During one of my college newspaper internships, the reporter who sat next to me told me nearly every day to flee journalism to find a more stable profession. He shares plenty of angst with others in the field, many of whom were watching their colleagues drop like flies in newsroom after layoffs and buyouts.

Anyone with a journalism background seems to have an opinion about the future of publishing, one that tends to be overly positive or terribly negative. In a new interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, New York Times media columnist David Carr seems to strike a nice balance between someone who sees the incredible possibilities for reporting but also see the economic realities in newsrooms. Here are some quotes from the transcript:

We are entering a golden age of journalism. I do think there has been horrible frictional costs, but I think when we look back at what has happened, I look at my backpack that is sitting here, and it contains more journalistic firepower than the entire newsroom that I walked into 30 to 40 years ago. It’s connected to the cloud, I can make digital recordings of everything that I do, I can check in real time if someone is telling me the truth, I have a still camera that takes video that I can upload quickly and seamlessly.

…I think that the ability to sit at your desk and check everything against history and narrative, it’s part of how newspapers ended up becoming … daily magazines. All the analytics are baked in because the reporters are able to check stuff as they go. … Now the business model has not kept up with that.

Those interested in the future of media might chuckle at his line about panels being the future of journalism. “The future of journalism is wearing badges and talking on panels, as far as I can tell,” he says.

Carr has been pretty open about his former drug and alcohol addictions, revealing a conversation he had with former executive editor Bill Keller about his memoir. “You know what, we don’t hire nuns. We have no problem with your book,” Keller told him. Gross finds a way to ask him about his faith, though she prefaces it by saying “This question will probably get too personal.” At about minute 28, she asks, “For a lot of people who are giving up an addiction, they’re encouraged to find a higher power … where it’s a religion or something else that will function in that way. Was there such a thing for you?” Carr says he’s in the middle of a struggle with religion.

I’m a churchgoing Catholic, and I do that as a matter of, it’s good to stand with my family. It’s good that I didn’t have to come up with my own creation myth for my children. It’s a wonderful … community. It’s not really where I find God. The accommodation I’ve reached is a very jury-rigged one, which is: All along the way, in [substance abuse] recovery, I’ve been helped without getting into specifics of names, by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. Not only is that not a general human impulse, but it’s not an impulse of mine. And yet, I found myself doing that over and over again. Am I, underneath all things, just a really wonderful, giving person? Or is there a force greater than myself that is leading me to act in ways that are altruistic and not self-interested and lead to the greater good? That’s sort of as far as I’ve gotten with the higher power thing. I’m kind of a pirate, kind of a thug. I’ve done terrible things, and yet I’m for the most part able to be a decent person. … I think something else is working on me.

How are you thinking about it, Gross asks. Are you reading things you haven’t read before? How do you figure that out?

One of the things I’m doing is praying, which seems like an uncomfortable, unnatural activity for me. It’s to whom, to what, about what? I have a prayer in my wallet that I’m saying. (chuckling) I feel like a complete fraud while I’m doing it, but it’s the act of acknowledging that there may be something else out there. I haven’t really thought it through, but I think the behavior and the activity will lead to something good. Anything that gets me into a place of something less than self-obsession and gets me into a place of some humility, not even acknowledging a higher power but that other people exist and they’re not here as an extension of my world. Part of the reason I got into journalism is I love the stories of other people.

Gross gently nudges him to get specific, asking him to pull out the prayer he has in his pocket.

Sure, let me look at it. It’s really full of like thees and thous. I think it’s the prayer of St. Francis. What it would be known programmatically, again, no names mentioned, is kind of a third-step prayer. I’m not comfortable reading the whole thing but what it talks about is to offer yourself to God to build with you as God would see fit. The important part to me is to relieve me of the bondage of self, so that I may better do thy will. It goes on to say, take away my difficulties; of course everyone prays for that, we all do. And that victory over them will bear witness to a power greater than yourselves. And it says may I do thy will always. I don’t really know who I’m talking about when I say those words, but it sort of feels good when I do.

Gross: I can understand that.

Carr: Yeah, I think it’s okay to have a superstitious belief of God and not really have thought it through. I think there’s freedom in allowing for the possibility of it. I don’t have a presence, I don’t have some idea in my mind a woman or a man figure or anything like that, but I find the spaces between people whether I’m making a newspaper with them or in recovery or living with them as family or friends I find something really godly in that. I don’t have trouble acknowledging that.

Gross: You found something godly but there isn’t a theology that you’re following.

Carr: Yeah, I’ve been watching this debate over Mormonism … people making fun of their theology. I think, I’m a practicing Catholic. We suggest in churches all over the world that there’s a metamorphoses of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus Christ which we proceed eat and drink, which when you take a step back is sort of creepy, but that’s who I’m running with. Whether it’s the underwear people wear, the hats they wear on their head or turbins, again I make no judgment. I find comfort in those traditions.

After listening to the interview, it was amusing to see parallel comments on NPR’s website:

Adrianne Wadewitz (wadewitz) wrote:
I turned this off once the focus turned to religion. Carr’s views on this topic are of no particular interest and I was unsure why the interview went in this direction. It was disappointing, as there was substantial time left that Gross could have used to talk about the changing face of media in the US and Britain.

Mark Nowak (marknowak) wrote:
Excellent interview, Terry. And I enjoyed the church stuff!

If you’re only looking information, for Carr to predict the future of media over his crystal ball, the part about his faith might seem a bit off topic. But if you’re looking to understand more about Carr as a human being, how he processes his faith and beliefs is fascinating, and Gross does a nice job of pulling that out of him.

Newspapers image via Shutterstock.

Year after year, the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has — as our resident liturgical Lutheran — played the role of liturgical enforcer here at GetReligion. This is not a small role, since so many of the traditional holidays in various faiths (can you say Chanukah? Or Hanukkah?) have been turned into secular festivals or twisted into forms that have almost nothing to do with their historic meanings.

This, of course, affects the mainstream news coverage of these holy days.

The normal GetReligion post focusing on these calendar issues features a two-part message. We tend to note that the typical sort-of-holiday story has a brief paragraph about the religious origins of the event, which is almost comically perfunctory, which is then followed by tons of details about the real, secularized celebrations.

What we are dealing with, most of the time, is a missed opportunity. Let me stress that our journalistic goal is not to ignore the secular reality, of course. We like to note that journalists can, from time to time, try to find out what happened to the religious rites, which often turns out to be an interesting and overlooked topic.

However, today’s Washington Post contains something unique. Hang on.

The dateline, of course, is Mexico City.

Once upon a time, it was the Day of the Dead, but now it is the days of the dead.

A reverent, rural tradition of making picnics at the cemetery, of building a home altar of marigolds for the dearly departed? That continues.

But like Halloween in the United States, Dia de los Muertes in Mexico has become a bit of a free-for-all, a five-day weekend with parties and drinking, a smash-up where dad dons a Spider Man costume and mom dresses up as a naughty French maid — to honor their ancestors, of course. It’s more pop, more pagan and more commercial. There’s even some trick or treating, which would have been unheard of a decade ago.

OK, the word “reverent” offers a hint of what’s missing.

I kept reading, waiting for the obligatory paragraph that would say something like this:

The celebration takes place on November 1st and 2nd, in connection with the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2).

But there was no obligatory background paragraph at all. None. Zip. Zero. Nada. Niente.

Now it can be argued that this Post story is really about some of the giant folk-art festivities that now surround the Day of the Dead. Yet the story opens with the reality that what was once a singular celebration has exploded into something larger. The innovation, of course, is that the story tells the reader (a) absolutely nothing about the sacred origins of this secularized holiday, (b) absolutely nothing about the true meaning of the events and (c) absolutely nothing about what is left of the liturgical celebrations of the real holy days (which one must assume still have some minimal meaning for practicing Catholics in Mexico).

You think? Let me stress that I know the story is about the secular events.

I get that. The question for me is whether the reader can make any sense of these secular rites without know at least a little bit about the sacred rites that came first. Is there no connection, today, between the symbols surrounding the millions of people in Mexico’s streets and the hundreds of thousands gathered at altars?

Maybe there could be room for one sentence? I’m not asking for a whole paragraph or a sidebar or anything really idealistic.

Just saying.

We joke about the overuse of “fundamentalist” to describe people that reporters don’t like, but I think we need a special award for whatever happened in this Associated Press report filed from Paris:

The city of Paris is filing legal complaints against a group of fundamentalist Christians who have been protesting a play currently showing at the municipal theater, claiming it is blasphemous, the mayor said Friday.

Riot police have been called in to chase off demonstrators bearing crosses loudly protesting in front of, and sometimes inside, the Theatre de la Ville since the Oct. 20 opening of the play.

“Sur le Concept du Visage du fils de Dieu” (“On the Concept of the Son of God’s Face”), by Italian Romeo Castellucci is a provocative story centering on a young man caring for his aged and incontinent father. A portrait of the face of Christ looms large onstage throughout and projectiles are ultimately thrown at it.

Each night, police have had to defend the theater from a group of ultra-Christian protesters — organized by the group Renouveau France — who turn up with crucifixes and banners denouncing “Christianophobia,” determined to disrupt the show.

Emphasis mine. We’ve discussed the problems with describing French Catholics as “fundamentalists” already. So by now, any GetReligion reader worth his salt could recite the Associated Press stylebook definition of “fundamentalist,” right? Right:

fundamentalist: The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. In recent years, however, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians.

In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself.

Way to ignore your own style guidelines, AP. So does the AP story tell us more about which sect of Protestants this “ultra-Christian” group belongs to? Guess what: these ultra-Christian French fundamentalist Protestants called Renouveau France aren’t even Protestants. I’m going to go with Wikipedia here but Renouveau France is described as “a French far-right nationalist political party affiliated with the European National Front, founded in November 2005. Renouveau français politically defines itself as nationalist, Catholic and “counterrevolutionary” — in this case, reactionary opposition to the principles of the French Revolution of 1789.” Like all good fundamentalists, they’ve “warned against the “parliamentary system”, and the “fundamentally Masonic, secular, and cosmopolitan Republic.” Just like George Marsden described, am I right?

