Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The future of the Crystal Cathedral’s glass building has been in limbo in recent months, but the board of directors said today that it prefers the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange County as its buyer.
I am, to be blunt, a church-history fan and that affected both my undergraduate and graduate educations as I prepared to seek work on the Godbeat. To get personal about it, this is also the sort of interest that can inspire a Baptist to swim the Bosporus.
Reporting on sports and religion is a messy business. When these worlds collide in a news story, the finished product is often filtered through the reporter’s prism of beliefs and prejudices. The advocacy journalism common to European newspapers, but restricted to the op-ed pages of most quality American papers, tends to run riot.
How knowledgeable is your audience? What can a writer assume and what must be explained. One of the arts of journalism is the ability to gauge readers’ interests and abilities — to write not too much nor too little in setting the background of a story. When I write a story for the Church of England Newspaper, the Jerusalem Post or an American newspaper, I have an idea of what needs to be said and left unsaid for that particular audience.
I could hardly believe the news last week when I read that Wilson Ramos, the Washington Nationals catcher, had been kidnapped in his native Venezuela. It just seemed like something out of a movie rather than real life. And reading this great play-by-play of his abduction and rescue makes you realize it could be a movie.
Confession time: I live in Oklahoma City, but I don’t read a whole lot of news stories about my local city council’s meetings.
As U.S. Catholic bishops met in Baltimore this week, this was the headline from the National Catholic Reporter:
The new head of my church body instituted a new emphasis for us around the concepts of “Witness, Mercy and Life Together.” As part of this approach, my congregation just went through a Bible Class at church learning about how the church lives and works together to proclaim the Gospel and to provide for our brothers and sisters in our congregations, communities and throughout the world.
