Category Archives: Currents

A New York Times piece on Mormons’ game-changing role in Senate approval of ENDA this week exemplified what smart religion coverage should be and do.  The most prominent political figures in a religious movement that threw its weight behind California’s … Continue reading →

An October 30 article in the Los Angeles Times reports on a UN population study on child marriage and frames the problem as a primarily economic one. The 7.3 million babies born each year to girls under the age of 18 … Continue reading →

NPR’s story on a local election in El’ad, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli town, is great as far as it goes; it just does’t go very far. Reporter Emily Harris’ four minute audio clip focuses on why two mothers are challenging community … Continue reading →

  Today’s WP article on Jerusalem’s mayoral race, to be decided on October 22, strangely sidesteps many of the deep religious and cultural divisions in that city. While noting that the incumbent multi-millionaire Nir Barkat has a reputation as a secularist … Continue reading →

During a recent trip to Nigeria, I traveled by road from Jos, a religiously mixed university town in the middle of the country, to Sokoto, seat of the 200-year-old Sufi caliphate that shapes the dominant Muslim culture in the country’s … Continue reading →

A middle-aged man, I was decidedly in the minority at an 11am weekday screening of “Gravity” at the Grove, one of the open-air consumerist Potemkin villages that began sprouting in Los Angeles and other Sunbelt cities just before the economic … Continue reading →

Today’s LATimes reports that American “officials” fear that “radical Islamists could take root in Syria.” Their concern has been piqued by the Al Nusra Front, a militant Islamic group allied with al-Qaida that seeks to replace the Assad government with … Continue reading →

In its coverage of Somalis in Nairobi facing a backlash in the wake of the Westgate Mall attack that left 67 dead and more than 200 wounded last month, the Washington Post inexplicably leaves out the potent subject of religion from … Continue reading →

In his speech at the U.N. this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose to bury the lede (the Palestinian issue remains by far the largest obstacle to peace in Israel-Palestine) and rant instead about the new Iranian president’s efforts at … Continue reading →