Review of Benedict’s Book – Jesus of Nazareth
When people pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV news, they generally aren’t looking for a Sunday school lesson. This creates a challenge for journalists covering religious leaders, since most of their public utterances are devoted either to expounding their faith, or urging people to behave. The way reporters solve the problem is by combing through those utterances to find statements presumed to have broad, non-sectarian significance, normally because they apply to matters of politics or culture.
The result is that the real concerns of religious leaders, and the priority they assign to those concerns, often don’t come across terribly clearly — not because reporters aren’t doing their jobs, but because of how the news business works in a secular world. Recent coverage of Benedict XVI’s new book, Jesus of Nazareth, offers a good example. Read Full Review
