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The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s ace religion reporter Ann Rodgers had an innovative angle on the pope’s address to U.S. bishops. Whereas most people focused on Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks about sexual abuse or immigration, Rodgers focused on his comments about the life of the church:
John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter provided a GetReligion-style service by performing, as he said, “rumor control,” in the hope that inaccurate or overblown material can be put in its proper context before it spins out of control.
Major props to Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post for a wonderful story on the front page of yesterday’s Style section analyzing the significance of Pope Benedict XVI’s papal garments.
Writing about a court’s opinion in a lawsuit should be easy. At least you may think it would be. The court’s opinion typically contains all the relevant facts, important quotes, the history of the law and how it applies in the particular case. For example, you’d expect that news reports of a opinion finding a coach’s participation in pre-football game prayers unconstitutional would include the words of the prayer, right?
With Pope Benedict XVI in town, the media are running with every angle imaginable on the Catholic Church.
Historian Martin Marty once told me that many people have a definition of “ecumenism” that goes something like this: “I don’t believe very much and you don’t believe very much, so we must have a lot in common.”
There is something unfortunate when a church creates limits on whether or not journalists can attend its religious services. How are journalists supposed to understand religion if they are limited or prohibited from attending what is generally considered the most important and frequent public event in that religious tradition’s week?
Associated Press writer Hillary Rhodes filed an interesting piece about how pastors are turning to the Internet to answer theology questions. One of the pastors she spoke with was Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church:
We are beginning to see some interesting advance stories based on the texts that Pope Benedict XVI will use during his upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., and New York City.
