Six years ago today, Douglas LeBlanc clicked his Mac mouse and GetReligion was born as a small website on TypePad.

We had a simple goal, but one that was a bit hard to explain to folks on the outside.

GetReligion was not and is not a site about religion news. It’s a site about how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion.

Let me repeat that: GetReligion was not and is not a site about religion news. It’s a site about how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion.

From the start we have tried to praise the good and dissect the bad, while striving to talk as much as possible about basic issues of journalism craft. As journalists, Doug and I outed ourselves, at the very beginning, as traditional Christians of two different brand names who shared a passion about improving religion-news coverage.

We hoped that, within a year or two, we might be taken seriously. We hoped that we might even end up being listed as a religion-news coverage resource at Poynter.org or other mainstream journalism sites. That happened in a matter of weeks.

Since then the online numbers have continued to add up, especially after a few other writers joined the team.

Right now, we’re at 5,051 posts in six years.

As I type this, we’re at 62,302 comments and at least another 20,000 or so have been spiked for one reason or another — mostly because they are based on arguments about doctrine, not journalism.

There are 3,181 comments containing the word “Jerry.” That’s a shock. There are 1,477 containing the word “deacon,” which is lower than I expected. Some folks have gotta do what they’ve gotta do. That’s fine with us, if they want to talk about journalism.

The site’s birthday is always a good time to point back at that first post, the one called “What we do, why we do it.” Here’s how that opens:

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The ghosts are still out there and we’re still trying to see them and write about them. We get to celebrate the fact that, even in tough times in daily journalism, there are some reporters who really know how to see the religion ghosts and write about them. There are some journalists who just don’t care or they even seem to want the ghosts to go away.

We will keep banging our head on this wall, because that is what we do. We remain committed to the belief that mainstream American journalism is important and that it will be improved by critics who love journalism, not hate journalism. There are many critics out there who actually hate mainstream journalism and we are not very fond of them, to tell you the truth.

So, what should we do to celebrate the past year?

In the past, the writers have posted our own summaries, like this “Take 5” roundup that I did last year. Surf around in the week and you’ll see the other posts in that series.

But this year — taking the advice of some folks in the comments pages — we want to hear from you.

So please cite your favorite posts from the year — two or three would be nice — and give us the links/URLs.

You can also point us toward the best contributions to the comment boards. If you only have one, that’s fine. The important thing is to take part. Tell us your favorite headlines, if the spirit moves.

Above all, please keep reading, please keep commenting and please keep sending us URLs from religion-news stories — good, bad and haunted — that you see in the mainstream press.

Thanks! If you send in a bunch of stuff I’ll try to create some kind of follow-up post later in the week.

Among the stories looking back at President Barack Obama’s first year in office, we’ve seen a few revisiting his worship life. More than a few readers sent in this story from ABC News, headlined “Holy BlackBerry! Obama Finds Ways to Keep the Faith During First Year in Office: Has the First Family’s D.C. Church Search Come to a Close?” Here’s the lede:

If church attendance is one measure of a man’s faith, then President Obama may appear to have lost some of his. The first family, once regular churchgoers, have publicly attended services in Washington just three times in the past year, by ABC News’ count, even bypassing the pews on Christmas Day.

Obama quit Chicago’s embattled Trinity United Church of Christ months before taking office in 2008 and has not formally joined a new one in his new hometown.

But sources familiar with the president’s personal life say Obama remains a faithful Christian while in the White House, practicing his beliefs regularly in private with family and the aid of his BlackBerry.

The story is actually quite charitable toward the president, citing the heavy burden on taxpayers and fellow churchgoers due to security concerns. One of the readers who sent in this story thought the reporters could have done a better job of exploring why the Obamas continue to engage in social outings (such as attending basketball games, going golfing or having dinner at local restaurants) while not attending church. There were a few points in the story where such a comparison should have been noted. However, the story hinted at what I believe is the biggest burden for presidents:

Incessant media attention is also distracting for any president trying to commune with God, exposing what is traditionally a private practice to public scrutiny, [Rev. Jim Wallis, an Obama friend and spiritual adviser,] said.

We pray for President Obama every week at my church. This isn’t a partisan thing — like many other liturgical Christians, the prayer of the church includes the country’s leader regardless of political affiliation. And when we pray for President Obama, I think of how grateful I am that I may attend my church’s Divine Services without having to have the media come in and exploit any parts of the liturgy or of my pastor’s excellent sermons. My pastor’s sermons are very concise but they still require a complete listen from start to finish. If you take any given line without the full context, you could get the wrong idea. The existence of this blog is a testament to the struggles the mainstream media have in understanding religious nuance. I am in no way defending the words of President Obama’s previous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but the legacy of the mainstream media reaction to his sermons makes it even more difficult for presidents to become members of a church during their time in office.

The ABC story is a good overview of the Obamas’ worship situation but it doesn’t exactly dig deep. For an exploration of the headline, it reverts to an old statement from the president that Joshua Dubois, who heads up the president’s faith-based office, sends him a devotional and quotes from other faiths to reflect on. There is no further discussion of this. On the other hand, the story does a good job of putting the Obama worship situation in some context of former presidents. The Obamas aren’t the first First Family to have trouble finding a church home.

I rather liked a story from a couple weeks ago on the same issue. It was published on the brand-new Daily Caller web site by White House reporter Jon Ward. Here’s how it handled the nut of the problem:

White House aides say privately that the president faces a problem: his presence at just about any church in D.C. is such a distraction that it turns what should be a personal and private experience - for the president, his family and every other worshiper - into a circus.

“I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say it creates a lot of havoc for the church,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Sure, security is a problem. But it’s a problem wherever the president goes. I rarely think media navel-gazing is a worthwhile task, but in this case I wish the media would be a bit more reflective about how they have contributed to the problem of presidential worship life. We hear all the time about how the media used to let politicos chase skirts with immunity. I hope that permitting politicians to worship in peace isn’t also a relic of the past.

As anyone knows who has read GetReligion for more than a day or two, the purpose of this weblog is — through positive and negative criticism — to lobby for improved coverage of religion news in the mainstream press. We like to argue that many major stories are haunted by “religion ghosts” that professionals need to learn to recognize and to include in stories throughout the newspaper, not just on the religion beat or on the religion page.

So there is much more to the task of improving religion-news coverage than what happens on the so-called Godbeat.

However, that does not mean that it is not important for newsrooms to include one or two experienced professionals who truly “get religion” and know what they are talking about when it comes to faith issues. The presence of one excellent religion-beat reporter can have a major impact in a newsroom.

Thus, your GetReligionistas are getting very tired of having to write posts — check this recent Divine Ms. MZ missive — detailing the departures of excellent writers from this complex and nuanced beat.

Personally, I’m starting to have daydreams about the movie “Network.”

We are not the only people to notice what is going on.

Click here and head over to the Freakonomics weblog at the New York Times, where Stephen J. Dubner has posted a short item with the headline: “The ‘God Beat’ Takes a Beating.” Here’s the whole item, but you should read it there to get all of the URLs:

The economic downturn has obviously hurt newspapers a great deal, but it’s hard to say which areas of coverage have been depleted the most. I have talked to people in many realms — international reporting, business, sports, entertainment — who claim their domain has been particularly hard hit. (Here’s a map from Paper Cuts that shows 2009 newspaper layoffs.)

But Cathleen Falsani, the Chicago Sun-Times’s recently departed religion writer, makes the point that she is just one of four prominent religion writers who have been moved off their beats in the past month. The others are Michael Paulson of the Boston Globe, Eric Gorski at the A.P., and Peter Steinfels at The Times. This hardly means that religion will no longer be covered at those institutions, but that’s an awful lot of high-end human capital to leave one beat in a short time. I wonder what kind of religion articles we won’t be reading in the future as a result.

Tell us about it.

All of these professionals will be missed, of course. But the more I think about it, the more I am stunned by Gorski’s departure — after such a short time on the beat. To help cope with my pain, let me make this appeal to our sharp readers, many of whom are young people on this beat, or veteran journalists who want to work on this beat.

So, anyone want to nominate a first-round draft pick for the Associated Press chair (unless we can find some way to knock a few decades off Richard Ostling), since that is such a crucial standard-setting position for the national press as a whole?

Be nice. Be constructive. Name some prospects.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to report on the relief and recovery efforts in Haiti, much less manage or participate in them. I keep reading the news and feeling sicker and sicker. One of the things that struck me about personal emails or messages out of Haiti is how they all emphasize the religious lives of the survivors. And it’s nice to see that much of the mainstream media coverage is touching on that as well.

And this Washington Post story, headlined “As lives and houses shattered in Haiti quake, so did some religious differences,” is all about how people’s religious lives have changed following the earthquake. Reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia begins by telling readers that Haitians sing spirituals together at night and then:

Haiti is known as a society of devout Christians — Catholics, Protestants, Methodists, evangelicals — and followers of voodoo. Faith has long played a powerful role in this impoverished nation, giving hope to the poor and fulfilling social functions that the government is incapable of handling.

But in the days since the earth pitched and rolled here, pulverizing shanties and mansions alike, the religious differences that sometimes separated Haitians have come crashing down.

Port-au-Prince has become a kind of multidenominational, open-air church. Tens of thousands live in the street together, scraping for food and water, sharing their misery and blending their spirituality.

The women singing together in Jeremy Square might never have worshiped side by side before the disaster, but now their voices harmonize and soar well past 2 in the morning. Lionelle Masse, a stringy woman with a deep, sad voice, lost a child in the quake. She sings next to Rosena Roche, a fiery-eyed Catholic whose husband is buried under tons of rubble.

“I still have faith in God,” Roche says. “I want to give glory to God.”

OK, so you get the picture. The reporter is saying that religious differences used to separate Haitians and now, with disaster everywhere, they don’t.

To make his case, he says that everyone is praying together now and everyone sings hymns together. He speaks with one priest who says that nobody cares about religious differences.

Now, the piece is just full of wonderful color about the role religion plays in disaster and it actually gets into some bonafide doctrinal matters, too. And not simply about theodicy, for once. I really appreciate these things and value them as a reader. Up until a couple of days ago, I noticed a disconnect between the private missives I was seeing out of Haiti — riddled with religious references and details — and many of the dry reports in the newspaper. Now, with many more reporters on the ground, it’s hard to get through a single story without inclusion of the role religion plays.

But what struck me about the piece was how the reporter was reading quite a bit into the vignettes he described. Maybe it’s true that Haitians never in their wildest dreams would have prayed together or sung shared religious hymns prior to the earthquake — but Christians pray together all the time. The fact that the various groups know the same hymns should be evidence of something, no?

If the story was about Vodoun being incorporated into the Sunday morning Mass at Sacre Couer cathedral, I think the reporter would definitely have a story. But the biggest divide he really gets into is between Roman Catholics and Protestants. The fact that Pentecostal women are taking refuge in Catholic churches is interesting. But is it really evidence that doctrinal distinctions are all of a sudden unimportant?

Take this story from Reuters about how Vodoun priests are objecting to mass graves because it violates their conception of how the dead should be handled. It sounds like doctrinal distinctions are still important and still matter.

In fact, it seems like the big “wall” that needs to be broken down is the reporter’s bias that doctrinal differences are unimportant.

This CNN story managed to simply report on the religious scene, painting a much more nuanced portrait:

It seems Tuesday’s quake has only strengthened the religious fervor many Haitians carry in their souls.

“A lot of people who never prayed or believed — now they believe,” said Cristina Bailey, a 24-year-old clerk.

In parks and backyards, anywhere a group gathers, the prayers of the Haitians can be heard. Last week, the call-and-response chanting and clapping that accompany those prayers pierced the darkness of night and the pre-dawn hours — sometimes as early as 4 a.m. The singing and praying was particularly intense in Champs de Mars plaza, where hundreds of people have taken refuge. But the scene was repeated throughout the city, with preachers on megaphones exhorting the faithful, who responded with lyrics like “O Lord, keep me close to you” and “Forgive me, Jesus.”

Many preachers are telling followers not to lose faith, that God remains with them regardless of what’s happened.

Okay, but what about Vodoun? The story doesn’t just tell but shows how the widespread practice is incorporated into the lives of Haitians:

Colonized by France, Haiti is a strongly Catholic country. Christian motifs are everywhere in Port-au-Prince. Many vehicles bear signs like the one painted on the windshield of a truck on Rue Delmar: “Merci Jesus,” it said. A woman passing by on Avenue Christophe chanted softly: “Accept Jesus.”

“In Haiti, you have Protestants and Catholics, and you have your percentage of each,” said J.B. Diederich, a native-born Haitian who now lives in Miami, Florida, but returned to the Caribbean for several days after the earthquake. “But everybody is 100 percent voodoo.”

Voodoo is widely acknowledged but practiced only behind closed doors, with practitioners often placing candles and icons on the floor of a home and dancing to music and drums.

Followers believe the world is under the power of loas — spirits and deities who act as intermediaries between humans and God. In voodoo, disasters like Tuesday’s quake are not the result of natural forces, but displeasure by a loa. See complete coverage of Haiti earthquake

“It’s in every apartment. The voodoo is our culture,” 25-year-old Alex Gassan said. “It’s like the folklore.”

Gassan proudly calls himself a Catholic, pulling out a crucifix necklace from under his shirt to show a reporter.

Haiti has a unique religious culture with unique religious values. It’s okay to just describe the situation and let people speak for themselves.

It seems like over the last 10 years or so, I’ve read roughly eleventy-bajillion trend pieces about the confluence of environmentalism and religion. Most of these pieces have been fairly uncritical about or even cheerleading this commingling. So I wasn’t terribly enthused to see this New York Times story, “Pastors in Northwest Find Focus in ‘Green.’”

Now I’m from the Northwest. My mother grew up in Portland and when I was very young we spent six years living in a tiny town in Southern Washington on a hill above the Columbia River Gorge. The view from my front yard was such that a National Geographic photographer knocked on our door one day asked if he could take pictures from our deck. (The picture you’re looking at to the left is a rough approximation of what it’s like to look west from a hill above White Salmon, Washington. And here’s a slightly more up close picture of what you saw when you looked out my living room window, just above sea level to the summit of Mt. Hood at 11,000 feet about 50 miles due south — yeah, I know.) Then we moved to Bend, Oregon, which is about as close to an environmental paradise as exists in this country. (The photo below is of Smith Rock State Park where I took Mollie and Evangeline hiking last time we were visiting my folks.)

My immediate reaction is that this would probably cover some cultural ground I’m pretty familiar with — thus making any errors or dubious characterizations particularly obvious. Everybody in the Pacific Northwest — particularly those that have been there for multiple generations — has strong opinions about the environment and the rapid population growth in the last few decades. The influx of new people has brought about pretty dramatic changes in the religious and political character or Oregon and Washington .

So I went into the story loaded for bear. And you know what? It’s not that bad. It discusses the environmentalism-in-religion trend in a pretty clear-eyed fashion. For one, it posits that churches embracing environmentalism are becoming more focused on local issues than global warming:

Religious leaders have been preaching environmentalism for years, and much attention has focused on politically powerful evangelical Christian leaders who have taken up climate change as a cause. Yet some smaller, older and often struggling mainline churches are also going greener, reducing their carbon footprint by upgrading basement boilers and streamlining the Sunday bulletin, swapping Styrofoam for ceramic mugs at coffee hour and tending jumbled vegetable gardens where lawns once were carefully cultivated.

The story provides some good local color to that extent, but I wish there was a better way to know how widespread this trend away from overarching issues and toward local action is.

Still, this is an interesting development. As you might expect, it notes that people are hopeful about the potential of environmentalism as an evangelical tool:

Several mainline church leaders in the Northwest said environmentalism offered an entry point, especially to younger adults, who might view Christianity as wrought with debates over gay rights and abortion.

A study released in December by the Barna Group, which more typically studies trends among evangelicals, said that older, mainline churches faced many challenges but that their approach to environmental issues was among several areas that “position those churches well for attracting younger Americans.”

“We actually encourage it as a way to get people into the churches,” said LeeAnne Beres, the executive director of Earth Ministry, a Seattle group founded in 1992 that has guided many area congregations through environmental upgrades over the past decade but has recently emphasized more direct political action for pastors and parishioners. “That is what people are interested in, and I don’t see anything Machiavellian in that.”

However, the story doesn’t provide any of evidence environmentalism has had much of an effect on the abysmal church attendance in the Pacific Northwest. And the anecdotal evidence in the story suggests the opposite:

He noted that while some mainline churches had reported increased attendance as they emphasized the issue, Emmanuel’s congregation, now about 250 families, had declined even though the church had been active on environmental issues for more than a decade.

And:

At Westminster Congregational United Church of Christ near downtown Spokane, built in 1893, the congregation has about 200 people, down from 2,000 a few decades ago. The pastor, Andrea CastroLang, said the church recently had an energy audit and that while it has made some of the proposed changes, including upgrading the boiler, some were impractical for the soaring, heat-leaking sanctuary.

“They were like, ‘It’d be really great if you could lower your ceiling,’” Ms. CastroLang said. “We said, ‘We can’t do that.’”

That last bit about lowering the ceiling is chuckle-worthy.

Still, I wish there was more concrete information on how this trend has affected attendance. However, as a reporter I sympathize with how difficult it is to suss out data on these kind of social trend stories. All in all, a more interesting and nuanced take on what seems like an, uh, evergreen topic on the Godbeat these days.

Last week we talked about the Godbeat losing both the Associated Press’ Eric Gorski and the Boston Globe’s Michael Paulson. Before that it was Peter Steinfels at the New York Times. And now we get word that Cathleen Falsani’s religion column at the Chicago Sun-Times, the last of which was to run January 22, has ended already.

Apparently her editor there forbade her to even mention that she’d be leaving in her last two columns, and that was a dealbreaker for her.

She’s posted her penultimate column here.

In a note to Poynter’s Romenesko earlier, she wrote:

I left the Sun-Times staff as reporter a couple of years ago to concentrate on books, etc., but I’ve continued on as the religion columnist. That ended yesterday. I was told by Don Hayner, the editor-in-chief and the man who hired me 10 years ago, that it was a budgetary and space issue. Now the paper has no religion reporter (that’s been the case for about a year) and no religion columnist.

This turn of events was not entirely unexpected. I saw the writing on the wall last week when there was no room in the physical paper for my Friday column so they ran it online only.

I had an extraordinary run at the Sun-Times and am so grateful for the opportunities — professional and personal (I doubt we’d have our son were it not for the paper: see http://vascosheart.blogspot.com) but I’m sad for the religion beat and do hope to find a new newspaper home for my column.

Indeed. These are interesting times for the religion beat. As Christianity Today’s Ted Olsen joked, “Last one on religion beat please turn out the lights!” He did find a bright side, too — all of these departures will certainly mean less predictable Religion Newswriter Association awards.

Whenever Pope Benedict XVI gives a homily or addresses a crowd, it’s always fascinating to see how the media write it up. This week, Benedict addressed the Vatican’s diplomatic corps that, by its nature, dealt a bit with broader political themes. How does a reporter sum up a 3,000-word address or figure out what aspect to focus on? To be sure, it’s a difficult task. The Boston Herald headlined its Associated Press story:

Pope denounces failure to forge new climate treaty

The article says the Pope denounced world leaders, that he’s been dubbed the “green pope” and that under his watch the Vatican is going green, etc., etc. The article does an admirable job of trying to explain how environmentalism is a moral issue for the church.

Reuters, on the other hand, took the exact same speech and said it was about gay marriage:

Pope says gay marriage threat to creation

So was the main point of the speech to denounce world leaders for failing to take action on global warming or was it to oppose laws that support same-sex marriage? What was this speech about?

Well, Benedict did talk about Copenhagen. He didn’t “denounce” world leaders so much as say he “shared in the growing concern” about resistance to combating the degradation of the environment and added:

It is proper, however, that this concern and commitment for the environment should be situated within the larger framework of the great challenges now facing mankind. If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn? It is in man’s respect for himself that his sense of responsibility for creation is shown. As Saint Thomas Aquinas has taught, man represents all that is most noble in the universe.

It might not be as sexy as denouncing world leaders or fighting gay marriage, but the speech was really about the Pope’s view of creation and how it encompasses more than just the earth’s natural resources but all life. It touched on politics but in order to make larger theological points. It’s difficult for many reporters to grasp that. To be fair, both of the reports above did include a tiny bit of the Pope’s theological statements in the stories. I read the Pope’s remarks after I read the stories about his remarks and I saw very little resemblance between them. Not just in the story’s content but in style and tone as well.

And, I have to note, what came off as the strongest denunciation to me was against the proliferation and maintenance of nuclear arms. In a different era, under different world leaders, I’m sure that would have gotten the headlines.

Like I said, it’s difficult to sum up a big speech or figure out what to focus on. But I’m not sure how well served the folks interested in the speech’s contents are by these summations.

If disaster strikes, you can pretty much count on religious broadcaster Pat Robertson to say something about it that offends much of the population. It’s not just Robertson, of course. You might recall Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., saying Katrina was about God wanting to smite Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour or something. Anyway, with the horrific news out of Haiti, that the earthquake there led to unbelievable loss of life and property, Robertson came in on cue. And news organizations spread the word immediately. Here’s how CNN reported it:

The Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever,” Robertson said on his broadcast Wednesday. “And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’ “

Now, explaining why Haiti is so poverty-stricken and troubled is a surprisingly challenging task. But what in the world was Robertson talking about?

The general approach being taken by the media seems to be 1) get Robertson’s quotes on air and in print STAT as they are ratings gold and 2) provide no context or explanation.

I wish we lived in a world where we had neither natural disasters nor Pat Robertson’s verbal disasters, but the media really like to cover him and he certainly represents a slice of religious thinking that should be covered. Even if I feel dirty writing about it.

The first thing that should be noted, but that many media outlets don’t, is that Robertson’s story wasn’t simply invented yesterday while he was on air. Let’s go to ABC News’ Jake Tapper who has the goods. After quoting Robertson extensively, he writes:

Robertson’s tale stems from a legend that Jean Jacques Dessalines, who led the Haitian revolution against the French Army, entered into a pact with Satan disguised as a voodoo deity in exchange for a military victory, which finally happened in 1803.

One minister of a Haitian-American church — who does not believe this legend — recently wrote about the frequent references in Haiti “to a spiritual pact that the fathers of the nation supposedly made with the devil to help them win their freedom from France. As a result of that satanic alliance, as they put it, God has placed a curse on the country sometime around its birth, and that divine burden has made it virtually impossible for the vast majority of Haitians to live in peace and prosperity in their land…The satanic pact allegedly took place at Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien on August 14, 1791 during a meeting organized by several slave leaders, under [Dutty] Boukman’s leadership, before launching what would become Haiti’s Independence War.”

Whatever one thinks of the veracity of this belief, it certainly should be included in stories about Robertson’s risible remarks. Another way to deepen understanding in these regular stories about Robertson is to provide some context for where he sits on the spectrum of religious broadcasters and evangelicals. Cathy Grossman at USA Today writes that he wasn’t just relying on this legend:

[H]e was also relying on his considerable talent for provoking attention, says Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay.

Lindsay interviewed Robertson for his book, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. He says:

“Robertson is savvy and vastly underestimated by most observers. He knows exactly what galvanizes attention among his constituents and the larger American public. It’s a mix of earnest belief and showmanship. He says these things intentionally. He’s not a careless speaker.

“Why bad things happen when God is good is the great question people ask at times of tragedy and disaster. To Robertson, it has to mean that evil — personified by the devil — is at work.”

Very interesting. I love having some perspective such as this. Sometimes I wonder whether the whole Pat Robertson experience doesn’t fill some cosmic need that everyone has after a natural disaster or act of terror. We want to be angry, but in a safe way. Robertson provides this vehicle for anger that fits perfectly into the 24-hour-news cycle.

Anyway, Robertson actually issued a statement defending the actual remarks he made. You can read it here.

