Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
One of the defining rituals of my young life was watching the Masters with my father, who was almost as good a golfer as he was a Baptist pastor and hospital chaplain. I drove home from college several times to keep that ritual intact.
As I write, the hammer is falling on a hapless editor in the offices of the Moscow Patriarchate for airbrushing a watch off of the wrist of Patriarch Cyril. The doctored photo of Cyril and the disappearing watch has been a gift to the Moscow press corps, prompting a flurry of arch and knowing stories written at the expense of the Russian Orthodox Church.
We usually stay away from critiquing columns here since we focus on mainstream coverage of religion news. Occasionally, though, a columnist will use reporting to make claims about the state of religion.
It was clear, this weekend, that the major West Coast newspapers didn’t expect the controversial (yes, I used that word deliberately) artist Thomas Kinkade to die at 54 years of age. Thus, the newsrooms did not have pre-written obituaries about the self-proclaimed “painter of light” ready to update and publish.
Yesterday morning at our beautiful Easter service, I looked across the aisle of our completely packed church and saw one of the young women at church wearing a fantastic hat. And I think Becky may have been the only woman wearing a hat. Immediately I felt a pang of regret that I hadn’t remembered to put my outfit together with a hat.
Many Christians will back to eating chocolate, hopping back on Facebook and, yes, eating meat with Easter upon us today.
That Tim Tebow guy is something else. You would think with all of the New York City media following him around these days, that it would be hard for him to sneak off and make some kind of radical change in his religious life.
You know it’s sad when both the general public (57 percent) and reporters (52 percent) agree that the media does a poor job explaining religion to the broader public. And then two-thirds of the public think religious coverage is scandal-driven, compared to 30 percent of journalists who say the same thing, according to a new study from the Knight Program in Media and Religion at USC and the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
