Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Believe it or not, I don’t have a whole lot to say about the mini-media flap about President-elect Barack Obama’s decision to ask his best evangelical buddy, that would be the Rev. Rick Warren, to offer the invocation on Jan. 20. Just imagine what the coverage will be like if Warren utters the J-word or prays that American will work for justice for all, born and unborn or something like that.
There’s an interesting story coming out of Atlanta where a judge arrested a Muslim woman for refusing to take off her head scarf at a courthouse security checkpoint. The early stories are pretty straightforward, such as this one from the Associated Press:
Singer Alexandra Burke recently won top honors on Britain’s X Factor TV talent competition, and she drove Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah” to the top of the pop charts. Ruth Gledhill of The Times asked her colleague Alan Franks to reflect on Cohen’s spiritual life.
I have been haunted by this story every single day since it came out in the Los Angeles Times. Yes, haunted, as in by a ghost.
It’s almost difficult to believe the size and scope of the scandal wrought by Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff. I knew the story had a religion angle because I follow the excellent work of religion reporter Brad Greenberg at the Jewish Journal‘s God Blog. I learned early on from him that Madoff is Jewish and worked with a significant number of Jewish investors and charities.
So much for any significant coverage of the country’s first Muslim member of Congress and one of the more significant acts he’ll perform relating to his religion. Granted, Congressman Keith Ellison’s trip to Mecca for this year’s Hajj is not a public act in the sense that he traveled on his own dime and it relates to his personal spiritual life. But the act is public in the sense that it is a, well, public act of traveling.
Last week the Vatican issued a document on bioethics called “The Dignity of a Person” that was covered fairly extensively by the mainstream media. Considering what coverage of Vatican statements and documents is normally like, the coverage was actually not bad. But it wasn’t perfect.
My high school, started by an Anglican canon and a Jewish atheist, started life blocks from Plymouth Congregational Church, former church of the 19th-century rock star abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher. The same neighborhood houses the Watchtower, ground zero for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, more recently is home to the roughly 10,000-member Brooklyn Tabernacle.