I was reading Pope Benedict XVI’s recent speech to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps when I came across this quote:

Sadly, in certain countries, mainly in the West, one increasingly encounters in political and cultural circles, as well in the media, scarce respect and at times hostility, if not scorn, directed towards religion and towards Christianity in particular.

Well, the Washington Post’s “On Faith” panel says the Pope is all wet. Sort of. On Faith editors Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn posed the following question to the panelists:

Media biased against Christians?

Fox News analyst Brit Hume said “widespread media bias against Christianity” was to blame for criticism of his suggestion that Tiger Woods should embrace Christianity to find redemption. “Instead of urging that Tiger Woods turn to Christianity, if I had said what he needed to do was to strengthen his Buddhist commitment or turn to Hinduism, I don’t think anybody would have said a word,” Hume told Christianity Today. “It’s Christ and Christianity that get people stirred up.”

Sarah Palin and other conservative Christians have made similar claims. Is there widespread media bias against Christianity? Against evangelicals such as Hume and Palin? Against public figures who speak openly and directly about their faith? Against people who believe as you do?

And a quick look at the panelist answers is interesting. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield says bias against Christianity is real, but also understandable. Secular Coalition for America President Herb Silverman says the only bias on display against Brit Hume was against pomposity. Gustav Niebuhr wonders what’s the big deal since Jesus said Christians would be persecuted for their beliefs. C. Welton Gaddy says the notion is silly. Atheist apologist Daniel Dennett says it’s about time that the religious were under more intense scrutiny by the media. Professor of Islamic Studies John Esposito says religious bias begins at Fox News. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite says that Palin and Hume are merely reaping what they sowed. Rabbi Jack Moline says that Hume had no integrity. Comparative religions professor Matthew N. Schmalz says it’s Hume who is biased against pluralism. And author and reporter Susan Jacoby says the idea is ludicrous (and that Michael Gerson’s piece in the Post really angered her).

Only one of the panelists, Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Muow, agrees that the media is biased against Christians.

So for those keeping score at home, that’s 10 Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” panelists saying that the Pope and Brit Hume are crazypants or get what they deserve and one panelist saying he thinks that they have a point.

Maybe this was just a particularly clever experiment from the minds of Meacham and Quinn to prove the point?

To be sure, I actually enjoyed many of the answers from the panelists, but I’m just kind of wondering if this is what the folks at the Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” site think is a representative look at American religious views.

Ross Douthat addressed the point in his most recent column gave his take on the matter in his most recent New York Times column:

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

A week ago, Brit Hume broke all three rules at once.

Read the whole thing for his interesting take on the situation. It may surprise you.

When I was writing for The Jewish Journal, I learned a dirty little secret: Despite the great work being done by my paper, by The Forward, by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, some of the best work in Jewish journalism isn’t being done by journalists at all. While there is nowhere I would rather turn for in-depth coverage about the many facets of American Jewish life than the Big Three (sorry Jewish Week), a good deal of breaking news comes not from reporters but a few bloggers deeply rooted in the Jewish community despite the scorn their blogging earns them.

Indeed, one of my first cover stories for The Jewish Journal was about L.A. Jewry’s own muckraker, Luke Ford. A sample:

The blogger likes playing the role of the outsider journalist, the little guy willing to fight back, more nimble than those dinosaurs we call newspapers. He is — to quote Luke Ford himself — “more a kid who likes to throw manure.”

The son of a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, Ford is named after the gentile physician who wrote one of the Gospels and he shares his last name with one of the most infamously anti-Semitic Americans in history. But that’s not why mentioning the contentious Internet journalist, who converted to Judaism 15 years ago, gives some Jews the sensation of nails scraping across a chalkboard.

“He’s a lashon hara monger,” said one community leader, who like many agreed to speak only anonymously. “He comes up with the most outrageous conclusions and puts them up on his Web site, passing them off as truth. If a rabbi stands up on the pulpit and says something, by Saturday night it is on [Ford’s] Web site, twisted, with his perverted insights, as if it is fool-proof truth.”

But sometimes, Ford is right. And therein lies this tale: what happens when gossip, roundly despised in Jewish law and tradition, turns out to be true and important? What is the difference between making gossip and breaking news? And how, in the brave new world of blogging, do we answer these questions?

There are other big — many bigger — members of the Jewish blogosphere, though they mostly focus on commentary rather than news-breaking. There feeds fill my Google Reader inbox: Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic; Philip Weiss of the anti-Zionist site Mondoweiss; the folks at Jewcy and Tablet and Heeb and Commentary. But then there is Shmarya Rosenberg, who runs the blog FailedMessiah.com and is in a league of his own:

“Shmarya often reminds me of journalism in the old days — when editors would sometimes go at one another physically in the street,” Jonathan D. Sarna, a historian of American Jewry at Brandeis University with expertise in Jewish journalism, wrote in an e-mail message. “I know that he is fiercely hated in some Orthodox circles, but he has had many a scoop, and is certainly THE destination for those who want dirt about Orthodoxy exposed to the world.”

Like Ford, Rosenberg, directs his energy at the Orthodox Jewish community, which, at least for an outsider like me, is much more difficult to cover than other Jewish niches. But, like I was when covering the broader Jewish community, Rosenberg is an insider-outsider.

The blog’s title refers to Rosenberg’s disenfranchisement from the Chabad movement — the Lubavitchers later responded by excommunicating him — and he achieved broad attention for his blogging on the Agriprocessors scandal.

I’m not sure what was the impetus, because FailedMessiah has been big for a while now and I know of no recent major scoop, but The New York Times gave Rosenberg a favorable profile this weekend under the able direction of Samuel G. Freedman, who knows a thing or two about Jews vs. Jews. That’s where I found the above quote from Sarna, who was always my go-to source for a perspective on American Jewish history. More from Freedman:

Blogging on the site FailedMessiah.com, Mr. Rosenberg, 51, has transmuted a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world. He has broken news about sexual misconduct, smear campaigns and dubious business practices conducted by or on behalf of stringently religious Jews.

Operating thousands of miles from the centers of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn and Jerusalem, waking at 3:30 a.m. and working a dozen hours at a stretch in an apartment cluttered with books, Mr. Rosenberg has had his scoops cited by The Wall Street Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, PR Week and Gawker. The national Jewish newspaper The Forward listed him among the 50 most influential American Jews, and the hip, cheeky magazine Heeb put him in its top 100.

And somewhat regularly, Mr. Rosenberg’s in-box brims with missives like this recent one: “what happened to you when you were young that you are so anti ‘haredi’ were you abused or molested, you are as false and krum as they come, you are not helping anybody with your negative bent. You wanna bring out sad occurrences in the community, im not sure that its your business to do that, there is such a thing called tznius. And to belittle gedolim whole sale just proves that you are insane.”

If you need a Hebrew and Yiddish glossary to fully fathom the diss — “krum” means “crooked,” “haredi” means “fervently Orthodox,” “tznius” is “modesty” and the “gedolim” are the great rabbis — then you have some sense of the almost claustrophobically inward community that Mr. Rosenberg chronicles.

Not to discount the appreciation readers probably felt for Freedman explaining terms they almost certainly aren’t familiar with, but now you know Rosenberg is big. The God Blog, and its creator, didn’t make either of those lists.

What a horrendous week for the Godbeat.

First came the news that the Boston Globe’s award-winning religion reporter Michael Paulson had been promoted to city editor. Jen Peter, the Globe’s previous city editor, was recently upped to metro editor and her first act was to promote Paulson. This is great news for him, but a loss for religion reporting. When Paulson hinted at this in his most recent Articles of Faith blog post, he mentioned that the Globe would find a new religion reporter if he were to leave the beat. We’ll keep you updated.

Here’s some interesting information from Peter’s memo about the promotion, as posted over at the Boston Phoenix:

During his nearly exactly 10 years with the Globe (his first day was Jan. 10, 2000), Michael has covered the region’s communities of faith with a sensitivity and authority that have made him one of the most esteemed religion reporters in the country. He was a member of the Globe team that, quite literally, changed the world, with its coverage of the clergy sex abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The coverage won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for public service and just about every other journalism award that exists.

He has also chronicled the Episcopal Church’s internal battle over gay marriage, the closings of multiple Catholic parishes, and the death of Pope John Paul II. These stories, combined with his coverage of the sex abuse scandal, earned him the Religion Communicators Council’s Wilbur Award four years in a row. I could go on, listing more stories that won more awards, but I think you get the idea. He had an extraordinary decade.

Perhaps most important to me, and what I hope to accomplish in my new role, Michael also was one of the first reporters to grasp the potential of online coverage. He liveblogged Archbishop O’Malley’s elevation to cardinal in Rome and Deval Patrick’s historic inauguration as the state’s first African-American governor. He produced several videos for boston.com and launched a blog, “Articles of Faith,” that drew a devoted readership.

And this week also saw the departure from the Godbeat of Associated Press reporter Eric Gorski. Now, I am pretty sure that Gorski’s own family doesn’t compliment his writing as much as I have, so you can imagine how personally I’m taking this loss! I’ll go ahead and let Gorski explain his decision to change beats:

From God to the quad

I’m excited to share the news that I’m taking on a new role at AP. I’ll be covering higher education while my national reporting team colleague Justin Pope is on a year-long leave.

Religion is one of the best beats in journalism. Over the last 11 years it’s taken me to a Juarez slum, the apartment of a cardinal in Rome, an Islamic school in rural Indonesia, a papal Mass at Yankee Stadium and the Great American Beer Festival.

I also relish the challenge of diving into a rich, complex and important beat like higher ed.

I know most of you know me through the God beat, and I can’t tell you at this point whether this is a respite or a permanent break. My religion writing partner Rachel Zoll will continue her great work on the beat, as will our regional team of religion writers working out of bureaus across the country.

I’ve got one more religion story in the works. And of course religion intersects with higher education as it does with almost everything. So I will be looking for stories of consequence there.

What a major change. I suppose it is good, in both Paulson’s and Gorski’s cases that they will be moving to new positions with an eye toward the importance of religion coverage. If only we could put former religion beat pros throughout every paper. Still, I have to agree with what another Godbeat pro said about the changes — that they’re “devastating to Godreporting.”

We of course wish them well and hope that they will keep us informed of their new adventures.

I know that we have already pointed GetReligion readers to more than a few tributes to the late Deborah Howell. But I want to add one last comment, focusing for a second on her thoughts about how religion news often gets linked to the hot-button subject of media bias.

I wrote my Scripps Howard News Service column about Howell this week, which you can read by clicking here. Let me salute whoever it was on the copy desk who came up with that “holy terror” headline.

While writing this column, I debated whether to go into first-person voice and share a comment or two — in paraphrase — from conversations that I had in the past with Howell, during her days at Newhouse News Service. It will not surprise you that we talked about mainstream religion news coverage and our mutual interest in the important work of Religion News Service.

The problem, of course, is that the conversations were not interviews. I was not taking notes. I remember her key point, but I don’t have the words in a form that I felt comfortable using in a wire-service piece. I don’t have the notes and those crucial direct quotes.

Luckily, years later, Howell put some of the same ideas into her farewell column at the Washington Post. MZ used this quote the other day, taken from Howell’s comments on accountability and diversity, but I need to share it again.

* Devote more coverage to religion. When you see how many reporters cover sports and politics, it seems natural to add more coverage of a subject dear to many readers’ hearts. This region has a wealth of religions with interesting stories. … (T)wo religion reporters aren’t enough.

* Make a serious effort to cover political and social conservatives and their issues; the paper tends to shy away from those stories, leaving conservatives feeling excluded and alienated from the paper. I’d like those who have canceled their subscriptions to be readers again. Too many Post staff members think alike; more diversity of opinion should be welcomed.

Now Howell was a liberal’s liberal on religion and culture and didn’t mind letting anyone know that, in ways both subtle and obvious. But she cared deeply about the role of the press in public discourse. She also knew that — week after week — she heard from readers who believed, often for valid reasons, that their religious beliefs were not being accurately and fairly covered.

To put it bluntly, was it in the interest of the mainstream press to continue to drive these readers away? Is there some way to cover a wide variety of religious believers in a way that rings true, both for the believers and for journalists who want to offer accurate, balanced, fair coverage of tough issues?

