Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As GetReligion readers know, I am about as pro-free speech as you can get, even pro-offensive speech in the tense world of religion and politics. I even think that the U.S. military doesn’t need to mandate a kind of lowest-common-denominator Unitarianism, funding with tax dollars. I’m a radical.
I wanted to revisit the Rolling Stone article on Scientology from earlier this week, partly because it generated a tremendous amount of discussion, but also because I want to highlight an aspect of the article that I overlooked the first time around.
It will be interesting to see how media coverage of yesterday’s unfortunate event in North Carolina develops. Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian-born man raised in Charlotte, drove an SUV into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. No one was killed and a handful were injured. The local ABC affiliate explains:
One or two people have asked me if I would comment on the allegations of financial scandal in the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy here in North America with Russian roots.
In Wednesday’s Lenten post, I noted that Slate‘s Andrew Santella wrote an interesting article about the revival of Lenten practices among Protestants. I chided him for throwing all Protestants together, from those that have marked Lenten penitence since the beginning with those evangelicals that are rediscovering the practices of the church.
I realize that I have started seeing the “pew gap” factor all over the place. Nevertheless, that is what I thought of this morning when I read the Wall Street Journal‘s “Black Flight: The exodus to charter schools” piece by Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten.
Another cartoon controversy involving religion has popped up in the news. This time it involves an American educational institution (Radford University in Virginia) and a student-run Internet magazine (Whim). There’s been no talk of censorship, according to administration officials, despite some protests from students. Another installment of the cartoon tilted “Christ On Campus” is supposed to be launched Friday by sophomore Christian Keesee.
Late yesterday afternoon, I received a call from Godbeat veteran Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post, who was working on an update about the status of the National Religious Broadcasters and the Rev. Pat Robertson. I don’t think it would hurt to say that he wanted to know if I would talk about some of the things that have been said about the czar of The 700 Club on this website, which I assume means this post, this one and especially this one.
Back in the early 1990s, the leaders of the Freedom Forum think tank put together a team to study a nagging question: Why do mainstream newsrooms have so much trouble covering religion news? The result was a study titled “Bridging the Gap” (full text here) that, essentially, argued that the situation was pretty complex, but that the biggest problem was that most journalists simply didn’t know enough about religion.
