In about 99 percent of the mainstream news reports you will ever read about India and religion, there will be a reference that reads something like the following, from a Washington Post story that I have been meaning to get to for a week or so. This is part of the wave of coverage — totally justifiable, methinks — about rape and women’s rights in that land. The crucial language, as is the norm, comes right at the end of... Read more
A few weeks ago, a Twitter post from Tim Townsend, the award-winning religion writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, caught my attention. The tweet linked to a Gawker.com piece titled “Journalism is not narcissism.” The enlightening essay concludes: The extent to which we train a generation of young writers to become robotic insta-memoirists is the extent to which a generation of stories from the wider world does not get told. The real tragedy of journalism-as-narcissism is not the general pettiness... Read more
Let me commend for your reading this AP article by reporter Gillian Wong on the military crack down in Tibet. Entitled “As Tibet burns, China makes arrests, seizes TVs” this article reports on the wave of self-immolations that have swept across Tibet in protest to the Chinese regime’s occupation of the region. It opens with a strong lede, provides the facts in a straight forward – balanced way, offers good comments from knowledgeable experts, provides the principle points of view... Read more
The Jerusalem Post and Times of Israel reported on a video from 2010 that was released by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi speaking against Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” (Transcript here.) It took some time before the U.S. media developed interest. The comments were reported by the Jerusalem Post on January 4. By January 11, Forbes columnist Richard Behar wrote a piece headlined “News Flash: Jews Are ‘Apes And Pigs.’... Read more
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.” Time to fix that. Our goal here is to feature at least one post from over there, especially when Ostling — with his years and years of experience at Time and the Associated Press — deals with religion questions that are directly... Read more
Way back in my guilt file is a story I wanted to highlight from CNN about Manti Te’o, Notre Dame’s star linebacker. The story is a detailed account of the role religion plays in his life and I found it fascinating. Te’o is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is from Hawaii. My husband was raised Mormon and is from Hawaii, so I’d been following Te’o’s story. He’d been a leader in the top-ranked... Read more
It is only two weeks into the new year, but I believe we may have a winner in the worst newspaper article of 2013 contest. A Sydney Morning Herald story entitled “Anti-gay rights to stay” is so awful, I am just about at a loss for words. Were I to say this story was anti-Christian, boorish, ignorant, and aggressively offensive I would only be scratching the surface. It takes a non-story — Prime Minister Julia Gillard will maintain religious freedoms... Read more
As strange as it sounds, the goal of this post is to praise The Los Angeles Times for a page-one story focusing on a single case history linked to the decades of sexual abuse of children and teens by Catholic priests. At the center of the story are two brothers, Damian and Bob Eckert and the priest, Father Robert Van Handel, who led the community boys choir in which they sang while growing up in Santa Barbara, Calif. Damian was... Read more
The internet freaked out this week when an advertisement done in the “Sponsored Content” style was discovered on The Atlantic‘s web site. I have to be completely honest that this made little sense to me. Ever since I can remember, I’ve read cheesy ads in my favorite magazines that say “sponsored content” at the top but are otherwise made to appear as part of the magazine. I fancy myself a discerning reader who is able to figure out that the... Read more
On a chilly morning last January, I got up before the sun rose and joined a Chicago-area preacher in his church van. We drove to a regional deportation center where volunteers minister to illegal immigrants’ relatives before their shackled loved ones are taken to O’Hare International Airport for flights to the U.S. border. I described the scene this way in a Christian Chronicle story: CHICAGO — On a dark street, a mother weeps. At 4:45 a.m., she stands outside a two-story... Read more
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