Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
In the past few weeks, three different readers of GetReligion have shown an exemplary commitment to discussing ideas. They have asked GetReligion’s editors to pass along their email addresses to other readers, so they may continue debating Proposition 8, missionary work and other volatile topics.
Since early in this decade, when I became aware of Mike White’s filmmaking career, I’ve thought it would be rewarding to get him together with his father, Mel, for a conversation about filmmaking and faith. Anyone who has followed Mel White’s career knows he once ghostwrote material for Jerry Falwell, Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, and that he outed himself and became a gay-rights activist in the early 1990s. His work on 53 documentaries usually gets short shrift, even on Internet Movie Database.
I would like to extend warm congratulations to guardian.co.uk, which responded to a tedious bus-slogan campaign in the most appropriate way: Launching a Web-based challenge for readers to write new counter-slogans.
When Roger Ebert was watching The Charlie Rose Show and saw director Tony Scott describe The Reader as another Holocaust movie, it set off a blog reverie on truth-telling. Ebert, who lost his voice after a protracted and heroic struggle with thyroid cancer and related complications, writes of keeping silent too often in past years. Now his words pour through the keyboard with startling ease:
In 1989 ABC became the first major American TV network to hire a full-time religion correspondent, and that worthy experiment did not spread far — except for CNN’s hiring of Delia Gallagher and then John Allen Jr. as Vatican correspondents. Even so, religion makes cameo appearances in certain corners of network TV, such as ABC’s Nightline, which runs a regular feature called Faith Matters.
GetReligion celebrates its fifth anniversary this week, and contributors will mark the occasion with lists of our five favorite posts from the past year. I’ll kick this off.
When the Episcopal Bishop of Washington participates in a conference on religion and politics, it’s not necessarily newsworthy. When that conference takes place in Tehran, Iran, and the same bishop has a private meeting with the theocratic nation’s top spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei, it deserves more attention.
Darrah Johnson has written a masterpiece of a story for The Washington Post Magazine about young Catholics living in an intentional community known as Simple House (or, more fully, A Simple House of Sts. Francis and Alphonsus).
Newsweek recently published a one-page story about Ted Haggard that showed a remarkable sympathy for the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals. The story, reported by Tony Dokoupil and drawing heavily from the new HBO documentary The Trials of Ted Haggard, was especially uncritical about Haggard’s claim of being mistreated by New Life Church, the Colorado Springs church he founded and built into an evangelical powerhouse:
