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If you were looking for a newspaper article on what other African-American preachers thought about Barack Obama’s former pastor’s fiery sermons from a religious perspective (and not exclusively related to politics), look no further than Tuesday’s Dallas Morning News.
I was contacting a few of my favorite religion reporters today to let them know about a some events in St. Louis on Sunday and Monday regarding the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod’s surprising cancellation of the popular radio show Issues, Etc.
The Pew Form on Religion & Public Life had a great forum the other day for journalists preparing to cover the upcoming visit by Pope Benedict XVI to Washington, D.C., and New York City. The speakers were two of the world’s top English-language Vatican watchers, John L. Allen, Jr., of the National Catholic Reporter and George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. If you have any interest in the pope and what he might have to say during this visit, you really need to check out the transcript.
Associated Press writer Hillary Rhodes filed an interesting piece about how pastors are turning to the Internet to answer theology questions. One of the pastors she spoke with was Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church:
We are beginning to see some interesting advance stories based on the texts that Pope Benedict XVI will use during his upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Yesterday I raised some of the journalistic questions surrounding coverage of the raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints in Texas. And I was happy to see I wasn’t alone in being intrigued by those questions.
Sometimes journalists should just step back and report the events, emotions and words of the event they are covering. Monday night’s NCAA Tournament was that kind of situation, and unfortunately for sports fans, it seems that the only person to notice a significant spiritual angle of one of the more impressive shots (and comebacks) in basketball history was a Sports Illustrated blogger.
I realize that this is still a religion-news blog and that we have not, officially, turned into a religion and sports weblog. But, say hey, do we have any baseball fans out there? Tell me that you saw this amazing moment the other day in the baseball cathedral called Fenway Park and did not get a lump in your throat and/or a tear in your eye. No way.
The cover of Time this week features a large image of Pope Benedict XVI with an American flag in the background. As I will try to show later, this is ironic, but for now it’s worth noting that the cover story is “Why the Pope Loves America.”
