George Cornell, the late and revered religion writer for the Associated Press, did one of his best stories before he died in 1994: An account on how people spend millions on sports, but billions on religion.
He added up the gate receipts in a given year of the 10 most-watched sports in America and compared those with giving statistics in the country’s 10 largest denominations. Religion outspent sports by far as peoples’ biggest source of weekend entertainment.
Not only is religion big business, it’s big news, which is why we felt it was about time this newspaper premiered a religion blog. It’s not the first to do so in the secular media. About 30 outlets are ahead of us on this one. But, better late than ”¦
Today, Dec. 3, is an appropriate launch date for Belief Blog, one day after the first Sunday in Advent and one day before Hanukkah. We did some mulling over the title and decided for alliteration and simplicity (although I do think one editor’s suggestion of “Papal Bull” could have attracted attention a lot quicker.)
I plan to make this stand out amongst many of the current faith blogs, many of which are little more than daily religion digests with uplinks. Not here. I’m aiming at something closer to Ruth Gledhill’s Articles of Faith blog in the London Times that has juicy details not in the dead tree version.