Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
GetReligion’s friend David Crumm sent email this week with the news that he will take a months-long leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press to develop a project called Read the Spirit. To call Read the Spirit a blog focused on religion news would be an understatement.
One thing I don’t miss from Washington are the snarky, uninformative feature/news stories in The Washington Post‘s Style section. The latest and greatest from those pages, Sridhar Pappu’s report on the Values Voters Summit, is like a bowl of bad popcorn. Little informed, slightly amused but mostly bemused, I came away from this story learning more about Pappu’s day at the Hilton Washington than the latest plots from the religious right to take over America, or at least install a president to its liking in 2008.
So I’m a fanatic of the reigning World Champion St. Louis Cardinals. But, uh, we didn’t do so well this year and didn’t even make it to the postseason.
Last weekend, I was out in Southern California (just as the winds started to pick up) and had a chance to read the Los Angeles Times every day on dead tree pulp, rather than trying to find my way through the digital version online. That means you have a chance to pick through all of the pages of the physical newspaper and look for ghosts. Sure enough, there are lots of them. Feel those guilt pangs?
Remember that tragic accident on an Indiana interstate that killed four Christian college students and a university employee? On Sunday, about 20 miles from that spot on that same stretch of interstate, another tragic car accident took the lives of five people traveling in yet another 15-passenger van.
I am well aware that many Harry Potter fans want GetReligion to help them answer this question: If Albus Dumbledore had a gay skeleton in his closet, why didn’t reporter Rita Skeeter of the Daily Prophet include that information in The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, her tacky, unauthorized, tell-all biography of the Hogwarts headmaster? Doesn’t that make his dark, dangerous and ultimately deadly relationship with the evil wizard Gellert Grindelwald all the more scandalous? Or not?
Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball (with Suzanne Smalley, Eve Conant, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Pat Wingert, Dan Ephron, Rod Nordland, John Barry, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, Richard Wolffe and Thijs Niemantsverdriet) profiled Blackwater CEO Erik Prince for Newsweek. It’s the kind of story that offers such balanced and illuminating insight as this:
