"What Christians do in the public square is still big news," writes John Warhurst in the Canberra Times. "Some Christian leaders lament their fall from grace. Others bewail that Christians are being pushed out of public debate, but that is not the case."

He goes on to say there can be little dispute that Christians, their leaders and their organisations, are still widely reported in the mainstream media. However Christians form as diverse and divided a community as Australia itself and when Christianity is reported in the media it seems to lack a figurehead to give the unity that brings greater political strength.

See also Warhurst's paper from 2006.

"My programs on religion would provide an unparalleled opportunity to hear the best and the brightest people articulate their religious traditions in a way that might foster the peace that Kung and others dreamt of.

"But the 1990s were anything but peaceful.

"Terrorism fuelled by Islamist extremism had already taken a toll at the World Trade Centre in 1993, resulting in over 1,000 injuries and six deaths.

"It would continue around the world ..."

Backstory: Rachael Kohn has covered religion and spirituality on radio and television at the ABC for 26 years.

Scott Kirkland in the Conversation:

We must protect people from harmful speech. Nobody has the right to harm another. This space must be hospitable. But the cause of freedom must exceed the creation of religious exemptions. We deserve a richer conversation over how to be free with rather than from one another.

Slate reports that the founders of FaithLeaks hope to shed light on corruption and cover-ups within other religious communities going forward.

“Our goal is to reduce the amount of deception and untruths and unethical behaviors that exist in some facets of religion,” Ryan McKnight told Religion News Service. “If someone is in possession of documents they feel deserve to be made public, we’re simply here to help facilitate that.”

(Update: Since 2019 stories have been published by the Truth and Transparency Foundation.)

Mark Woods, writing for Christian Today:

What often seems to be lacking in how religion is spoken about in the secular media is any sense of how it's actually experienced in the lives of believers. If you aren't one, you don't get that unless you've lived alongside and listened respectfully to those whose worldview is entirely different from your own.

Believers and non-believers are flocking in droves to challenging TV, like Godless, The Preacher, The Sinner, and darkest of all, The Handmaid’s Tale where men have all the power and there is no mercy for women and dissenters in "God's work".

ABC Radio National, God Forbid: Finding the holy in Hollywood.

From "Unknown unknowns", a review of three books in the New York Times.

Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers. Religion is an immense, sprawling and variegated affair. Any attempt to define it, however comprehensive, will omit some aspects, and most attempts to define it, however crude, will capture something ...

For Crane, the religious worldview is better understood as the combination of two attitudes. First: a sense of the transcendent, of an unseen moral order to the universe, often known as God. Second: an identification with a community that tries to “make sense of the world” by attempting to bring its members into alignment with this moral order through a tradition of narratives and rituals.

For his project "The Devoted", featured by the Guardian, photographer Michael Wickham made portraits of religious leaders and spoke to them about their faith’s relevance in modern society ...

Cynthia Pasquale for Colorado University Connections puts five questions to Stewart Hoover, who says:

Since 2006, I’ve looked more at how people’s identities and meanings are made out of an interaction between things like religion and the kinds of media they consume. I’m also interested in the fact that people are increasingly using media to do religion. That is the place where a lot of religious practice takes place, and that means traditional religious leaders and authorities don’t have the same kind of power they used to have.

Does a media event, attracting a powerful ritualisation of media coverage, also involve a media content sacralisation? Does the call for religious archetypes covered by dramatic events also involve a sacred perspective on those events and on their major actors? Does the mitologisation of the journalistic discourse bring along a sacred sense/meaning?

Call for papers for Third International Conference MEDIA and RELIGION Bucharest, 10-12 November 2017 on MEDIA, RELIGION and POPULAR CULTURE: from extraordinary to extra-ordinary.