Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In 1989 ABC became the first major American TV network to hire a full-time religion correspondent, and that worthy experiment did not spread far — except for CNN’s hiring of Delia Gallagher and then John Allen Jr. as Vatican correspondents. Even so, religion makes cameo appearances in certain corners of network TV, such as ABC’s Nightline, which runs a regular feature called Faith Matters.
It seems like just a few months ago that I was compiling my list of top stories from the previous year. Regardless of how quickly I would like to see time fly by, what follows is my summary from the past year and a celebration of this blog’s five years in existence.
Not just a religiously rich, important and awesome movie, Groundhog Day is also a great secular holy day. Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow yesterday, meaning six more weeks of winter. Slate took the occasion of running a previously published piece on the origins and meaning of the day, written by Timothy Noah.
I have always been fascinated with intentional religious communities and the New York Times ran a news feature on one the other day that was very well done — with one serious gap.
There’s no avoiding the fact that sexual abuse of children is an unbelievably sordid and distressing topic-particularly when it occurs in in what should literally be a sanctuary.
One of the big stories of last year was President Barack Obama’s religious outreach efforts. And yet the rise of politically liberal religious groups was horribly undercovered. Instead we saw a lot of stories about how evangelical Christians were broadening their areas of interest. It’s a weird blind spot considering that the religious groups supporting President George W. Bush and Republicans in general are always well noticed by the media.
GetReligion celebrates its fifth anniversary this week, and contributors will mark the occasion with lists of our five favorite posts from the past year. I’ll kick this off.
It would be hard to write a more angry, snarky headline than the one atop that piece by Ken Shepherd that the Newsbusters crew shot over the bow of the nation’s best known evangelical magazine.
Art Stricklin of Baptist Press had an excellent profile of the faith of Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin earlier this week. Unfortunately, the article seems to be one of the only works of print journalism to be on top of Tomlin’s life-story of faith.
