Covering a Boston mosque’s radical ties

April 24, 2013 By 3 Comments

The latest headlines give some indication of where the Boston bombing story is going. From the New York Times, for instance:

Bombing Suspect Cites Islamic Extremist Beliefs as Motive

A more informative article from the Associated Press is headlined:

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Influenced By Mysterious Muslim Radical, Turned Towards Fundamentalism

Headlined in the Huffington Post, I hasten to add, since the “F” word violates the AP Stylebook. It begins:

In the years before the Boston Marathon bombings, Tamerlan Tsarnaev fell under the influence of a new friend, a Muslim convert who steered the religiously apathetic young man toward a strict strain of Islam, family members said.

Under the tutelage of a friend known to the Tsarnaev family only as Misha, Tamerlan gave up boxing and stopped studying music, his family said. He began opposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He turned to websites and literature claiming that the CIA was behind the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Jews controlled the world.

“Somehow, he just took his brain,” said Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, who recalled conversations with Tamerlan’s worried father about Misha’s influence. Efforts over several days by The Associated Press to identify and interview Misha have been unsuccessful.

We focus on religion angles and how they are treated in the media, and will continue to do so in this and subsequent posts. That should not be interpreted as reason to focus exclusively on those angles. Journalists should heed the counsel of terrorism experts when they caution that “Complex rather than single causality is the norm, not the exception, for terrorism.” It’s definitely an egregious error to downplay the role religion plays in stories but that doesn’t excuse an exclusive focus on it.

The AP article suggests that Misha and Tamerlan met at a local mosque, though that mosque isn’t identified. I’ve been particularly intrigued with stories about the mosque(s) that the Tsarnaev brothers attended. Initial reports stated that no local mosques had heard of the brothers. By now we’re progressing to stories such as the Associated Press one above. I don’t even know if I can find it but I read a Boston Globe story that had a video featuring Suhaib Webb, an imam at a sister mosque. The story and the accompanying video emphasized how very moderate those mosques were — and how Tamerlan found their moderation difficult.

So I was surprised when some folks sent me a video suggesting that the mosques themselves had ties to radicals. I won’t link to it because the very first item the video mentioned had an error. It said that the founder of the mosque the brothers attended was sentenced to prison for his role in an Al Qaeda plot. I looked it up and found that description lacking. He is serving a 23-year sentence for his role in a terror plot, but it wasn’t identified as an Al Qaeda plot. I should add that when I looked up the name of the imam in the Globe video mentioned above, I saw this FBI document about how he had appeared at a legal defense fundraiser for Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a Muslim man on trial for (and later convicted of) killing two police officers … with U.S. citizen and drone victim Anwar al Awlaki back in 2001.

It got me thinking. Are these things newsworthy? Politically, there’s an argument for balance that might be described as finding a middle ground between ignoring the role of Islam, and putting the “Muslim community” under surveillance? There’s a journalism corollary to this, I’m sure. So how does one present this information?

USA Today took the approach of investigating various ties the mosques have to terrorists and just laying it all out there. Headlined, “Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties,” it begins by saying several people who attend “have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque’s first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.” It adds that the sister mosque has invited guests who defend terror suspects and that a former trustee advocates “treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews.”

It might be helpful to know a little bit more about mainstream Muslim thought on some of these topics. And I’d like to hear the comments in context, to know if they’re accurately conveyed. It quotes someone saying that the curriculum of the mosque radicalizes people and that other people have been radicalized there. It includes this quote in response:

Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers.

“If there were really any worry about us being extreme,” Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community.

Now, considering that some groups have been questioning the U.S. government’s involvement with some mosques — and the FBI’s lack of interest in the brothers despite repeated warnings — perhaps a response to this quote would have been in order. But it’s already pretty long and there’s not space for every back and forth. The article again mentions that the two mosques share an owner and later on they mention that they’re both affiliated with the Muslim American Society.

The article states that the FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in the terrorism commited by the Tsarnaev brothers. But it does list some of the attendees and officials who have been “implicated” in terrorist activity. And it’s an impressive list:

• Abdulrahman Alamoudi, who signed the articles of incorporation as the Cambridge mosque’s president, was sentenced to 23 years in federal court in Alexandria, Va., in 2004 for his role as a facilitator in what federal prosecutors called a Libyan assassination plot against then-Saudi crown prince Abdullah. Abdullah is now the Saudi king.

• Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.

• Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston alleged.

• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna’s co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges of providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a foreign country.

• Jamal Badawi of Canada, a former trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in Texas over the funneling of money to Hamas, which is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The article also mentions a little bit about the Muslim American Society:

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Islam, Journalism, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Gosnell fog blankets Britain

April 19, 2013 By 8 Comments

Last week my colleague at GetReligion Mollie Hemingway broke the American media blockade surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial. Mollie, and Kirsten Powers writing in USA Today, reported on the absence of national press coverage of the trial of the Philadelphia abortionist — questioning why reporters who never tired of Sandra Flake or Komen Foundation stories shied away from this national news item.

Some members of the press and newspapers have sought to repair their damaged credibility and are now playing catch up, while others have retreated into the bunker (Nixonian allusions spring to mind but would likely be lost on the miscreants).

However, the British press appears not to have received the memo. As of the date of this post, the BBC has yet to air a story on the Gosnell affair (though it did run one web piece on 15 April after the Hemingway storm broke and the American media mea culpa.) ITV and Channel 4 have yet to report.

The newspapers have not raised the average. The Times ran one story on 13 April, but the Guardian and Independent have remained silent. The Telegraph does a little better — it had one news article dated 12 April entitled “Kermit Gosnell: US abortion doctor could be put to death over ‘baby charnel house’”. Op-Ed writers Damian Thompson and Tim Stanley weighed in on the Gosnell story as well as the media blackout. On 12 April Thompson wrote:

But British readers must know about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell, which has been played down in the American media – possibly because the allegations of a homicidal abortion doctor don’t fit into their pro-choice narrative.

Well, Philadelphia is very far away after all. And a story about an abortionist on trial for infanticide in Philadelphia may not be interesting to the British newspaper reading public. American newspapers are notorious for their lack of in-depth overseas reporting due to the perception that  its readers don’t care about the outside world.

Perhaps the Daily Mail is an outlier — it has published 26 stories since 2011 on the Kermit Gosnell case — a number greater than all the news stories of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, ABC, CBS, NBS, and CNN combined. It must be due to the large number of transplanted Philadelphians residing in Surrey.

The popular British blog Archbishop Cranmer explains the reticence stating:

This low-key response is almost certainly because Dr Gosnell’s case takes us to the question of what it means to be human and humane, and this is why it is so important. What he was doing crossed a fundamental line in law and morality between abortion and infanticide. Abortion prioritises the health of the mother. Dr Gosnell is accused of killing babies after the child was outside of the mother, at a time when the risks of childbirth were passed, though they were now entering the risk-laden world of Dr Gosnell’s post-operative care.

He sees a political explanation in all this. The same news outlets who pushed Barack Obama into the Oval Office are protecting their investment.

There is a political reason behind the silence amongst a media that subjected President Obama to as little scrutiny as Dr Gosnell. There have been efforts to legislate for doctors to be required to provide full medical treatment to babies who survive abortion procedures. Three times the President has voted against it, imperiously ignoring the possibility that men like Dr Gosnell exist. The US Federal Government provides 45% of the $1billion budget of Planned Parenthood, the US major abortion provider.

They, like the President, are very equivocal about this issue of infanticide as this video demonstrates. The lady struggling to answer the clear and direct questions is Alisa Lapolt Snow, a lobbyist for Planned Parenthood giving evidence to a committee of Florida legislators. Dr Gosnell’s trial puts the inconvenient truth of abortion and infanticide plainly into the public domain. It puts the brutal bloody facts to the sanitised language and could prove to be the tipping point in the public debate as ordinary people see for the first time how far the pro-abortion lobby are prepared to go in defending their industry.

There is a reason we talk about the ‘slippery slope’.

Why are so few people in the media, American or British, asking these questions?

Filed Under: Journalism, Politics, World Tagged With: , , , , , , 8 Comments

Turkson wouldn’t be first African pope

February 14, 2013 By

Yesterday morning a Lutheran friend sent me an email joking that he was “off Team Turkson” on account of Turkson campaigning for the job of pope. That would be Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson. Now, I realize just how unseemly it is for a churchman to campaign for any job but this may be an unfair reading of an interview Turkson gave in the Telegraph.

Some media outlet called The Week pretty much just recycled someone else’s work into their story headlined “Peter Turkson not shy about his wish to become first black Pope.”

