The reaction continues to roll in as the mainstream press surfs through the results of the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), the one that points to the rising wave of the post-denominational age in American religion. For background on the survey itself, click here to head over to ...

Here is an old, old story that has been bugging me for some time now, which is why it ended up in tmatt’s GetReligion Folder of Guilt. Then again, it’s an old, old story about and old, but very important news story. There is a good chance that the Washington Post team that worked on it d...

Last weekend, I poked the Los Angeles Times because it’s lede on the Dr. James Dobson retirement story went a bit too far. You may recall that it said: James Dobson is stepping down as chairman of Focus on the Family, the conservative religious group announced Friday — a change that come...

A GetReligion reader with an intense interest in history, especially in northern Africa and other regions bordering the Middle East, sent me the URL of to this haunting multi-media feature by CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson. Trust me, the text is enough. It is an interview with ...

The Divine MZ and I have decided to go shallow, for a day, in a blatant attempt to appeal to search engines. All jesting aside, I have always been interested — in a trying not to stare at a train wreck fashion — with the role of faith and moral issues in the career of Britney Spears. I m...

Day after day, the press releases and news reports flow into my inbox. They started late in the 2008 primary season and this digital tide tends to rise sharply in the hours just after One Of Those Appointments by the staff of President Barack Obama. You know the appointments that I’m talking a...

As you would imagine, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the Rocky Mountain News the past week, especially once the final word came down on the shutdown of the newspaper where I worked during most of the 1980s. I still have lots of friends out there and, of course, that is also the paper ...

Guess what? The new leader of the Catholic Archdiocese of New York is Catholic enough to make the collage of cardinals at the New York Times a bit miffed at his appointment, but flexible and corporate enough not to make the Gray Lady mad. I’m shocked, shocked, how about you? There’s all ...

When media critics — like me — start arguing about why mainstream journalists often fail to “get religion,” the discussions almost always turn into a discussion of the various biases that affect news coverage. In my summary of the biases — as detailed long, long ago in ...

When discussing the Anglican wars, one of GetReligion’s mantras is that reporters must struggle — even in short stories — to place these events in the context of church structures at the local, regional-diocesan, national and global levels. That’s the bad news. The problem fo...