Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Yesterday I raised some of the journalistic questions surrounding coverage of the raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas. And I was happy to see I wasn’t alone in being intrigued by those questions.
The cover of Time this week features a large image of Pope Benedict XVI with an American flag in the background. As I will try to show later, this is ironic, but for now it’s worth noting that the cover story is “Why the Pope Loves America.”
Voodoo, in its New World form, is a syncretized religion. It blends religion native to West Africa and Central Africa with Christianity. Reporter Marc Lacey wrote about the new Port-au-Prince-based head of Voodoo in a profile for the New York Times:
Pardon me while I take a quick trip into my GetReligion guilt folder. This is an Anglican warfare story from last weekend that I have been trying to find the time to write about all week.
Jacqueline L. Salmon of The Washington Post wrote what I consider a very regrettable story about Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl. Salmon’s mini-profile of Wuerl, written in preparation for Pope Benedict XVI’s visit, was shallow and unfair, the sort of story that the Archbishop detests and rightly so.
It appears that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston has a new co-cathedral, which is the kind of thing that happens when a little inland town called Houston grows into a megacity and you need a giant new sacred space to symbolize that. It’s formal name is the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.
There’s a lot of ink spilled over how politics and religion intersect, but I wish we could see more stories about religion and commerce. It’s somewhat rare to find any religion stories on the business pages.
How can journalists reveal the interior life of their characters or interview subjects? Tom Wolfe has long advocated using three techniques — in-depth interviewing, diaries, and letters.
There is a really, really interesting story developing out there in the world of the Protestant mainline, over on the right side of Lutheran Land.
