Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The Akron Beacon Journal published quite a story Sunday that touches on issues with which many families struggle, but so rarely do they spill out into the public square. In this case, a family’s personal controversy over the child’s decision to join a non-denominational Christian group known as the Xenos Christian Fellowship created a story that the newspaper could not ignore.
The aim of this web site is to help media professionals “get religion.” Well, journalism professor Stephen Bates, writing in Slate, also thinks media professionals need to get religion. But he means something else entirely.
How do you write a story about the declining number of young priests without asking about, well, you know what? And while we’re at it, you know, the other big elephant in the living room, too?
This article on “mindfulness meditation” from the The Sacramento Bee is a “therapy in the schools” story. It’s an important one to follow in an era in which, often, public schools either apppropriate for themselves or are forced into the role of “in loco parentis.”
Norman Lear was the the writer and producer behind television hits All in the Family, Sanford and Son, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Good Times and Maude. He’s also a successful liberal activist behind People for the American Way, a group he founded in the early 1980s to fight the influence of the Christian Right.
Too frequently in print journalism, headline-induced spin ruins an otherwise solid news article. Such seems to be the case in this New York Times article on the alleged “return” of indulgences.
It has taken me some time to get a handle on that recent New York Times feature that ran with the headline, “Uncovering Lost Path of the Most Wanted Nazi” by Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish.
Since early in this decade, when I became aware of Mike White’s filmmaking career, I’ve thought it would be rewarding to get him together with his father, Mel, for a conversation about filmmaking and faith. Anyone who has followed Mel White’s career knows he once ghostwrote material for Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, and that he outed himself and became a gay-rights activist in the early 1990s. His work on 53 documentaries usually gets short shrift, even on Internet Movie Database.
In the immortal words of Meg Ryan in one of my all-time favorite flicks: “I have no response to that.”
