In a special year-end edition, Weekend Plug-in counts down the Top 10 most popular Religion Unplugged stories from the past 12 months.
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“Religion is more than simply attending services; it is in the way we behave towards others,” Youngman said. “Showing religion in action and how it has affected culture, art and life around the world is important. My articles for Religion Unplugged show it at work quietly within the communities across Europe, and those stories can inspire others.”
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It’s the best of the Godbeat, 2025 version. Many of the nation’s top religion journalists pick their top piece of the year.
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“My stories for Religion Unplugged are important because they offer readers a nuanced understanding of a complex region often reduced to simplistic narratives,” Iqbal said. “The website amplifies original, deeply reported stories that reveal how religion has become central to social and political developments.”
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(REVIEW) What does it mean when we finds moral clarity from not just punishing criminals, but making it a spectacle? When the most reviled offenders are exposed and humiliated in public view, few feel compelled to object. After all, who would defend a child sex predator? All this is examined in a new must-see Paramount+ documentary.
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What you choose to read matters. Only together can we can combat misinformation and uplift reporting that informs rather than inflames.
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(ANALYSIS) “News as we have hitherto known it has died and been laid to rest.” So wrote illustrious former BBC war correspondent Martin Bell, ending his autobiography, “War and the Death of News.” He was not writing the BBC’s obituary, but he could have been. No, he was arguing the BBC no longer knew the difference between fairness and neutrality.
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Once again, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops gathered for debates and votes with serious implications for the current occupant of the White House and his supporters.
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(ANALYSIS) The Oversight Board, a body making precedent-setting content moderation decisions on the social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, issued a decision calling on Meta to mitigate information asymmetries in armed conflicts. The Oversight Board is a body examining whether Meta’s decisions are in line with its policies, values and human rights commitments.
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As we enter the final two months of the year, I want to take a moment to thank you — for reading, for sharing and for supporting our work.
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While most episodes of “Crossroads” focus on religious issues in news coverage, this week’s podcast was quite different. The hook for my discussion with host Todd Wilken was a New York Times interview in which Hopkins described, in often cryptic language, an “epiphany” that made him the man and movie legend that he is today.
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What do you know? If you go to a typical online dictionary and look up the verb “drawl,” you will find, “to speak slowly with vowels greatly prolonged.”
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If the president of the United States boards Air Force One for a dramatic trip to Israel — in the larger symbolic region often called the “Holy Land” — please consider putting at least one or two skilled religion-beat specialists on the airplane.
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A reporting trip to middle-of-nowhere western Idaho got our Weekend Plug-in columnist thinking about the speck-on-the-map places that chasing stories takes him.
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The bottom line: Weiss (a liberal Jew who is married to another woman) has demonstrated a strong belief that real religious believers, acting on real religious beliefs, can shape real news events in the real world.
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After 40-plus years on the Godbeat, let me offer this observation: It’s extremely difficult to write about ancient, complex, often mysterious religious beliefs and doctrines in language that is both accurate and easily understandable in the mainstream media.
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(ANALYSIS) Twenty years after Katrina’s landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, the hurricane remains one of the biggest disasters in American history: 1,392 deaths, and damage of about $200 billion (in 2025 dollars). This will be a week of remembrance in New Orleans. We’ll probably hear a lot about the scope of the loss and the failures in response.
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The brouhaha over a certain country-themed restaurant/store’s brand redesign touches on a topic that churches encounter at some point. “Someone in your congregation should want to get a cap or t-shirt with your logo on it, and wear it,” said author Mark MacDonald. “It actually represents them, since they are the church.” It goes much deeper than a shirt and expands beyond the church’s walls.
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(ANALYSIS) International lawyers from a U.K.-based Doughty Street Chambers and Howard Kennedy raised the dire situation of Iranian journalists globally, with several of them being subjected to serious threats. According to their statement, over the past six weeks, Iranian authorities have intimidated and threatened 45 journalists and 315 of their family members.
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Legendary journalist Jerry Mitchell reflects on faith and journalism. “The church is supposed to take care of sin,” Mitchell says. “We’re not supposed to wink at it or cover it up.”
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