TIME magazine has come out with its list of the 10 top religion stories of 2008. The winner is a story about how religion did not tip the balance in the U.S. presidential election. U.S. media often publish this kind of list at the end of the year. Are there similar lists out there from other countries? Please let us know if you see them elsewhere.

Here are TIME’s top 10:

Have you seen this story in your local newspaper? Mumbai’s top Islamic clerics have refused to bury the nine Islamist militants killed during the three-day siege in the city. Declaring the rampage proved they could not have been true Muslims, they declared that no Muslim cemetery in India would accept them. A debate has broken out about what to do with the bodies, which according to Muslim custom should have been buried within a few hours of death.

(Photo: Palestinian funeral for Hamas militant killed fighting Israeli troops in Gaza, 17 Oct 2007/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

The reason I ask whether your local newspaper ran this story is that Muslims often say the media regularly link Islam and terrorism but rarely report when Muslims denounce acts of Islamist violence. There is some truth in this complaint, especially since Islam does not have central authorities, such as a pope, who can claim to speak in the name of all believers. Individual protests from small groups get lost in the flood of news. Some publications are also simply unwilling to print news that goes against their view of Islam as a violent religion, so it makes no difference there how many such protests are reported. They won’t believe them anyway.

This refusal to bury the Mumbai attackers is different. It is an original and bold protest against Islamist violence by religious authorities who would normally make sure any Muslim got a proper burial. “This is symbolically very important,” Mustafa Akyol, a columnist for the Hürriyet Daily News in Istanbul and an active Muslim blogger. “I’ve heard of imams declining to lead a prayer for the deceased because he was an outright atheist, but never of people being denied burial.”

This raises a few questions about religion and politics. Is it proper to deny a religious burial to the dead because they were extremists? Should religious leaders use the dead to make a political point?

(Photo: Mumbai Muslim leaders meet to denounce Islamist attacks, 2 Dec 2008/Punit Paranjpe)

Given the way Muslim protests against Islamist violence do not seem to attract much attention, is this a proper way for the religious authorities to dramatise their stand? And, as asked above, did you see this in your local newspaper? If not, do you think it should have been there?

By the way, this decision did not come out of the blue. Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, one of India’s leading Islamic groups, endorsed a fatwa against terrorism in early November. More than 6,000 clerics signed the edict, which follows a similar one issued in February by India’s top Islamic seminary, Darul Uloom Deoband.

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and its sister organization The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life have just released a study on the media coverage of religion in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. A summary of the findings with links to the whole report can be found here.

“Religion played a much more significant role in the media coverage of President-elect Barack Obama than it did in the press treatment of Republican nominee John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign, but much of the coverage related to false yet persistent rumors that Obama is a Muslim,” Pew said.

It added that there was scant scrutiny of the role of personal faith in the shaping of the candidates’ political values with the exception of Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The moose-hunting Alaska governor ignited the Republican Party’s conservative Christian base with her evangelical faith and her strong commitment to what many in the party see as “family issues” such as unwavering opposition to abortion rights.

Among its other key findings:

- Press narratives devoted to issues of faith accounted for four percent of the coverage of the general election campaign — less than the economic crisis at nine percent but equal to that devoted to race.

- Over 50 percent of the campaign stories on religion were focused on President-elect Obama and just nine percent on McCain. Much of the coverage of Obama focused on the persistent but false rumours that he was a Muslim. Coverage of Palin focused on her family values and church background.

- Culture war issues such as abortion and gay marriage were not driving narratives of this election cycle — no surprise to those who monitored the election closely.

What do you think about the media’s coverage of religious issues and the ‘08 White House race? Was there enough scrutiny in this area? And was it fair and balanced?

For the past 30 years or more, I have unintentionally been disappointing Christian Scientists on a regular basis. Whenever I was in the United States and came across a Christian Science Reading Room, I walked in and asked for the latest copy of the Christian Science Monitor. Behind the desk was usually a kindly older man or woman, probably a retired volunteer, and they seemed happy to see a young (and then not so young) person dropping by. They seemed even more pleased when I also took copies from the day before or the day before that. They often asked how I knew the paper and I’d say I used to subscribe when I was a grad student in Boston. With a kindly smile, they would then inquire if I was a Christian Scientist or wanted to learn more about Christian Science. I would say no, thank you very much, and leave.

I thought about these people today when I heard that the Christian Science Monitor will scrap its daily print run for web-only edition in April 2009 (plus a weekly in print). It’s been struggling for a while and circulation has fallen from the levels back in the early ’70s when I read it daily. But it continued to publish high-quality journalism and I enjoyed picking up a copy or two whenever I came across it.

For a church-related publication, the Monitor was curious in that it did not promote its own faith in its pages (apart, perhaps, from its lack of obituaries). There was just one daily religious feature on the Home Forum page, towards the back of the paper. Otherwise, it focused on serious analytical reporting of national and international news, especially foreign stories that mainstream American newspapers were not good at covering. It was a must-read for anyone interested in world affairs.

Even if there wasn’t much overtly religious about the Monitor, it did have an ethical dimension that shaped its character. It was launched in 1908 as a reply to the yellow journalism of the day and the church’s founder Mary Baker Eddy said it was “to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” It avoided sensationalism and spin and could take a day or two before writing about an event. This was a breath of fresh air even before 24/7 television news came our way.

So the end of the print daily may make readers a bit nostalgic (like WNYC’s John Hockenberry - listen here), but there’s a little silver lining for me and probably many other occasional readers over the years. We won’t have to disappoint those friendly people at the reading rooms anymore.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette is an American Catholic nun who is spunky despite her 106 years.  She was born in Manchester, New Hampshire on March 25, 1902 — when Republican Teddy Roosevelt was president  — and has been living (until recently) in obscurity in a convent in Rome.  The last time she voted was in 1952, for Dwight Eisenhower, another Republican. Now she is voting for Barack Obama. Read the Reuters story here and watch the CBS video to find out why.

Not surprisingly, the blogosphere has reacted with both praise and condemnation for Gaudette for backing a candidate who supports abortion rights.  Some readers even see the story as a kind of covert media campaigning for Obama. Last month a Roman Catholic with a much higher profile,  Archbishop Raymond Burke, a senior American official at the Vatican, caused a stir when he said the Democratic Party risked becoming a “party of death” because of its choices on abortion, embryonic stem cells and other bioethical questions.

With the Obama button on her habit and little American flag in hand, Sister Cecelia seems to be a perfect subject for a nice little story. Is that all this is? Or do you think her critics are right to read much more into this?

Some of Kosovo’s “crypto- Catholics” are slowly coming out of hiding. Pressured into accepting Islam centuries ago by the victorious Ottoman Turks, some families in this Balkan country maintained their Christian customs in private while passing as Muslims in public. Some of them returned to their ancestral faith in the late 19th century, after the Ottomans withdrew. Now, almost 10 years after Serbian rule ended, more have decided to go back to Roman Catholicism. The Church says the conversions now run into the thousands.

Finding these Catholics for a feature was not too hard. At a local church in Pristina, priests provided information on people who had converted and names of other churches where it had happened.

The Sopi family in the central Kosovo town of Klina, which was highlighted in the feature, was initially wary of talking to the international media after a story in the local newspaper led their Muslim neighbours to regard them differently now. But after a long chat, they agreed to an interview as long as it was neither taped nor photographed.

There have been 32 converts in the Sopi family over the past few months. “We have asked the authorities to give us land to build the church and have our own cemeteries,” said Ismet Sopi. He has had no answer yet. The issue of a Christian cemetery was especially important because burials had to be two-faced affairs in the past, he explained: “When someone died ,we were prayed as Catholics in our homes, but at cemeteries we had the imam for the burial ceremony.”

The village of Kravoserija in the south of the country has had a Catholic Church since 2005. People there are happy to be visited by the media. There are five people in the village who have the keys to open the new church and everyone there has their telephone numbers. “Call Ismet or Beke,” said a man working in his yard when I asked how to visit the church. Ismet was not home that day but Beke answered promptly. “Go at the church and I’ll be there in two minutes,” he said. And he was.

In the Kosovo capital Pristina, a new cathedral named after Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Theresa, an ethnic Albanian nun born in neighbouring Macedonia, is under construction. It was raining on the day I went to visit, but that didn’t stop the work. “I’m a Muslim and I’m fasting during this holy month of Ramadan. But work is work,” said Nexhat Osmani, a worker at the cathedral site. Once it is finished, the 70-meter-high cathedral will be the tallest building in town.

Around 90 percent of the Kosovo’s Albanian population is Muslim, with just four percent Roman Catholics.

Anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish feelings are rising in several major European countries, according to a survey by the Washington- based Pew Research Center’s Global Attitude Survey. Mike Conlon in our Chicago bureau has summed up the report here.

Apart from the figures themselves, what struck me most was the way the study says the trends are moving. Pew said the upswing in anti-Muslim feelings came mostly between 2004 and 2006, with some falls since then, while the upswing of feelings against Jews has come mostly between 2006 and 2008. Is this matched by facts on the ground, such as attacks on religious people and sites or increasingly discriminatory acts or agitation against religious minorities? Or is this a change in mood that need surveys like this to be perceived?

The news media tend to focus on actual examples of such prejudices, such as the recent anti-mosque campaign in Italy or suspected anti-Semitic attack on a young Paris Jew, since these are news events that reflect prejudices. This is admittedly an imperfect measure (which, by the way, is one reason why we also report surveys like this). We don’t claim to be able to cover such events so thoroughly that we could track trends like Pew does. Even with that proviso, I’m not sure I would have said that Europe saw a surge of anti-Muslim feeling between 2004 and 2006 and a surge of anti-Jewish feeling since then. The evidence from actual events is difficult to read.

A certain level of prejudice and violence against both groups is always present. But events seem to point towards upswings in anti-Muslim feeling more right after 9/11 and then in recent years with the growing anti-mosque movement and the Prophet Mohammad cartoons controversy. As for anti-Jewish feeling across Europe, the upswing in actual anti-Semitic acts and rhetoric seemed stronger at the start of the second Intifada early in this decade. Maybe the fact that this poll series began in the summer of 2002 skews the data.

Do you see upswings in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim feelings going the way Pew sketches them, or differently?

During a Vatican briefing this week on Pope Benedict’s trip to France, a television producer got up and asked the question that surely was foremost in the minds of many photographers and television crews struggling to hold back yawns as subjects such as France’s secular history were discussed:

Will Carla Bruni be at the airport to welcome the pope?

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi smiled. He said Carla Bruni’s husband — who happens to be Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France – had made it known that he might be at the airport. But he said he did not know if Bruni would be there. Heads of state usually wait for popes at their palaces but sometimes, to show their added respect for the pontiff, they also go to the airport.

In Paris, government officials confirmed Sarkozy would break protocol and greet Benedict at Orly airport, something he is not required to do because this is an official visit rather than a more formal state visit. They said they expected Carla to be there … but didn’t want to be quoted on that.

It seems wherever Sarkozy goes these days,  the visual media is less interested in him than in his current wife, the fomer Carla Bruni. The Italian-born singer, song writer and former supermodel who has been the darling of the media since she entered Sarkozy’s life late last year. Bruni, 40, married Sarkozy in February after a whirlwind three-month romance that started one month after Sarkozy, 53, divorced his second wife, Cecilia.

Carla, who has said she sees herself as being akin to the late U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was not married to Sarkozy when he last saw the pope in Rome in December, so she did not — to the disappointment of the media — accompany him. Sarkozy considers himself a “cultural Catholic” and attends mass only occasionally. Under Church law he is not allowed to take communion since he has not received annulments from his previous marriages.

The pope’s trip to Paris and Lourdes begins on Friday and the media surely will have more weighty political and religious subjects to consider. But for the visual media at least, the moment to die for– whether it takes place at the airport or the Elysée Palace or in Notre Dame Cathedral– will be that of Carla and the pope.

France wouldn’t be France if it didn’t satirise the high and mighty — especially when the target is none other than head of the Roman Catholic Church which once held so much power here.

