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The New York Times had a fascinating story about gay Muslims in Berlin. Reporter Nicholas Kulish interviewed visitors to a gay nightclub in the Kreuzberg neighborhood and produces a piece showing how young Muslims — many of them immigrants — are navigating their sexual identity and religion:
When “good girl” celebrity Jamie Lynn Spears announced she was pregnant, reporters cast their rhetorical stones at the fallen teen role model. As Monica Hesse of The Washington Post wrote:
The Washington Post Foreign Service has an interesting story today about the revival of church bells and bilos in the Russian Orthodox church. The other day we looked at the New York Times foreign desk’s treatment of the rise of piety in Islamic Egypt. That story used the prevalence of a mark of piety to explore larger cultural trends but also focused on the religious meaning.
As you would expect, I have heard from some folks asking my opinion of the Washington Post feature story about that Paul Hewson guy that ran with this faith-based two-decker headline: “Bono’s Calling — The Irish Rocker Has a Mission: To Fight Poverty and Enlist the Powerful in the Battle.”
Over the summer, Pope Benedict XVI allowed priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass without receiving permission from their local bishop. Reporters naturally have written follow-up stories about the revival of the ancient service. So far two storylines seem to have emerged: Why the interest in the Tridentine Mass? and Are Catholics (especially young Catholics) actually flocking to the service?
Let’s take a break from the Anglican wars for a moment, shall we (even though the battles keep raging on)?
Back in the late 1990s, I opened a Scripps Howard News Service column about trends in megachurch worship and music with the following:
There’s a big religion story going on in Baltimore right now and it centers on what most evangelical or even fundamentalist Protestants would call a “revival meeting.”
There just has to be a ghost in here somewhere, seeing as how this story is about the soul of the nation of Spain — which has to be some of the most religion-haunted soil on earth.
