Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Salman Rushdie is not, of course, a conventionally religious man. During the recent Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing he went out of his way to call himself a “dreadful old atheist.”
Following up on last week’s post on whether society can be tolerant of the intolerant, I wanted to point out some of the language being used on the left to justify limiting freedom of speech.
If you hadn’t seen it yet, Edward Cody had a front-page story in Sunday’s Washington Post on warming relations between the Communist government in China and the Roman Catholic Church. In fact, if you hadn’t heard, the two sides are moving closer to normal relations.
Ever since Sept. 11, there have been several consistent themes in the mainstream media’s coverage of Islam. There have also been some interesting holes, as GetReligion keeps pointing out, and there have been some interesting contradictions.
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.
