Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
At a humble, green-domed mosque in the heart of Baghdad, a grizzled preacher named Sheik Ahmed Yassin stood his ground. Gunmen had killed five of his followers and kidnapped two of his sons. Threats had thinned his congregation, and the worshipers who still came rushed to their cars after prayers to avoid becoming the latest victims.
I think it says something about Phillip E. Johnson that the best art I could find of the man using Google images was a cartoon on the cover of one of his own books. He is not a guy who warms up to camera lens (especially after two strokes) and he keeps trying to get the media to aim their coverage at the younger voices in the Intelligent Design movement.
From an interesting, fairly even-handed report in The Washington Post. A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would expand government-funded embryonic stem cell research. The president’s response?
I am in Washington, D.C., at the moment up to my eyebrows in the first few days of the 11th annual Summer Institute of Journalism here at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities — about a 10-minute walk from the U.S. Capitol. See this if that interests you.
Meg James of the Los Angeles Times has a good ear for the deadpan humor of network executives talking like network executives. Witness Leslie Moonves, the immeasurably hip 56-year-old chairman of CBS, discussing some programming changes:
I missed a Boston Globe profile of science philosopher Michael Ruse at the beginning of this month, but Rich Poll’s Apologia Report has pointed it out. Ruse, a vigorous defender of evolution, distinguishes between evolution and evolutionism, and he criticizes fellow academicians who do not see the clash of worldviews behind the public debates.
There is a point at which media criticism becomes rather censorious, and I think we’ve crossed it in the Newsweek scandal. Jonah Goldberg, in his latest column for National Review Online, writes of Michael Isikoff’s motive for breaking the story, “my guess is that [he] was more motivated by a reporter’s desire to break a story than by some Left-wing anti-Americanism.” Then he gets to the argument:
As part of the never-ending quest for political metaphors after the red-blue divide, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press has developed a nifty little online test in an attempt to give a snapshot of the basic political viewpoints in the land.
A few years ago, when one Internet wag wanted to poke fun at President Bush’s faith, the face from Salman’s “Head of Christ” replaced the head of Michael Gerson in the photo that accompanies this post. (GetReligion did not create that image, but has used it with irony.)