So this is what Howell told me. It pained her to see the press attacked (usually by the right), often for reasons that were invalid. It pained her even more for to see the press attacked (usually by the right), for reasons that were valid. The bottom line: If the press can do a better job covering religion, many of these critics will have less to criticize.

This is a journalism problem and the goal is to improve the journalism.

Will things ever be perfect? No way. Can the situation be improved? Yes. By journalists who want to hear criticism, and praise, from both sides sides of the sanctuary aisle and the political aisle.

In other words, Howell was known for her cursing. Why?

“She had a unique persona. She could be very intimidating. She knew how to browbeat people,” said Mark O’Keefe, who worked for Howell on the Newhouse staff and as editor of Religion News Service. “It’s easy to talk about her colorful language, but I also think it’s important to understand why she used to get so upset. …

“She was a fierce advocate for important stories that she really cared about and that was especially true when it came to covering religion.”

The there is this from the current RNS editor:

In the mid-1990s, Howell urged Newhouse to purchase Religion News Service, the only mainstream wire service dedicated to covering religion news. In the years that followed, “She protected us, advocated for us, cajoled us, yelled at us, pushed us, swore at us and loved us,” noted Kevin Eckstrom, the current RNS editor, in an online tribute. “She, more than any other person, is responsible for us weathering the media meltdown that has devastated daily journalism.”

A cartoon in that newsroom says it all. In it, Howell is depicted as an angel hovering over the U.S. Capitol, while a second Howell — a devil with a pitchfork — gazes up in disgust, saying, “Give me a @?X!*$# break.” An adult convert to the Episcopal Church, the editor cherished her two nicknames bestowed by friends — Mother Mary Deborah and the Dragon Lady.

And there’s one more testimony from O’Keefe:

Year after year, stressed O’Keefe, Howell used her national network of contacts in newsrooms, and her credibility as journalism pioneer, to pound away on the importance of religion in the news.

“She was so passionate,” he said. “What she believed was that journalists can’t understand this country and what makes it tick — as well as lots of events around the world — without understanding religion. … She was like an invisible guardian angel out there behind the scenes, fighting in her own unique way for serious religion coverage in the mainstream press.”

Carry on, people. Carry on.

I’ve lived in Washington for a dozen years and as I was reading this fascinating piece by the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein, it occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about the Unification Church. Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his church have strong ties in the area, including ownership of the Washington Times. And mention of the Unification Church, the Rev. Moon or the Moonies isn’t unheard of ‘round these parts. But when was the last time you read a decent story about what the church teaches?

The focus of Boorstein’s story is second-generation Unificationists, as the church prefers members be called. These are the “blessed children” of Moon-arranged mass weddings from decades ago, children whose parents went straight from being strangers to engaged couples after their Messiah, the Korean Moon, matched them up. Moon is now in his late 80s and some church members are wondering how the church will and should proceed. Boorstein checks in with them and tells their story, particularly in light of some recent upsets in Moon-connected businesses in the Washington area. (Various executives at the Times were let go, as were some 40 percent of the staff, and other related businesses have also been shaken.)

The article includes relevant statistical information — church officials estimate that 7,500 of the 21,000 active Unificationists in the country are blessed children. It also includes fascinating information about the doctrine. For instance, Unificationists believe these children were born free of original sin and have a special spiritual status.

Here’s a portion of the piece that shows the range of belief in practice among second generation Unificationists:

Miilhan Stephens, a 22-year-old studying food science at the University of Maryland, beamed as he talked about Moon pairing him by photograph with a young woman from Japan. Photos from the matching ceremony show him holding the hand of his fiancee, who’s wearing a white dress and veil, in a Manhattan concert hall filled with couples.

By contrast, Marisa Rand, a 21-year-old art student whose Moon-matched parents divorced long ago, said the circumstance of their marriage was such a sensitive subject that it was barely mentioned when she was growing up in Cheverly. Her family no longer practices Unificationism, and she can’t imagine marrying the way her parents did.

Then there’s Moffitt, who represents the new, somewhat more moderate face of Unificationism. He didn’t marry a stranger — he and his wife, Kaeleigh, have known each other since they were children — and their marriage wasn’t arranged by Moon.

The two sat together in the Bowie living room with other blessed children for their weekly youth group. They discussed a book by Hyung-Jin Moon — the Moon son leading the religious part of the movement —performed skits, ate potato chips and admired one another’s clothes. Except for their biracial faces — evidence of a theology that sees intermarriage as a cosmic way to end conflict — and the photo of Rev. Moon on the wall, their lives are a world away from their parents’.
A new way to find their spouses

The article goes on to explain that many blessed children and their parents are using Web sites for matching. Moon announced in 2001, we learn, that parents could match their own children and Boorstein explains the theology behind that announcement. The article balances some of these doctrinal points with anecdotes, including a look at one of the local arranged marriages that was successful, a couple with 35 years of marriage and five children.

It’s easy to ignore, dismiss or sensationalize outlier religious groups such as the Unification Church. This article brings the church and its members into focus and, for someone like me who is largely ignorant of the Unification Church, it’s welcome.

The current dialogue between this weblog and reporter Paul Vitello of the New York Times, in addition to raising some valid issues worthy of discussion, has helped us pinpoint another problem here at GetReligion that needed to be fixed.

It seems that the click-on “Policies” link up there in our masthead has been broken for some time now, although no one seems to know when or how the problem developed.

That’s bad.

What’s the use of having policies if no one can read them?

This has been fixed, or as fixed as something can be in the wild world of comments pages in the blogosphere. You know, one person’s valid comment is another person’s screed.

I have, many times, quoted the following wisdom of Steve Waldman, who in 1999 founded the wild and crazy cyberspace known as Beliefnet.com and then left to join the Barack Obama administration. Faced with legions of comments-page scribes who wanted to argue about doctrine and politics, Waldman came up with the following guidelines for what they could and couldn’t get away with.

This may not be a precise quote, but it’s very close. I didn’t have a notepad at that particular dinner table in Key West.

“At Beliefnet, we’ll allow someone to say something like this in a comment: ‘According to the doctrines of my faith, you are wrong and you are going to hell.’ What we will not allow someone to say is this, ‘According to the doctrines of my faith, you are wrong and you are going to hell and I would like to assist in that process by any means possible.’ “

Well, here at GetReligion we are no where near that wild and crazy. Here is the short memo that we have just posted up there under “Policies.” It is essentially what the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc and I came up with five-plus years ago when we began to realize that we were going to have to work hard to keep the comments boards somewhat under control.

This is what we expect from our readers who leave comments here.

1. Engage the contents of the post. This is a journalism weblog. Please strive to comment on journalism issues, not your opinions of the doctrinal or political beliefs of other people. [If you leave a TrackBack, link to the post.]

2. Provide a valid email address or a link to your blog or website. If you’re unwilling to do this, we do not owe you a forum.

3. Provide at least your first name. If all you have to offer is a nom de plume, we’re not interested. If you post as more than one person from the same IP address, we’ll block that address.

4. A note to journalists: If you want to argue or dialogue with us about a GetReligion post that addresses your work, please use our “Submit” link to tell us that you wish to do so. We take your concerns seriously and want to air them and discuss them in a public, on-the-record manner if that is possible.

5. Do not engage in ad hominem arguments. We will delete such comments punctually, and will not respond to complaints (whether public or private) about the deletions.

6. We reserve the right to identify trollish behavior for what it is.

Keep it clean, friends, and try to focus on journalism issues. We’ll do our best, too, in this sinful, fallen world.

Editor’s note: The troll illustration the accompanies this post is from “The Lord of the Rings” movies and does not represent any known comments-page regular here at GetReligion.

Anyone who has, for the past 20 years or so, followed the joys and sorrows of Eastern Orthodoxy in the United States knows that at least two important trends can be seen, all at the same time.

The story that has received the most media attention is the rise of the “evangelical Orthodox” and others who are converting into this ancient faith. I have been part of that story, of course, on both sides of the notebook. This is a story of the slow growth of an American expression of Orthodoxy, a process both painful and encouraging.

The other trend, however, is linked to the struggles of many — but not all — Orthodox parishes in the United States that are defined, for the most part, in terms of ethnicity and their ties to the “old country,” whatever that old country might be. This story has received little media attention.

But if you want to start somewhere to understand this second, painful, trend — click here, sit down and read. This will take you to a news feature in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the struggles of several Eastern Christian churches, not all of them Orthodox, in the old, hip, resurgent neighborhood known as Northern Liberties. The writing by David O’Reilly is quite good and I only have one major complaint about the reporting, which I will mention later. You must read the whole story.

Let it sink in, in all of its sadness. Here’s a crucial chunk of this long feature, near the top:

The ages-old glow of Christendom’s most elaborate, enigmatic liturgy no longer is a guiding light for the community. But inside St. Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, beneath four blue onion domes, the sanctuary is as luminous as the day it opened in 1902, if not nearly as brimful of youth and hope.

The Rev. Mark Shinn, bearded and gold-caped, appears through the “royal door” before the altar, an ornate chalice in each hand. Murmuring a prayer, he raises the goblets toward the worshipers, who bow and make the sign of the cross under the wide-eyed gaze of saintly icons. In a gesture of humility, some sweep their fingertips across the oak floor. A few prostrate themselves to kiss it.

They do not retake their seats. There aren’t any. The congregants stand for a candlelit service lasting at least two hours and celebrated almost wholly in Old Church Slavonic, an archaic Eastern European tongue.

On a typical Sunday, about 80 people attend. For that, the archpriest is grateful.

“We keep no rolls and collect no dues,” Shinn said. “If you come, you’re a member.”

If you come.

The neighborhood used to be the safe, transforming landing place for immigrants. Now it is emerging as the spiritual home of young urbanites who define themselves as, yes, “spiritual,” but not “religious.” Who wants to go to church, let alone one in an ancient tongue? This is life in the post-denominational, post-doctrinal world. The only creed is that there are no creeds, unless they focus on the environment or other worthwhile causes.

One pastor sadly quips, “We’d probably do better if we had a doggy day care.”

O’Reilly does a stunning job of painting the historic context for what is happening now, flashing back into the good old days when the churches were full and pastors knew that their mission was to provide a home to those who were settling so far from home.

So what is missing?

What is missing is the broader picture of what is happening in Orthodoxy elsewhere in greater Philadelphia, in areas where multi-ethnic and pan-Orthodox parishes are greeting newcomers with open arms, when, of course, the newcomers come seeking a place to practice the faith of Eastern Orthodoxy.

There is one nod to small changes in a few of the Northern Liberties parishes. At least two Russian heritage churches switched to English liturgies and some new members arrived. However, the older members of the parish are not sure that they want to allow these newcomers to threaten what one pastor calls “their authority, their prestige.”

It’s a sad story, but an important story. A few years ago, I was invited to speak to a national assembly of Orthodox laypeople on this topic — “What do the converts want?” Here is one pivotal part of my address, which may or may not be linked to what is happening in this one corner of Philadelphia.

America is all about assimilation. But I need to stress that Orthodox believers face two different forms of assimilation. One asks them to assimilate into America at the level of culture and language. The other tempts them to assimilate on the level of doctrine and practice.

I believe that Orthodox Christians have divided into two different camps, whether this choice is conscious or unconscious. In many parishes, we see people who are struggling to assimilate into American culture, but don’t know what parts to accept. They are struggling to retain their language and to some extent their art. But on the level of faith and practice, they have already assimilated and their children have as well. You walk into their homes and you see little or no iconography. Yet when you walk into their church, they are not speaking English.

It’s an interesting mix of what they’ve given up and what they’ve chosen to cling to. As an Orthodox priest of an ethnic parish once told me: “Most of the members of my congregation have never been to confession in their lives. They have no idea that this even exists as a part of our church. They see no connection between confession and the life of our parish and the sacramental reality of our parish.”

So, let me offer some sad, but sincere, applause for O’Reilly and the team that produced this deep, vivid story. I hope they explore some other sanctuaries, looking for the other side of the Orthodox equation here in the “new country.”

Top photo: From the “Weekend in Philadephia” page at Cgunson.com.