Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
What we have here is a really interesting New York Times story about a significant development among liberal mainline Protestants in Belgium that could end up spreading to other parts of Europe.
OK, this is going to be a story that is buried in online debate about the labeling of the different candidates, including the winner, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York.
Genuinely shocking news out of Baltimore, where the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has a new president and it isn’t the mainstream progressive candidate, Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuscon, the sitting vice president. The Associated Press already has a short story out on this and GetReligion will be following the coverage.
We’ve had quite a bit of very serious content lately about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and in lands nearby. The massacre in the cathedral in Iraq set off an important wave of new coverage.
In the past decade or so, the mainstream press has offered waves of news features that have attempted to explain the state of mind in our nation’s growing Islamic population. The need for these stories is obvious, although most of them end up presenting a single, unified Muslim community that does not in fact exist.
A few months ago, we discussed Confucianism’s comeback in China. Now the New York Times magazine considers the rise of Taoism as part of a broader religious revival in the Communist country. Ian Johnson’s article seems pretty thorough, but it also feels a little light on China’s tense relationship with religion.
Pope Benedict XVI dedicated the Basilica of the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family in Barcelona this past Sunday. I was traveling from Denver yesterday and following a bunch of Catholic bloggers as they described the mass as one of the most exquisite and inspiring they’d ever witnessed. And the church itself is considered a feat of architecture, engineering and art. Though largely completed, it won’t be totally done for another 15 years or so. It will be the tallest church in the world. Designed by Antoni Gaudi, it’s replete with Christian symbolism.
Anyone who has read GetReligion for any time at all knows that our goal is to offer criticism — positive and negative — of mainstream news coverage of religion events and trends. The key word is “news.”
With that whole election thing over (yeah, right), so I suddenly feel a need to turn to Something Completely Different. Thus, it’s time to visit the tmatt folder of GetReligion guilt.
