Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the pleasures of magazines is in an editor’s creative matching of writer and subject. When the matchmaking defies obvious choices, the results can be especially satisfying, as in Patricia Marx’s profile of two rabbis who inspect food factories in China for kosher compliance (abstract here; full article requires registration).
Sometimes I get the feeling that reporters struggle to cover annual events. This leads to less coverage of the liturgical calendar and its festive celebrations and penitential seasons than to events marked by trend-driven church bodies. You don’t see much coverage of Pentecost, marked annually by millions of American Christians, compared to, say, the sex sermon series being pushed by some pastor in Michigan.
I am happy, but not surprised, to find that GetReligion has readers in moderate Muslim circles, especially when it comes to issues of women’s rights and the actual practice of that faith.
Why, as Time did last week, profile an evangelical course in Christian basics that began almost 20 years ago in a London Anglican church?
Sometimes the religious angles in a football story just jump out and grab the sports writer and force them to dig into the topic. For example, see here this excellent profile piece by ESPN.com’s Wayne Drehs on Kurt Warner. This is one of those athletes you simply cannot write about without mentioning his faith:
My Google News religion search included an interesting headline for a Los Angeles Times story: “Obama, family spend Christmas at vacation home, forgo church services.” But when I linked on the story, the actual headline was “Obama visits Hawaiian base.”
While my recent thread about rites on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day rolls on and on, please allow me to raise another seasonal issue that is dear to my heart.
How often do you see scripture appropriately quoted in a front-page news article? I was hoping I would see something like this in one of the mid-sized American newspapers before the Christmas season was over. To my pleasant surprise, my own local paper, The Indianapolis Star, on Christmas Day gave its readers an informative, meaningful and insightful news article on how the Christmas holiday season and the current economic downturn is affecting people spiritually.
This is not the Christmas story that I wanted to write about, today, but The Los Angeles Times has raised a question that makes it, for me, a must cover for this weblog.
