Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
For public schools in Washington, despite their spending an average of $25,000 per year on each student, the educational results are abysmal. Some people have high hopes for the new chancellor Michelle Rhee but there’s a long way to go.
The new post by the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc about the Obama family, National Episcopal Cathedral and the theological musings by the seeker-friendly agnostic Sally Quinn reminded me of something I have been meaning to do for some time now.
You might think that the debut of his Christmas special was as good a time as any for journalists to explore the beliefs of Stephen Colbert, one of television’s most vocal comedians, and 2008 Presidential candidate who disappointed millions (thousands? his immediate family?) by being forced to drop out of the race in South Carolina last year (go on and laugh –but who could have envisioned Minnesota’s Al Franken?).
Sally Quinn can be a charming and entertaining writer, especially on the topic of throwing a great party. With her Saturday op-ed for The Washington Post, however, Quinn calls more attention to her poorly informed and utilitarian understanding of why a church exists.
As far as I can tell, there is no faith, no religion, no hope and no positive sense of morality in the following story.
Some of this blog’s readers regurarly object to sports stories that deal with religion, particularly when they deal with professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play a game. I generally hold that regardless of salaries, the religious angles in athletes’ lives are generally relevant since they are part of the make-up of a person who has a faith.
MZ has just arrived back in town from a trip to the distant, distant West (think home state of the president elect) and she promptly posted on that non-Roman Catholic priest story. At the precise moment she clicked “post,” I was finishing up this post.
I am so sick of looking at the shoddy coverage of non-Roman Catholic priests who are female. But since it’s our job here to root out shoddy coverage, let’s look at this piece and then pray that the coverage improves. The latest one is from KSDK in St. Louis. The headline is: “St. Louis woman becomes world’s first Catholic priest to give birth.”
I don’t know about you, but out here in the Philadelphia exurbs we are in the grip of the kind of crisis that brings the area to its knees– about four more inches of snow than apparently anyone expected.
