Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
If great religion journalism is going to survive, it is going to be because of the writing and not because of the pictures, graphics, videos or even blogs. That was driven home to me today when I read Andrew Rice’s masterful piece in the New York Times Magazine on the Redeemed Christian Church of God, one of the African missionary churches that the Times says is transforming Western Christianity.
This is an ultra-busy time of the year for people whose lives revolve around ancient religious traditions. I mention this, because your GetReligionistas are impacted in a major way.
On my way to church tonight, a media friend living in another country called me to tell me she couldn’t believe what she just saw on CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. She said it was so dismissive of Christian prayer that she almost wondered if she’d misheard.
We’ve remarked before how the media usually tell religious news stories when those stories interact with the true passion of the media: politics. This story, from the New York Times, is no exception. The whole hook is how a small religious sect is working the political system for survival. The Saddam Hussein years were hard for many groups who perished or suffered under his notorious oppression. But the post-Saddam Hussein years have been difficult in particular for non-Muslim groups. It’s an important story that hasn’t been covered as much as should be. So I was glad to see this story about the Yazidi, (who are definitely faring better post-Saddam):
Passover, a time of family gatherings and a myriad of rituals, comes once every year. Birchat HaChama, the blessing of the sun, comes once every 28 years on the Jewish calendar. Owing to the journalistic principle that the rare story is often the better story, Birchat HaChama has been getting an inordinate amount of coverage this year. Both arrive on Wednesday and it looks like Birchat HaChama has already outshone Passover.
The BBC has what could have been an interesting little story about Muslim prayer practices and rules. Unfortunately, it has very little doctrinal meat to it. The story is this:
So former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was received into the Roman Catholic Church this past weekend. He had been Baptist. For most people, conversion isn’t exactly a political event. But when you’re a prominent Republican whose name is being mentioned as a possible future candidate for President, well, everything is political.
I thought I’d wait to write this post until I saw mainstream media coverage of one particular aspect of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. And then, thousands of stories about the visit to Mexico later, I realized that the press wasn’t going to be covering it.
From time to time, your GetReligionistas are accused — accurately, I might add — of whining about the fact that many religion stories in the mainstream media are too short, too shallow or have too many holes in them, world without end. Amen.
