Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the more nagging questions about the mass killings at Virginia Tech is how the parents of killer Seung-Hui Cho related to him. Their earlier statement to the public clearly expressed agony about their son’s rampage. The Washington Post‘s front-page story from Sunday fills in more blanks, especially regarding the killer’s mother, Hyang In Cho.
It’s interesting, whenever the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life releases a new study, to watch the ripples from that data spread out into the work of mainstream newsrooms that take religion news seriously.
Religion reporter Alan Cooperman had a very interesting article in Saturday’s Washington Post. I enjoy Cooperman’s stories. His smooth, clear writing style is easy to read and digest. Anyway, he uses the hook of a Missouri State University instructor requiring students to write letters urging state legislators to support adoptions by same-sex couples. One of the students, Emily Brooker, objected on religious grounds and the school charged her with discriminating against gays.
If you know anything about modern video games, then you know what the term “first-person shooter” means.
Gentle readers, I am going to have to ask your patience for a few minutes as the former copy editor in me rages a bit. However, I have no idea what is going on at the moment at The New York Times‘ copy desk when it comes to handling the tricky issue of formal titles for clergy.
Reader FzxGkJssFrk (is that his birth name, I wonder?), passed along a piece from ESPN’s Jemele Hill about National Football League rookie Terreal Bierria. The article is rather interesting but the reader noticed something amiss in this passage:
If Russell Chandler, retired from the Los Angeles Times, is one of the gold-standard names in traditional religion-beat work, then our second subject represents a much edgier style of reporting from the post-1960s alternative press. The work being done by Julie Lyons in her Bible Girl columns at the Dallas Observer represents a kind of neo-European, advocacy version of the Godbeat in modern niche media.
Eve Conant does a great job in the May 7 Newsweek of tracking the spiritual struggles of Army Chaplain Roger Benimoff, who begins a second tour of duty filled with idealism (“My heart is filled with prayer and god is giving me a discerning spirit”) and returns to the United States with his faith in tatters (“We make God into what we need for the moment. I hate God”).
Professional team switcher Jim McGreevey is back in the news. He’s the former New Jersey governor who was forced to resign amid charges of sexual harrassment from a male subordinate. McGreevey was married at the time and had been married previously but somehow managed to turn the bad news into a celebration of his newly revealed homosexuality. Now that’s how you spin, kids. He and his wife are divorcing and he plans to get hitched to his live-in male lover. McGreevey claimed, by the way, that he began an affair with his aide while his wife was recuperating in the hospital from a particularly hard labor and delivery. Classy.
