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Should the state tell black pastors what to preach?

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You remember how New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael famously asked how Richard Nixon could have won the presidency considering how everyone she knew voted against him? Well, I feel like Pauline Kael a lot since I live in Washington, D.C. If there is a less diverse political environment out there, I’m not aware of it. I was shocked that Bush won in 2004 because we went 90 percent for Kerry. I don’t actually know anyone who voted for Bush and lives in D.C.


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Why military chaplains matter

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Last Sunday’s 8,000-plus-word takeout in The Washington Post Magazine on military chaplains is a tremendous example of why long-form journalism is so helpful in dealing with complex religious issues. The magazine’s editors gave Kristin Henderson, the wife of a Navy chaplain and author of While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront, the space needed to tell the story of why chaplains are a necessary part of the U.S. military operations and some of the immense challenges they face:


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EW takes a (nice) look at Walden

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I will never forget reading the very first issue of Entertainment Weekly. It was back in 1990, wasn’t it? I looked through it and I thought to myself, “This is amazing. The Time empire has managed to assemble a team of writers and editors who have achieved a state of world-weariness and cynicism in its very first issue! What an achievement!”


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Does Da Vinci need a disclaimer?

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One thing I’m looking forward to seeing in the launch of The Da Vinci Code next weekend (besides everyone laughing at Tom Hanks’ career-damaging hair) is what type of on-screen language it will open with and what, if any, type of language it will end with.


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Birth control, Da Movie and MercyMe

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Every now and then, I see people or groups produce material that makes me think to myself: “Behold, that’s a GetReligion item.” Truth be told, I don’t quite know what to do when this happens. I mean, it’s hard to write a case study about a case study. That’s a bit too Zen for me.


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What will the Associated Press do?

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One of the reasons some editors and reporters shy away from reporting about religious issues is because their ignorance on the topic can cause outrage among readers. You get a businessman’s name wrong and you run a correction. Get a detail wrong about Mennonites and you field angry calls from Pennsylvania for weeks. Connie Coyne, the reader advocate for the Salt Lake Tribune, deals with an example of this in her column this week:


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More "moderate" than thou (Rumble III)

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Remember that soul-searching June 23, 2005, memo that New York Times editor Bill Keller wrote to his staff? This was the one called “Assuring Our Credibility” (PDF) that talked about the newspaper needing to do a better job of covering religion and being fair to people whose beliefs seem strange to people who work in the world’s most powerful newsroom.


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China-Vatican deal goes boom over bishops

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Alessandra Rizzo of the Associated Press reported Friday that the Vatican excommunicated four bishops because two of them were ordained by the state-controlled church without consent from the Pope. The two bishops who ordained them were also excommunicated. Except they weren’t quite cut off from church fellowship.


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