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The Associated Press wrote an interesting man-bites-dog story about religious conflict in Israel. According to the wire service, Orthodox Jews burned hundreds of copies of the New Testament:
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a Newsday story that examined a trend of older men entering the seminary and becoming ordained in a New York diocese. The otherwise solid story failed to examine whether the bishop had contributed to the influx of seminarians and ordinations. In response, faithful GR reader FW Ken wrote that the personal involvement of the bishop encouraged vocations:
Nobody doubts that religion plays a big role in the Iraq War. Yet few reporters, or at least the ones I have read, have shown the extent to which religion plays a role in the conflict.
David Gonzalez of The New York Times wrote a curiously incomplete story. He reported that a group of priests in the New York archdiocese resent Cardinal Edward Egan for reassigning them unilaterally. But he failed to explain why the priests are upset.
Reporters have pointed out that the California Supreme Court’s decision to redefine the state’s marriage laws is premised on the idea that homosexuality should be treated no differently than race. Now Maura Dolan of The Los Angeles Times fills in details about this assertion.
The California Supreme Court, you might have heard, changed my native state’s definition of marriage. Marriage had been defined as the union between one man and one woman. Now marriage is defined as the union between two people of any gender.
We at Get Religion have urged reporters to use a diversity of sources — a catholicity you might say. Interview activists, church figures, and academics. Scan church documents and laws.
Since the 2004 elections, evangelicals’ relations with the Republican Party have been, to say the least, uneasy. The botched nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, the Bush administration’s lack of interest in pushing for a federal marriage amendment, the initial popularity of Rudy Giuliani as a GOP presidential contender — on these and other issues, the relationship has been less like that of a happily married couple and more like that of quarreling lovers.
Everyone knows that few Christians in Britain worship regularly. But The London Times revealed the severity of this trend. As Ruth Gledhill reported,
