Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Did you all catch Frank DeFord’s rather pretentious defense of sportswriting in the Washington Post Book World Sunday? I love Frank DeFord and listen to him all the time on NPR and watch him on (the best sports show out there) HBO’s RealSports with Bryant Gumbel. I also love sportswriting. I’ll never forget the transformative experience that was reading Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes while on a transcontinental flight.
The big news in David D. Kirkpatrick’s latest New York Times report from the front pews of the Culture Wars is hinted at in the lead and then buried way near the bottom. The big news: It seems that a few leaders on the Catholic left may agree to back a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriages.
What would prompt a New Yorker with a medical degree from the University of Chicago to yell at Chinese president Hu Jintao during a state ceremony and risk facing likely arrest and prosecution?
Oh my. The following is one of those stories where you wish you could have been a fly on the wall in the meeting in which people debated and made the business decision that led to it. In this case, it makes me wish someone had done an illegal wiretap. This story is beyond silly. It is sick.
Pentecostals make for great copy. Their leaders are, well, charismatic (and, dare I say, sometimes found dancing near the devil). They have some righteous tunes. And they make frequent claims of dramatic healings. Now they’re celebrating their 100th anniversary, more or less. The Azusa Street Revival — where an interracial Los Angeles congregation of thousands, led by the Rev. William Joseph Seymour, experienced speaking in tongues and physical manifestations of supernatural contact — began in April 1906.
Speaking of Fred Barnes and the faith factor, there is a great Fred moment in his op-ed today in the Wall Street Journal. In effect, it opens with Sen. George F. Allen of Virginia trying out his “cultural right” soundbites for the most influential “cultural right” journalist in D.C. journalism.
Gentrification is a big issue in Washington, D.C. Local journalists have done an adequate job of covering the clash between cultures and minorities being priced out of neighborhoods as property values rise.
Because I am one of those people — cultural conservatives who go to church all the time — many of my friends in academia and journalism assume that I watch Fox News.
Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times religion reporter — and author of the new book The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People — had an interesting story that ran on (Western) Easter Sunday. Rather than taking the controversy tack used by so many others, she wrote an article about all the different translations and versions of the Bible:
