Kind of a Big Deal
By Jeremy Lott The following is a list of the biggest religious newsmakers of 2013, not newsworthies. In compiling this list, we wanted to identify those figures who rocked the envelope, pushed the boat, tap danced on glass ceilings. Those who perhaps ideally deserved coverage didn't even register. You'd think that bias would push us toward flashy self-promoters across the board. Yet this turns out not to be the case. While Jesus's words that in Heaven "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" do not map perfectly onto the world of religion-flavored news, many figures who dominated the headlines this year did not expect to find themselves there. They were by no means all happy about it. Where appropriate, we recognized multiple people with one entry. We have two families, one broad group of... people, a pair of kings, two wild cards, several preachers, one politician and a dead man. We arrived at these names by reviewing the year of RealClearReligion headlines and other religion news coverage and seeing which names jumped out at us repeatedly. If after reading this list you think someone got robbed, by all means make the case. We make no claims of infallibility, unlike our first newsmakers. Jeremy Lott is editor-at-large of RealClearPolitics.
