Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It’s baseball playoff season, which makes me feel slightly uncomfortable. I really don’t like feeling out of the loop because I read the Internet quite a bit and like to feel “in the know.”
Writing about the miraculous — apart from baseball — is a tricky task. The key to a good miracle story is its tone. If a writer is too deferential to his subject he becomes an apologist. Too harsh and he becomes an antagonist. Adopting the voice of the village atheist or a credulous devotee fails the test of sound journalism.
The Divine Ms. M.Z. Hemingway is on the road right now, but I can still pass along this item from one of her emails to the GetReligionistas circle. It concerns a rather strange headline about Mitt Romney, America, God and world domination.
Most of the stories we critique find their way to GetReligion through technological means: Google alerts, bookmarked religion pages, Twitter posts, Facebook links and e-mailed suggestions by readers.
So let’s say that you are reading a lengthy story about a famous Baptist preacher from the deep South, from a location in the heart of the Bible Belt.
A week after baseball’s night of miracles, my beloved Texas Rangers await the winner of tonight’s decisive American League Division Series Game 5 between the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers.
`Tweedledum and Tweedledee Agreed to have a battle; For Tweedledum said Tweedledee Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
We may have anticipated the news but it’s still such a shock to read about Apple founder Steve Jobs’ death, likely from pancreatic cancer. Many of us first read or heard the news on Apple products. I write this on my iMac with two iPhones, an iPad and two Macbooks nearby. And I’m not even one of those Mac evangelists. I just really like the design and function of the products.
Anyone who knows anything about the religion beat knows that there are stories that the pros end up writing time and time again. Holiday stories are the most obvious, but there are others — such as all of those theodicy studies that your GetReligionistas keep pointing out year after year.
