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 reader alerted us to the airing of a PBS Frontline documentary on “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan”. I had the chance to watch it earlier in the week and it is absolutely riveting. You can watch it online and I encourage you to do so if it has already aired in your market.
When the New York Times ran a story about the Vatican response to a particularly horrendous case of child sexual abuse by a priest, many observers felt that the Times should have explained a bit more about Jeff Anderson, a primary source for the piece. So, for instance, here is Bill McGurn taking the story’s author — Laurie Goodstein — to task in a Wall Street Journal column from earlier this month. She’d described Anderson as a lawyer:
FROM: Terry Mattingly, GetReligion.orgTO: Tim Keown, c/o ESPN MagazineRE: Potential answer to Pujols question
And now, a word from Richard N. Ostling, one of the most celebrated religion-beat writers of the late 20th century.
Reuters is definitely my favorite source for international religious news. But this story out of Srinagar, India, could use some help. Headlined “Visitors banned from Kashmir’s Jesus shrine,” it tells about a local Muslim fight over a shrine. And in so doing, it gives terribly short short shrift to the most fundamental Christian teachings:
Every year, I usually take a few minutes to go through Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People package to Google a lot of names I’ve never heard before. It probably says more about the magazine’s editors and who they want as subscribers than anything else.
We looked at some of the coverage of the Comedy Central’s censorship of the South Park program. South Park has long shown offensive images of Jesus and other non-Muslim religious figures. It has also attempted to show inoffensive “images of Muhammad” but been censored by the network — and other media covering the issue — out of fears of violence. I put “images of Muhammad” in quotes because their most recent censored images were actually of a bear and a taxi-cab (that Muhammad was supposedly inside).
Here is a sticky question: What is a reporter supposed to do when writing a story about a religious group that does not see itself as a denomination and strives not to use traditional (remember that word) language to describe itself and much of its work? Do you use the traditional terms and explain that the group being covered does not use them or do you use the group’s unique terms, knowing that you’ll need to translate them for readers?
Honk if you’ve heard the phrase “more spiritual than religious.” That, not “WWJD,” appears to be the mantra of today’s young people, even those who call themselves Christian. The movement has significant ramifications for Christianity — and religion in general — in the United States.