CARDINAL Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian prelate who is hotly-tipped to become the next Pope, has given a candid interview about the “life-changing” responsibility of leading the Catholic Church.

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the 64-year-old bookies’ favourite openly admitted he has pondered the possibility of becoming the first black Pope and what it would mean for himself and his church. He concedes it “would signal a lot of [personal] change. I have been an archbishop, which involved a certain amount of leadership, and now having to do this on a world level, the dimensions expand almost infinitely.”

Bookmaker William Hill was today offering odds of 7/2 on Turkson becoming Pope, making him the joint favourite with Canada’s Cardinal Marc Ouellet.

Despite his surprising candour on the subject of succeeding Pope Benedict XVI, Turkson was “quick” to take a conservative line on controversial issues such as gay marriage and other “alternative lifestyles”, the Telegraph says. He said the Catholic Church needed to find ways to “evangelise” or convert those who had embraced “alternative lifestyles, trends or gender issues”.

The article then quotes Queerty — noted experts on all things papal.

Anyway, where, oh where, to begin.

First off would be my question as to why The Week contends Turkson would be the first black pope.

I know of at least three African popes and I don’t believe I’ve heard anything about their skin color. I have heard that Victor I — the first African pope — was the first black pope but I don’t think that’s been proven. Apparently skin color is a more modern obsession. As for Miltiades and Gelasius I — and any other African popes — no reports on their skin color.

Does anyone have a good answer on this?

I’m seeing this “first black pope” thing all over the place. I’m not sure the history can confirm such a claim regarding Turkson.

But it’s that last paragraph that is so bizarre.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Catholicism, Uncategorized, World Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Escape from Westboro Baptist, for some reason or another

February 8, 2013 By
YouTube Preview Image

Let’s face it, the edgy folks at the Westboro Baptist Church are not easy to cover in a fair and accurate manner. You think?

However, did I miss something? When did the Westboro people join a liturgical church or pack up and move to Louisiana (or maybe Canada)?

What am I talking about?

Find yourself a decent online dictionary and look up the word “parish.” You’ll usually find something that reads like this:

par·ish … n.

1. a. An administrative part of a diocese that has its own church in the Anglican, Roman Catholic, and some other churches. b. The members of such a parish; a religious community attending one church.

2. A political subdivision of a British county, usually corresponding in boundaries to an original ecclesiastical parish.

3. An administrative subdivision in Louisiana that corresponds to a county in other U.S. states.

I think it is safe to assume that the independent Westboro flock — which preaches a brand of free-church Protestantism that even the most conservative of Baptists would consider bizarre if not heretical — has not jumped into a Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican diocese. Also, I think the church is still up in Kansas.

Why do I bring this up? Read this Toronto Star copy carefully:

It was a different kind of coming-out moment for two members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Megan Phelps-Roper and her younger sister Grace announced their exodus from the Westboro Baptist Church, a Kansas-based parish made infamous by its “God hates fags” campaign.

“We know that we’ve done and said things that hurt people. Inflicting pain on others wasn’t the goal, but it was one of the outcomes,” wrote Megan Phelps-Roper. “What we can do is try to find a better way to live from here on. That’s our focus.”

The Westboro Baptist Church was started in 1955 by Fred Phelps, Grace and Megan’s grandfather, exclusively for the Phelps family. The parish has been lambasted for protesting the funerals of American solders, whom they claim died because of America’s acceptance of homosexuality.

What? Did the people who wrote and edited this story assume that a “church” or “congregation” is the same thing as a “parish”? It would appear so. They made that mistake more than once.

This is a bizarre, but rather symbolic, little mistake. The bigger problem found in this story is more common in Westboro coverage.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Baptists, Godbeat, Journalism, People, Same-sex marriage, Sex

Richard Ostling — finally! — sets up an online camp

November 29, 2012 By

Anyone who has followed GetReligion for very long knows what the letters WWROD stand for. I mean, the first reference of this kind showed up only a few weeks into the blog’s existence, way back in 2004.

WWROD? We’re asking, What Would Richard Ostling Do?

Ostling, of course, is the former religion-beat pro at Time, back in the days when that weekly magazine was a force in hard news, and then with the Associated Press. For those of us who arrived on the Godbeat in last quarter of the 20th Century, it would be hard to name someone we respected more or whose work carried more professional authority (with Russ Chandler of the great Los Angeles Times religion team joining him in the top ranks).

Thus, I am happy to pass along the following email from Ostling, which followed several chats on this topic during the recent Religion Newswriters Association meetings here in Beltway territory:

Forsaking lazy retirement mode I am about to launch a new “Religion Q and A” blog for patheos.com, probably the most important interfaith site on the Internet.

Most features on Patheos are opinionated, faith-specific (Buddhist, Catholic, Pagan) … whereas mine will be non-partisan and journalistic in approach and cover wide-ranging topics.

We’ll be asking folks in cyberspace to send in questions regarding any and all faiths, any Scriptures, current church-state and religion-politics issues, moral quandaries and other such puzzlements and curiosities. If I’m able, I’ll post an answer with others then welcome others to add comments.

To get this thing launched I need savvy folks to start providing some interesting questions for me to try to answer. If willing, would you, and contacts in your circle of friends who’d be interested in this, send in questions that I’ll consider for the first postings on the site? Simply go to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/

On the right-hand side type in your question and click “Send” which transmits it to me to consider for a posted answer.

The name, in other words, is “Religion Q and A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy Answers Your Questions.” I had lobbied hard for “The Religion Answer Man.” Whatever. This is great news no matter what it’s called. I’ve been bugging this man for years about getting involved in a blog, whether writing for GetReligion every now and then or pursuing some other online option.

Once this is up and running, Ostling will be in the Patheos “News and Politics” channel, which is also the home of GetReligion. Obviously, Ostling expects to get his share of questions about the role of religion in the news and public life and, thus, GetReligion plans to feature at least one of his posts each week. It’s the kind of cooperation we hope to see more of around these cyber-parts (hint, hint former GetReligionista Jeremy Lott and Deacon Greg Kandra, the former CBS News scribe).

Those seeking a quick introduction to Ostling, via audio, can check out this interview conducted at the Calvin Institute of Worship.

For a sample of Ostling’s print work — one that is highly relevant to his new blogging format — click here for a 2005 GetReligion post focusing on a short Associated Press analysis piece in which he tried to explain the unexplainable, as in the very divergent schools of sexual ethics found in the global Anglican Communion. That full AP report can be found stashed away right here.

Here’s a large chunk of that AP text, focusing on the four camps that Ostling calls “dismissal, perplexity, renovation and traditionalism.”

Dismissal is the left-fringe attitude personified by Bishop John Shelby Spong, former head of the Newark, N.J., diocese. In “The Sins of Scripture” (HarperSanFrancisco), he says calling the Bible “the Word of God” (a belief he himself affirmed at ordination) is “perhaps the strangest claim ever made” for a document. Spong finds the Old Testament’s homosexual prohibitions ignorant and “morally incompetent” expressions of “popular prejudices.” With the New Testament, he disdains Paul’s condemnations as “ill-informed” ravings from a zealot who, he hypothesizes, was a “deeply repressed, self-loathing” homosexual.

“The contending positions are mutually exclusive,” he concludes, and “there can be no compromise.” He dismisses conservative views as “frail, fragile and pitiful.”

The other three approaches were displayed at a … hearing before the international Anglican Consultative Council. …

Perplexity was the outlook of Anglican Church of Canada representatives. Their denomination affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of homosexual relationships and tolerated a diocese’s blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. The Canadians said they are “seeking discernment” but face “deep divisions” and lack consensus.

Renovation was the policy of the U.S. Episcopal Church in its report “To Set Our Hope on Christ,” written by seven theologians. It was the denomination’s first official rationale for recognition of the unhindered same-sex blessings in its ranks and for toleration of openly gay clergy, including a bishop.

Traditionalists answered that argument with “A True Hearing,” a paper by writers from nine nations that the Anglican Mainstream group gave to delegates to explain the stance endorsed in 1998 by 82 percent of the world’s Anglican bishops.

And so forth and so on. In other words, Ostling is going to help point readers and, I would imagine, some journalists toward information and resources on complex religion-news questions. I would be hard-pressed to name a better scribe to take on that task.

Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Academia, Anglicanism, Announcements, Godbeat, Journalism, Religion, Web/Tech

On women bishops: Who voted ‘no’ and why?

November 21, 2012 By
YouTube Preview Image

To the shock of legions of mainstream reporters, the Church of England fell just short of approving the long-debated step of raising women to the Anglican episcopate.

The issue that seems to have some reporters stumped, a bit, is why the laypeople who cast these votes didn’t go along with this latest evolution in Anglican orders. Take, for example, the pretty solid report from Reuters, as offered by The Huffington Post. Here are two summary passages that contain the key material:

After hours of debate, the General Synod, the Church legislature made up of separate houses for bishops, clergy and laity, fell just short of the two-thirds majority required in all three houses to pass the measure. … The vote among lay members fell short by just four votes.

“It’s crushing for morale, senior women clergy must feel despondent and most bishops and most clergy male or female feel hugely sad and worse than sad, embarrassed and angry,” said Christina Rees, a Synod member and former chairman of the advocacy group Women and the Church. “Women bishops will come, but this is an unnecessary and an unholy delay,” she told Reuters.

The second passage is the key. Yes, careful readers will, of course, note that the progressives are once again called “reformers,” which means that, by definition, they are attempting to right a wrong. Nice neutral language, there. Not.

Women already serve as Anglican bishops in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, but the Church of England, mother church for the world’s 80 million Anglicans, has struggled to reconcile the dispute between reformers and traditionalists on whether to allow them in England.

The Church had already agreed to allow women bishops in theory but Tuesday’s vote, on provisions to be made for conservatives theologically opposed to senior women clergy, needed to be approved before female Anglican priests could be promoted to episcopal rank in England. …

More than 100 members spoke during six hours of discussion in a vast circular chamber in Church House, the Church’s central London headquarters, airing their views under a domed ceiling inscribed with a prayer to “them that endured in the heat of conflict.” The dispute centred on ways to designate alternative male bishops to work with traditionalist parishes that might reject the authority of a woman bishop named to head their diocese.

So what’s the problem here?

It is good that the story notes that the opponents of female bishops are “conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics,” because there are plenty of evangelicals who are willing to back the ordination of women to all orders.

It is not helpful that, at the end of the piece, the divisions inside the global Anglican Communion are described, in effect, as being between Anglicans in modern lands and many “Anglicans in developing countries.” That radically oversimplifies matters, especially in Africa. One could just as easily have described this as a conflict between the Communion’s rapidly shrinking liberal churches and its rapidly growing conservative ones.

The story also fails to note that taking this step would have created even more tensions between Anglicans and the ancient Christian churches of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which do not ordain women to the priesthood and the episcopate.

Careful readers will note that the story does not, in fact, quote any person — ordained or laity — who opposed this crucial “reform,” which would lead to female bishops who would then ordain priests, male or female, that traditional Anglicans would argue have not been truly ordained. If the conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics won, where are their happy voices? Why leave them out of the story?

But here is the key question: Did the vote fail, in fact, because there were liberal Anglicans who voted against this measure because they believed it offered too much protection for conservatives? Did they oppose this measure because it did not go far enough to please the “reformers”? Meanwhile, did others who support the ordination of women vote against the measure because they did not believe it did enough to protect the traditionalists? Watch the video at the top of this post.

In other words, did the left split? Again, note that this Reuters report did say that the key “dispute centred on ways to designate alternative male bishops to work with traditionalist parishes that might reject the authority of a woman bishop named to head their diocese.”

If that was the dispute that led to the defeat of the measure, then the single most important thing this story needed to do was to explain that conflict, while quoting representative, authoritative voices on both sides of that dispute.

The bottom line: Why voted “no” and why? Was this measure defeated by a coalition of people who opposed it for very different reasons? If so, where are these crucial voices in this report?

Filed Under: Anglicanism, Evangelicals, People, World, Worship Tagged With: ,

Pod People: Romney, abstinent New Yorkers and (almost) Randy Travis

August 25, 2012 By

On the latest Issues, Etc. podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discuss my recent post on media coverage of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney going to church.

In the comments section of that post, Mark Hemingway, GetReligion’s resident expert on Mormonism, raised an interesting question:

There’s one interesting detail I would like to know, though I don’t know whether it’s here nor there in relation to what Bobby wrote. Did the Romney campaign allow multiple reporters to attend services — or just one? Because the pool report that all of the details in this story appear to have been cribbed from was written by McKay Coppins, who is covering Romney for Buzzfeed and happens to be an active Mormon.

Wilken and I also talk about my recent post on a New York Times feature on sexually abstinent New Yorkers.

A topic that Wilken and I didn’t address: my recent post on the religion ghosts in media coverage of country star Randy Travis — full of drink and devoid of clothing — being arrested at a Texas convenience store.

I bring up that post here because (1) this post is running short and (2) there has been a new development related to Travis. A hat tip to my GetReligion colleague George Conger for pointing out this headline from Canada’s Vancouver Sun: 

Randy Travis, fully clothed, hospitalized after ‘church fight’

You can click this link for all the juicy details.

But to all who questioned if a religion angle really existed related to Travis, I say: I Told You So.

Filed Under: Mormons, People, Podcasts, Sex

GetReligion has moved to the Patheos universe

August 15, 2012 By

It didn’t take long, after the Rt. Rev. Douglas Leblanc and I started GetReligion.org back in 2004, for people to start suggesting that this weblog needed to hook up with a larger website or online institution that was about religion or journalism or, hopefully, both.

Early on, it seemed that a massive religion portal — think fishing for beliefs — was going to be able to produce a serious, broad blend of multi-faith news and commentary. We talked. There wasn’t enough news in the mix, for me.

We have talked to people who wanted to mix religion, news and popular culture. We have talked to a few academic institutions about links to The Media Project and, of course, GetReligion.

The key to all of these talks is this: GetReligion really, really, really is not a “religion” site and it also isn’t a “religion news” site.

Honest. We are a journalism site dedicated to looking at the good and the bad in mainstream news media attempts to produce balanced, accurate, informed news about the world of religion. We think (click here for the Day 1 essay) that it’s impossible for journalists to make sense of real news in the real world without taking religion seriously.

In other words, we think religion deserves a chair at the table of serious news coverage. We’ve been making that case for nearly 7,500 posts and millions of words. We are not going to stop chasing those religion-news “ghosts.”

However, GetReligion has moved. Finally.

In the future, GetReligion.org will still get you to the weblog, but if you want to bookmark the most direct cyber-route, here’s the URL that you need:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/

Of course, we’ll also be up and running via RSS, and Facebook, and Twitter, and just about any other platform that comes along.

The Patheos crew is into it all.

Now, if you know anything about Patheos (“Hosting the conversation on faith”), you know that this sprawling parallel universe is organized around a wide variety of channels dedicated to various world religions and approaches to belief and, well, to unbelief. Inside these digital doors there are legions of bloggers and commentators on the left, on the right, in the center and in lots of other places that cannot be labeled. Patheos is as well known as the home of The Friendly Atheist as The Optimistic Christian. You can find The Wild Hunt there, a few navigation turns away from The Anchoress.

Where in the world, GetReligion readers might ask, would a journalism blog about religion fit into that structure?

Well, the reason we have signed up with Patheos is that its leaders have committed to creating what will be a sprawling new channel dedicated to news, politics and culture. Some of the folks who have already set up shop there are Greg Kandra (former CBS News producer) at The Deacon’s Bench, former GetReligion scribe Jeremy Lott of Real Clear Religion, the Muslimah Media Watch, the Public Religion Research Institute’s Faith in the Numbers blog, Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online and others.

There will be plenty more. There are many different angles, when it comes to discussing the intersection of religion and the news. Bring ‘em on. Patheos is big enough for activists, journalists, scholars, commentators, clergy, politicians and lots of other folks who are interested in the world of religion.

This move will leave all of our existing features intact and our massive, massive archives will come with us (as will the Tmatt.net archives, pretty soon). The look will change, as we move into a narrower column width in a space surrounded by a few advertisements. (Yes, I am not a fan of pop-up ads. However, I have been told that, when that first pop-up ad appears, you can click it and then the pop-ups will vanish for the rest of your session or your return visits to the site that day. One ad per day, per person, in other words. Friends, we live in a fallen world and ads keep websites open and growing.)

We’ll have to change the ways we handle art. We will try harder to avoid long, long posts (wink, wink) in such a narrow space. But we will keep doing the same work.

So mark the new URL. The change will take place in stages over the next few days and, as always, I expect a few bumps, dead links, wayward YouTube videos and other signs that we are getting used to our new home. Please be patient. This post should be the last one at GetReligion.org proper. In a day or two, that URL will point toward the new address at Patheos.

We’re not going away. We’re simply moving into a complex, exciting and growing neighborhood. Look around. Explore. Keep coming back.

Filed Under: Announcements