As a journalism professor, one of the toughest challenges that I face is helping students learn how to avoid what I call “buried pronoun disease.”
The strange case of tmatt and the twisted pronoun
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Elizabeth Smart's 'street preacher' abductor
The 9-year story of Elizabeth Smart’s abduction appeared to come to a close this week as her captor was sentenced to life in prison. Smart, now 23, was 14 when she was kidnapped from her bedroom in her family’s home almost a decade ago.
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Study: non-Christians' brains atrophy
The other day we looked at the way the media handled a study that showed that Protestants who don’t identify a “born-again” experience had less hippocampal atrophy than Catholics, non-believers and those who do claim a “born-again” experience. I noted that all the headlines I could find highlighted that “born-again” Christians had “smaller brains.”
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The Joplin twister, God and CNN
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God, god and Oprah's good-bye
Click here if you want to read the dead-tree-pulp Washington Post story about the final show by Oprah Winfrey. Or don’t. It really doesn’t matter, because this story is about a television event — not a signpost event in the development of pop and/or civic religion in American culture. Ditto for this news report in the New York Times.
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Survey says: I have better sex than you
Yesterday I pointed out the curious manner in which journalists wrote up a study showing that non-believers, Catholics and evangelical Christians have smaller brains than Protestants who don’t claim a “born-again” experience. But at least that study, though having a small sample size, was done by real academics at a real university using typical methods of analysis.
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Thou shalt read these stories
To every thing there is a season, and Religion News Service this week chose to publish an excellent package of stories and sidebars — eight items in all — on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. (Here and here, Sarah earlier highlighted some of the coverage of the KJV milestone.)
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Cutting edge synagogue-state clash
It would be hard to imagine a more apocalyptic battle between synagogue and state than the ballot-box battle that is unfolding in San Francisco over the right of Jews (and anyone else) to circumcise their newborn males. Now the battle is spreading down the left coast to Santa Monica.
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Study: nonbelievers have small brains
OK, so Religion News Service has a provocative story on a provocative study that I’ve seen in a few papers. But the headlines that are running with the story are curious, to say the least.
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