Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
First let me praise Jeffrey Fleishman of the Los Angeles Times for taking a religion-haunted story — the debates over immigration in Europe — and letting the ghost dance right out in the open. Besides, it’s hard not to read a story with a face-slap lead like this one: “Europe is buying more coffins than cribs.”
Franklin Foer became the editor of The New Republic in March, and this already seems to be good news for people who seek lively and opinionated coverage of religion. Only a few weeks after publishing a lengthy cover-story attack on Richard John Neuhaus, it has now published a lengthy cover-story attack on Harold Bloom.
Tithing in this country is a bigger story than initially meets the eye. Every local newspaper should be doing stories on tithing. It matters.
The collision of religion and politics always makes for a good story. Last year the IRS opened an investigation into All Saints Church, an Episcopal congregation in Pasadena, for featuring a liberal political sermon two days before the 2004 election. Bradley Whitford, former Quaker, outspoken liberal and erstwhile star of The West Wing, is a member of the church and wrote up his thoughts about the action a few months ago.
It is one of the most controversial events in the history of the 20th century and hardly anyone in America knows about it.
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.
