story that ran with the headline, “Kremlin Rules — At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church.” I noticed it and other people made sure that I noticed it, too.
A long, long, time ago — before that Pope Benedict XVI person came to town and took over the lives of your GetReligionistas (with some help from a controversial sect in Texas) — the Los Angeles Times ran a short educational feature entitled, “Muslim true/false — What you think you know about them is likely wrong — and that’s dangerous.”