Also, what in the world does “ultra-Christian” mean? Is there some use of the phrase with which I should be familiar? It’s almost as if the reporter meant to describe “ultra-Royalists,” which sounds more like what the group is going for. While the mayor is quoted as using the “f” word, the story failed to put the group’s action in the context of a long line of right-wing royalist Catholic groups.

On that note, the protests involve, it seems, a few different far-right Catholic groups. The AP credits Renouveau Francais while The Guardian credits Institut Civitas:

Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci has responded to Christian protests against his work by offering to “forgive” those who disrupted performances in Paris last week.

On Thursday, members of the Institut Civitas group interrupted a performance of On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God at the Theatre de la Ville, brandishing placards with the slogan “Stop Christianophobia”. The performance resumed after protesters were removed by police.

The following night, despite increased security, audience members were pelted with eggs and oil as they entered the theatre, according to French news agency AFP.

In a statement, Castellucci paraphrased the words of Christ, saying: “I forgive them for they know not what they do … I forgive them because they are ignorant and their ignorance is much more arrogant and damaging because it involves faith.”

This is the same group that, with the Bishop of Avignon, collected some 80,000 signatures to prevent the town council from staging an art exhibit that included Andres Serano’s ‘Piss Christ’. All this would be helpful information to include the next time we read about “ultra-Christian” French “fundamentalists.”

I’m munching on a jack-o-lantern-shaped Butterfinger as I type this, so I suppose I’m not one of those “conservative and fundamentalist Christians” who think “Halloween is a celebration of evil and has no place in the life of a believer.”

Either that, or I just really love chocolate.

Seriously, the above description of how some Christians view Halloween came from a CNN report with this headline:

A Christian debate over Halloween: Counter, co-opt, or embrace it?

Now, my first thought when I saw the headline was this: Pity the poor reporter forced to cover that breaking news. Your GetReligionistas certainly sympathize with journalists challenged with finding a fresh angle to the same ole annual occurrence.

That said, this particular story falls a few goblins short of the high journalistic quality that frequently characterizes CNN’s Belief Blog. For one thing, there’s no actual debate. Rather, there are three pastors quoted, identified as a conservative, a fundamentalist and a mainline Protestant. In fact, a reliance on vague labels haunts the piece throughout, with the terms conservative, fundamentalist and mainline appearing seven times.

From the “conservative” side:

Some Christians, like Hernandez, believe Halloween’s pagan roots can open the door to evil. That’s why Worshipwalk is hosting a harvest festival in its church parking lot on Monday, with kids’ games and face painting.

Hernandez calls it harvesting hearts for God.

Not mentioned are the thousands of churches — conservative and otherwise — nationwide that host “trunk-or-treat” events in their parking lots, fully embracing the Halloween holiday if not the pagan past. This certainly appears to be a growing trend that might add a fresh angle to the story. Of course, it would require a bit of journalistic digging to see if there’s any hard data to back up my suspicion.

From the “fundamentalist” side:

Some conservative churches go a step further, attempting to co-opt the holiday with haunted houses - called “hell houses” - that are designed to give a glimpse of eternal damnation in hopes of strengthening faith.

“There’s Satan’s lies and there’s Jesus’ redemption and there’s a message that will change your life,” said Keenan Roberts, who says he is the inventor of the hell house, which people walk or call through, just as they would a haunted house.

Now, Christian hell houses have been making headline for 15 to 20 years. I wrote an Associated Press story nearly a decade old on the concept, including the milder “Judgement Houses” — which remain in the news. Unfortunately, CNN provides no context at all to understand whether this not-so-new development is still the rage or a flickering approach.

From the “mainline” side:

Mainline Protestants tend to take a much softer line on Halloween, with some mainline churches embracing it.

Is there a source on this? Is there any survey data? Is Halloween really an issue for most, or even many, evangelical Christians in 2011? What about Roman Catholics? Why no mention of such a large contingent of Christians in a report such as this?

Another unexplored angle: trick-or-treating as a time for evangelicals to hand out salvation tracts.

Meanwhile, my Butterfinger has disappeared. Next on the agenda: a fun-size Snickers.

Halloween image via Shutterstock.

As a woman takes the helm at The New York Times for the first time this fall, many will be watching whether Jill Abramson takes the paper in a new direction editorially. The New Yorker’s profile of Abramson has been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a while, and it was worth a weekend read to consider future issues the new executive editor will face.

[Abramson’s] family so revered the Times that at one point they had two copies delivered to their home. “The New York Times was our religion,” Abramson has said more than once.

This quote was included in the initial Times web story about Abramson’s appointment, but it was later removed for the print version. The profile doesn’t go into Abramson’s personal faith, so it’s unclear whether that will change the level of importance she puts on religion coverage. For instance, former executive editor Bill Keller might see religion as alien, baggage or a Trojan horse, but he wants it covered.

The profile revealed other elements about Abramson’s background, how she came to leadership at the paper and how she plans to take the paper forward.

Abramson says that her editorship will be marked by more investigative reporting, attention to politics, cultural coverage, and searching for the story behind the public-relations announcement.

Of course, we’re wondering where religion coverage fits into these categories, since probing faith angles often leads reporters to the motivations behind a particular event or person’s actions. Keller offered some background on what she Abramson would bring to editorial meetings.

Keller and Abramson came to treat their different interests and temperaments as complementary. “It was great to have her as a partner,” Keller says. “Jill took newsroom meetings to an extraordinary level with her thoroughness. She would come in most mornings having read everything.” She pressed editors and reporters to offer more context and to delve into people’s motives.

Again, religion can often be found in motivations. Questions about liberal bias is one area Abramson will likely continue to face.

An editorial voice in news stories adds credence to the frequent charge that the Times’ news reporting often displays a liberal bias—a critique that will not be lessened by the elevation of a woman brought up in a liberal-Democratic household on the West Side of Manhattan who worked for liberal Southern Democrats and wrote a book asserting that Clarence Thomas probably lied.

Abramson recognizes that the paper has an “insular urban bias.”

She fervently believes that the Times is an equal-opportunity prober of Democrats as well as of Republicans. Asked about her own upbringing, she responds, “I’m often the one who raises the point in page-one meetings that our mix of stories is too urban in outlook, too parochial. All my years in Washington, and in some ways being attacked by conservatives, made me more conscious of how a story might be seen in the rest of America.”

Tmatt took on the question of whether the newspaper could be considered liberal, looking at some commentary from former executive editor Keller.

In the comments section of that post, reader “Passing By” wrote, “I really would be interested in links to Times articles that are actually respectful of traditional Christians, and not just when we run soup kitchens. I saw an article like that once on the Times website (meant to bookmark it and didn’t), and am sure there are others.”

I would be curious what Passing By means when he says “respectful of traditional Christians.” Does he mean positive coverage? Hopefully it’s not news that Christians (or another those in other religious traditions) are doing good deeds. Perhaps the stories don’t always land on the front page, but there are some reporters and columnists to keep an eye on.

We read just about anything Laurie Goodstein writes. Occasionally religion is covered well within political coverage from reporters like Sheryl Gay Stolberg. For whatever reason, much of the Times coverage of Christianity specifically seems to appear in its editorial pages with columnists like Mark Oppenheimer, Samuel Freedman and Ross Douthat. Yes, there was that recent simplistic op-ed on “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason” (NYT, the 1980s called. It wants its evangelicalism back.) But the regular columnists regularly use their spaces to reveal new trends related to religion, culture and/or politics.

We’ll be watching to see whether the amount and quality of religion coverage changes under Abramson, who may or may not have a personal interest in the subject. We do know from the profile that she is quite interested in her pets. She recently published the book, “The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout.”

In it, she describes the death of the family’s first dog, Buddy, and says that her sister calls Scout “needier” than Buddy. “But we were needy, too,” she writes. “After the departure of our children, Buddy’s death, and my accident, our home lives had become a little narrow and thin. … Bringing into our empty nest another living being to make happy and take care of helped put our relationship back on its natural axis.”

Apparently not everyone is pleased with the new book.

“Being executive editor is a full-time job,” one masthead editor demurs. “You shouldn’t be writing a book.” Especially one called “The Puppy Diaries.” Abramson admits that she is self-conscious about her dog book being published during her second month as executive editor of the august New York Times. Say what you will about the grayer days of the Times in mid-century, but it was always hard to imagine James Reston writing a book about a beloved household pet.

The quoted masthead editor might be taking himself/herself a bit too seriously, since I’m guessing her book might resonate with the way many people feel about their own pets. As long as Abramson recognizes that people feel as passionately about religion as she does about her puppies, The Times could be in good hands.

Yesterday I mentioned that I had been thinking about how we cover stories about suspected terrorism. A couple of weeks ago, a reader submitted a story about a disrupted flight that seemed to have a bit of a ghost. I thought I’d wait for more details to come out and revisit it. Here’s the original story from the Amarillo Globe-News:

Somewhere in the heavens above Amarillo, angry shouts rang out from the back of Southwest Airlines Flight 3683.

“You’re all going to die,” a man dressed in black screamed at passengers Tuesday afternoon. “You’re all going to hell. Allahu Akbar,” translated as God is great in Arabic.

Federal authorities arrested Ali Reza Shahsavari, 29, of Indialantic, Fla., onboard the Boeing 737 after pilots made an emergency landing at Rick Husband Amarillo International Airport at 3:30 p.m. He is being held in the Randall County jail on a federal charge of interfering with a flight crew.

Despite the reference above, the reader pointed out that the article said nothing about the man’s religion. The article later had this, too:

FBI Special Agent Mark White, based in Dallas, said the event did not appear to be an act of terrorism. He described Shahsavari as a U.S. citizen who might have experienced an episode of mental illness.

“It sounded like he sort of lost control of himself,” White said.

We hear from readers with complaints about mental illness diagnoses during terror-related events. Sometimes this is because people think that Islamic terror is something the media can’t confront. Sometimes this is because people resent the idea that mental health can be diagnosed by observers who are not taking care of a given patient.

