Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Last week found me stumbling around trying to write about religious issues in the World Cup. The event is one of the most significant worldwide. Certainly there were more religious issues than merely an immature head-butting, we thought.
Some ghosts are just too obvious to miss. But sadly, in an attempt to cram reams of issues into an eight-minute radio broadcast, National Public Radio did what so many media outlets do in attempt to write about Islam: give theological issues the short stick.
Details on the perpetrators of Tuesday’s horrific bombings of the Mumbai train system are still scant, but investigators are considering it the work of Islamic extremists from Pakistan. As further details come in, it will be important for journalists to sort out the messy theological details of the group and whether it is connected to a more international Islamic terrorism effort.
You are not going to believe this laugh-to-keep-from-crying update on the life and Roman Catholic times of former GetReligion-ist Jeremy Lott, the author of that In Defense of Hypocrisy book.
On one level, Peggy Noonan’s column this morning in The Wall Street Journal is not about religion news coverage. In fact, it isn’t about religion, at least not directly.
Normally we try to analyze recent mainstream media coverage of religious issues. The magazine article in this post is from January of 2005; it’s a bit dated. But reader Daniel Grover passed it along yesterday and it was too interesting to keep from others.
Molly Moore wrote in Tuesday’s Washington Post that France’s national soccer team captain Zinedine Zidane, banished in the final minutes of Sunday’s World Cup final for head-butting an opponent in a moment of rage, is the “son of Christian Algerian immigrants.”
It’s hard for an American to come away from a meeting with international journalists without feeling a bit, well, guilty.
