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Sometimes I’m surprised at how little the media covers the vibrant world of online religion. Snejana Farberov of Columbia News Service penned a piece about, loosely, God and the internet. She describes how churches broadcast their sermons online:
Last February we looked at an intriguing First Amendment story in the Tacoma News Tribune. Reporter Ian Demsky looked at the fallout from a Washington State Department of Corrections settlement decision that gives inmates the right to adhere to two religions at the same time. One priest in particular took a voluntary leave of absence because he couldn’t support the state decision.
Today is Pentecost, one of the three chief festivals in the Western Christian church year. It would be hard to imagine a complete lack of coverage of Christmas or Easter but Pentecost, the least commercial or secularized of the three days, doesn’t receive much media coverage at all. I don’t have any statistics to back this up but I think that media coverage is particularly sparse during those years, like 2008, that the High Holy Day of Mothers coincides with Pentecost.
Long-time GetReligion readers may remember that I have been, and remain, very confused about the meaning of the term “emerging church” and how it relates to that other confusing term “evangelical.” There was even a time, two years ago or thereabouts, when GetReligion.org was named one of the top weblogs linked to the “emerging church” movement. That struck me as most strange. It still does.
It’s no secret that Barack Obama fared poorly among white-working class voters in the Indiana primary. Why did he not win them over? Thomas M. DeFrank of The New York Daily News knows — Joe Six-Pack is a religious bigot:
News reporters are starting to step up to the challenge of exploring the complicated issue of why a person joins a church. A pair of articles published this week explore both sides of the coin that is a person’s decision to attend the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
In popular Catholic piety, Padre Pio Pietrelcina is still a revered figure, if not to the extent that he was for decades after World War II. The Italian Capuchin monk bore the stigmata on his hands, chest, and feet. He cured people. He made prophesies. So how will the intellectual Pope Benedict XVI treat the saint and his emotional followers?
It’s no secret that the U.S. Catholic church has comparatively fewer priests than it had 40 years ago. So how are Catholics responding? Melanie Lefkowitz of Newsday wrote about one response: an influx of older seminarians and priests entering the ministry.
It never ceases to amaze me how much media coverage of denominational politics we get for The Episcopal Church vis-a-vis all other denominations. It seems like every time an Episcopal clergyman sneezes, it’s worthy of massive coverage. But a major church body — the United Methodist Church — holds its quadrennial convention in Fort Worth over the last two weeks and we get nothing. Or at least something close to nothing.