What I wanted to point out related to the story above is something we all know is true — while it’s wrong to dismiss all religious extremism as the result of mental illness, there is an overlap between certain mental illnesses and outbursts of a religious nature. If you’ve ever had a family member with schizophrenia, for instance, chances are decent you’ve experienced this.

The same paper, but a different reporter, reported on the indictment from a Grand Jury investigating the situation:

Before a court hearing Thursday in Amarillo, Shahsavari gave a breathless rant about his immortality.

“Welcome to your salvation,” he said. “You can’t be harmed in this room. I saved your life.”

After reading a copy of the indictment, Shahsavari asked, “How is this a crime of violence?”

Shahsavari’s attorney, Jeff Blackburn, said Shasavari’s sister, who was in the courtroom Thursday, was taking him to Florida to get help for schizophrenia.

More disordered thinking follows, including reports of his scary outbursts on the plane:

“You’re all going to die,” Shahsavari yelled on the flight, passenger Doug Oerding of Sacramento, Calif., said.

Oerding also said Shahsavari shouted, “You’re all going to hell. Allahu Akbar,” translated as “God is great” in Arabic.

Blackburn said his client was taking old medication and needed new treatment for his mental disorder. Schizophrenia is a group of severe brain disorders which may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking and behavior, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website. It is a chronic condition that requires lifelong treatment, even when symptoms have subsided, according to the website.

You can see where his mid-flight exclamations could be interpreted not as the rantings of a schizophrenic but something much more nefarious. While the story does still avoid any mention of the accused’s religious affiliation, it does a much better job of putting the incident in context, particularly compared to other media outlets.

Yesterday I pointed out that even incidents that have many more markers indicating religiously motivated violence must be handled with care. That doesn’t mean avoiding a discussion of religion, of course. Far from it. But it does mean we need to be back up our news sense with hard facts.

And since we’re on the topic, a reader also sent in this story from NPR’s “All Things Considered.” It’s about a trial in Massachusetts where a 29-year-old U.S. citizen is charged with distributing propaganda for al Qaeda. His defense, we’re told, is that he was just exercising his free speech rights to protest the war.

The story is really interesting and it’s very difficult, particularly for free speech proponents, to find fault with his defense. But what was interesting about the story was how it was framed. Here’s the beginning:

DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: To hear prosecutors tell it, Tarek Mehanna supported al-Qaida when he translated one of its handbooks from Arabic into English. He also put English subtitles on a speech by Osama bin Laden and posted it online. Of course, lots of news organizations do more or less the same thing.

DAVID NEVIN: CNN probably still has on its website an al-Qaida instructional video.

TEMPLE-RASTON: That’s attorney David Nevin. He’s talking about that video that’s aired repeatedly over the years of al-Qaida operatives swinging on monkey bars and running through an obstacle course at a training camp.

NEVIN: And the same would be true of interviews with Osama bin Laden where he advocates killing Americans wherever he can find them. And ABC broadcast that on their website and on television stations all over the world. Is that permitted? Is that a crime? Well, of course not.

And so it goes. And we hear about how the Occupy Boston protesters are all out in support of this American who was merely exercising his free speech rights. And then this is the very end of the story:

Now, Mehanna isn’t just on trial just because of his blog. Prosecutors also say that he had conspired to shoot up a local shopping mall. And they told jurors that they will play wiretap tapes that will reveal the details of that plot. Mehanna is also accused of lying to the FBI. That means even if he wins the day on First Amendment grounds, there are other charges that could be harder to beat.

It’s a great way to demonstrate how much power a reporter has in how they frame a story. Had they mentioned this first, along with the bit about how he tried to train at a terrorist camp in Yemen, the story would have had a very different feel.

Aggressive man image via Shutterstock.

The Baltimore Sun — the newspaper that lands in my yard — has done another story related to the vocations crisis in the modern Catholic Church. Regular GetReligion readers know what that means.

(Cue: audible sigh)

This time around, the story centers on a new “Focus 11” program that strives to expose children in Catholic schools to the more personal, subtle details of life as a priest, monk, sister or nun.

On the positive side, I liked the story’s use of personal details and even humor:

Focus 11 includes activities like a quiz game between the children and panelists, who included a priest, a brother, a deacon and two nuns. The back and forth showed the children that vocations come from people leading ordinary lives.

“Nobody is born a priest or nun,” said Sister Fran Gorsuch, who played emcee for the game. “God called them to that life. And, that life is anything but boring.”

When she asked which panelist was a Phillies baseball fan and a motorcyclist who worked in the Dominican Republic, the children chose one of the men — not the correct answer (it was Sister Mary Beth Antonelli). They erred about who had mastered fencing. It was the “lady in blue,” Sister Mary Grace Dateno.

However, you also knew that the story would include the usual background paragraphs about the causes of the vocations crisis.

At this point, I assume that every computer in the Sun newsroom has some kind of Control-click macro feature that automatically inserts the following paragraph — or precise variations on these themes — into the semi-regular stories about American Catholicism’s shortage of priests and nuns.

