I was flipping through the back pages of the news section of my local newspaper this weekend and this Associated Press story stopped me in my tracks.
Say what? A Polish spy in the Vatican?
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Will TV Land defile Salem, Mass.?
Kathy McCabe of The Boston Globe reported this week that the TV Land cable network wants to honor Elizabeth Montgomery’s Bewitched character, Samantha Stephens, with a statue in Salem, Mass.
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Der kidding me, right?
Wow, check out this reaction to the election of Benedict XVI in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. I mean, the editors might as well have assigned a heavily sedated Matthew Fox to write the piece on the election of the first German pope since 1048. The long subhead reads:
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A simple story: God, Zo and a kidney
According to the seminars offered by our friends at Poynter.org, one of the quickest ways to improve religion news coverage in the MSM is for journalists simply to stop removing the faith elements of stories in which they are already present.
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No alt-del-esc for Microsoft
It’s always a pleasure to see an independent weekly breaking news of national importance, which The Stranger (Seattle) is doing in a story involving Microsoft, an African American megachurch pastor and a proposed gay-rights bill in the state legislature.
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Galloping Air Force Academy fundamentalism
No doubt about it — David Kelly at the Los Angeles Times has found a good story out in the red-zone wilds of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
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Some things never change
Ernesto Cardenal’s time in the media spotlight was brief but iconic. The bearded poet of the Sandinista revolution removed his beret and attempted to kneel when greeting Pope John Paul II in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1983. John Paul not only stopped Cardenal from kneeling but also delivered a finger-wagging scolding about the priest’s volunteering his talent for verse to the Sandinista cause.
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God: dead but lively
Given that newsstand copies of the May Harper’s have an ad flap that reads “The Christian Right’s War on America,” it was only a matter of time before one of us GetReligion sleuths broke down and bought a copy to investigate.
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Here we go: Darth Vader and "The Fall"
In the book Boiling Point: Monitoring Cultural Shifts in the 21st Century, the evangelical pollster George Barna and writer Mark Hatch make the following observation about the awesome power of mass media:
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