Bill Keller's modest proposal

When I read Bill Keller’s bizarre piece in the New York Times yesterday morning, where he proposes a loaded religious quiz for potential candidates, I actually gasped. Considering I’ve been reading dozens of religion stories a day for years, it’s hard to surprise me. I’m not saying I haven’t heard these types of comments uttered against religious believers, be they Pagan or Mormon or Catholic. And there’s even a counter-Jihad movement that says similar things to what Keller has said, only about Muslims.


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NYT takes on aliens, baggage, Trojan horse faith

It gets terribly exhausting trying to convince people that The New York Times publishes some pretty interesting and solid pieces. It consistently gets accused of liberal or anti-religious bias, but it employs some good reporters. Unfortunately, The New York Times Magazine has just published a terribly embarrassing column from its outgoing executive editor Bill Keller that only fuels the anti-Times fire.


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God in lede and at the end (ghosts in between)

It is a principle that has been voiced many times here at GetReligion through the years: If religion is important enough to dominate a story’s lede then religious content should probably be included in the body of the story, as well.


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Framing fundamental moral issues as political

On August 21, Vice President Joe Biden was giving remarks on U.S. China relations to people gathered at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China. Here’s a portion of what he said:


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Israel a la Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck is back–at least his rallying cry is–this time in Israel. The former Fox News host headed up his “Restoring Courage” rally this week, one year after his “Restoring Honor” rally in DC last year.


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Can the National Cathedral afford a quake?

As you may have heard, there was an earthquake in Washington, D.C., and other parts of the center-of-the-universe Northeast corridor. While people immediately started joking about the ratio between news reports and the actual damages (my personal favorite, here), the event has served up one major story (so far) for folks who cover the religion beat.


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Guilt files, Pagan edition

We sometimes reference our guilt files and my guilt file is reaching epic levels so I’m going to try to unload three recent stories into one post. I’m grouping them together under what I’ll call The Wild Hunt banner — they’re all stories that would or could be covered over at that blog that deals with Pagan and Heathen communities. The Wild Hunt, for what it’s worth, is now appearing over at Patheos so it’s interesting to see how Patheos is landing various bloggers across the religious spectrum.


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CNN on porn: Smart people vs. Bible folks

It seems that the comments pages at the CNN religion blog have been on fire for several days — with good reason. That’s what happens when you publish a feature about Christians hooked on pornography and you top it with a photo of a man reading a copy of Playboy hidden inside his Bible.


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