The Catholic Church has for the last several decades experienced declining numbers of candidates for the priesthood and the religious life. Some of the factors blamed for the decrease are the required vows of celibacy and the fact that priesthood is limited to men. Church sex abuse scandals have hurt as well, said Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocation Conference. …

In the Archdiocese of Baltimore, only two priests have been ordained in the past two years. Since 1965, the number of priests nationwide has dropped from nearly 60,000 to fewer than 40,000, according to statistics from CARA. There are less than a third as many nuns today in the United States as there were 50 years ago, and while the Catholic population has increased, many parishes are not staffed by a resident priest.

All of this is true, of course. That is not my point.

I am also sure that Bednarczyk spoke those words, during his discussion of causes for the crisis. However, based on my own experiences and interviews with other Catholic leaders, I am sure that he discussed other subjects as well. However, the official, designated, simplistic list of causes seems to have been carved into stone at this point and it’s hard for mainstream journalists to ponder other factors.

Like what? Well, one of the major problems these days is that millions of Catholic parents are no longer sure if they want their sons and daughters to surrender their lives to the church.

This is the factor that the Sun continues to miss in its coverage of stories linked to Catholic statistics — such as struggling parishes, closing schools and, yes, the declining number of priests. A key fact: Birth rates for most white American Catholics now resemble those found in liberal Protestant churches.

I dug into this a few years ago in a pair of Scripps Howard columns that shipped with this title: “Fathers, mothers and Catholic sons.” The key interview was with the progressive Catholic academic Father Donald B. Cozzens, a former seminary vicar in Ohio and author of the influential 2000 book, “The Changing Face of the Priesthood.”

The bottom line: How many Catholic young people will even considering entering religious life if this step is actively opposed by their fathers and mothers?

In the past, when large families were the norm, it was a matter of pride to have a son enter religious life. But what if most Catholic families contain only one son?

“When it has become normal to have two children or less, you are not going to find many parents who are encouraging a son — especially an only son — to become a priest,” said Cozzens. “They want him to get married, to have grandchildren and carry on the family name. …

“So there are fewer sons and there are more mothers who are asking hard questions.”

Grandchildren or no grandchildren?

This needs to go into the Sun macro on the crisis. Once again, demographics is destiny. I would also note that, especially in Catholic pews, demographics are often shaped by doctrine.

I was writing a post about how we cover suspected or actual terrorism (which I’ll save for tomorrow) when word came that a gunman fired shots at the United States Embassy in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. As snippets of news came out about this on Twitter, I saw a picture of the gunman (seen here) and it appeared, because the picture wasn’t of great quality, that the man was wearing shorts. That seemed odd attire for a gunman in October. Sarah Schlesinger, a research fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at Hudson Institute, explained:

“Short pants,” which is used as a euphemism for Wahhabis in Bosnia.

You learn something every day. And, indeed, this man had the appearance of a Muslim from his facial hair. I wondered how the media would report this. Some readers complain that the media downplay the role of Islam whenever there’s a terrorist incident. That certainly can be true, but it’s also true that reporters are in the business of reporting things that can be confirmed, not speculated. Just because someone appears to be something doesn’t mean you can begin extrapolating from there. We need to nail down what we know and what we don’t know.

So having said that, I thought that this New York Times blog did a great job of reporting the news, with a concern for the religious angle.

The top of the story is a just-the-facts look at precisely what happened. Gunman fired shots at the Embassy. Video of the assault was posted by a news service. State Department guy says no injury reports. Embassy is in lockdown. Law enforcement is responding. A (yes, “A”) Bosnian president condemns the attack. Another president (how many presidents does this country have?) called the incident a “terrorist attack.” Some media outlets report that the gunman was wounded by a police sniper.

And then we get some information about a possible religion angle:

Citing a Sarajevo newspaper, the Belgrade radio station B-92 reported that there might have been more than one attacker, and noted that the man seen in the video was bearded in the manner of Islamist radicals.

The Sarajevo daily, Dnevni Avaz, reported in a live blog on the attack that the gunman was a 23-year-old with a Slavic name who was born in the Sandzak region of Serbia, which is home to a Muslim community. The newspaper also said that the man spent time in Gornja Moaca, an isolated village in northern Bosnian which was home to a small group of adherents of Wahabbism, a strict form of Islam.

This Bosnian television report on the shooting shows police officers outside the U.S. Embassy after the incident, and identifies the gunman as Mevlid Jašarevi?.

Most of Bosnia’s indigenous Muslim population is made up of ethnic Slavs, whose ancestors converted to Islam centuries ago, during Ottoman Turkish rule. Although the community as a whole has not been particularly observant in recent decades, from the start of the country’s civil war in the 1990s, Bosnian Muslims were subjected to a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing by extremists from the Serb Orthodox and Croat Catholic communities.

During the civil war, hundreds of Islamist foreign fighters came to the aid of the Bosnian Muslims. Some of those men remained in the country after the Dayton peace accords were signed in 1995.

