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There is something unfortunate when a church creates limits on whether or not journalists can attend its religious services. How are journalists supposed to understand religion if they are limited or prohibited from attending what is generally considered the most important and frequent public event in that religious tradition’s week?
Regular GetReligion readers may recall that I am a native Texan, though I must confess of the “prodigal” variety. Still, I speak fluent Texan and my instincts about my native land are pretty good.
Cathy Grossman of USA Today talked to a lot of Catholics sources for her mini-profile of Pope Benedict XVI. Yet the one source she did not quote from, aside from one seven-word sentence, was the pontiff himself.
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.
