Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
I began reading GetReligion back in the day because my brother Daniel Pulliam (former GetReligion writer extraordinair) set my home page to the site. Little did I know I would end up writing for tmatt & co. one day.
It hardly seems possible that it’s been a year since tmatt was giving me pointers on how to write for GetReligion. There was so much I had to learn — and although I’ve learned a lot, I haven’t learned everything, by any means. Sometimes I read the work of my GetReligion colleagues and wonder how they make it appear so easy.
Did you hear about the attempted honor killing a couple of weeks ago in Arizona? I haven’t seen many stories about it. Tmatt looked at the ghosts in some of the coverage a week or so ago but It’s clearly not major news, although national media outlets have begun running their traditional one (or fewer!) stories on the matter. For the life of me, I can’t understand why stories about honor killings or attempted honor killings aren’t major news. This is a concept so very foreign and horrifying to most readers of American media and yet these stories are routinely underplayed. Now maybe the mainstream media doesn’t need advice on how to get more readers/viewers/listeners, but I think that when a father runs down his daughter with two tons of steel over some perceived slight to his honor, that’s newsworthy.
All together now, religion-beat pros (and fans), let’s chant this together: L’Osservatore Romano does not equal the Vatican.
If you like articles that take readers on journeys to places where faith and culture intersect in new and unexpected ways, then you’ll enjoy reading Kate Shellnutt’s Chicago Sun-Times story, “Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion.”
Every now and then, one of your GetReligionistas reads a story — usually about a controversy tied to culture and morality — and then says, in his or her heart of hearts, “You know, religion ought to be in here somewhere.”
One of my close friends — and fellow St. Louis Cardinals fans — is a wonderful Lutheran pastor who suffers from clinical depression. Earlier this year, he published a book titled “I Trust When Dark My Road.” The book (which you can download for free here) allows the reader to look deep into the heart, mind and soul of someone suffering mental illness. Many Americans, myself included, have depression or other related problems. And even for me it’s somewhat difficult to think that it afflicts pastors — as if wearing a stole somehow protects you from the problem.
Eleven years ago gay teen Matthew Shephard was beaten and left to die on a Wyoming fencepost. That was also the year three white men in a truck, in another sickening act of violence, pulled African American James Byrd behind them until he was dead. This past Wednesday, President Obama signed the Matthew Shephard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In a fairly common practice, it was passed as part of a totally unrelated spending bill.
A couple of months ago, Elizabeth looked at a big Newsweek piece on polyamory and criticized it for its lack of depth, neglect of religious angles, and its unrealistic portrayal of poly communities. Well, compared to this CNN story with an attention-grabbing headline of “Mate debate: Is monogamy realistic?,” that Newsweek article was a masterpiece. Apparently the premise of this article is that in oldentimes, people were monogamous but in these complicated modern times, it’s a completely unrealistic virtue and should be dropped post haste.
