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Religion's mysterious role in Egypt

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We’ve had many days of protests and the conditions are dramatically different now than even yesterday. Protesters, police and military are on the streets of cities throughout Egypt, despite a curfew and unbelievable crackdown on communications. News outlets are reporting that their staff are being beaten up, arrested, or thwarted in their attempts to get the news published and broadcast. There was a surreal moment when Al Jazeera was broadcasting while police were trying to shut them down. Reuters reports that more than 400 have been wounded, some with bullets.


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College frosh are depressed for some reason

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Long ago, while I was working in Charlotte, the editors in my newsroom decided to do one of those sure-to-win-awards projects in which they would use hard statistics, personal interviews and a strong spine of new poll data to answer a big question.


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8 murders in Philadelphia

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Last week, Dr. Kermit Gosnell was arrested for the murders of eight people. Now, normally if anyone in the country is accused of murdering 8 people (and, in fact, a reading of the grand jury report indicates he is suspected in the murders of untold more, and I do mean untold), that would be big news. This has not been big news. It’s been covered, but not in the way the 24-hour news cycle covers, say, a missing blonde woman.


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Unrest in Egypt

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Anti-government protests are shaking Egypt right now. It’s incredibly hard to get good information about what is going on there since the U.S.-backed Mubarak government (we give them over $1.3 billion annually, I believe) has shut down social media and regular media. Here’s just one recent example:


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Anglican baptism lite? Say what?

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This is one of those religion stories that, on one level, sounds perfectly logical to one set of readers. At the same time, other people may read the same story and want to laugh to keep from crying or, in a few cases, readers may want to laugh, then cry, then bash their heads into a wall.


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Crusaders and conspiracy theories

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More than a few GetReligion readers dropped us a line or two to mention the Foreign Policy report about a recent Seymour Hersh speech. The Washington Post took interest in the speech, too. Here’s how reporter Paul Farhi covered it in his article “Hersh rebuked on ‘crusaders’:


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