Last year, Bosnian police officers raided Gornja Moaca where some former fighters of Arab origin were reported to have established a community that practiced a strict form of Islam.

I just wanted to highlight how the reporter included information that people must have been wondering about without going overboard or being too restrained. The report indicates what information is known and what information might be relevant. Perhaps facts that are revealed later will show that some of this context was insufficient, but it’s a good start.

Oh, To Be Young, Hip and Mormon.

That was the stylish headline this week as the Old Gray Lady devoted 1,800 words to cool Mormons — as opposed to the regular, stuffy kind.

Hip Mormons, you should know, favor facial hair, tattoos and Pellegrino (mineral water that might make other partygoers “assume you are in recovery,” instead of someone, heaven forbid, who does not believe in drinking alcohol).

As you might imagine, this New York Times literally salivates over the possibility of young Mormons who find a way around “what the church says.” With all the hyperventilating, however, there’s not much in the way of actual reporting (read: journalism) on what these hip Mormons believe or practice related to their faith. (There is plenty of ink given to special underwear.)

The top of the story:

WITH his manly stubble, flannel shirt and skinny black jeans, Brandon Flowers looks every bit the hipster front man for his rock band, the Killers.

With songs about drowning one’s sorrows in bourbon or exploring the seedy underbelly of his hometown, Las Vegas, Mr. Flowers has sold more than 15 million records worldwide. In the past, he has been candid about his drinking, smoking and taste for blackjack.

But in a gauzy four-minute video, an advertisement for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that was posted online earlier this month, the singer stares at the camera and says, “I’m a father, I’m a husband, and I’m a Mormon.”

For decades, the popular image of Mormon style has been shaped by clean-cut young missionaries on bicycles in dark suits, white shirts and skinny black ties — and more recently by the sculptured coif of the presidential candidate Mitt Romney or the sporty style of the motocross-bike-riding Jon Huntsman, another Republican presidential candidate.

But the boundaries of Mormon style are expanding. The highly visible “I’m a Mormon” ad campaign (the subject of a major push on television, billboards, the subway and the Internet) seeks to quash strait-laced stereotypes by showing off a cool, diverse set of Mormons, including, besides Mr. Flowers, a leather-clad Harley aficionado, knit-cap-wearing professional skateboarder and an R & B singer with a shaved head.

With that lede, you’d expect to read more details later in the story about Flowers, right? How do the lyrics of his songs mesh with what he believes? Does he still drink, smoke and gamble? Or did he give up his vices, and if so, how did his faith play into his personal transformation? Does he make it a point to attend worship on Sundays? Does he try to skirt the edges of his church’s teachings? Why did he appear in the “I’m a Mormon? video? (For insiders, questions might include: Does he have a temple card? Is he a member in good standing who can do the required temple duties and rites?)

These are all questions that an actual journalistic report might address. The reporter would, perhaps, pick up the telephone and conduct an interview. Ask questions about Flowers’ faith. Dig below the surface of “young” and “hip.” But that does not happen in this story. Instead, Flowers makes a cameo appearance and then disappears entirely.

Interestingly, the Deseret News in Salt Lake City reported last week on the reaction to Flowers’ video:

Flowers has never denied his faith, but his official declaration of it has set off quite a reaction. In the video, Flowers discussed striving to maintain his standards in the wild world of rock music. Rachel Kaiser, a backup singer in Flowers’ solo tour, detailed what it was like working with him in a November Deseret News article.

“One of the first things he talked to me about was the fact we are both LDS,” Kaiser told the Deseret News. “I think it was a way to break the ice.”

The article continued: “Kaiser has been grateful for the high standards Flowers and others set. She has not been confronted with the partying, drugs and alcohol that often accompany musicians on tour.”

No partying, drugs or alcohol!? Flowers sounds much hipper in the Times. But I digress.

Back to the Times. How’s this for a blanket statement?:

Needless to say, countless Mormons work in fashion, design, art, music and film, and they generally dress and act just like anybody else.

At the risk of sounding petty, if they dress and act just like anybody else, what exactly makes them Mormon? Are we talking about cultural Mormons? Churchgoing Mormons? Again, the Times shows no interest in such relevant details.

But we get some salty language — courtesy of a Mormon! — at the end of the piece:

This is why many Brooklyn Mormons tended to host house parties of their own, Ms. Baker said. She recalled one party where someone brought a six-pack of O’Doul’s, which advertises itself as a non-alcoholic beer, “for shock value.” But typically, the only vice on display was sugar, in the form of a large dessert spread, the focal point of many a Mormon party, she added.

But even a table full of pies and pastries can pose a challenge, her brother, Britain, joked. “Because of all the dessert parties,” he said, “skinny jeans can be a bitch.”

Oh, To Be Young, Hip and Mormon.

Bishop Richard Williamson of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is up to his old tricks and has angered the European Council of Rabbis with his remarks about the Jews’ role in the crucifixion of Jesus. The bishop believes Jews are Christ-killers — and his latest words on the subject come as Pope Benedict XVI begins an inter-faith summit in Assisi. Among his many attributes, I must say Bishop Williamson has great timing.

