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Obviously, the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway was all over the political conventions this week. I must confess that I focused on events in a different religion in American life. Well, duh. I live in Baltimore.
I could not have had more fun watching the conventions. Before they began, if someone had asked me which convention would have the more dramatic religious stories, I would have picked the Republican one in a heartbeat. What with Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and his evangelical base and all that. But it turned out that all the interesting religion news action was over in Charlotte, where the Democrats gathered.
The BBC’s inability to comprehend religion is not a new story at GetReligion. Often as not the corporation appears oblivious to the faith dimension of a story. I should say the BBC’s religion reporters are a professional lot and there are a number of fine specialty programs that treat faith issues well and when it focuses on religion it does a good job. It is outside the religion ghetto that the BBC fails to “get religion.”
Let’s face it. In the age of search-engine optimization, it’s oh so tempting to blog about a news story that allows you to put “patriarch” and “topless woman” in the same headline.
OK, so I’ll begin by thanking everyone for being kind to me. I think it’s fair to say that I royally messed up yesterday’s post.
What is driving the violence in Burma? Race or religion? And can the two be distinguished from one another. Reports from the South East Asian nation have framed the conflict in terms of sectarian violence — but is religion really the issue here?
So, The New York Times ran one of those lengthy news features the other day that set out to penetrate the walls of Barack Obama’s White House and show readers what is really happening on the inside, in the halls of power that are the center of all that is important in the universe.
So I watched all of the Democratic National Convention’s first night last night and it included quite a bit of God talk. In fact, the speakers were far more likely to discuss God than at the Republican Convention — one even mentioned making the sign of the cross — even if they were also discussing abortion, which was the theme of the first part of the evening.
