Chicken soup for the presidential soul

In conjunction with yesterday’s annual prayer breakfast in Washington D.C., everybody’s got politics and religion on their mind. Or perhaps more appropriately, the religion of our politicians. The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut saw it as a fitting occasion to reexamine the religiosity of the President. The headline on the piece, “Obama’s spirituality is largely private, but it’s influential, advisers say” seemed to appropriately reflect the complexity of the issue, so I had high hopes for the story.


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Got news? Monogamy and gay unions

A few months ago, when the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to affirm gay clergy in “monogamous” relationships, tmatt noted that the word has different definitions among gay theologians.


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One Haitian pastor found, but another missing

GetReligion readers who are closely following that twisted story of the Southern Baptists from Idaho and the case of the 33 Haitian “orphans” — the quote marks will be explained shortly — need to know that there has been an important development.


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The rise of the Calvinists

When Scott Brown, R-Mass., was elected to the U.S. Senate a couple of weeks ago, I noted the lack of media coverage of his religious views. I had just assumed he was Roman Catholic since no one had said anything. Turns out he’s Protestant and belongs to a type of church that normally doesn’t get much media coverage.


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From Baptist kid to jihadist fighter

In “The Jihadist Next Door,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andrea Elliott’s Sunday cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Elliott turns her laser focus on the journey of one American youngster who decides to join a Somali terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.


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Oh No! Abstinence works? (revisited)

Earlier today, we looked at a couple of media treatments of that abstinence study. Both the Washington Post and Associated Press coverage we looked at were much better than this Los Angeles Times story. It’s awful. Here’s a sample:


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