Davison's Doodle

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, 2013

With 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.