Via Rocco Palmo’s Twitter feed, I came across this Miami CBS affiliate story about the Roman Catholic archdiocese there launching a television campaign about the sacrament of penance:
Uncovering ghosts in girl's death by lashing
It’s encouraging to see news outlets continuing to cover the death of a 14-year-old girl who was accused of adultery and sentenced to 101 lashes.
Earliest Christian writing ever?
Yesterday I had a mini-meltdown when the BBC site was offline for an hour or so. I must be more reliant on them than I had realized! One of the stories I was trying to read was written by BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott, headlined “Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relics“:
Dissecting a new Wiccan dilemma
As always, the goal here in GetReligion land is to dig into the nuts and bolts of religion-news coverage in the mainstream press. Truth is, this is easier to do when the coverage is bad than when it is good. Besides, when we praise coverage almost no one writes comments and these good-coverage posts do not affect the trolls who say that we hate the mainstream press.
Shiva Sisters: Jewish ritual without religion
The way this story from the Los Angeles Times opens, it gives the impression that the Shiva Sisters are like the Jewish mourning version of Batman & Robin.
Blasphemy laws punish Muslims, too
If asked to prepare a list of mainstream foreign correspondents who “get religion,” Pamela Constable of the Washington Post would be in my top handful of names. Simple stated, she does not look at conflicts that are packed with religious language, symbolism and actions and then automatically assume that this is the result of “tribalism” and/or vague “sectarian” forces in the culture. In the past, I have also pointed GetReligion readers toward her evocative memoir — “Fragments of Grace: My Search for Meaning in the Strife of South Asia.”
St. Augustine's Spankological Protocol
One of my favorite teachers in high school — all the kids loved him — was Mr. Richard Bonacquista. He was our Colorado History teacher — no one could make Colorado history more entertaining — and our baseball coach. In any case, one of the things he showed us from early first teaching days — over in mining country in the southwest part of the state — was a wooden paddle.
Could church make you fat?
Muslims don't want Sharia in Florida
Did you hear the story from, of course, Florida about a judge ordering the use of sharia in a lawsuit over mosque leadership? The St. Petersburg Times had a write-up with an intriguing lede:
