Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Gentle readers, you would be amazed at the amount of public relations materials that, day after day, people send via email to your GetReligionistas. Almost all of this stuff comes from people who clearly have never even looked at this website or paid any attention to what we do here.
Happy Canada Day to any of our Canadian readers out there. In honor of our own national holiday coming up on Monday, I dug into my guilt file and pulled out the coverage from a few weeks ago of Goshen College’s decision to stop playing the National Anthem.
I guess it was about a week ago that I first saw the news that the Council on American-Islamic Relations was in some trouble with the IRS. The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported that the group was one of 275,000 to lose its tax-exempt status following three years of failure to file a Form 990.
My first brush with Unitarian Universalists came 15-plus years ago when I covered Edmond, Okla., a fast-growing bedroom community north of Oklahoma City, for The Oklahoman.
Here’s a fun one. A few days before Easter, the Surfing Madonna mysteriously appeared in a seaside city north of San Diego. The mural attracted a lot of attention, and, when it was ordered removed, the Los Angeles Times wrote this story:
The Associated Press ran a religion story about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ restatement and clarification on political neutrality toward candidates and parties. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, is Mormon. So are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, both candidates for the Republican nomination for president.
Right up front, let me confess that I really had my hopes up when I started reading the Washington Post story that ran under the following headline: “Justices who will shape Supreme Courtâs future are matching pairs.”
A couple weeks ago, I went to the liturgy at a Greek Orthodox church in Brooklyn. One of my best friends goes there and her fiance is taking instruction there at Sts. Constantine and Helen Cathedral. My daughters will be in their wedding and they thought it might be good for them to have a refresher on what Greek services are like before the big wedding day.
I wanted to follow up on two recent GetReligion posts where I cast doubt on media reports. The first was a widely transmitted report about a Jewish court in Israel condemning a dog to death by stoning. I have a pretty good bovine excrement detector and something just smelled with the story. Of course, even people who are much less skeptical and cynical than I am probably could have figured out something was weird about the story. But you never know — crazy things happen all the time that I can’t believe. I’ve lost many a wager with my own husband about whether something actually happened (Reports of Mel Gibson’s initial rant against a police officer is one such example.).
