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I’ve always felt plenty of guilt — I blame my Catholic and Jewish roots — for not feeling more persecuted for my Christian beliefs in the United States. But in many corners of the world Christians get all the persecution they can handle.
The biblical character named Job, in my opinion, tends to be yanked into all kinds of public discussions that do not deserve being connected with his awesome story of pain, suffering and loss.
Hey GetReligion readers! Is there anyone else out there that really, really likes the P.D. James novel called “The Children of Men”?
We’ve discussed a bit of the European media’s coverage of various Roman Catholic sex scandals. The German press has been working on stories dealing with Pope Benedict XVI’s time there as a diocesan bishop, during which one child-molesting priest was transferred. The news has been terribly sad to read. And the New York Times has also gotten into the fray with some hard-hitting coverage. Here’s Laurie Goodstein’s recent story questioning whether then-Cardinal Ratzinger failed to act with one troublesome case involving untold numbers of deaf children in the scandal-plagued Milwaukee diocese.
Earlier this week, we discussed whether there are any neutral abortion terms to describe people on both sides of the debate.
There was some unsurprising but sobering news from the folks over at Pew this week. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life analyzed more than 68,700 stories from 2009 and determined that religion stories accounted for 0.8 percent of the total news coverage from last year. That’s down a smidge from 2008′s 1.0 percent. By comparison, news about health care comprised 11 percent. Education and immigration, on the other hand, are about where religion coverage is.
Every now and then it seems that a story in the mainstream press gets under the skin of GetReligion readers and quite a few drop us notes pointing toward the same URL. This time around, it was a story in the New York Times that ran under the headline, “A Flock Grows Right at Home for a Priest in Ukraine.”
That pretty much sums up a Page 1 story in The Salt Lake Tribune this week about a children’s charity co-founder charged with sex abuse:
