Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Jim Wallis has been calling the religious right dead for a while now. I can’t imagine his surprise when he was included in Newsweek‘s new list on “faces of the Christian right.” It is as if the editors at Newsweek are saying, “Ha ha, you thought it was dead, but you’re actually the leader of it — joke’s on you!”
The holidays seem to give reporters an incentive to look for heart-warming stories, ones the show someone overcoming struggle for eventual triumph. The Atlantic‘s food section features an inspiring story of an ex-con who is reforming his life through his job at DC Central Kitchen.
My sense is that reporters often look to religion when covering people who are against abortion. It might seem obvious, since people do often cite their underlying religious beliefs as their reason for opposition. Though when reporters explore why people do provide abortions, religion suddenly disappears from consideration.
I’ve written several solder-dies-in-Iraq stories, so I know it can be quite uncomfortable for a reporter to waltz into someone else’s tragedy and capture the heart-wrenching details. Paul Schwartzman has written a beautiful story for the Washington Post about a father’s care for his son after a horrible beating.
I don’t understand organizations’ rush to build iPhone apps when Android is clearly the better option. Before I anger the Apple enthusiasts (including my colleagues here), let me quickly move to an interesting story about how the iTunes store removed a Manhattan Declaration application. Change.org garnered 7,700 signers asking Apple to remove the “anti-gay and anti-choice” app. At the time of this post, about 24,000 people have signed the petition to restore the app.
Occasionally we’ll see stories where video games and religion collide, where a game might feature religion or a country might ban certain games if deemed religiously offensive.
Doing a story on abortion doctors must be terribly challenging, since it would be impossible to create a sweeping generalization of religious, political, ethical views and backgrounds. The Toronto Star tackles this challenge in a lengthy piece exploring the dimensions of trying to be an abortion provider. The hook is really fascinating: it begins with a gay doctor, Dr. Evan James, who never wavered in his determination to become an abortion provider.
A few days ago, we looked at a startling story from Thailand where 2,000 dead fetuses from illegal abortion clinics were found at a Buddhist temple. The story indicated that monks were not aware of what was taking place, but there were inevitable implications for the temple.
As we’ve stated in the past, sometimes an abortion-related story is also a religion story. The tension between the two is fairly evident in this recent New York Times story about how 2,000 fetuses from illegal abortion clinics were found at a Buddhist temple in Thailand.
