Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Everyone knows there are two sides to every story. In the case of Fr. Michael Pfleger, there is his side and the side of Chicago Cardinal Francis George. Yet reporters so far have tilted almost exclusively toward the former. That’s a problem.
When my wonderful wife first told me about the mother fighting a church’s legal ban on her autistic son attendance at Catholic Mass, I worried the news coverage would be rather shallow. On Sunday, Dave Kolpack of the Associated Press was able to publish a longish well developed update of this ongoing story that has important Catholic theology at its heart.
Conflicts between the various streams of American Judaism have always fascinated me, all the way back to my graduate school days at the University of Illinois in Urbana. There are so many parallels with similar conflicts between traditional and liberal Christians, between pre-modern doctrines and the believers who are rooted in the modern and, I guess, the postmodern.
Back in March, we criticized some of the stories that came from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that one in four teenage girls had a sexually transmitted disease. Many of the stories were thinly veiled advocacy pieces. They argued that this sad statistic was the result of a national policy of abstinence education.
From time to time, I have been known to use a strange adjective in my posts about conflicts inside the wide, wide world of Roman Catholicism.
Imagine getting access to the building that stores files for and against Pope John Paul II’s case for sainthood. How would you explain and describe to readers the process by which this occurs?
One of the biggest problems that your GetReligionistas face week after week can be stated this way: We know that many problems on the religion beat would vanish if reporters had more time to write and were given longer story lengths.
No wonder millions of young, biblically conservative young people no longer want to be known as “evangelicals.” You have to keep asking the question that your GetReligionistas have been asking since the dawn of blogging: What in the world does “evangelical” mean, anyway?The Washington Post ran yet another piece this week that perfectly illustrates that “evangelical” is quickly becoming the new “fundamentalist.”
What do you think of the media coverage of the latest religious news being made by and around Sen. Barack Obama?
