Religion

No one likes to see his religion trashed, and from everything we have learned about [the PBS documentary] "The Life of Muhammad," Muslims have nothing to worry about. The New York Daily News says the film could be subtitled "Islam 101," boasting that "If it helps with greater understanding, it has done its job." A professor who appears in the series praises it for its "balance." However, a…

Imagine a generally conservative evangelical figure switching his party affiliation from Republican to Democratic because in his view the 2012 Republican Convention's array of speakers and the party's platform convinced him that he could no longer in good conscience be affiliated with a political party which he believed steadfastly aligned itself with sinful positions on say care for the poor…

Two reporters at the Associated Press covering the trial of the alleged (but really confessed) perpetrator of the Ft. Hood massacre still believe there is a "key but difficult question" which needs to be answered: "Why did Maj. Nidal Hasan attack his fellow soldiers in the worst mass shooting ever on a U.S. military base?" Although the narrative of Nomaan Merchant and Michael Graczyk is…

Left-wing radio host and MSNBC weekend denizen Ed Schultz made it abundantly clear yesterday that he is fed up with "phony Christians" in the Republican Party who "hide behind their plastic Jesus." Schultz also touted himself as a Christian before questioning the born-again faith of GOP Senator Ted Cruz, thereby demonstrating that religious hypocrisy is not the exclusive province of those he…

The Leadership Conference of Women Religious begins its annual assembly today in Orlando. The group of Catholic nuns from various orders is certain to be considering a response to the Vatican’s finding that LCWR’s liberal activism strays from Church doctrine on a variety of issues. But the sisters probably aren’t too worried. They have something the Vactican doesn’t – a friendly news media.

The Washington Post reporter today that Mayor Vince Gray (D-Washington, D.C.) confirmed it was he who pressured gospel singer Donnie McClurkin to back out of Saturday's city-sponsored concert honoring the late Martin Luther King, Jr. McClurkin was the target of local gay activists because of comments he made in 2002 in which he testified about how he used to practice homosexuality but repented…

On Friday, I noted how ostensibly objective religion reporter David Gibson of Religion News Service has been tapped by Sister Simone Campbell to co-author her memoirs. Proceeds from the project will go into the coffers of NETWORK, Campbell's left-leaning "social justice" organization. Campbell, you may recall, addressed the Democratic National Convention last year and was a mini-celebrity on…

On Monday, the perilously liberal Huffington Post put the following headline on its front page: 6 Famous Documentaries That Were Shockingly Full Of Sh*t   Unbelievably, one of the films totally lambasted in the piece was - wait for it! - Bill Maher's "Religulous" from 2008 (serious vulgarity alert):

Friday’s Washington Post carried a large article with color photographs of  Jesus-bashing author Reza Aslan called “The Book of Reza.” Post reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia mocked “the astonishingly absurd questions lobbed at him” by Fox News religion correspondent Lauren Green, asking why a Muslim would write about Jesus. Aslan told the Post he held Fox in low esteem (like almost every leftist…

Imagine the hand-wringing that would ensue among secular journalists were Franklin Graham or Bishop Harry Jackson to write a memoir with a mainstream media religion reporter on board as a credited co-author. Surely much ado would be made about an ostensibly objective journalist assisting a politically engaged, conservative clergyman to write a book the proceeds of which would go into his…

The Guardian is unapologetically left-of-center editorially, but being a British publication, its geographical and cultural separation from the journalistic elite on this side of the pond helps inoculate it from venerating the sacred cows and cozying up to the favored pundits of the liberal media here in the States. A prime example of that is Stuart Kelly's review of UC Riverside professor…

In Sunday's edition, the Washington Post perhaps unintentionally did conservative critics of Reza Aslan a favor by printing liberal religion scholar Stephen Prothero's review of the UC Riverside creative writing professor's new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. "Aslan is more a storyteller here than a historian" who doesn't bring "much new here other than [his] slick…

Saturday evening, a friend suggested that I watch the midnight rerun of Judge Jeanine Pirro's Fox News program for her interview segment with a Democrat and a Republican about this weekend's closing of 22 embassies overseas in response to terrorist threats. Ryan Clayton was the Democrat whose arguments blaming George W. Bush's administration for the current level of threats in the Middle East…

One of the most inaccurate things that secular reporters do in reporting on homosexuality and religion is in putting the words “devout” and “gay” right next to each other – even when it’s clear that the sympathetic gay characters in their stories are shedding their religious traditions in favor of their gay identity. The New York Daily News carried a story with the headline “Shahar Hadar, 34…