Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Ever since the so-called New Age era, I have been interested in the rise of Wicca and the whole neopagan scene. This trend raises all kinds of interesting issues of coven and state (Do conservative Christians really want equal access laws?), and you really can’t talk about faith in popular culture, especially Hollywood, without dealing with the new consumer-friendly forms of paganism.
It’s interesting, whenever the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life releases a new study, to watch the ripples from that data spread out into the work of mainstream newsrooms that take religion news seriously.
It has been some time since we offered any kind of update on the Anglican Wars, here and abroad. This one will be brief. I promise.
A very strange thing happens when journalists write books — they find themselves (hopefully) being interviewed by other journalists, often before speeches and other (hopefully) book-promoting events. Soon thereafter, they often read articles based on these interviews and find themselves exclaiming, “Wait just a (provide colorful descriptive words here) minute, I didn’t say that!”
Every now and then, you read a feature story in a major newspaper and, as you read and read, you think to yourself: “OK, at some point, the reporter just has to raise a moral or religious question about all of this. Don’t they?”
Surveys are tricky things to report, especially when the data is sole sourced, to use a bureaucratic term. Sometimes I get the feeling that those doing the research are stretching a bit to reach their conclusions with the aid of supposedly scientific numbers, and you always have to question to motives of those commissioning the survey.
In the late 1980s, I went to the Roman Catholic cathedral in downtown Denver to cover a rally by Catholic feminists who were demanding open talks about the ordination of women and other changes in Church teachings. It was your basic Catholic progressive gathering, or so I thought.
Religion is a hard subject to pin down, so we shouldn’t be surprised to find a feature titled “On Easter, Symbolism and the Exuberance of Spring” in the Dining & Wine section of The New York Times.
I hope everyone is having a blessed Lazarus Saturday, which means that tomorrow is Palm Sunday. This is the rare year when the churches of the East and West will be celebrating Easter — Pascha in the East — on the same date.
