Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Stories about religous and moral controversies are about polity and denominations, protests and politics — but they are also, and mostly, about people. When a writer cares enough to spend time getting to know the people behind the positions, then it is possible (or more possible) for the journalist to let the story unspool invitingly without jumping in there with the exclamation points and scare quotes.
You don’t have to read this blog very long to realize that your GetReligionistas are not fond of religious labels — especially inaccurate uses of words such as “fundamentalist” and the lazy use of vague, content-free words such as “moderate.”
After having argued in my Tuesday post that not all Episcopalians are theological innovators, imagine my anxiety while perusing read this article on the telegraph.co.uk website. “Church leaders offer communion wafer in the post” reads the headline. Communion wafers, eh? Must be a liturgical denomination — or a remarkably tacky secular entrepreneur. Hope it’s not the Anglicans or some sister freelancers across the pond!
This week’s edition of Time features a 2,400-word essay by Robert Wright, and it’s one of the most amusing exercises in eisegesis I’ve read in a very long time. The cover of Time promotes the essay, an excerpt from Wright’s new book The Evolution of God, as cracking a code embedded in the Scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The article’s subtitle suggests that, if the monotheistic Scriptures are read correctly (i.e., with Wright’s code in mind), this may even create the possibility of reconciliation and religious harmony.
President Obama’s Cairo speech seemed to have a very broad, some would say impossible agenda. First off, to make it evident how he sees the political realities on the ground — and give some hint of his priorities. Second, to reach the broadest possible spectrum of believers with his call for religious liberty and tolerance. Third, of course, and the one that got top billing, to reach out particularly to Muslims around the world. And I’m sure there are some others that I’ve forgotten to mention.
In his attempts to build bridges on abortion, President Barack Obama has been able to draw favorable coverage by changing the words he uses to talk about the issue, while only hinting at minor policy changes that do not address core issues linked to any restrictions on abortion. Now, many mainstream journalists are now drawing parallels between the president’s approach on abortion with his historic Cairo University speech on tensions between America, Israel and the Arab world.
Last week, I went to Kiev to speak to a group of Ukrainian journalists — both secular and religious — about the challenges of covering religion news in mainstream press. My chapter in the Oxford Centre book, “Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion,” had been translated into Ukrainian and it was a great chance to get some feedback from scribes in a very different context — a post-Soviet culture.
Last week NPR listeners got what some of them pay for — a thoughtful, consistently engaging look at the interdisciplinary field of science, and particularly brain science, and spirituality. Those who listened to Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s five-part series on the “science of spirituality” heard a diverse group of (mostly scientists) ponder the ways in which the brain is affected by spiritual events, including those with hallucenogenic drugs, meditation and near-death experiences.
Yesterday Doug complimented American media on showing “commendable restraint” in reacting to the more than 2,500-page report documenting decades of child abuse by Irish monks and nuns. I have to admit that I am torn between being convinced that the facts do speak for themselves, and a sense that readers should be faced with the scale and breadth of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children — all the more ghastly because it was done by men and women “of God.”
