Category: Guest Column
Religion Blogs 2013
“Read more than one newspaper or journal. Seek out a diversity of ideas and opinions. If we’ve done our job you’ve leaned how to ask questions.” Chancellor Tucker offered those words and many others at my college graduation. I’m sure he said other important things, but these have stuck with me. Unfortunately, “corporate media” has made it more difficult to find a diverse world of informed opinions and ideas even as the Internet has opened up our access to the world of ideas. Amateur has come to mean something different in the information age yet there has been no formal “redefinition” of the word. I’m a fan of TEDtalks, of Fora.tv, of Patheos.com, of Huffington Post, and Haretz; but I also read Christianity Today and the Wall Street Journal.
The Huffington Post has a list of the best religion blog posts from 2013, their opinion, that is worth your time. You can see a headline about the each post and there are links to the post themselves. So, if you have some time check these out.
Sightings . . .
Here is a paragraph and link to Martin Marty’s latest Sightings. May God’s peace be upon us all in the days ahead. I recommend receiving this weekly from the Marty Center.
Religion 2013
Martin Marty | December 23, 2013With this release Monday’s Sightings says good-bye to 2013. Appropriately, I want to use this moment to take a retrospective look at religion-in-the-news during the past year.
The Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) was eight years old when, in 1957, I first tagged along with its pioneers as they investigated American religion. (See the reference below for Richard Ostling’s fine retelling of these pioneers’ struggles and successes from 1949 to 1974). Looking back, it is hard to picture the difficulties that religion newswriters faced in the early decades of their profession. Most newspaper editors equated religion with denominations, and relegated articles to a back page in the Saturday issue, where church advertisements were ghettoized. Now, religion-related stories daily make the front page, prime-time, and top blogs.