Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
An expose of a Kansas City megachurch ran on the front page of The Kansas City Star‘s Sunday edition and a few readers passed it along then. I apologize for the delay in posting about it, but it’s taken me days to get through the whole package.
Some of you have written to me to express your dismay about the mainstream media’s coverage of the new theological document released by that complex, bookish fellow named Pope Benedict XVI. In particular, I realize that you are upset about the focus taken in the first few paragraphs in the story published by the only newspaper that really matters, The New York Times.
If anyone is hoping that the loud relationship between politics and personal faith is merely a freakish and temporal effect of George W. Bush’s presidency, simply observing the candidates and reporters warm up this year should dispense with that fanciful wish.
What in the world was the Apostle Paul thinking in 1 Corinthians 1:10-17 when he told Christians to eliminate all divisions and “be perfectly united in mind and thought”?
Washington Post Foreign Service writer Kevin Sullivan had a lengthy piece on religion and the Internet today. The article is full of details about how Indian Hindus use the Internet in their religious devotion. Here was one of the early paragraphs:
Like it or not, digital technology and blogging software have raised up armies of freelance media critics, many of whom are dedicated to taking potshots at the principalities and powers in the mainstream press.
The Secular Coalition for America generated a bit of news on the left West Coast by announcing that Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif. , does not believe in God. The Los Angeles Times picked up the story and played it in a way that confirms for conservatives everything they thought about liberals. Take, for instance the headline, the subhead and the lede:
Evangelicals are going at it again over the environment, and the media have hardly sparred us a detail in covering the blow-by-blow in this round. For starters, Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times laid out the fight Saturday as an attack by “leaders” such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family on those who have “strayed too far from their signature battles against abortion and gay rights.”
