Religion disappears from narrative

Compared to the primary election, the subject of the religion and faith of Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama’s has largely been absent from the pages of Midwestern newspapers and magazines. Some of this can be justified by the fact that the Midwest is reeling in an economic slump that is seeing people threatened with the loss of their jobs and homes and the collapse of the auto industry and other manufacturing industries that make up a substantial portion of the region’s economy. People want to hear the candidates talk about their economic plans more than their spiritual backgrounds.


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The biggest loser

Usually I groan when I come across an Associated Press piece marked “analysis.” I like my AP reporters to report, not analyze. But in a year like this, when reporters have dropped most pretense of reporting in favor of overtly playing politics, it’s actually kind of a breath of fresh air to have something clearly identified as analysis. On this note, if media outlets’ horribly misnamed “fact checks” could go the way of the Dodo bird, I’d be most happy.


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Wide, wide open Holy Communion

Regular readers at this weblog are probably aware of the fact that each of my computers — at home and work — contains an email folder labeled “GetReligion guilt.” It contains religion-beat articles that I really intended to write about, but things, kept, getting, in, the, way.


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Young evangelical Republicans cope

The big story in Friday’s Washington Post was headlined “God, Country and McCain.” The article was less on those three subjects and more an attempt to demonstrate the current mindset of young conservative evangelical Republicans on the eve of what could be for many of them their first electoral defeat as active voters.


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Mapping the tempest

As the foreclosures and stock market roller-coasters shake global markets, journalists here and abroad continue to pay attention to how the ongoing economic crisis is affecting our spiritual lives –and how clergy are grappling to find meaning in the midst of uncertainty.


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Studs Terkel, gospel fan

Matters of the spirit were not among Studs Terkel’s higher priorities as a left-wing agnostic writer. Writing on Friday afternoon, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra noted that Terkel died in the same week that gospel singer Mahalia Jackson was born, and described their “spiritual connection”:


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