Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee today officially launched his bid to be the 2008 Republican nominee for president (or, as some would say, his candidacy to be someone’s vice president). Thanks to some diligent reading and good questions from Meet the Press host Tim Russert on Sunday, we have a pretty good idea of how the former Baptist preacher understands the role of his faith in his public duties.
So if it’s Monday, that must mean I write about something from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. And so I will. Mark Oppenheimer used the hook of a nondenominational university in Arkansas permitting dance for the first time as a way to explore some Christians’ view of dancing. The piece is ridiculously smooth and well-written and looks at the issue from a number of angles.
Almost a year ago, M.Z. Hemingway had an interesting post about the controversial Body Worlds exhibits. You may remember they feature artworks by Dr. Gunther von Hagens that consist of dead, flayed, dissected human beings preserved in plastic.
Back when I was in graduate school at Baylor University in the late 1970s, I had a classmate who was considering doing graduate work at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. This student was not a fundamentalist at all and, in fact, I believe that he soon converted to the Episcopal Church. As often happens, we lost touch after graduate school.
Journalists use terms and labels daily to communicate meaning and historical significance to their readers. Now and then a term or label becomes so overused, misused or underused, that a reevaluation of that term or label is needed. While most newsroom discussions are best kept off the news pages due to their sheer banality, the discussion of how to describe groups is relevant. What better way to hash out the discussion than by sharing it with your readers?
As the reigning (three-time) champion of my newsroom’s Oscar pool, I’ve been preparing for the coming battle by watching as many Oscar-contending films as possible. The Queen was definitely one of the best movies of the year. Helen Mirren is amazing. Unfortunately Peter Morgan’s Oscar-nominated screenplay was tampered with a bit by some censors. The Associated Press’ Giovanna Dell’Orto reports:
OK, here is the modern question that seems to come up every few months in a major newspaper or wire service: If the pope says you are no longer a Catholic, are you still a Catholic?
Jimmy Carter apologized yesterday for a line in his recently released book, except that he didn’t, at least according to the Associated Press. The CNN clip presented here shows that while broadcasters played up Carter’s apology, most mainstream American media decided to play it down.
There is, sad to say, mounting evidence that GetReligion readers are not all that interested in discussing the changes in the religion-news coverage strategies of The Dallas Morning News. This is rather disappointing to me because the “multi-platform” news questions faced by Jeffrey Weiss & Co. are issues that the entire news world will have to face sooner rather than later.
