Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Oh my, this is good religion reporting — that was my first thought when I got about halfway through the first in Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times series on overseas priests serving Catholic parishes in the United States.
I’m always amazed when I read a piece of journalism that takes what I call the “anthropological approach” to some weird religious group. It seems particularly odd when the group in question is Christians in America. Usually it’s evangelical Christians who get this special treatment.
Charles Blow fills a niche so precise that The New York Times is one of the few daily papers that could maintain it in these lean times. He is the Times‘ “visual Op-Ed columnist,” which means that Blow, drawing on his long experience as graphics editor and then graphics director for the Times, supplements his concise remarks with graphics.
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.”
