Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.– Letter 1, The Screwtape Letters
Palin and the born-again Baldwin
The Associated Press television writer David Bauder deserves credit for catching the somewhat subtle religion ghost in one of the two Saturday Night Live skits involving Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Hello, there's a god on line one
Don’t you love it when you are reading an interesting news story and a real, live religion ghost rears its head?
Separation of church and football
I suppose there’s no reason that the Atlanta Journal Constitution should have better religion reporting than the average newspaper. But I rarely read anything noteworthy from the paper and sometimes the stories are really lacking.
Speaking in tongues?
The venerable British Bible Society (anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce was one of its influential founders in 1804) is engaged in a project they estimate will take twelve years: translating the Old and New Testaments into patois.
To pray or not to pray
Wanted: More evangelical journalists?
Several GetReligion readers (and former students) have written to let me know that there is a strange picture of me in their local newspapers.
Catholics ponder abortion rights
The big religion story with voters this year has been white evangelicals. Will they remain supporters of pro-life Republican candidates or will they drift leftward? Despite the thousands of column inches devoted to the topic, it looks like they’ve remained largely in the GOP camp — although anything could happen.
No interest? No problem.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen stories about Muslim rules prohibiting interest payments. Usually these stories are in a non-US context and deal with Muslim banking in general. But this wonderful Associated Press story looked at the issue in a distinctly American context:
