A church in Ashtabula, Ohio, was the scene of a shooting on Easter Sunday. Just as services had ended, a man arrived and shot his father in the head, killing him. A reporter sent us a link to an earlier version of an Associated Press story that ran in the Houston Chronicle with a headline that read: Witness: Man yelled about God after church killing That’s the headline that remains over this Columbus Dispatch version of the AP report. The... Read more
Every religion writer has experienced those awkward moments each year when an editor walks over to your desk and says, “Hey, it’s almost Easter (or Passover, of Christmas, or Ramadan, or …) and we have to have some Easter stories. What do you have going on that we can call an Easter story?” The key is timing. The newspaper wants something — with glorious art! — that can run on the morning of said holy day or even before. Of... Read more
The reporter who passed this one along to us wrote, simply: they just make it real easy for you guys, don’t they? Another reporter on Twitter put it: That NYT correction has to be throwing @GetReligion HQ into all-hands-on-deck mode. “I need EVERYONE ON THIS NOW!” Sadly, we’ve had such reason to be down on general religion coverage in recent weeks, that I’m not even sure anyone is surprised by this. But still. But still. The New York Times published... Read more
First of all, let me state right up front that it is hard to do a news critique of a graphic device. I concede that point. At the same time, I also know that Google is not, in and of itself, a news source. Google is, of course, much more than a news source. Google is one of the most powerful forces shaping culture and information in this digital age in which we live, read and think. Google is a... Read more
What’s good for the goose is good for, um, Sarah Pulliam Bailey. Right? Sarah, former online editor for Christianity Today and now managing editor for Odyssey Networks, spent three years as a GetReligion contributor before leaving us this past October. To be honest, I still haven’t forgiven Sarah for giving up her high-paying gig as a GetReligionista. How dare she abandon our close-knit team of blogging professionals? But anyway, this tweet by Sarah caught my attention today: At evangelical colleges, a... Read more
So, this pope vs. pope theme has been building, in mainstream coverage, during the amazing early days of Pope Francis. Have you noticed? One of the world’s top reporters on all things Catholic has noticed, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s a classic example of the genre, drawn from a Reuters report: Since his election on March 13, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina has broken with the more esoteric and, some would say, ostentatious... Read more
A story I have yet to see in the Anglo-American press is the apotheosis of Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan strongman died on 5 March 2013 after fifteen years in office leaving Venezuela with 25 per cent inflation, public debt at 70 percent of GDP, a shortage of basic consumer goods, a crumbling electrical grid with frequent power outages, widespread crime and a serious contraction of the oil industry — the source of 95 per cent of the country’s exports. Since 1998... Read more
http://youtu.be/2N9NPuxCjXg Readers who have been following GetReligion for some time, or even reading my Scripps Howard News Service columns, may remember that I have been keeping up with the debates about the Shroud of Turin since the mid-1980s, when I worked at The Rocky Mountain News in Denver. That meant that I wasn’t that far from some of the key American players in this lively field, both in Colorado Springs, Colo., and in Los Alamos, N.M. Thus, over the decades,... Read more
Yesterday some of us got a bit academic (and some of us practiced calling people bigots) as we discussed media coverage of the efforts to change marriage from an institution built on sexual complementarity to an institution built on sexual orientation. Believing — by science, religion or otherwise — that all humans are made male and female and that the regeneration of humans requires the joining together of male and female is — as we all know — grounds for... Read more
School vouchers aren’t exactly a new concept. In my education reporting days — before I ascended to Godbeat heaven — I covered the Oklahoma City school system for The Oklahoman. In a front-page Sunday story in 1999, I highlighted the opposing viewpoints in Oklahoma at that time: In a nation that cherishes separation of church and state, talk of publicly funded religious schools stirs emotional debate. “School vouchers are just another way that the religious right wing is attempting to destroy... Read more
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