Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Regular GetReligion readers will not be surprised to know that I noticed the New York Times story that ran with the headline, “Kremlin Rules — At Expense of All Others, Putin Picks a Church.” I noticed it and other people made sure that I noticed it, too.
Blaine Harden of The Washington Post faults the Catholic church for keeping Filipinos poor. The gist of Harden’s story is that by opposing artificial contraception, the church has intimidated people in heavily Catholic Philippines into having more unwanted children.
You can find maps showing the leading church bodies per county in the United States and the state of South Carolina divided into four regions, according to the preferred style of condiment used on barbecued food. But the most recent map caught my eye, which you can see right here.
Everyone knows what Sen. Barack Obama said about small-town Pennsylvania voters at a fundraiser in my native city, or at least everyone who listens to the news or reads a newspaper. For those who don’t know, click here. Obama’s remarks were fairly well publicized.
The other day I wrote about mainstream media coverage of a religion story involving my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. I wrote about the cancellation of the LCMS’ only nationally-syndicated radio program (“Issues, Etc.”) and sudden firing of its host and producer in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last month. I also attended a worship service in St. Louis to pray for the men who were fired, ate some bratwurst at the fundraising dinner following the service and took part in a demonstration the next day at church headquarters.
A long, long, time ago — before that Pope Benedict XVI person came to town and took over the lives of your GetReligionistas (with some help from a controversial sect in Texas) — the Los Angeles Times ran a short educational feature entitled, “Muslim true/false — What you think you know about them is likely wrong — and that’s dangerous.”
The Associated Press’ Eric Gorski wrote a ton of stories about the pope’s visit. One dealt with the relationship Benedict XVI has with American youth.
The greatest reporter you’ve never heard of is Samuel Lubell. In his 1950 classic The Future of American Politics, Lubell explained why Harry Truman, against all odds and the conventional wisdom, won the 1948 presidential election. What made Lubell’s book great was his skill at interviewing ordinary voters, telling their stories with nuance and subtlety, and detecting the larger pattern from their responses.
Religion reporters covering atheism should approach the subject as straightforward as any other group of individuals who believe in similar ideas about God, an afterlife, the reason for evilness in the world, and the need for community and morality. To assume that atheists come down on the same side of all those issues would be to engage in gross stereotyping and fail to give significant depth to covering a complex minority in the United States.
