Anglican Mainstream

By Adam Sherwin, Independent

Religion should be incorporated into “reality” television shows in order to increase understanding of other faiths, the Archbishop of Canterbury has claimed.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, who was enthroned in March, warned of “dangerous” consequences if religion disappeared from television schedules. Broadcasters who force religion to the margins are helping to “cultivate ignorance”, the Archbishop said.

He praised the ITV documentary series, Strictly Kosher, which featured an internet-dating Rabbi and a flamboyant fashion boutique owner based in Manchester’s orthodox Jewish community, for “stitching” religion into everyday life.

Referring to the growth of reality TV shows from Castaway to I'm A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, he told the Radio Times: “Over the past decade, a little English word has become synonymous with broadcasting that puts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances: ‘reality.’

“In this context, reality can often mean people putting their lives on hold, flying off to a desert island, and taking part in bewildering challenges. But there is another kind of reality broadcasting – one that I think delves far deeper into the questions of who we are, what we are, and why we are.”

Read here

By Bethany Monk, CitizenLink

By Matt Philbin, LifeSite News

that didn’t last long. In fact, it barely happened at all. After a month of ignoring the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of murdering one woman and seven infants, it looked like the media had been shamed into covering the story.

By George Conger, Get Religion

Last week my colleague at GetReligion Mollie Hemingway broke the American media blockade surrounding the Kermit Gosnell trial. Mollie, and Kirsten Powers writing in USA Today, reported on the absence of national press coverage of the trial of the Philadelphia abortionist — questioning why reporters who never tired of Sandra Flake or Komen Foundation stories shied away from this national news item.

But British readers must know about the case of Dr Kermit Gosnell, which has been played down in the American media – possibly because the allegations of a homicidal abortion doctor don’t fit into their pro-choice narrative.

By Melanie Phillips, Mailonline

Yesterday's BBC Radio 4 Today programme informed us that Brighton's local public health agency may introduce what is euphemistically called a drug 'safe consumption room', otherwise known as a 'shooting gallery'.

The purpose of such places is to enable addicts to 'shoot up' on heroin and crack cocaine under supervision, without fear of prosecution.

Brighton has one of the highest drug-related death rates in the UK, and is where more than one in four has used drugs — double the national average.

Now it is being invited by a self-described 'independent drug commission' to consider becoming the first British city to open such a shooting gallery.

The commission claims this would reduce drug-related harm.

But this could not be more wrong. Successive governments have refused to sanction such shooting galleries because they have correctly judged that they would, in fact, create more harm.

Such places normalise, institutionalise and thus encourage the continued use of hard drugs.

Read here

From NBC News

A doctor whose abortion clinic was a filthy, foul-smelling "house of horrors" that was overlooked by regulators for years was charged Wednesday with murder, accused of delivering seven babies alive and then using scissors to kill them.

Hundreds of other babies likely died in the squalid clinic that Dr. Kermit Gosnell ran from 1979 to 2010, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams said at a news conference.

"My comprehension of the English language can't adequately describe the barbaric nature of Dr. Gosnell," he added.

Williams said he might seek the death penalty for Gosnell, who with nine of his associates, including his wife, was arrested on Wednesday.

Gosnell was charged with murder, infanticide, conspiracy, abortion at 24 or more weeks and other charges.

Pennsylvania law prohibits abortion after 24 weeks except to save the life of the mother or avoid serious health risk to her.

In a nearly 300-page grand jury report filled with ghastly, stomach-turning detail, prosecutors said Pennsylvania regulators ignored complaints of barbaric conditions at Gosnell's clinic, which catered to poor, immigrant and minority women in the city's impoverished West Philadelphia section.

Read here

Read also: On Kermit Gosnell by Bill Muehlenberg

by John Jalsevac, LifeSite News

It’s gruesome. It’s dramatic. It’s arguably the abortion-related story of the decade.

It's the murder trial of "House of Horrors" abortionist Kermit Gosnell. And the mainstream media is almost completely ignoring it.

But cracks are beginning to show in what pro-life activists argue can only plausibly be explained as a deliberate blackout by a largely pro-abortion media of one of the biggest stories of 2013.

Recently 21 leaders in the pro-life and conservative movements signed a statement denouncing national broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC for failing to give so much as a nod to the Gosnell trial.

Now they have been joined by a U.S. Congressman and a leading feminist columnist.

In a statement on the House floor today, Rep. Scott Perry, R-PA, slammed President Obama and the media for turning a blind eye to Gosnell’s alleged misdeeds.

"Mr. President, your silence is deafening," Rep. Perry said today, according to The Hill. "Are you so blind, are you so intractable, are you so extreme that you yourself can't even call this out for what it is, something that is reprehensible? Pro-life or pro-choice, this is reprehensible.

"It is worthy of your attention," he said. "It is worthy of your leadership. It is worthy of your direction."

"The media doesn't want to talk about it," Perry added. "Not NBC, CBS, ABC, CNBC, not Fox, and not the leaders of our nation, not the president."

Read here

By Katie Yoder, LifeSite News

As thousands trekked across the country this week to protest at the Supreme Court while justices heard arguments on Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the media did the same by voicing their own opinions. From the networks to online news sites, so-called neutral journalists twisted coverage in support of gay marriage.

By Mollie Hemingway, Get Religion

Yesterday some of us got a bit academic (and some of us practiced calling people bigots) as we discussed media coverage of the efforts to change marriage from an institution built on sexual complementarity to an institution built on sexual orientation.

By John Bingham, Telegraph

A Bishop last night accused the BBC of deliberately provoking Christians by screening a documentary on Good Friday suggesting that Jesus had a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the former bishop of Rochester, said the programme, presented by Melvyn Bragg would be “hugely offensive” to devout Christians because it amounted to the “sexualisation of Christ”.

He said it was all the more upsetting because it is being screened at midday on Good Friday – the moment the Bible says Jesus was put on the cross.

Last night one Christian group issued an alert to its supporters urging them to contact the BBC’s complaints line.

Lord Bragg, who describes himself as “no longer a believer”, argues that Mary’s close relationship with Jesus was effectively airbrushed out of the accepted Biblical account by “misogynist” Romans.

He points to a series of ancient writings known as the Gnostic Gospels which were not included in the agreed list of books which became the New Testament.

They include references to Mary being “kissed on the mouth” by Jesus, being his favourite and even, as one passage suggests, his wife.

The suggestion that Mary had a sexual relationship with Jesus lies behind the storyline of the Hollywood film The Last Temptation of Christ, which provoked a scandal, and more recently the Da Vinci Code, the best-selling novel by Dan Brown.

Read here

From The Christian Institute

By David Lindsay

A tiny handful of apparent disciples of Fred Phelps outside the United States Supreme Court got coverage in this country. Although of course even they were not actually interviewed, unlike the other side.
 
But hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated in defence of traditional marriage in a capital city a short train ride from London might as well have been rallying on the dark side of the Moon.

by Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

I have always loathed the compulsory mateyness of Red Nose Day. Charity should be done in secret, not used to polish the images of showbiz figures and the grotesquely ill-managed BBC.

It also suffers from the default Leftism of modern ‘comedy’.

The quickest way to a laugh is to use the F-word, and many alleged jokes trade on the fact that some people still hate swearing, love their country and – horrors – believe in God. Insult them, and the mob will cackle.

No need to make an effort or be truly witty. At any time of day, a real funny man would have refused to perform the embarrassingly bad lines, full of coarseness and crudity, mouthed by Rowan Atkinson on ‘Comic Relief’, which might as well be renamed ‘Vomit Release’ if this is the best it can do.

He would have done so not on the grounds of decency, but because he was ashamed to be associated with such poor, weak stuff. Whose idea was it to mock Christianity? Mr Atkinson’s brother Rodney has revealed that the alleged comedian has supported the church in private life. So why attack it in front of a crowd?

Even ten years ago, these events would have caused an enormous row, not the mild media tremor they actually brought about. We have been shocked so much that we are numb. What worries me is this: if this could happen in 2013, what will be considered normal in 2023?

Read here

By Ann Widdecombe, Daily Express

THE BBC just doesn’t get it.

Its idea of a family show for Comic Relief was filth before the watershed and the programme-makers were so hopelessly in thrall to the without-sex-and-swearing-it-isn’t-any-good culture that they appear to have been taken by surprise at the strength of audience reaction.

What is the conversation like in their own households?

Do they discuss vajazzles with their eight-year-olds?

Or do they crack jokes about the Bible and sex with their children before dropping them off at primary school?

If not, then why do they assume they can say these things with impunity in front of other people’s children?

I was asked to take part in a scene so grossly offensive that it should have been unthinkable to approach an elderly practising Catholic but they don’t think, believing naively that their humour is universal and that everyone seeks fun in filth.

BBC bosses believe that raising money for charity justifies anything.

Read here

By David Green, Civitas

In the great struggle now taking place over press freedom, the choice is not between self-regulation and political regulation. It is between regulation open to manipulation by ruling politicians; and regulation that is independent of both the newspaper industry and the political class.

The royal-charter solution to press regulation might have been workable, but the calibre of the political class today is such that it is best not to add in any way to the temptations it faces. Ruling parties want to keep power and, in pursuit of their goal, have shown themselves willing to fiddle all manner of public information, including the crime statistics, school exam results, and NHS death rates. Without a free press, we would never have found out. Under the proposed regime, any excuse to suppress valid press criticism will be seized on.

Read here

Read also:  Announcing OfBlog – the mother of all quangos from Cranmer

Backlash grows over press curbs: Cracks start to show after just one day as newspapers refuse to sign up by James Chapman, Mailonline

From The Christian Institute

The BBC will broadcast an Easter programme saying the way Britain treats gay people is like the crucifixion of Jesus.

Critics say the BBC has sunk “to a new low” by using the crucifixion to push a gay rights message.

The programme will be broadcast on Radio 4 as part of a series of lectures in the run up to Easter.

The lecture will be given by Benjamin Cohen – a gay rights activist and former Channel 4 News reporter.

He founded the gay news website, pinknews.co.uk, and has been campaigning for marriage to be redefined.

Mr Cohen will say that the words of Jesus on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, echo his own experience of rejection as a gay man.

But the Christian Institute has hit out at the BBC.

A spokesman said: “This is typical of the BBC’s socially liberal bias which tries to distort the Christian message at every turn.

Read here

From BBC News

This is the march for life which the mainstream media chose to ignore.  Read an account of it by Mollie Hemingway at Get Religion.

By George Conger, Get Religion

January has been a wonderful month for lovers of Anglican ecclesiastical drama. The resignation of Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury at year’s end should have led to a few month’s peace and quiet for the Church of England and the wider Anglican world. I had even thought of taking a vacation this month as little of substance appeared on the radar as of late December.

By Julian Mann

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) would not recognise the politically correct, theologically liberal distortion of his magnificent Roman Catholic sleuth, Father Brown, by the 21st century BBC in its current television series.

In one of the episodes written by a contemporary author, Father Brown defers to Hinduism in a way that Chesterton's character would never do. In dialogue with a Hindu, the BBC creation concedes that the miracles of Jesus should not be taken 'too literally'.

The original orthodox Christian writer of the wonderful Father Brown stories took a dim view of pantheism. In The Dagger with Wings, the villain tries to con Father Brown with a supernatural explanation for the murder he has committed, The murderer appeals to the idea, becoming fashionable amongst the English intelligentsia in the 1920s, that the world religions are simply different manifestations of one spiritual reality:

Read here