Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
This week the New York Times ran a fascinating profile of a Texas Associated Press journalist whose beat has led him to witness more executions than anyone else on record. As in, more than 300. I really enjoyed the article although I enjoyed it less after I realized it was a bit of a rewrite of a CNN piece from July.
If you want to split an oldline Protestant church, you start a fight over sexuality. You can read that story in major newspapers year after year from coast to coast, world without end. Amen.
For years there’s been a move among some in the emergent and evangelical churches, conservative churches reaching out to the young, and some mainline congregations to adapt and retool (if that’s not too irreverent) ancient liturgical practices in a way that reaches contemporary congregants. (See the late Dr. Robert Webber’s work on this topic.)
As tmatt reminded us the other day, this summer is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, the music festival. The combination of music, drugs and fellowship can’t be repeated — or can it? Surfing the Pennsylvania media yesterday, I came across this classic from the Post-gazette.com, a reminder that for some of us, Woodstock never ended.
Let’s make one thing clear: I am a smidgen too young to be into this whole, “Hey man, did you make it to Woodstock or not?” thing that’s going on in the mainstream media right now. My priest, however, is another matter, since he was there and I still think he looks like Jerry Garcia.
At the beginning of the month we looked at the various and sundry ways the mainstream media reported on the stabbing of an 8-months-pregnant woman and the kidnapping of her baby. Some people called the child, who was taken from the mother’s womb, a “fetus” while others called it a “baby.”
Maybe the most unnecessarily talked about story of the past few days, particularly in that corner of the world I dwell in known as the Jewish twitterverse, has been Madonna’s first-person piece for Israel’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Achronot. In “I Found an Answer,” the Material Girl offered a testimonial about how she found God, got religion and awakened her spiritual soul through Kabbalah.
If you thought the story of Bryant Neal Vinas, the Long Island Muslim convert who joined Al Qaeda and quickly rose through the ranks before being arrested last fall, was bad for Muslim public relations, the news emerging today of a North Carolina Muslim gang is a PR nightmare.
