Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
NBC has resurrected the “Jesus Rifles” story of 2010, reporting that some three years after the Pentagon began removing a “Bible code” stamped on rifle sights manufactured by Michigan company Trijicon, the job of erasing the Scripture references remains unfinished.
The title of this story from the Agence France Presse (AFP), “Exorcism boom in Poland sees magazine launch” caught my eye, as a good headline should, and set my click finger twitching.
A few years ago, about 2,500 of my closest friends and I packed into a megachurch auditorium in the Oklahoma City area to hear Randy Travis sing.
Folks, I have committed a serious sin that I hate to spot among other reporters. When searching for obvious religion, I overlooked the subtle spots.
It was the detail in the Aurora, Colo., massacre that, logically enough, led more than a few GetReligion readers to drop me a note. Here’s the top of a Los Angeles Times report that puts the denominational label right up front:
A while back, one of my colleagues — who, as it happens, has written some pretty terrific things on the subject of religion — asked me if I was familiar with the writer Walter Kirn. Knowing that we were both ex-Mormons and Kirn often wrote about religious themes, he wondered what I thought of Kirn’s work. I spent a lot of time in the creative writing department as an undergrad in the mid-late 90s just as Kirn’s career as a novelist was taking off, and he’d been recommended to me several times though I’d never gotten around to exploring any of his books. (More recently, you might be aware that his book Up in the Air had been made into the eponymous and rather acclaimed movie.)
I know, I know. I know that it’s absolutely crazy to look for hard, factual material in stories about celebrities — especially when it has anything to do with politics and religion. And in this case, we are talking about the brightest of all possible gossip stars.
The deadly consequences of blasphemous speech have been the focus of some great writing on militant Islam and its intolerance of free thought. While I wish to take nothing away from these reports, I would urge GetReligion readers not to forget that censorship under the guise of hate speech laws is alive and well at home.
On 17 August 1980 seven week old Azaria Chamberlain disappeared from her family’s campsite near Ayer’s Rock in the Australian desert.
