One of the many products offered by Religion News Service is its daily round-up of news items, a chatty summary that is almost always infused with opinion. Here’s an example from earlier this month: The Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit civil liberties group, posted on its website last week that it had discovered that six people chosen to review biology textbooks for the state had ties to creationism. That was later amended to four. Still. Still … what? I mean,... Read more
My cellphone chimed at me earlier this afternoon with a news bulletin from CNN that actress Lisa Robin Kelly had died. Millions of Americans would want to know this breaking news, I imagine, because of her work with the television comedy “That ’70s Show.” I think it is safe to say (tragic but true, in other words), that the typical American newsroom executive can assume that the typical American news consumer will know the name of this woman and that... Read more
The largest Lutheran group in the United States is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I’m part of the next largest group, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. We really don’t have much in common, oddly enough. The ELCA just elected their first female presiding bishop. We retain male-only ordination. We have major differences in confessional subscription and requirements for our clergy and congregational membership. So for non-ELCA Lutherans, we flinch when we see headlines such as this one from the Minneapolis... Read more
Kudos to the Christian Science Monitor for correcting is 10 August 2013 story entitled “Churches feel vulnerable after Mugabe reelected in Zimbabwe”. By moving quickly and acting openly, the Christian Science Monitor shows how a quality newspaper responds to a mistake. Well done! On Monday I posted a story at Get Religion questioning the accuracy of the first version of the CSM story. I wrote: The gist of the story entitled “Churches feel vulnerable after Mugabe reelected in Zimbabwe” printed... Read more
I recently cataloged about 1,000 of my 1,300 or so vinyl records (the classical music remains to be done), something I’d been meaning to do for many years. For a vinyl obsessive, this means checking liner notes and record quality. It’s fun to see who appears on which albums. You begin to see more clearly those trends across labels, decades, producers. It’s fun. I’m nowhere near the obsessive of Dawn Eden, who was profiled in the New York Times Sunday... Read more
The bloodshed in Egypt continues and, to be quite frank about it, it’s hard to know what to write about most of the mainstream news coverage. This is especially true if your primary goal is to understand the role that religion is playing in these hellish events. Through it all, I have been asking the following question: Is it possible, in a land in which the majority of voters hunger for Islamic law, to defend the rights of religious minorities... Read more
As a famous religious figure once said, “Ask and you shall receive.” Sometimes even we media critics get what we ask for. Last month I asked for more – and deeper – coverage of hipster churches, and then this week veteran Godbeat reporter Michelle Boorstein fulfills my request (at least partially). Last Sunday the Church at Clarendon, a self-professed “diverse urban church” in Washington, D.C. held an “experimental service called Church Remixed, which featured music by a DJ rather than... Read more
If you know anything about the Baltimore Ravens, then you probably know something about the complex legacy left behind by retired linebacker Ray Lewis, a sure fire first ballot Hall of Famer. When it came to his religious beliefs, Lewis was loud and proud to the point of driving some fans a bit nuts. I think there were some local and national journalists who were tired of his God’s linebacker sermons, as well. Anyway, Lewis has retired and one of... Read more
The Godbeat reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel consistently does good work. “After 125 years, Bethlehem Lutheran Church holds last service” is the latest example. It was one of those stories that I came across via a Google alert, expecting it to be a boring depiction of what happened to cause a church to shutter its doors. Usually those stories are only exciting if they involve some type of doctrinal or financial corruption. But this was an amazingly engaging story... Read more
I didn’t know much about the Rt. Rev. David Leighton — the 11th diocese of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland — before reading the recent Baltimore Sun news article about the funeral rites held in his honor. In fact, while this may be hard to believe, I think it would be accurate to say that I knew less about this man after reading the Sun article than I knew before reading it. I certainly had more questions afterwards. How is... Read more
GetReligion
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In