Tragically hip New Calvinists

The New York Times Magazine has wandered into the testosterone-heavy world of Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church and emerged with a feature story that mostly does justice to both Driscoll and his critics. The coverage is by Molly Worthen, who has also written a previous New York Times Magazine story on classical Christian education and a feature about L’Abri Fellowship for Christianity Today. She is no stranger to the subcultures of evangelical Protestantism.


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Jewish mythbusting at the Wharton School

As we’ve seen in press coverage over the past couple of months, the 50 billion dollar fraud allegedly perpetrated by financier Bernard Madoff has sparked debate and some soul-searching about Jewish identity in the Jewish community.


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Is this "moderate" Islam in Kabul?

The Washington Post ran one of those stories the other day that was so sad, so heavy with fact and detail, that at the end of it you just wanted to sigh or cry or scream and throw something at a wall.


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Two stories on Dungy merge

Two basic kinds of stories have been written about the retirement of Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy. The first are about Dungy’s results on the gridiron, his record-setting 10 straight playoff seasons, and six in-a-row seasons of 12-plus wins. The second story is about Dungy’s faith and his personal impact on the world around him.


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Protestants of the world, unite!

Remember when President-elect Barack Obama picked the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver an invocation and all hell broke loose? The rioting and the pillaging and swastika-painting and what not? I couldn’t begin to quantify how many stories I’ve read on the pick and its response in the gay community.


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Coping with complex sex talk

Trust me. There are times when your GetReligionistas get tired of writing posts that criticize the same publications for making the same errors, time after time. Meanwhile, we know that readers may also tire of hearing us praise some of the same skilled, talented professionals who know what they are doing on the religion beat.


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Got news? Kristof reports hard truth

As part of our new effort to highlight opinion columnist and their work that could have and should have been covered as straight news, I wanted to highlight a pair of articles by Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. The first, which dates just before Christmas, highlights some interesting statistics purporting to show that “[w]e liberals are personally stingy.”


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Is only free speech sacred?

Christopher Hitchens is most engaging when he’s showing indignation, but he’s most endearing when paying tribute to a courageous friend. His portrait of novelist Salman Rushdie, appearing in the February issue of Vanity Fair, opens with some of the warmest and most affectionate words I’ve seen from Hitchens in quite a while.


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Sex, lies and schnitzel

One of the journalism terms we use on this site is the “hook.” Like it sounds, it’s that thing in the lede of a story that snags reader/viewer/listener attention. There is so much news and information competing for attention that news consumers need a reason to stop and read or watch or listen to your story.


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