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An iron constitution, a phlegmatic personality and a clean conscience means that it is rather hard to wind me up over a news story. When I start on my morning newspapers my strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.
Anyone who has worked on the religion beat, or anyone who has read GetReligion for a year or so, knows that one of the biggest faith-based challenges that journalists face is the demand — year after year — to come up with valid, insightful stories about religious holidays.
Have you been following the reports out of Afghanistan after it was learned that Qurans and other holy books had been burned by troops? The story keeps developing. More people have been killed, including NATO troops, and President Obama sent a letter of apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
If you watch internal church debates, you know that nothing gets people riled up more than just about anything to do with sex: premarital sex, homosexuality, you name it. People feel quite passionately about these issues, enough to part ways with one another. So I laughed out loud when I read a line from a piece published in New York Times about a “quieter battle” being waged within churches over gay marriage and gay ordination.
First things first. Let me state right up front, for GetReligion readers who do not already know, that I have known Archbishop Charles Chaput ever since he was an urban pastor and college campus minister long ago in Denver. The young Franciscan I knew then is still the man who makes headlines from time to time today, especially now that he has moved from Denver to the historic Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
It’s been an interesting, if tiring, few weeks in media criticism and the culture wars. We saw how national media figures immediately jumped to help Planned Parenthood’s campaign against the Komen Foundation and how they have been working hard to frame objections to a federal mandate (that critics say seriously harms religious liberty) as a war on women. So when news broke this weekend about some supposedly alarming things that Rick Santorum said, I wasn’t sure I could handle another round.
I was in New York City last weekend when the infamous and seemingly racist headline ran about the Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. The phrase that was used — a chink in the armor — is not racist on its own. If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, you can read about it here. But one of the words in the idiom can be a racist slur. I was talking about it with friends and no one could believe that the headline was posted. We freaked out, actually. But one friend wondered if there was any way that the editor was younger and didn’t know about the racist connotation. It certainly worked under the non-racist definition — the article was discussing Lin’s turnovers as his Achilles’ heel, a fatal flaw in his performance.
GetReligion readers who frequent the CNN Belief blog know that it features a wide range of material, from hard news stories to essays by academics. A recent offering falls into this latter category, but I still think GetReligion readers will want to know about it since it focuses on a topic that frequently comes up for discussions on this blog.
