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As superstar reporter John L. Allen, Jr., of the National Catholic Reporter recently noted, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver refuses to remain the quiet shepherd of a flock in an obscure time zone. Instead, he keeps raising his voice on crucial issues, as you would expect from a man who keeps repeating these marching orders: “There’s no more room in American life for easy or tepid faith.”
Pope Benedict XVI is on a visit to Portugal. As is his custom for trips outside the Vatican, he takes reporters’ questions while in-flight. One of the responses has gotten quite a bit of media coverage. Here’s how Reuters put it:
Someone could write a good country song — or even a bad one — about the great Nashville, Tenn., flood of 2010.
The following information is sad, but true. It is very common for mainstream journalists, especially wire-service reporters in foreign bureaus, to have to write about events that they do not have the time or money to cover in person.
Back when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, I went on record saying he should be replaced by another Lutheran. I was joking but it looks like I was onto something. Sarah has covered the stories leading up to this moment, so it’s no surprise to GetReligion readers, but the Supreme Court is sans Protestants.
I’m part of a little bitty religious group. We call ourselves the Churches of Christ. This is how a Florida newspaper described us over the weekend:
St. Louis may be best known for its Gateway Arch, but for GetReligion regulars, perhaps it’s best known for Tim Townsend. We’re regularly reading reports from Townsend, who has been the religion reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since June 2004. He also writes a news analysis column, called “Keep the Faith,” and oversees the newspaper’s faith blog Civil Religion. He previously covered personal finance and consumer news for The Wall Street Journal.
When I think about great magazine features about religion news in the age of GetReligion, some of the first stories that leap into my mind are headlines like “The Jesus War,” which probed the roots of Mel Gibson’s “Passion” play on film, and “Jesus in the Classroom,” which offers an unusually balanced and nuanced account of the battles over religion and American history in the elite public-school classrooms of Cupertino, Calif.