With Pope Benedict due to arrive on Friday for his first official visit, the French satirical press is having a field day poking fun at him, Catholics, Church doctrine and anything else to do with religion. Being militantly anti-Catholic is a badge of honour for a certain type of secularist French intellectual, so this week’s editions of their favourite journals were bound to zero in on Benedict. But there’s an interesting twist…

Le Canard enchaîné (picture above), a weekly that mixes satire and investigative journalism, something like Private Eye in Britain, leads its front page with a spoof story claiming Benedict (Benoît XVI in French) has been listed in a controversial classified police registry dubbed Edvige. Pretty tame stuff. Its main scoop — the Canard is a must-read for Parisian political gossip — is the claim that President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to attend just about every important event during Benedict’s stay in France. Like many other anonymously sourced Canard scoops, this may or may not be true. Sounds likely, though…

The other satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, loves to provoke with much cruder fare. This is the magazine that reprinted the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad and was taken to court by French Muslims for defamation (it won easily, because free speech was bound to trump the Muslims’ charges of blasphemy in court). This week’s Numéro Spécial Pape (Special Pope Edition) won’t disappoint its readers. It has a long editorial denouncing the Church, cartoons satirising Sarkozy for speaking positively about religion and a list of planned anti-pope petitions and protests (all a safe distance from any papal events). There are also pages of polemical cartoons, some of them downright pornographic and insulting. The cover (at right) was the tamest of them all.

The most interesting aspect of this criticism, though, is what the French like to call the “non-dit” — the “unsaid”. There is much less snide criticism in the media now than there used to be. Just before the 1997 World Youth Day (WYD) in Paris, the media poured cold water on the idea and made fun of the Catholic Church and the ailing Pope John Paul. Commentators announced in advance that it would be a flop. In the end, it was a stunning success. The final Mass at Longchamp racetrack drew over a million Catholics, twice as many as expected.

“There was a change with the 1997 WYD. Catholics were proud to turn out in numbers,” explained Frédéric Lenoir, editor-in-chief of the bimonthly Le Monde des Religions. “All of a sudden, that gave the media — and French society in general — the feeling that religion was important now and one had to reckon with it. Contrary to what the sociologists had been saying for years, it wasn’t a phenomenon that was disappearing. To the contrary, it was a phenomenon that had never disappeared, it had just gone underground a bit.”

One and a half million euros ($2.1 million) for 24 hours in Paris? No, we’re not talking about some luxury visit, but the stopover that Pope Benedict will make on Friday and Saturday on his way to the shrine at Lourdes. The pontiff apparently did not even plan to visit the capital on his first trip to France, meant to mark the 150th anniversary of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary there. But the city’s archbishop, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, argued for a stop in the City of Light and Benedict agreed.

The Archdiocese of Paris has offered an interesting peek into the costs of a papal visit as part of a public appeal it made to Catholics to help foot the bill. The archdiocese expects to cover all costs without having to dip into its own funds. At a media briefing on Monday, it presented pie-charts (which the French call “camemberts”) breaking down projected expenditure and income. The costs for security, which must be considerable, are assumed by the state and not included in these totals.

On the cost side, the largest chunk of the 1.5 million euro budget — 52% — will go for 15 giant screens that will be set up along the left bank of the River Seine on Friday to show live broadcasts of the pope’s activities during the day. They will then be switched to the Espalanade des Invalides, a spacious green in western Paris, to transmit his Mass to the crowd of 200,000 expected there on Saturday morning.

The costs of the different liturgical celebrations — including new vestments and other equipment for the vespers in Notre Dame and the open-air Mass — will take up another 19% and logistical costs another 11%. Nine percent will go for the media centre at the Ecole Militaire and the final three percent for organisational costs.

What about those high Paris hotel prices? No problem — he’ll stay at the nunciature (Vatican embassy).

The faithful are expected to foot 72% of this bill in one way or another. Individual donations are due to cover 52% of the costs and the collection at the Mass should bring in another 20%. Private patrons shuld pay 15% of the total and commercial sponsors 10%. The last three percent should come from sales of souvenirs like the T-shirts advertised on the archdiocese’s website.