Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
If there is anything that your GetReligionistas appreciate, it is people who take the nuts and bolts of religion news seriously. While this website’s primary audience is mainstream journalists — editors, reporters, producers, you name it — we also know that we have plenty of faithful readers in academia and also in pulpits.
Did you catch Robert Wright’s “religious literacy test” in The New York Times this week? It’s under the opinion section, and I’m all for people having their own opinions. But, as they say, you can’t have your own facts. And that’s why I bring it up here. Wright is very well respected, a journalist and the author of the bestseller The Evolution of God.
You know how The Screwtape Letters was written from the perspective of a senior demon to his nephew demon? This article on the Pope’s visit to Britain by Washington Post foreign service writer Anthony Faiola reads better — and much funnier — if you imagine it written by someone pretending to be a demon.
If you’ve read GetReligion for any amount of time, you know that context means everything. Circumstances matter, too. And, of course, geography.
The last time Molly Norris was in the news was July. She’s the Seattle cartoonist who responded to censorship of South Park by declaring April 20 to be “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.”
I have always thought that papal trips — especially to lands that stage regular media circuses — are the Olympics of religion news. The big problem, of course, is that the pope is WAY too important to be covered by mere religion-beat professionals. You have to break out the media superstars and political/cultural reporters and that’s where the real fun begins.
So here is your assignment. Read the top of the following story in the Los Angeles Times and try to spot the religion ghost.
The New York Daily News has a brief story about a man who was just fired for a First Amendment protest.
Let me be clear: I am not a hipster. I’ve had black-rim glasses since junior year of high school (12 years) and a beard for almost as long (off and on). But I am a Christian and I have had Christian hipster friends for the past decade, so Brett McCracken’s new book, “Hipster Christianity,” appeals to me.
