Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an 11-page comic strip by R. Crumb that depicts the accounts of the Creation and the Fall from the first three chapters of Genesis. (The feature is an excerpt from the forthcoming The Book of Genesis: Illustrated by R. Crumb.) The online version requires a subscription, and that’s too bad.
Here’s a journalistic mystery: Why the difference between news coverage about the murders of abortion specialist George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, and Army recruiter Pvt. William Long of Conway, Arkansas?
The murder of a physician who performs abortions has become a bewildering ritual of individual desperation, occurring four times since 1993. It also has become a ritual test of journalists’ abilities to report the news calmly and fairly.
Yesterday morning at Los Angeles International Airport, Brenda Lee presented herself as a journalist, a Catholic priestess, and a California citizen so concerned about gay marriage that she wanted to give a letter to President Obama. In blurring those identities — in behaving as an activist while standing amid journalists — she managed to get herself hauled away in full-throttle civil disobedience mode.
Katie Petroski of the Austin American-Statesman has written an elegant profile of Lloyd Dalton, a longtime telephone lineman by day and guitarist by night, who rediscovered his faith after a deadly shooting in a bar.
Mainstream media are showing a commendable restraint in their coverage of decades-long abuse of children in church-run schools in Ireland. The details are soul-crushing and they appear in each report: Thousands of children, from the 1930s and into the 1990s, subjected to humiliation, shaming, beating and rape. The government has paid 12,000 victims an average of $90,000.
Have you heard? GQ has the images, people, the proof of just how outrageous the Bush years were, the stuff that’s going to blow the lid on all the pious hypocrisy that was the Global War on Terrorism. Just wait until Keith Olbermann tees off on this!
