Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As you may have noticed, your friends here at GetReligion.org rarely, if ever, comment on op-ed columns. We’d need to open an entire second site if we started chasing religion into the editorial pages.
After being booed during her Saturday night performance and ejected from the Aladdin hotel and casino, Linda Ronstadt is on the fast track to reverential treatment in the entertainment media. Now that she’s been subjected to the cruelties of a Las Vegas crowd — which typically doesn’t travel to the neon oasis to hear odes to filmmaker Michael Moore’s patriotism — it’s best not to predict what Ronstadt will have to say about these lumpen Americans.
As I’ve noted before in this space, The Life of David Gale once offered this dubious advice regarding cultural geography: “You know you are in the Bible belt when there are more churches than Starbucks.”
During the past month or two, I have rarely seen my own office and my own telephone. I have been working in Washington, D.C., and then following that with travel to Turkey, Greece, Phoenix, the remote corners of the North Carolina mountains and this coming week to New Jersey.
From the BBC (via Religion News Blog) comes feel-good news about Nigerian 419 scams: a coalition called 419 Eater is fighting back and, in one case, using an elaborate parody of church talk to achieve its goal. (An audio report by BBC Radio 4 is available here.)
Cathleen Falsani of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a playful article last week about the Christian Comic Creators Summit at Judson College. It was a humble summit, attracting only 14 writers and artists.
The Parliament of the World’s Religions, which concluded yesterday in Barcelona, marked one happy development on the God Beat: seeing the latest on-site journalism by Gustav Niebuhr, former religion correspondent for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, who now teaches at Syracuse University.
I have vanished this week for a simple reason. My family is hiding up in the Smoky Mountains in a location so remote that we have no telephone and the nearest computer dial-up service is so slow that posting to the blog has been impossible. So I am sending this to the ever-patient Doug via email. It was interesting that I could post from Turkey and Greece easier than from this corner of North Carolina.
Scott Goldstein of the Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote a concise and energetic story on Monday about the 10th anniversary of a devastating fire at St. James’s Episcopal Church in Richmond (which I attend).
