Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
What can I say. Every now and then, since the creation of this here weblog, your GetReligionistas have found ourselves on the other side of the reporter’s notebook. We do have our own opinions and areas of expertise. MZ and “Two Kingdoms” theology. Mark and the interactions of the Democratic Party with Catholicism and labor. Daniel’s insights into why God cheers for the Indianapolis Colts.
By most any measure, the late Sir John Templeton was a remarkable man. He was a pioneer in not one but two fields: investing in stocks and donating money to explore the intersection of science and religion.
Sir John Templeton, the wildly-successful mutual-fund manager who pioneered international investing died Tuesday at the age of 95. He was also well-known for giving away much of his fortune to scientific and religious causes.
I received a lovely and witty email this morning from GetReligion co-founder Doug LeBlanc, who still lingers out there in cyberspace doing that copy editor thing that he does. This is a guy that knows what makes me laugh.
In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell criticized modern writers for all manners of sins, not the least of which were a lack of detail and specificity. He cited a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong …” Then he translated it in modern English: “Objective consideration of temporary phenomena compels the conclusion …”
Most conversations about globalization focus on economic issues and, clearly, that engine of modernization turns many other cultural wheels. But anyone who has studied mass media knows that images from other cultures — especially advertisements and entertainment images — have a profound impact on their own. A professor of mine once said that that two main messages carried by most ads are (1) you do not own this and (2) you do not look like this.
Back in April when Texas authorities seized children from a ranch owned by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, we discussed how well the media distinguished between them and the much larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Life is like a night in a second-class hotel. It contains hints of beauty and glory with little of the reality. This is more than a paraphrase of a quote from St. Teresa of Avila. It serves as an analogy for the coverage of religion in The Washington Post‘s two-part series about propaganda in the U.S. war against Islamic terrorism.
As you may have noticed — if you have taken a turn or two around the WWW in the past 20 hours or so (click here) — those amazingly productive people over at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have rolled out the second half of their lay-of-the-land study of religion in the United States.
