Christianity

"(T)his is a loving, caring Jesus," is how the New York Times recently profiled a leading man in a play about abortion written by a Notre Dame grad. The script dialogue includes a woman asking Christ: "Did you ever say, 'I'm Jesus, and I say that stupid girls who let guys talk them into going to the back seat of their cars have to have babies?' Did you say that ever?" "No," Jesus replies.

As Christians observe Holy Week and the anticipation of Easter, PBS' Frontline program will air another investigation into abuse by clergy of the Catholic Church. In an episode entitled, "The Silence," the program (Tue. 4/19/11) is scheduled to profile the awful abuse from decades ago of under-aged Native Americans and Eskimos in Alaska. The network claims that it is covering "a little-known…

In 1966, Time magazine's April 8 cover story famously asked "Is God Dead?" Forty-five years later the magazine is still hard at work attempting to discredit traditional Christian faith, with former Newsweek writer Jon Meacham exploring the question  "Is Hell Dead?" Meacham doesn't answer the question definitively but used the raging controversy over Michigan pastor Rob Bell's new book "Love…

The following is cross-posted from Human Events, where Mattera serves as editor. Christian conservatives often decry the silencing of faith by major network television.  But Sunday night on CBS’ hit reality TV series “Undercover Boss,” people of faith had their breath taken away by what they witnessed, sparking a Facebook and Twitter avalanche of support and praise.  On Facebook, Kini Se…

On February 24, Washington Post reporter John Wagner sympathetically covered leading Maryland Democrats (and Catholics) for crossing their hierarchy to lobby for "gay marriage" -- without seeming to contact this hierarchy. So when Wagner sympathetically profiled House Speaker Michael Busch -- again -- at the top of the April 11 Style section, the primary question was: How was this "news," a…

If Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite actually believed in Hell, she'd probably preach that Tea Partiers were headed there unless they repented and backed higher taxes and more government spending. The liberal seminary professor and Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" contributor last Wednesday lashed out at the "fundamentalism" of Tea Party calls for fiscal restraint, insisting that conservative…

"Evangelical Liberty University received half a billion dollars in federal aid money: One conservative college got more government cash than NPR last year." That's the misleading headline for Alex Pareene's April 5 War Room blog post at Salon.com. Adding insult to inaccuracy, Pareene slandered the late Jerry Falwell -- without a link to corroborating evidence -- as an apartheid supporter…

With the looming possibility of a government shutdown and today's Republican 2012 budget proposal, you can expect the media to be hard at work amplifying the complaints of liberal Democrats that conservative-proposed budget cuts are extreme. Even newspaper sections or online features generally disconnected from politics are picking up on the meme. Take the Chicago Tribune's The Seeker blog, a…

Burning a copy of the Koran is morally equivalent to flying a plane into the World Trade Center and equally eternally damnable. That's essentially the fatwa of Time magazine's Joe Klein in an April 1 blog post at the magazine's Swampland blog. Klein was condemning Florida pastor Terry Jones's "trial" and subsequent burning of a Koran which allegedly have sparked a murderous rampage against…

It’s a discussion for another day as to why those entrusted with the delivery of news so stubbornly refuse to cover the very deadly war being waged at this very moment against Christianity in the Middle East. The aggressors are radical Islamists, the victims Christians, especially those wearing the cloth. Every week another report detailing another attack seeps through the wall of non-…

A best-selling book recounting a four-year-old child's claims to have briefly visited Heaven while under anesthesia for an appendectomy has "On Faith" contributor Susan Jacoby on a tear. "There really is such a thing as American exceptionalism: we are more gullible than the public in the rest of the developed world," Jacoby groused in a March 30 "The Spirited Atheist" post, part of the "On…

Never let it be said that Showtime ignores Christianity. In fact, the network that aired "The Tudors" is getting into the spirit of Lent and gleefully calling to mind some of the Catholic Church's centuries-old sins. "The Borgias" is Showtime's new 10-part miniseries about the infamous 15thCentury Italian family of that name, and about a dark period in the history of the Church. Rodrigo…

On Tuesday's In the Arena on CNN, Bill Maher channeled the far left's frustration with President Obama: "This is one of my big problems with our president. He never blames the Republicans for anything. He's their best friend....There's an oil rig that blows up in the Gulf of Mexico, and the party of drill, baby, drill does not get blamed." Host Eliot Spitzer also joined Maher in bashing the Tea…

As we've noted time and again, "On Faith" -- a Washington Post/Newsweek-run religion news and discussion website -- is biased against, if not outright hostile to traditional religious belief, particularly traditional Christian theology. This weekend's "Discussion" section topic provided more evidence of that. Examining the controversy over Michigan pastor Rob Bell's book "Love Wins: A Book…