Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
How significant was Tuesday’s unanimous Supreme Court ruling — allowing a New Mexico congregation to use a hallucinogenic tea in its religious rituals — in establishing precedent in religious-freedom law? If you read Wednesday’s Washington Post article, you would come away thinking the impact was minimal, but thankfully, the Internet gives us other sources of information. (GetReligion’s original post on the issue is here.)
Every morning, my email includes a news digest from the Washington Post. The nice thing about WashingtonPost.com is that the administrative tools allow me to set up a decently nuanced set of filters beyond the usual “national,” “politics,” “sports” and other topics that MSM leaders think are important.
Just a quick note to follow-up on Old Man Mattingly’s post about different standards for Christians, Jews and Muslims. Catholic church leaders in New Zealand are calling for a boycott of television stations that plan to screen an “ugly and tasteless” episode of South Park, according to the BBC. I have seen many episodes of South Park and I can’t think of one that wasn’t ugly or tasteless. Sometimes they’re even funny.
I know that the following op-ed piece isn’t hard news, but it is opinion about the shaping of the news. And I do think that some very interesting people are getting upset about the same things.
I’ve noticed a shift in the cartoon coverage and in many bloggers’ attitudes toward the image-inspired violence and arguments over whether the images should have been published by media organizations. This shift has been driven largely by events on the ground that are just too huge to ignore, particularly as the “Furor Over Cartoons Pits Muslim Against Muslim,” as a New York Times headline writer phrased it Tuesday.
For those interested in a GetReligion flashback, today’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page includes a review of the new book Fired! by actress Annabelle Gurwitch. The book sounds interesting, especially its list of 21 synonymns that people in power use in this sensitive age in place of the blunt words “You’re fired.”
Reader Matt Holiday says that he sees a religion ghost in the following Reuters story by Carolyn Abate, which describes the problem that California state officials are having finding medical professionals who are willing to take part in the execution of convicted killer Michael Morales. Here is the final section of the story, which contains the direct quote in which Holiday says he sees a ghost:
This does seem to be national Crunchy Cons day among conservatives of a certain ilk and, yes, I was planning on mentioning the long-awaited release of Rod “Friend of this Blog” Dreher’s book. After all, a major theme of this blog is the complexity of some of the “liberal” and “conservative” labels that journalists toss around all the time.
I wanted to bring to attention this item in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. Staff writer Lorenza Muñoz jumped on a tremendous Hollywood story of how Tyler Perry‘s Oprah-inspired journal writing about childhood physical abuse turned into plays and movies that are now taking the entertainment industry by storm.
