Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Late last month, GetReligion considered the work of Marilynne Robinson — especially in response to an ill-founded claim by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic that Robinson is a fierce opponent of predestination.
In a brisk 830 words, Robert D. Kaplan of The Atlantic explains some of the smoldering tensions that led to this past week’s slaughter in Mumbai.
Sally Quinn can be a charming and entertaining writer, especially on the topic of throwing a great party. With her Saturday op-ed for The Washington Post, however, Quinn calls more attention to her poorly informed and utilitarian understanding of why a church exists.
Criticizing Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light™, for churning out glurge is now criminally easy, but Paul Cullum betrays an ignorance of flyover country in writing about Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage (direct to DVD this week). Working from a 16-point memo of Kinkade’s filmmaking tips, Cullum first tries to classify Kinkade as “a postmodern Norman Rockwell for the evangelist set.”
Amy Sullivan of Time has written about six church options for President-elect Barack Obama and his family — and, hold the phone, the list does not include St. John’s, Lafayette Square (“the church of the presidents”) or Washington National Cathedral.
I was watching MSNBC on Monday night, but the Home Companion heard the theme song from Countdown with Keith Olbermann begin, and then changed the channel. No one else in the room — neither I nor the three spayed female cats we liberated from the nearest no-kill animal shelter — dared voice even the briefest protest. Such is the dismal state of my life in November 2008 in what Americans, in our hubris, call the United States of America.
After Michael Crichton’s death last week, a few different obituaries hinted at his iconoclastic questioning of global-warming certainties. What’s striking is that Crichton’s criticisms of global warming attracted more hostility than his attacks on religion — a generic religion that stands as the enemy of all things scientific. New York Times science columnist John Tierney quotes from a speech, “Environmentalism as Religion,” which Crichton delivered in September 2003 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club:
It is no surprise that Newsweek has joined the chorus declaring evangelicals as big losers in this year’s election. What surprises me more is the exaggerated tone of both the headline on Newsweek‘s Web Exclusive by Lisa Miller — “Post-Evangelical America” — and of her first three sentences:
Of the many articles written about the death late Sunday of Barack Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Payne Dunham, nothing expressed Christian hope quite so well as these pithy words from blogger Andrew Sullivan:
