Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Today’s New York Times includes this report about Sleeper Cell, a 10-part Showtime series about a faithful Muslim named Darwyn (yes, we get it) who infiltrates a terrorist group. The Times mentions the producers’ goal of high realism, but also must grant that, while some Muslim FBI agents exist, there’s no way to know if any such agent has infiltrated a terrorist cell.
It’s hard to know where to start with this AFP piece on a phantom “left turn” in “America’s pulpits,” so let’s just take it from the top. The article begins by saying that “America’s moderate and progressive evangelists,” long “outgunned” by the “mighty ‘religious right,’” have finally demanded a cut of the political action.
Whoa! Is it just me, or did everyone click on Google News this a.m. and find the following section available in the main page? If this change has somehow been made in the Google template, the timing could not be better.
In all the hubbub over Justice O’Connor’s retirement, the resurgence of the Plame affair, and the usual raucous Canada Day celebrations, I’ll venture to guess that most readers of GetReligion (including literate woodpeckers) have not heard of the latest controversy on female ordination in the Catholic Church.
The Dallas Morning News has a fun book-related feature up today called “Grace Lands: Professor hits the road in search of religious kitsch, and finds true faith along the way.” The book is called Roadside Religion and it’s about a mainline Protestant attempting to dissect the strange people who live in strange lands dominated by traditional forms of faith, which means that, in many ways, it has the exact same journalistic point of view as the entire Dallas Morning News, especially its nationally known religion section.
I’ve been too slow to praise Hanna Rosin’s profile of Patrick Henry College in the June 27 New Yorker, but it’s still available online.
Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard — who is not famous because of his sources in the world of rock ‘n’ roll — recently (a) broke a big story without knowing it or (b) made the kind of picky mistake that U2 fans get hot and bothered about. I am wondering if anyone else out there spotted this and can tell me whether the reference is accurate or not.
Based on the previews ABC already had shown for Welcome to the Neighborhood, it was going to be a touchy-feely and maybe even pleasant version of a marathon course in cultural diversity. Sure, the premise had a creepy whiff of exploitation, which set people of various cultural backgrounds in competition for a house in a white suburb near Austin, Texas. Still, it held out the promise of crumbling stereotypes and group hugs and, well, at least a few hours of transcending the culture wars that even some of us culture-war-vultures sometimes find wearying.