The Guardian ran a story last week on the Jewish reaction to the bishop’s comments. However, the story had some problems. “Bishop’s blog raises tensions between Jews and the Vatican” misstates church history and makes assumptions about the relationship of Bishop Williamson to the Catholic Church. And like most reporting on Vatican-Jewish relations misses or misunderstands the pope’s outstretched hand to the Jews.

Let’s take a look at the story. It begins with the the author’s interpretation of events, a sentence clarifying who Williamson is, what he believes and what the Catholic Church teaches, is followed by quotes from his latest missive and the ECR’s response.

Relations between Jews and Catholics are under immense strain after a bishop made controversial remarks on his blog.

Richard Williamson, who has previously denied the existence of gas chambers and the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, accused the Jews of killing Jesus, a charge that divided the two faiths for centuries until Pope Benedict XVI declared this year that Jews could not be held responsible for Jesus’s death.

In his weekly post, Williamson wrote that “the killing of Jesus was truly ‘deicide’ ” and that “only the Jews (leaders and people) were the prime agents of the deicide because it is obvious from the gospels that the gentile most involved, Pontius Pilate, … would never have condemned Jesus to death had not the Jewish leaders roused the Jewish people to clamour for his crucifixion.”

His comments have angered Jewish leaders and Holocaust survivors, who are urging Rome to cease reconciliation talks with the ultra-traditionalist splinter group to which Williamson belongs, the Society of St Pius X. Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt of the European Council of Rabbis said: “We call upon the Catholic church to suspend negotiations with extremist Catholic tendencies until it is clear that these groups show a clear commitment to tackling antisemitism within their ranks.”

Let’s start with the obvious problem and then move back to the deeper issue of identity. The Catholic Church did not stop accusing “the Jews of killing Jesus” in 2010. On 28 Oct 1965 Pope Paul VI promulgated the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate). A product of the Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate rejected the charge of deicide leveled against the Jews.

True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, … [and the Church] decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.

What happened in 2010 was the publication of excerpts from the pope’s latest book, Jesus of Nazareth - Holy Week: From Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, which was published in March of this year. The Daily Mail reported that in his new book Benedict:

confronts the controversial text of St Matthew’s Gospel in which ‘the Jews’ demand the execution of Jesus and shout to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate: ‘Let his blood be on us and on our children.’

The passage has been described as a ‘rallying cry for anti-Semites down the centuries’.

But the Pope said when St Matthew wrote ‘the Jews’ he meant the mob in Pilate’s courtyard and not the Jewish people in general.

As such the crowd was representative of the whole of sinful humanity, he added.

In addition to the factual error, the identification of Richard Williamson in this article I also find problematic. It is possible for a man to be Roman Catholic and a bishop, but also for that same man not to be a Roman Catholic bishop. Richard Williamson is not a Roman Catholic bishop — he is a bishop of the Society of St Piux X, and his consecration as a bishop in 1988 led to his excommunication from the Catholic Church. The way the first sentence is worded implies that Williamson is a Roman Catholic bishop (and the photo caption identifies him as such.)

The SSPX and the Vatican have been engaged in talks to end the split — which is (rather confusingly) not a schism. As blogger Fr John Zuhlsdorf  notes:

In the 1988 Motu Proprio Ecclesia Dei adflicta Pope John Paul used the word “schism“.  It looks like a schism, to be sure.  But officials of the [Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei] have affirmed over the last few years that while Archbishop Lefebvre’s actions in 1988 were schismatic acts, the SSPX did not in fact go into schism.

In 2009 the excommunication was lifted, but Williamson has not been permitted to function as a bishop. His denial of the Holocaust and rejection of Nostra Aetate led the Vatican to state that  “in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, [Williamson] will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.”

It is not just the Vatican who is appalled. Williamson’s comments were also published in defiance of his SSPX Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay, who not only ordered him to stop making “any public statements on political or historical issues”, but has also denounced his anti-Semitism.

In a limited sense, Williamson is right in saying that Jews are Christ-killers. The catechism states that “All sinners were the authors of Christ’s Passion” (cf CCC 598). However this means that all Jews, all Gentiles — you, me, everyone — is responsible for the crucifixion. But that is not what Williamson is saying and while the Guardian story at its close does note that the Vatican has asked Williamson to recant, the overall tone of the story does not give a true sense of the church’s rejection of this pernicious evil.

Christianity’s relations with Jews and Judaism has been fraught with cruelty, abuse and murder. The Catholic Church should not be singled out on this point, however. Quakers aside, I am hard pressed to think of any Christian body that has not behaved badly. However, the past few decades have seen great strides in Catholic-Jewish relations. Cardinal Ratzinger, as he was then, was and is a consistent and strong voice for rapprochement — when I covered Catholic - Jewish relations in Europe for the Jerusalem Post I heard time and again from members of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and other Jewish leaders of their respect and appreciation for Joseph Ratzinger (and later Benedict XVI).

It is the absence of this underlying element, Joseph Ratzinger’s philo-Semitism, that distorts the reporting on the Vatican’s relations with Jews and Judaism. (That and factual errors.)