Christianity

The Huffington Post is promoting a positive review of Colm Toibin’s blasphemous play “The Testament of Mary” by Religion News Service reporter Charles Austin, who bizarrely claimed the bitterly anti-Catholic Irish writer is just like a preacher in imagining how “biblical heroes” acted between the lines. “Preachers do it every Sunday in their sermons.” Which preachers echo Toibin in…

Bill Maher on HBO's Real Time Friday made a statement that will make the Right cheer as the left predictably cringes. After his guest Brian Levin - the director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino - said of the Boston bombings and how it relates to radical Islam, "We have hypocrites across faiths, Jewish, Christian who say they're…

ABC is really proud of its hoax "exclusive." Tuesday's Nightline and Wednesday's Good Morning America hyped an interview with the man who allegedly perpetrated an elaborate fiction, smearing Pastor Joel Osteen as renouncing his Christian faith. GMA's Elizabeth Vargas touted, "...The hoaxer is explaining why he did it in an exclusive interview with ABC's David Wright." [See video below. MP3…

Social liberalism continues to dominate the New York Times. Reporter Jess Bidgood didn't even blink over the controversy of a Planned Parenthood-affiliated student group distributing condoms on a Catholic campus, Boston College, in Monday's "Ban on Free Condoms Jeopardizes Student Group’s Work With Catholic College." Bidgood led off with libertine language from the condom-pushers: Chelsea…

During the highly publicized exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham on gay marriage, O'Reilly made this statement: "There are Bible thumpers, and all they do is say, 'I object to gay marriage because God objects to it.' You don't win a policy debate in America with that." Really?

Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion is amazed that people would say the most notable, memorable thing evangelical preacher Rick Warren ever did was give the invocation at President Obama's first Inauguration. Warren's son Matthew committed suicide on Saturday. "Not having heard of Warren prior to 2008 means that you had to have been in utero (or high school, or something similar) during 2002 or…

"I never thought I would write these words, but I agree with Bill O’Reilly (in part)." That's how Center for American Progress senior fellow and liberal theologian Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite opened her latest column for the Washington Post "On Faith" section, "Thumping the Bible: O’Reilly, gay marriage, and theology." Brooks Thistlethwaite was praising the Fox News anchor for "vigorously…

Late last year, NPR already proved its affinity for publicizing a vicious tale where the Virgin Mary is turned into a bitter atheist who denies the divinity of Jesus and hates the Apostles for trying to spread Christianity. But NPR proved it again....on Good Friday. The news “hook” is the forthcoming Broadway adaptation, a one-woman monologue, set to open on April 22. So NPR obviously timed…

On Thursday, Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog pointed out CBS's "major mistake" on the March 31, 2013 edition of Sunday Morning. On the Easter Sunday broadcast, Martha Teichner confused two biblical figures with the same name when she stated that "only one of the Gospels places Mary at the crucifixion, alongside the so-called 'beloved disciple' – possibly John the Baptist." Actually,…

Last week, I gave 12 examples of how religious liberty has been assaulted in just the past two years in the U.S. Here are about two dozen more instances just for good measure, as reported by the Family Research Council, the office of Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., and various media outlets. —The following public institutions recently have joined the growing ranks of those that have banned the use…

The mainstream media are in love with Pope Francis, but it's not because of his conservative theology. It's because they see him as a potentially liberal pioneer for the Catholic Church. On Saturday’s CBS This Morning, the network ran a story that cheered on the pope in his supposed struggle against more traditional voices within the church. Vatican correspondent Allen Pizzey drew the…

Who says the New York Times is ignorant of religion? Elisabetta Povoledo is a Rome-based reporter for the paper's international edition, but either she or her copy editor made a mortifying mischaracterization of the meaning of Easter in an online story on Pope Francis posted Monday: "Pope Calls for ‘Peace in All the World’ in First Easter Message."

At the Weekly Standard's blog today, Daniel Halper relayed a pool reporter's notes from the Easter service President Barack Obama and his family attended this morning. The highlights from the Rev. Dr. Luis Leon's sermon" included the following statement: "It drives me crazy when the captains of the religious right are always calling us back ... for blacks to be back in the back of the bus ...…

As religious people are bludgeoned with secular views by America's media practically 24/7, it would be nice if they could be given a break on their holiest days. George Stephanopoulos clearly doesn't feel that way for on Easter Sunday he invited an atheist on ABC's This Week to join a panel discussion about - wait for it! - religion (video follows with transcript and commentary):