Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
To paraphrase my friend Dan Kearns, The Washington Post‘s story about the Pew study is too much Aristotle and too little Plato and Thucydides. It contained interesting facts and figures, but lacked a big idea or organizing device.
Churches throughout the country have been given permission by the great and mighty National Football League to use their big screens during next year’s Super Bowl. The concession seems to come after pressure exerted by some national lawmakers (think anti-trust exemption and federal control over the airways) backed up by big newspaper stories.
Say what you want about The New York Times — actually, don’t say what you want — the paper does have some great resources at its disposal. One of my favorite features is their city journal. That’s where stringers and foreign correspondents file slice-of-life reports from exotic locales.
Much of the mainstream media coverage of the controversies in the Anglican Communion have focused on The Episcopal Church. Canada’s Globe and Mail looked at how things are playing out in another part of North America. Robert Matas wrote a story on Friday about a parish in Vancouver deciding to align with Anglicans in South America. He took the novel and welcome angle of determining why the parish had made its decision. For his lede, he told readers about the Bible study that parishioners at St. John’s Shaughnessy Church had taken part in prior to voting to request oversight from Archbishop Gregory Venables of the Anglican Province of Southern Cone:
One of the big questions that religion writers discuss when they are in private and speak freely is this one: Are we supposed to challenge people when they claim that they have had some kind of unique, supernatural spiritual experience? Do we, somehow, try to dig into the details and challenge this kind of account?
Each year, I like to look at what stories the mainstream media publish for Lent. The papers that noted Ash Wednesday, such as the Indianapolis Star, Newsday and the Orange County Register, published brief stories about the imposition of ashes.
Shira Schoenberg of the Concord Monitor wrote an interesting story about a Jewish Orthodox politician. Or at least her story was interesting, fascinating even, about the ritual and personal aspects of Jason Bedrick’s faith.
Tim Townsend of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has won praise for his coverage of an excommunication dispute between a priest and six laymen at a church and Archbishop Raymond Burke. As Mollie noted, Townsend has explained to readers that the battle is not over any sexy theological or moral issues, but rather over church authority.
At its best, Get Religion is akin to what the Greenville Delta-Democrat Times was in the post-war white South: a rare publication that questions the establishment’s assumptions and reveals its sins of omission and commission.
