Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A long time ago, in a radically different age, then White House scribe Michael Gerson told a circle of mainstream journalists that the crucial internal battles during the first Geroge W. Bush term usually boiled down to a clash between the “libertarians” and the “small-c catholics.”
It’s just three little paragraphs in today’s Independent under the headline “Women May Join Papal Swiss Guard,” but it contains so many mistakes, both when it comes to religion and when it comes to journalism.
Pastors sometimes rebuke congregations by comparing their subdued worship style to the more exuberant displays among sports fans. “The Chosen One,” a report this week on ESPN’s Outside the Lines, reinforces the notion that nobody worships quite like a person sitting in a sports venue. (For whatever reason, the ESPN video is no longer accessible. The video is on this page if ESPN ever brings it back by cultic demand.)
In my denomination, as in most other mainline Protestant ones and the Roman Catholic Church, among others, clergy and lay volunteers are required to undergo anti-sex abuse training, which includes a criminal background check.
Poor Pope Benedict XVI. Wherever he goes he is plagued by the larger-than-life reputation of Pope John Paul II whose legacy keeps growing, perhaps nowhere more so than on the current visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.
So Sunday was Mother’s Day. I hope you all bought your mothers flowers and wrote her a nice poem or something. As is tradition in my family, I did pretty much nothing for my amazing mom other than call her. Mother’s Day is not on the liturgical calendar of my church although I think it’s probably marked more by most American religious institutions than Cantate, which is what Lutherans noted today.
For some reason, there’s just something about a billionaire pizza czar trying to build a neo-Frank Lloyd Wright Catholic college and a conservative, faith-friendly town to go with it that makes mainstream journalists get miffed. I mean, check out some of these earlier GetReligion visits to the press coverage of Ave Maria University near Florida’s west coast.
