Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Bacchanals at his residence, liaisons with prostititutes, an ambiguous relationship with a teenage girl — allegations against the Italian Prime Minister have been roiling the country for months.
In terms of political content, the unofficial state funeral (video here) of Sen. Edward Kennedy was pretty normal, with pews full of presidents and prose full of allusions to legislation that helped the masses, with President Barack Obama in full civil-religion flight.
We’ve been complaining a bit about the meager inclusion of religion angles in some of the political coverage of the various legislative efforts to reform health care and health insurance. So David Kirkpatrick’s piece in the New York Times this week was welcome. Headlined “Some Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan,” here’s how it began:
Journalists can be sometimes sloppy about how they use terms like “evangelical” or “born-again.” But they also face a real problem — how to convey the basics of a situation accurately in very limited space. And when covering a doctrinal dispute, or a controversial denominational figure, it’s very tricky to give your readers all the information they need without getting into dangerous territory.
While the health-care wars are dominating the mainstream press at the moment, I think it’s interesting that the Vatican inquiry into the doctrinal standards of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious is continuing to get quite a bit of ink. In fact, there’s too much coverage — click here for a sample — to take it on all at once.
Let’s talk demographics for a moment. Hispanics are the fastest growing immigrant population in the United States. Around a third of American Catholics are Hispanic. And, according to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) website, Hispanic evangelicals are a booming demographic: “Hispanic born-again Christians make up 37 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population and 88% of all U.S. Hispanic Protestants, 43% of all U.S. Hispanic Mainline Protestants, and 26% of all U.S. Hispanic Roman Catholics.”
Since I became a member of my congregation almost a dozen years ago, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of young children attending. Hang on, this is linked to a news story.
Every now and then I stop and think to myself, “How in the heckfire did I do my job — make that my jobs, plural — before there was email and the World Wide Web?
