Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
All together now: Raise your hands if you wanted to throw something at the television screen the 666th time, or thereabouts, that CNN put up that graphic announcing that the newly named Pope Francis — formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina — was the “first non-European pope.”
Friends, Romans and other anxious news consumers, some of you may not have seen the following update from Poynter.org about the current status of one of America’s most skilled scribes on all things inside-Catholic:
The thought for the day and, perhaps, for the next week or two, care of Father James Martin, the chaplain of The Colbert Report and author of the essential “Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life.”
I visit the Twitter-verse every now and then, but don’t munch all the way through the streams of data the way some folks do.
To my shock, no one out in cyberspace filed a pope-retirement question over at veteran religion-reporter Richard Ostling’s handy new website, “Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy Answers your Questions.”
If you’ve paid attention to religion news at all in recent days, you probably know that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has responded to the latest attempt by the White House (.pdf here) to draw a legal line between religious liberty in church pews and freedom of religious expression in the marketplace and the rest of American life.
So, friends and neighbors, if we are going to do some intense navel-gazing here at GetReligion (nine years into this project), then I will assume that it’s fair game to briefly pay some attention to a different set of navels.
It’s been a few weeks — with Christmas season travel and all — since your GetReligionistas checked in with veteran religion-beat writer Richard Ostling and his new Patheos weblog, Religion Q&A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy answers your questions.â
