Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I can’t remember when, exactly, the mainstream media decided that it would stop with the unilateral caricature of evangelicals as the Christian Right, but I’m not sure the new caricature is much improved.
The 2008 Pulitzers have been announced and the Washington Post won every category. Okay, not quite. But they did win the Public Service, Breaking News, National Reporting, International Reporting, Feature Writing and Commentary prizes.
This is a strange moment for Black America. A major black celebrity frets about its values, while black Christian ministers worry about structural problems. Bill Cosby scolds black men for not being responsible fathers, while civil-rights era preachers encourage their flock to attend job training classes.
Charlton Heston raised the tablets containing the Ten Commandments high over his head decades before he did the same thing with a flintlock rifle and, to their credit, most of the journalists who wrote his obituaries managed to cover both of those symbolic gestures.
Surrogate pregnancy was the focus of Newsweek‘s cover story last week. Its angle was on the women who are surrogates as opposed to the medical advances of assisted reproductive technology or the laws and regulations governing the practice.
One of the things I love about the religion beat is that valid and even interesting religious content can show up literally anywhere in the newspaper. If you needed evidence of that, check out this chatty little story from the Washington Times, focusing on the highs and lows of celebrity parenting.
How often do you read that the Southern Baptist Convention is to the left of a theological debate? For many, that fact alone is the story’s lead. Such is the situation when a reporter must cover a theological/academic spat at a religiously fundamental institutions.
Voodoo, in its New World form, is a syncretized religion. It blends religion native to West Africa and Central Africa with Christianity. Reporter Marc Lacey wrote about the new Port-au-Prince-based head of Voodoo in a profile for the New York Times:
The Dallas Morning News had a compelling story last week that dealt with the closing of a 118-year-old neighborhood church that draws on local, regional and national religion trends. Locally, dwindling membership and declining revenues have challenged the church. In addition, the church has struggled as a “predominantly Anglo church in a largely Hispanic area.”
