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This is a note from a reader, addressing my take on the one-sided Los Angeles Times series on religious tensions at the Air Force Academy. This is an important issue to this blog, so let’s dig into it a bit.
Please pardon this shameless plug for the official grandmother of this blog, Frederica Mathewes-Green of Beliefnet, NPR and lots of other places. The Dallas Morning News just ran a very interesting Q&A with her — gentle and blunt at the same time — linked to the content of her recent lectures in an Episcopal church in Dallas. The title of the lectures was a flag-waver if I have seen one: “Sex and the City: Men, Women and the Future of Civilization.”
World editor Marvin Olasky, in one of his more pointed criticisms of the notion of journalistic objectivity, once wrote that journalists feel no need to quote pro-cancer sources when writing about that dread disease. Well, there’s no shortage of pro-sharia sources in The Washington Post‘s heartbreaking account of a married woman in Afghanistan who was killed — whether by a stoning or a beating — after she admitted to committing adultery with an unmarried man.
Last lines of stories often serve as a way for the reporter to . . . help readers know how to think about a subject. With that in mind, GetReligion offers the last words in this round of stories about the ouster of Fr. Thomas Reese as editor of the Jesuit weekly America:
I have been meaning to get back to this story the second half of the week, but many other things kept getting in the way. Over at the Los Angeles Times, reporter David Kelly continues to roll with the story of evangelical abuses at the Air Force Academy.
Here we go again. I have been watching to see if the MSM notices this story. Sadly, I don’t think it’s on the radar. It seems that an Assemblies of God preacher in Iran may lose his head because of his faith and his voice. Here is a brief clip from Compass Direct, a Christian wire service:
Former colleague Charles Paul Freund (pictured) has a good piece over at Reason‘s Hit & Run blog on the various popes’ relations with the Jewish community of Rome. Some of the historical details are cringe-inducing. Pope Paul IV, for instance, established the Jewish ghetto, the miniscule boundaries of which were to house the city’s Jewish population between the 1550s and 1870, when the Vatican lost control of most of the city.
Peter Carlson of The Washington Post has great fun with the legacy of the three Bob Joneses who served as consecutive presidents of Bob Jones University, and with the tradition-breaking appointment of Stephen Jones as the school’s new president.
The religion-beat pros at the ReligionLink.org project have read the signs of the Hollywood times and released a newsroom-friendly guide to the God-talk elements in Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other similar summer flicks. So why do these movies matter? Preach it:
