GetReligion readers likely are familiar with John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter’s ace Vatican reporter. His latest column analyzes the biggest Vatican stories of the last 10 years. An aside: is anyone else annoyed at all of these “best of decade” lists coming a year prior to the end of the actual decade?

Allen said he thought about compiling a list of the “biggest Vatican stories that never happened” or “most under-appreciated Vatican stories” but decided to just do some empirical analysis of what stories got the most play in print and on-line.

The top three were the sexual abuse crisis; the death of Pope John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI; and Benedict’s visit to the U.S. in April 2008. The second story was the biggest, particularly when it comes to broadcast coverage. Other big stories were Pope John Paul II’s visit to the Holy Land in 2000; his 25th anniversary as Pope; Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture; his decision to authorize wider celebration of the old Latin Mass; the Vatican’s critical reaction to the war in Iraq; a 2005 ruling that homosexuals should not be admitted to seminiaries; Catholic Jewish relations and Vatican reactions to The Da Vinci Code and “The Passion of the Christ.”

Allen says there are three interesting “lines of reflection” suggested by his research. One is that print and broadcast media cover the Vatican very differently. The papal transition accounted for around 10 percent of print coverage for the decade but one-third of broadcast coverage. You already probably know why, but here’s Allen’s explanation:

The explanation seems reasonably obvious: Stories with a dramatic visual and audio component are more likely to be widely followed by broadcast media, whereas stories about policy or theological disputes are more at home in the print world. The Vatican has always been adept at stagecraft, which makes it a natural for TV.

Given that contrast, it might be an interesting exercise for a Catholic college to conduct a study of differences in perception of the Vatican and/or the pope among Americans who are mostly dependent upon TV for their news (presumably, a substantial majority) and those whose outlooks are more shaped by newspapers and journals. Though it’s no more than a working hypothesis, my hunch would be that people more attuned to broadcast media may have a slightly sunnier impression of where things stand.

And Allen says that media coverage is much more favorable to the Catholic church than some Catholics believe. He says that may not be fair:

Simply adding up the total number of references to the Vatican doesn’t distinguish between positive and negative coverage, but it’s worth noting that two of the three clear winners for biggest stories of the decade were, by common reckoning, good ones for the Vatican: the global outpouring of affection for John Paul II at the time of his death, and the visit of Benedict XVI to the United States. Polls taken shortly after that trip showed the new pope winning high marks for his candor on the sex abuse issue, including the first-ever papal session with victims, and for the image of basic kindness he managed to project.

He also points out that some media outlets, such as CNN, carried Benedict’s American masses from “bell-to-bell” in what had to be a record for most Catholic liturgy ever broadcast on an American commercial network in a single week.

Another interesting tidbit is that while John Paul II received more broadcast coverage, Benedict XVI actually has received more print coverage. I find that fascinating. Here’s Allen’s explanation:

Those numbers seem to confirm a bit of conventional journalistic wisdom, which is that while John Paul II was the ideal pope for the TV age, the cerebral Benedict is often better suited to print. My friend and colleague Delia Gallagher was, I think, the first to say that Benedict XVI is a great pope for the Internet, because he’s meant to be read, and virtually every word he either speaks or publishes is now available in real time.

Here’s a final impression, which I can’t confirm statistically, but it reflects my experience: Much coverage of John Paul II during the first half of the decade was cast either in the past tense or the future, while Benedict’s is more firmly in the present.

Interesting! Allen says that much of this past, er, decade’s coverage of John Paul II was focused on his health or successor while coverage of Benedict XVI is all about the here and now. Allen calls this the “sweet spot” for media focus on ideas. Like any good end-of-year list, this one gives much food for thought and discussion.

I rarely disagree with the results of the Religion Newswriters Association poll that selects the year’s Top 10 stories on the religion-news beat.

But not this year. This time around, my ballot looked nothing like the final list. Click here to see the press release announcing the results.

Before we get to my choice for the year’s top religion story and why I picked it, here’s the top of my Scripps Howard News Service column for this week — which offers my take on the RNA results. I’ll give you the rest of the list later in this post.

President Barack Obama deserved the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, said the Norwegian Nobel Committee, because his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen … cooperation between peoples” had created a “new climate in international politics.”

Even Obama’s fiercest admirers admitted that his best work for peace occurred at lecture podiums, where the new president offered more of the soaring, idealistic words that helped him rise to power. Nobel judges, in particular, had to be thinking about his June 4 address at Cairo University, in which he promised an era of improved relations between America and the Muslim world.

It’s crucial, he said, for Americans and Muslims to realize that their cultures “overlap, and share common principles — principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.” Muslims and Americans must, for example, find ways to work together to defend religious liberty.

“People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind, heart and soul,” he said. “This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive. … The richness of religious diversity must be upheld — whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. … Freedom of religion is central to the ability of peoples to live together.”

The Cairo speech — which included quotes from the Koran, the Bible and the Talmud — was the year’s most important religion story, according to a poll of mainstream reporters who cover religion news. The role of Obama’s liberal Christian faith in the White House race topped the 2008 Religion Newswriters Association poll.

The problem, for me at least, is that the Cairo speech was, well, just a speech. Ask the Copts how things are going on the ground.

I know that the Cairo event it was terribly symbolic, but the content of the speech was not linked to other concrete initiatives during the year. In particular, it was a mixed year on the global human-rights front, especially in terms of U.S. actions on religious liberty. I mean, why did the president decline to meet with the Dalai Lama? That was the rare event that worried activists in Hollywood and at Focus on the Family.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s crucial for the White House to take steps to defend religious minorities and moderate Muslims who want to extend basic human rights to other believers who live in Muslim nations. That’s a vital issue. But were the lofty words in Cairo connected to concrete actions that were reported in the mainstream press?

Meanwhile, researchers at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released some sobering information toward the end of the year that was, in many ways, directly linked to the Cairo speech. The “Global Restrictions on Religion” study found that citizens in a third of all nations — nations representing 70 percent of the world’s population — are not able to practice their religion freely, due to government policies or hostile actions taken by individuals or groups.

Where did religious minorities face the worst restrictions? That would be Egypt, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan and India. Where did religious minorities enjoy the most freedom? That would be the United States, Brazil, Japan, Italy, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Clearly the tensions inside Islam over religious liberty issues are not going to disappear soon.

I thought the Cairo speech was important, and had it ranked No. 6 on my ballot. The story that I ranked No. 1 — President Obama’s honorary degree at Notre Dame — ended up slotted at No. 6 in the RNA results.

Why did I think the Notre Dame event was more important than the Cairo event? Because the issues raised at Notre Dame are directly linked to what I saw as the biggest story of the year, which was the growing tensions between liberal Catholics in the Obama administration and many, but not all, of the leadership and staff of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The president continues to work with progressive Catholics to redefine what it means to be a Catholic in American life, especially in terms of issues linked to the sanctity of human life. This affected all kinds of issues this year, especially linked to health care. The event at Notre Dame, on many levels, was the health-care story with striking visuals and the symbolic power linked to that old cliche — location, location, location.

Here is my take on the rest of the RNA top 10 list.

(2) Faith groups were at the center of debates over health-care reform, which was the hottest topic in Congress for most of the year. The U.S. Catholic bishops consistently opposed the use of tax dollars to fund abortions, thus clashing with other religious groups that supporting an expanded government role.

(3) The role of radical forms of Islam in terrorism hit the news once again, due to the disturbing history of statements and actions of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused gunman in the massacre of 13 people, including a pregnant woman, at Fort Hood.

(4) George Tiller, an outspoken specialist in performing late-term abortions, was shot while ushering at his Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregation in Wichita. The antigovernment radical charged with the murder, Scott Roeder, had in the past supported the views of writers who argue — see ArmyofGod.com — that violence against abortionists is morally justified.

(5) Mormons in California were attacked by some gay-rights supporters due to their lobbying efforts on behalf of Proposition 8, which outlawed gay marriage. Anti-Mormon protests led to vandalism at some Mormon buildings.

(6) President Obama was granted an honorary degree in law from the University of Notre Dame, despite protests that this violated a U.S. bishops policy urging Catholic institutions not to honor those who openly oppose church teachings on the sanctity of human life.

(7) The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to ordain gay and lesbian pastors who live in faithful, committed, monogamous relationships, leading some congregations to start preparations to form a new denomination.

(8) The national recession forced budget cuts at a wide variety of faith-related groups — houses of worship, publishing houses, relief agencies, colleges and seminaries.

(9) Leaders of the Episcopal Church voted to end a moratorium on installing gay bishops, ignoring a request from the archbishop of Canterbury and many other leaders in the global Anglican Communion. The Diocese of Los Angeles then elected a lesbian as a new assistant bishop.

(10) President Obama’s inauguration rites included a controversial invocation by the Rev. Rick Warren, a controversial benediction by the Rev. Joseph Lowery and, at a celebration beforehand, a prayer by New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay, noncelibate bishop.

When leaving comments, please stick to the contents of the post. However, feel free to offer your own choices for the top stories of the year. I think that would be fair game, this time around.

If, like me, you’re long since tired of reading stories about Tiger Woods’ sordid personal life, please hang with me for one more.

It’s an unusual story. I would expect nothing less from Slate. The online magazine is a great place to read unique angles to the same stories everyone else is reporting on. But this story may be an example of how sometimes Slate’s need to be contrarian gets a little awkward. The headline gave the first hint:

Tiger Woods Does Not Have 11 “Mistresses”

What? He has more?!

Quite the contrary. In this article, Jesse Sheidlower, author of “The F-Word” and editor-at-large for the Oxford English Dictionary, argues that Woods has zero. He’s not purporting that Woods wasn’t a master of infidelity — only that these liaisons don’t rise to the level of respect reserved for the mistress to the marriage. This seems absurd to me, but in Sheidlower’s opinion the mistress relationship has an element of sanctity that is higher than an open relationship but lower than marriage.

The word mistress entered English in the 14th century by way of French. Effectively equivalent to master with the ess feminine suffix, it originally meant “a woman having control or authority”—such as a woman who is the head of a household. By the 15th century, the word developed the meaning “a woman who is loved by a man; a female sweetheart,” but the specific sense “a woman other than his wife with whom a man has a long-lasting sexual relationship,” to quote the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition, doesn’t appear until the early 17th century. (John Donne made this meaning particularly clear in a sermon mentioning “women, whom the Kings were to take for their Wives, and not for Mistresses, (which is but a later name for Concubines).”)

This bare dictionary definition, even with the emphasis on “long-lasting,” doesn’t fully capture the nuances of mistress’s use. A mistress is exclusively devoted to one man. Although that man may have other partners, his relationship with his mistress is relatively serious and stable. He may even pay to support her, or at least help cover some of her living expenses. This signification comes across in characteristic quotations from such authors as Edith Wharton (“Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?”), F. Scott Fitzgerald (“There is always a halt there of at least a minute, and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress. The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her”), and John Updike (“He phoned the news, not to his wife, whom it would sadden, but to his mistress”).

If the type of romantic partnership that mistress evokes seems a little quaint, that points to the very problem with the word in current use: It refers to a social role for women that is increasingly rare, because it is increasingly unnecessary, in modern-day America.

So, “mistress” would be the word Daniel Burke was looking for in this RNS piece last week about Thomas Merton’s affair with a young student nurse. Their fling involved commitment and devotion, albeit only for the few months before Merton re-devoted himself to the monastic life.

So too would Steve McNair’s lover-killer have been his mistress, though most media outlets labeled her as his “girlfriend.”

Sheidlower touches on a principle recently proposed by the social critics Matt Stone and Trey Parker (AKA the creators of “South Park): A word’s meaning can change overtime. But in the end he says that though he doesn’t think mistress is a good fit, there really isn’t anything better in the English language.

Girlfriend usually implies an ongoing relationship, as does lover, which is in any case regarded by many media outlets as a bit too explicit. There are also expressions, often slangy, for the relationship itself, including affair (which can, but does not always, imply a continuing relationship), one-night stand, or hookup. These expressions, however, or more circumlocutory descriptions (“a woman with whom Tiger Woods had an affair”), are clunky and therefore not appropriate for headlines.

In other words, they’re mistresses.

You could argue that this is all just semantics. And it is. But words matter. And, far too often, journalists use language inaccurately.

Here, however, it seems they got it right. But if they are in need of an alternative, I’m a fan of using the old-fashioned and biblical “co-adulterers.”

Over the weekend, I discussed a New York Times story about a possible rift between the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Health Association (CHA) — which represents the many Catholic hospitals in the country — over health care reform legislation. The Times reported the following: “In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.”

News of a split would be a big deal politically in that it might give some self-identified pro-life Democrats some cover to vote for the bill. There would also be big ramifications for Catholic theology in the public square if a major Catholic group was at odds with the bishops on an important public policy matter. As it turns out, however, the “apparent split” is not so apparent, according to Catholic News Service:

Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity, told Catholic News Service in a telephone interview Dec. 28 that her organization has never wavered in its commitment to health care that protects “from conception to natural death,” as outlined in the CHA document, “Our Vision for U.S. Health Care.”

She disputed a report in The New York Times Dec. 26 that a recent CHA statement on Senate negotiations over abortion funding in health reform legislation represented a split with the bishops.

“There is not a shred of disagreement between CHA and the bishops,” Sister Carol said. “We believe there is a great possibility and probability that in conference committee we can work toward a solution that will prevent federal funding of abortion.”

The CNS report also clarified the sequence of events that might have led to the Times reporter getting the impression there was a split:

Sister Carol said Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick based his Dec. 26 story on a Dec. 17 CHA statement which noted that CHA had not reviewed the language of various amendments on the table at the time but was “encouraged by recent deliberations and the outline” Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., was developing.

At that point, “I felt they were making progress and were getting where we needed to be,” she said.

“I understand that it doesn’t make a good story to say (CHA and the USCCB) are working together,” Sister Carol added. “But it would have been an honest story.”

Anyway, go read the rest of CNS’ report and see if you can’t sort out what happened — obviously, if CHA’s statement came out on the 17th they would have had no way of knowing what the final abortion language in the bill would be and whether it would be problematic. It’s certainly possible the Times story resulted from plain old confusion.

It’s also possible that there’s more to this story than meets the eye. While the bishops do a good job of speaking together on public policy issues, there is a lot of rumbling beneath the scenes. It’s entirely likely that not all of the conference staff or the staff of groups such as the hospital association are going to be as concerned with upholding various doctrinal points as the bishops are. The tension between conscience protections and a grander social justice agenda is real and unsurprising. And the reporter may know more about what’s going on than made it into the paper.

I had some pretty pointed (and I think fair) critiques of the original New York Times piece, but it’s my experience that reporter David Kirkpatrick is very able. I hope he stays on this story and helps further illuminate what’s happening here.

I’ve only been a card-carrying Get Religion-er since August, and in that brief time I’ve been repeatedly drawn to articles that cover the intersection of faith and culture.

And what a year it was for examining Dan Brown and the Masons, Michael Moore and Catholicism, the Coen brothers and Judaism, punk rock musicians and Islam, Ricky Gervais and atheism, Glenn Beck and Mormonism, or the online pranksters of the Assclown Offensive and Scientology.

There were also fascinating books (such as cartoonist Robert Crumb’s Bible project, Andre Agassi’s memoir “Open,” and Carl Jung’s huge (and hugely anticipated) “Red Book.”

The Vatican gave a fitting postlude to the year in culture with its Dec. 22 release of a document commemorating TV’s “The Simpsons” on its 20th anniversary. The Associated Press was first up with the story: “Vatican paper says ‘The Simpsons’ are okely dokely.”

While not ignoring the show’s apparent problems (“excessively crude language, the violence of certain episodes or some extreme choices by the scriptwriters”) the article in L’Osservatore Romano by Luke M. Possati graciously praised the show’s accomplishments:

Religion, from the snore-evoking sermons of the Rev. Lovejoy to Homer’s face-to-face talks with God, appears so frequently on the show that it could be possible to come up with a “Simpsonian theology,” it said.

Homer’s religious confusion and ignorance are “a mirror of the indifference and the need that modern man feels toward faith,” the paper said.

It commented on several religion-themed episodes, including one in which Homer calls for divine intervention by crying: “I’m not normally a religious man, but if you’re up there, save me, Superman!”

“Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong,” L’Osservatore said. “But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well.”

Other reports soon appeared in newspapers, entertainment publications and blogs worldwide—none of them improving on the AP’s original. I can’t comment on the faithfulness of these various reports to the original L’Osservatore Romano article, which I have been unable to find in English translation. But some of the reports generated the ire of Catholics, like these two readers:

You have got to be kidding. It is a crude and vile show that teaches nothing. I can’t believe that the Vatican would sanction this.

Are there not enough good and beautiful works of man that we must sift through his most insulting and degrading work for one shred of value, only to be seen as “cool” in the eyes of the world?

Perhaps that’s the way things will be eternally at the intersection of faith and culture. A work will evoke religious euphoria in one recipient, while another will recoil from the same work in revulsion.

Finally, I can’t let 2009 end withouot praising Religion & Ethics Newsweekly for two fine reports: Rafael Pi Roman’s Nov. 20 piece on Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor and Kim Lawton’s in-depth look at Jewish rap singer Matisyahu.

I can’t wait to see what kinds of culture faith will inspire in 2010.

The Washington Post’s Rob Stein has an important story looking at how federal funding of abstinence-focused education might be included in the behemoth health care reform legislation pending in the Senate.

There are a few good things in the article. Coverage of the overall issue has been wretched for years. One minor pet peeve of mine is that mainstream reporters use the term “abstinence only” to describe programs that encourage teenagers to, among other things, wait to have sex until they’re married.

“Abstinence only” is a great term of polemics, and I certainly understand why people who oppose such programs use the term, but there is no way it’s fair to use in a mainstream media account. It conjures up scary visions of the religious right, fails to accurately describe the curriculum and isn’t how proponents of the program describe the curriculum. I’ve actually read through the curriculum of some abstinence education programs and was surprised to find that they deal much less with sex than with self-esteem training, decision making and goal setting.

To the Post’s credit, it describes abstinence programs using fair language and the term “abstinence-only” is limited to quotes from proponents of sex education that does not focus on abstinence.

But not all of the piece shines:

Critics of sex education programs focused on abstinence, however, are fighting to permanently end funding, saying there is clear evidence that the approach is unsuccessful.

“This is a last-ditch attempt by conservatives to resuscitate a program that has been proven to be ineffective,” said James Wagoner, president of Advocates for Youth, a Washington-based advocacy group. “This is the failed abstinence-only model that research has shown is ineffective.”

During President George W. Bush’s administration, abstinence programs received more than $100 million per year directly in federal funding and about $50 million in federal money funneled through the states. But the effort came under mounting criticism when studies concluded that the approach was ineffective and signs indicated the long decline in teen pregnancies was slowing.

(So “Advocates for Youth” is an advocacy group? You don’t say. I think even I could have figured that out from the name.) But we’re told that “studies concluded that the approach was ineffective”? And “signs indicated the long decline in teen pregnancies was slowing”? Are the minority of schools using abstinence education are to be blamed for this? What are these studies that have concluded this? Why aren’t they named or cited? Are we just supposed to trust the media?

I’m a huge skeptic on media coverage of abstinence education. I’ve written about the topic for years and it combines two of the media’s Achilles’ heels — an inability to understand statistics and a general favoring of the sexual revolution-end of the morality spectrum. A few years ago the CDC announced — wildly and completely erroneously, it turns out — that one in four teenage girls had a sexually transmitted disease. Without any corresponding data to suggest a relationship with sex education, many major media outlets — such as the New York Times and the Associated Press — repeated the claim and suggested that this increase was due to “abstinence only” education.

Or there was the study that showed that teenagers who delay or abstain sexual activity have much lower risks than those who don’t. But it showed that those who take public virginity pledges have higher incidences of some risky behavior than those who abstain from sex but do not take virginity pledges. And the media covered this either as proof that virginity pledges don’t work (without revealing that the comparison was not with sexually active teenagers but, rather, sexually abstinent teenagers who didn’t take public pledges). Or, worse, they covered the study as proof that “abstinence only” education doesn’t work. The only problem being that the study didn’t even look at what sex education curriculum was used. These virginity pledges might have taken place independently, in a church or para-church environment or in a school.

There was a solid study done by RAND Corporation on virginity pledges that showed they delay the onset of teenage sexual activity. And the media response was along the lines of crickets chirping.

My own reporting on sex education indicated that different programs work for different populations. If you’re a girl who doesn’t see college or a fancy career on her horizons and desperately wants to have a child, learning how to use condoms won’t alter your plans. Learning how to set reasonable goals and make responsible decisions might. If you’re a girl who has her college and career choices lined up and thinks that sleeping with the jai alai team is the path to happiness, learning how to use birth control might help you achieve your goals. It’s very difficult to quantify what works when considering the widely divergent populations that are being analyzed.

And contrary to popular reporting, abstinence education isn’t terribly widespread, even if it increased in popularity and funding during the previous administration. The standard sex education is still the typical curriculum, although it’s hard to say that any curriculum is typical since there are so many on the market. This article doesn’t mention how much these other programs receive in taxpayer funding.

The article does quote defenders of abstinence education disputing the views of Planned Parenthood and other groups that claim the programs are ineffective. But the Post has already sided with the latter group. Of course, even if sex education effectiveness wasn’t difficult to quantify and wasn’t highly charged and political, it would be inappropriate for the Post to side with one group over the other.

The fact is that we all probably wish that these heady questions of morality could be decided with simple quantitative analysis. It could happen, I guess, but it hasn’t happened yet. These stories will always pit supporters of the sexual revolution against apologists for the, say, Evangelical-Catholic-Muslim-Hindu approach to sex outside of marriage. Whether federal tax dollars are used to say that sex outside of marriage is great (and here’s how to do it) or that it’s unwise (and here’s how to avoid doing it) the moral and religious beliefs of many are at stake. Because of these underlying values, it’s a minefield to cover but there’s certainly room for improvement.

If, from the very beginning, your GetReligionistas have been complaining that the press does not “get religion,” we have also been complaining about the fact that the press does not devote enough attention to the religious left.

Now, the press “gets” the religious left when it comes to politics.

In fact, reporters often frame everything that groups on the religious left do in terms of politics. However, it is unfair to portray believers on the liberal side of the sanctuary aisle as mere politicos. It us unfair to portray liberals as people who have beliefs about political issues, but not doctrinal, creedal, biblical and sacramental issues.

So what should reporters do when they are handed a news story that is (a) liberal, (b) not rooted in moral theology about sex, yet (c) clearly rooted in doctrine? The answer should be obvious: They should allow the liberal believers to explain what they believe and how those beliefs have shaped their actions.

Take, for example, that Washington Post story that ran under the boring headline, “Church billboard in increasingly secular New Zealand causes controversy.” I thought this was another church vs. Santa story until a few paragraphs down.

Talk about burying the lede! Here’s how the story begins:

The Christmas season in sun-kissed New Zealand is normally a chilled-out, festive time more likely to involve beaches and barbecues than robust debates on the story of Jesus’s birth.

But this year, many here are caught up in the latter (on the beach and around the barbecue, of course), because of a billboard outside St. Matthew-in-the-City, a towering neo-gothic Anglican church on a bustling street in downtown Auckland.

The poster features Mary and Joseph in bed and apparently naked under the sheets. Joseph looks dejected, while Mary gazes sadly toward the heavens. The caption reads: “Poor Joseph, God was a hard act to follow.”

Oh those naughty Anglican vicars. As you would expect, the billboard caused its share of fury, anger most strongly expressed in physical attacks on the image and the theft of the second attempt to post it.

So the story is angry traditionalists? In secular New Zealand?

Much later in the story, readers find out that the billboard is not just an attempt to create public discussions about Christmas. This parish has a unique doctrinal point of view, one that clashes head on with centuries of Christian doctrine and tradition.

This is where the Post made a major error.

Archdeacon Glynn Cardy said the poster was intended to challenge stereotypes about the virgin birth. His church believes that Jesus had two human parents and was conceived naturally.

“We wanted to say to people who are on the margins: If you want to find out about God and Jesus, you don’t have to hang up your brain, you don’t have to believe in supernatural things. There are Christians who don’t believe God is a being in the sky who directs traffic on Earth,” Cardy said in an interview.

Anglican readers, did you catch it?

The editors at the Post really needed to ask if Cardy was saying that his church (as in his parish) does not believe in the Virgin Birth or if his Church (as in the Anglican Church in New Zealand) no longer teaches this ancient doctrine.

Either way, the story is that a congregation or a national church in the Anglican Communion put up a rather shocking billboard — at Christmas — attacking ancient doctrines about the Virgin Birth. The heart of the story should consist of Cardy and other members of his parish explaining why they believe what they believe and why they did what they did.

In other words, don’t bury the lede.

What does it mean when Cardy says that members of his church “don’t have to believe in supernatural things”?

What does that mean in terms of other credal doctrines, such as the Incarnation and the Resurrection?

Has this doctrinal approach affected worship in this congregation? What happens, for example, when the person in the pulpit and the people in the pews reach this passage in the Book of Common Prayer, as printed in New Zealand?

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; begotten from the Father before all worlds; God from God; Light from Light; true God from true God; begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father; through whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. …

There could be a story in there somewhere. You think?

Photos: The billboard image; St. Matthew-in-the-City Anglican Church, Auckland.

Earlier this year, former President Clinton helped negotiate the release of two American journalists who were held in North Korea for five months after crossing the border illegally.

Now an American missionary has crossed into North Korea’s borders calling on Kim Jong Il to shut down the country’s political prison camps.

I’m pleasantly surprised to see coverage early on and interested to see if it keeps up. Here’s coverage from South Korea by The New York Times:

“I am an American citizen,” Robert Park, 28, said as he crossed the frozen river separating China from North Korea on Friday, according to Jo Sung-rae, head of Pax Koreana, a conservative civic group based in Seoul. “I am coming here to deliver God’s love. God loves you.”

By early Sunday, there was no word of his fate from North Korea.

Before heading to China last week to make the journey, Mr. Park said he was determined to become a “martyr” for the tens of thousands of people said to be incarcerated in North Korea’s infamous concentration camps, Mr. Jo said.

In a videotaped message he made before the trip, Mr. Park said he wanted to be arrested and had no intention of leaving North Korea voluntarily until it shuts down its camps. He also said he did not want President Obama to “buy his freedom.”

Of course, the Times considers the impact on Washington’s diplomatic relations with North Korea, but I’m also curious how South Korean churches might respond, since they send out a lot of missionaries. I’m guessing there will be mixed reactions as some might consider him brave while others might consider him foolish. The Times’s article is worth a read because it does a nice job of giving readers some context of North Korea’s situation and offering some background of the missionary.

The Associated Press has more background from the missionary’s parents who heard from their son December 23 in an e-mail.

“Know that I am the happiest in all my life,” his e-mail said. “Incredible miracles are happening in the liberation of North Koreans right now … We are going to see a big and beautiful change in Korea and in the World this year!”

A Tuscan-based television station also reports on how Park’s background as a missionary.

“We call him a modern-day John the Baptist. That’s literally what we call him,” said Pastor John Benson.

Benson said that he ordained Park as a missionary in late 2007, and said that Park’s capacity for prayer surprised even him.

“We were kind of a place told him, ‘hey, Robert, it’s okay man, let’s go eat. Let’s go sleep. We would pray and then Robert would pray after the prayer meeting, on the way home,” Pastor Benson said.

We saw a lot of coverage of the journalists detained in the same country earlier this year, as journalists love covering other journalists. It will be interesting to see whether they continue to cover this development in the same way.

Times continue to be tough for Christians who live and who attempt to worship in Iraq. As you would expect, several mainstream news outlets used Christmas as a hook for updated reports about this issue, which touches at the heart of human-rights concerns about the plight of religious minorities in Iraq.

How tough did things get this Christmas? Here’s the top of a Washington Post report on the subject:

Christians in Iraq are preparing for a muted holiday season, with one bishop in the southern city of Basra calling for a ban on public festivities while other congregations across the country have canceled services and cautioned worshipers to keep their celebrations private.

The Chaldean bishop of Basra, Imad al-Banna, is asking Christians “not to display their joy, not to publicly celebrate the feast of Nativity” to avoid offending Iraq’s Shiite community, whose Ashura holiday falls two days after Christmas this year. According to Louis Sako, chief archbishop of Kirkuk for the Chaldean Christians, a Catholic sect that originated in Iraq, none of the northern archdiocese’s nine churches has scheduled a Christmas Mass this year.

“This is the first time we have had to cancel our celebrations,” he said.

Conditions continue to worsen for the Christian minority there and the report has the sad numbers to illustrate that. Here’s a sample:

Hundreds of thousands of Christians remain in Iraq, but many live in isolated enclaves, according to church officials. … (The) Chaldean archbishop, said that 10,000 Christians have fled Kirkuk in the past three months, and church officials in Basra have reported that the Christian community there has halved to about 2,500 people because of militia attacks.

The United Nations reported over the summer that 12,000 Christians had left Mosul and recently called for a “redoubling of efforts” to protect the besieged minority. Many Christian families have sought refuge in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north, where church services and festivities are held with no apparent security problems.

You can read many of the same facts in this Los Angeles Times report, as well, which includes details from Dec. 25th events.

The news is especially bleak since there were signs of hope not that long ago. Thus, we read:

Only months ago, there was optimism that Iraq might be on the verge of stability, but after weeks of rising bloodshed, many churches closed their doors … or hosted few guests for a late-afternoon Christmas Eve Mass.

Most Christians fled Baghdad in 2006 and ‘07 at the height of the sectarian violence when Islamic militants branded them U.S. collaborators, attacked their churches and gave them an ultimatum to either convert to Islam or pay a religious tax. A year ago, some returned triumphantly to their neighborhoods. But now they again are alarmed by the security situation in the city and nervous about drawing attention to themselves.

I really only have one concern about these reports, which are gripping — but incomplete.

To see what I am talking about, click here.

You would think, if you read the Christmas news reports, that all Christians in Iraq are in Eastern Catholic churches linked to Rome, such as the Chaldeans. Let me state right up front that it is understandable that these larger groups, especially those with ties to the West, would dominate reports in Western media.

Still, are there no Protestants in Iraq? There used to be a few. What about the Orthodox Christians, in a number of different Eastern and even Oriental traditions? There are Orthodox Christians in the Middle East (think Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem, for example) who continue to celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, according to the ancient Julian calendar. Are they being forced to close their doors this year, as well?

Again, I understand that the Chaldeans are the dominant church. Still, I think it would have been good to include some material on how the current crisis is affecting other bodies. Are some being hurt worse than others?

Just asking. Yes, as an Orthodox Christian I admit that I am sensitive on this issue, in large part because of the years I spent worshiping in an overwhelmingly Arab parish in South Florida. All of the Christians in the Middle East feel abandoned and the realities on the ground are quite complex and, yes, they deserve coverage.

If you were watching bowl games the night after Christmas, you heard the news repeated over and over again every few minutes: Florida Gators football Coach Urban Meyer had announced he was stepping down from one of the most prominent and prized coaching positions in college sports.

The reason cited was concerns about Meyer’s health, specifically his heart.

But Sunday’s New York Times story by Pete Thamel about the resignation indicates that a deeper motivation was that God had been tugging on Meyer’s spiritual heart (otherwise known as his soul) since the night of Dec. 5, when the Gators lost the Southeastern Conference title game and Meyer was taken to the hospital with severe chest pains.

Meyer said in a telephone interview late Saturday that the hospital trip prompted weeks of soul searching that ended on Christmas night, when he told his family he would be leaving his job at Florida. He said that his 18-year-old daughter, Nicki, hugged him and said, “I get my daddy back.”

“I saw it as a sign from God that this was the right thing to do,” Meyer said of his daughter’s reaction. “I was worried about letting people down. I was feeling so awful and concerned about my health. That was among several other signs that said it’s time to back away.”

[On Sunday, new reports said Meyer was considering taking a leave of absence instead of resigning.]

The symptoms that led to Meyer’s resignation are all too familiar to any of us who are driven to excel and respond to the pressures of modern life by seeking to cram ever more amounts of frantic activity into our already over-crammed days.

If there was a hallmark to Meyer’s coaching style, both on and off the field, it was his relentlessness. He said he found himself e-mailing recruits in church. He said that his 16-year-old daughter told him that she had not felt as if she had talked to him in the past two years. In a 10-day period around the SEC title game, Meyer said, he lost 20 pounds. Meyer discussed coaching one more year with Florida’s athletic director, Jeremy Foley, but decided to step down immediately.

“When your health flashes before your eyes, what’s before you means more than anything,” he said. “I have a strong faith that there’s a reason for everything, and God has a plan for us. I just don’t know what it is.”

Kudos to Thamel for letting Meyer call it as he sees it, even if it means filling the sports section with religious language. We’ve become accustomed to hearing God talk from Florida player Tim Tebow. Some readers feel they have heard too much. They argue that sports figures should be quoted discussing plays and stats, not riffing on theology. But Meyer had more on his mind than football, and Thamel let him express it.

The message of Meyer’s decision comes as we wrap up a year that was difficult for many of us. And it arrives just before the New Year’s tradition of making resolutions designed to help the future be better than the past. Perhaps Meyer’s action can inspire the rest of us to take a look at our lives and see what needs rearranging. Thus, we read:

“I made the decision that had to be made at this time,” he said. “There were all the warning signs. I felt like God was telling me I have to slow down and stop it.”

I spent most of Christmas in airports and in airplanes, so forgive me for dwelling on travel as of late. While we were waiting for our third flight on Friday, I read on my new phone (thank you, husband) about the attempted attack on a jetliner arriving in Detroit. There’s nothing like a terrorist scare to get you excited about flying again.

I’m guessing the airport chaplain whom the Washington Post recently profiled kept pretty busy this weekend. Reporter Paul Farhi offered a pretty nice Christmas-day feature on the chaplain at Dulles airport who might pray with people, offer directions to a gate or give counsel to employees.

Indeed, nearly 7,000 people this year have sought pastoral counseling at Dulles and Reagan National Airport, according to Metropolitan Washington Airports Interfaith Chapels, the nonprofit organization that runs chapels at both facilities. Chaplains at the airports have met with 28,000 employees over the years, as well, to talk with them about all manner of problems — family issues, money issues, drug and alcohol abuse.

I suppose there are chaplains everywhere—in the military, sports, hospitals, politics—but it never occurred to me that airports would have chaplains running around.

There are some sections of the article that could have used editing, however. Take the second half of this sentence, for example.

Which in this case includes about 36,000 airport employees and tens of thousands of travelers, many of whom seemed more in need of gate information than spiritual guidance.

Thanks for your opinion? The biggest problem, though, is that the reporter buries the chaplain’s religion down to the 14th paragraph. That’s sort of like writing about an athlete but not describing the sport or a musician without explaining the instrument.

By tradition, airport chaplains are interfaith (Benson happens to be a Presbyterian minister) and do not proselytize. They are most visible in emergencies, such as the aftermath of a plane crash, but most of the time they counsel airport employees and conduct worship services and Bible study sessions. Benson and his 10 assistant chaplains, all of whom are Christian and most of whom are former military chaplains, receive a small stipend for their work from MWAIC, which itself survives on donations. (A Muslim cleric conducts services on Fridays.)

Benson happens to be a Presbyterian minister? What if he were a religious leader in another tradition—would he happen to be a priest or an imam? We need more information here; for example, is he ordained?

The interfaith issues could easily be developed more. He’s not Catholic, he’s not Jewish, he’s not Muslim, so how can he be both interfaith and Presbyterian? What happens if, say, someone who’s Hindu wants to talk to a guru instead of a Presbyterian? I’m guessing some people would find it uncomfortable to pray to someone else’s God—Does Benson ever get someone who just doesn’t want to pray with him?

I’m also curious how one “gets” to be a airport chaplain. Do you have to have certain qualifications to become one? Does it require any formal education or training? Do you audition or something? Who do they “report” to? Those are some pretty basic questions I would find important for a story like this.

One angle the reporter could have explored is how Benson would compare his role as a hospital chaplain to his former role in the military. I assume military and sports chaplains hang out with their platoon or team for the deployment or season, while airport and hospital chaplains probably see people come and go all the time.

I would also be interested in hearing from airport authorities about why they have chaplains. Is it just one more way to keep people from mentally exploding after waiting in line after line after line? What role can a chaplain play that, say, an airport employee can’t?

More and more flying customers will be on edge as tighter security measures will likely be put in place. Plus, people love talking about their latest horror airport experience (after two days, I still don’t have my bag), so airport chaplains are potential profiles to pursue.

Editors like easy stories. Holiday stories, awful as they often are, tend to fit that bill. And this time of year we always have a few intersecting holiday storie like Christmas and college football bowl season.

It seems natural then that we’d get at least one story that discussed both. And we did with this Los Angeles Times story about UCLA football’s gregarious and joyful ball-hawk Rahim Moore:

“I used to tell my mom: ‘I don’t want to go to school. I want to go to football,’ ” Moore said. “I love the game so much. I would stay after practice playing catch or tackling guys. It’s all I wanted to do. Well, I went to school.”

The straight — and narrow — line Moore has followed between then and now has been rough at times. But it has been direct, like the path he has taken to the football so many times this season.

Another Christmas has come and it’s better than some. Moore will celebrate with his mother, Nowana Buchanan, and family today. On Friday he gets on a plane for the nation’s capital, where the Bruins will play Temple in the EagleBank Bowl on Tuesday.

It’s another step in the journey.

“I am so proud of his accomplishments,” said Buchanan, a single mother with three children. “Every kid should follow the path of their dream. Every kid should desire to be positive in life and have a goal. I’ve seen him grow and seen him go after his dream. And he didn’t get into any trouble. That is the most rewarding thing.”

OK, not a bad start. But the next paragraph offers this:

There is little doubt that Moore, a 19-year-old with deep religious beliefs, is the light bulb around which many of his teammates hover, providing a nonstop monologue to anyone within range.

No, there will be no explanation of those religious beliefs. There won’t even be another reference to anything religious, except for celebrating Christmas with the family. So why the mention?

I had a friend who played football at UCLA a few years who was, in fact, deeply religious. I knew what that meant — for him. But what is the likelihood that most LA Times readers know what someone means when they say Moore is “deeply religious”?

For some reason, many reporters find it very difficult to write about faith and football. (It’s not really that tough, but, then again, I’m not a sportwriter.) At seems like unless the subject is Tim Tebow or, maybe, Tony Dungy, religion is considered too tangential to the story.

It’s unclear from this story about Moore, which left many other things to be desired too, whether religion should have gotten more attention. We just don’t know because there is not enough info there. But it does seem clear that the “Oh, and he’s also religious so you know he’s a good guy” line doesn’t belong. I’d even venture that it’s worse than using the D-word.

P.S. Go Bruins.

The Senate’s passage of health care reform legislation was a major victory, though there’s a big difference between winning a battle and winning the war. There’s no solid evidence as of yet that the House is going to accept the Senate’s legislation as it’s written. The President appears to concede the issue may not be resolved into February.

And of course a major sticking point for the passage of health care reform is abortion funding. The House passed its own version of the health care bill by 220-215, and that was only after pro-life Democratic Congressman Bart Stupak led a revolt to ensure that the legislation didn’t use tax dollars to fund or subsidize abortion. The Senate bill contains no such guarantee, although Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska did force the inclusion of some other abortion language.

You can see what kind of pickle this has created. Even with language explicitly removing abortion funding from the House bill, health care legislation barely squeaked through the lower chamber. Switch three more votes and it won’t pass, and the likelihood of three pro-life Democratic holdouts given the way the Senate bill handles abortion is awfully high.

So that’s the legislative sitrep. There’s a lot of tension over whether the abortion issue can be resolved. Yesterday’s New York Times looked at one important development in the abortion impasse with “Catholic Group Supports Senate on Abortion Aid”:

In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.

Further, here’s the Times’ description of the abortion, ahem, “compromise” in the Senate bill:

The Senate bill, approved Thursday morning, allows any state to bar the use of federal subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion and requires insurers in other states to divide subsidy money into separate accounts so that only dollars from private premiums would be used to pay for abortions.

Technically, that’s accurate — but it doesn’t at all spell out what’s particularly controversial about the Senate’s abortion language, and as we all know the unintended consequences of a piece of legislation often outstrip what it was meant to do. Stupak sure isn’t happy about the Senate’s abortion language. Then in an interview early this week Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius gave to a feminist blogger, Sebelius essentially admitted that language in the Senate bill means that everyone in government insurance exchanges will be forced to pay for abortion. The Times should really be a bit more explicit about what’s going on here and exactly why people object.

That objection aside, the thrust of the Times piece is contrasting the stance of Catholic hospitals and Catholic bishops on Democratic health care legislation:

Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that such a compromise “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” An umbrella group for nuns followed its lead.

The same day, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the proposed compromise “morally unacceptable.”

The divide frames one of the most contentious issues facing House and Senate negotiators as they try to produce a bill that can pass in both chambers.

One big thing that the Times article gets right, is that the fact that it makes it pretty clear Catholic hospitals and Catholic bishops aren’t on equal footing when it comes to speaking with the authority of the church:

And in practical political terms, some Democrats — including some opponents of abortion rights — say that the Catholic hospitals’ relative openness to a compromise could play a pivotal role by providing political cover for Democrats who oppose abortion to support the health bill. Democrats and liberal groups quickly disseminated the association’s endorsement along with others from the nuns’ group, other Catholics and evangelicals.

The key phrase here is “providing political cover for Democrats who oppose abortion to support the health bill.” There’s no split on doctrine or confusion over who has more authority to speak for the church here, it’s just a matter of practical politics. Allegedly pro-life Democrats may welcome a “Catholic group” to point to as backing their decision if they decide to vote for the bill.

In that sense, however, the Catholic hospitals and Catholic bishops are decidedly not dueling moral authorities on the same footing. Fortunately, near the bottom of the article we do get this quote:

After the Catholic Hospital Association’s endorsement of the proposed compromise, Catholic conservatives and some abortion opponents accused the group of selling out to the Democrats.

“The Catholic Health Association does not represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life,” the conservative Catholic activist Deal Hudson said in a statement, calling the association’s move “utterly offensive.”

But the way this characterization is presented it seems to be more of an opinion. Certainly, the the “utterly offensive” statement certainly is Deal Hudson’s opinion and it doesn’t help that Hudson is viewed by many as a Republican mouthpiece. However, that the Catholic Health Association is not in a position to “represent the teaching of the Catholic Church on the non-negotiable defense of innocent life” is pretty much a fact. At the same time, the perspective that Catholic hospitals are acting out of moral concern is explicitly presented:

“We have known for quite some time that the Catholic hospitals and also the nuns are really breaking from these hard-line bishops and saying, ‘This really is our goal: to get more people into health care coverage,’ ” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado.

DeGette’s position as a leader of the abortion rights contingent of the House is not mentioned in the article. Which brings us to the final thing I wanted to note about the article. It is perhaps the most egregious:

Catholic scholars say their statement reflects a different application of church teachings against “cooperation with evil,” a calculus that the legislation offers a way to extend health insurance to millions of Americans. For the Catholic hospitals, that it is both a moral and financial imperative, since like other hospitals they stand to gain from reducing the number of uninsured patients.

That last sentence is the only mention in the entire article of motivation that Catholic hospitals might have to support the Senate’s health care legislation other than the moral considerations over abortion. This is a 2,000+ page piece of legislation that could potentially dictate how trillions of tax dollars are spent for health care in perpetuity. We should probably take a much, much closer look at what hospitals — many of which are deeply in the red right now — have to gain financially by supporting this legislation. Without going into particulars, it’s a lot.

In light of that, readers deserve a clear and compelling idea of what’s at stake for hospitals materially to help judge for themselves what exactly is motivating Catholic hospitals’ support of Democratic health care legislation. And it’s nowhere to be found in the Times piece.

If there is anything that I truly enjoy, as a reporter, it’s talking with articulate, sharp people who are totally comfortable in their own skins and open about what they think and believe.

This goes for secularists and religious liberals too, I must emphasize. The folks I have trouble working with, as a journalist, are the people — left or right — who are trying to hide what they believe and think. Take, for example, liberal bishops who have to hide the fine details of their beliefs, so that there isn’t too much fallout in the offering plates in centrist and traditionalist parishes. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I really enjoyed getting to interview Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever, the author of a somewhat snarky, but at all times well-reported and heartfelt, book about Christmas entitled “Tinsel.” Stuever is an openly gay entertainment reporter who calls himself a “cultural Catholic,” which, in his case, seems to mean that he has rejected all of the central doctrines of the faith, but he is also skeptical about his own unbelief. He’s just plan skeptical, period, which means that he is a reporter’s reporter.

To catch a glimpse of his style, check out his recent visit to the “Late, Late Show.” And here’s the top of a lengthy excerpt that ran the other day in the Style section (naturally) that gives you the basics about what Stuever set out to do, which was to embed himself on the front lines of a suburbanized Christmas in the Bible Belt.

I set out to tell a story about Christmas, but also about everything else: our weird economy, our modern sense of home, our oft-broken hearts, and our notions of God. The biggies. To tell it, I turned to a world made possible by chain stores, in an American economy mainly powered by the magical thinking of retail.

Where novelists and the makers of romantic holiday comedy movies exaggerate and fictionalize the Christmas past (cozy Dickens villages, snowy mornings, Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in turtleneck sweaters), I desired something more true, to see the nation’s half-trillion-dollar holiday in the high-definition light of the early 21st century, the real Christmas present, starting at the butt-crack of dawn in front of the big-box stores. I wanted to be there with hundreds of rabid consumers who’d waited all night for the melee of Black Friday to begin. I went looking for a country living not only on borrowed time, but also on borrowed grace. Which is how I wound up in Frisco, a former farm town turned Dallas mega burb, north of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Freeway, north of the President George Bush Turnpike; a place that grew in 15 years from 6,000 people to 100,000 people and, in the past decade, opened 7 million square feet of chain retail and restaurants.

I went toward the starter mansions. I went for the Sunday mornings at the giant churches, rockin’ to those ring-tone power ballads for Christ. I longed to see neighbors compete to have the best holiday light displays. I wanted to bask in all that bless-your-heart. The hottie moms in pink feather boas and Ugg boots waiting in line at Starbucks; the hottie dads in camouflage hunting gear examining flat-screen upgrades at the Best Buy. I wanted all that. Lord, I wanted to borrow some grace, too.

Stuever and I talked for more than two hours and it seemed like 20 minutes. I am, of course, a prodigal Texan who gets sweaty palms in shopping malls and, frankly, Stuever was much more patient and kind than I would have been trying to write about the material that he covered. He takes the people totally serious, even while lacing his work with large does of sarcasm and even cynicism when he deals with the culture in which they live.

I would have jumped straight to anger, which would have sent me to my priest for confession over and over and over.

Why? Here is the opening of my Christmas column about “Tinsel” for the Scripps Howard News Service:

As the Christmas pageant dress rehearsal rolled to its bold finale, reporter Hank Stuever found his mind drifting away to an unlikely artistic destination — a masterpiece from the Cubist movement.

The cast of “It’s a Wonderful Life 2” reassembled onstage at Celebration Covenant Church, a suburban mega church north of Dallas. There were characters from a Victorian tableau, along with Frosty the Snowman, young ballerinas and children dressed as penguins. Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus were there, too.

Then, entering from stage right, came “an adult Christ stripped down to his loincloth and smeared with Dracula blood, dragging a cross to center stage while being whipped by two centurion guards,” writes Stuever, in “Tinsel,” his open-a-vein study of Christmas in the American marketplace. “Here is where the Nativity, Dickens and Burl Ives collide head-on with Good Friday, as Jesus is crucified while everyone sings ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ ending on a long, noisy note: ‘newborn kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.’

“Then they freeze.

“Hold it for applause.”

The scene was achingly sincere and painfully bizarre, with holy images jammed into a pop framework next to crass materialism. For millions of Americans, this is the real Christmas.

“I wrote it in my notes, right there in that church,” Stuever said. “I wrote, ‘It’s Picasso. … I just couldn’t believe it.”

The key is that Stuever, who is not a Christian believer, openly sought the true meaning of Christmas in the material world. He pretty much proves that this is what most Americans do, whether they want to admit it or not. As I put it in the column, “Most Americans say they want Bethlehem and the North Pole, but the truth is that they invest more time, energy and money at the North Pole.”

You really need to read the book, if you have the stomach for it. I am not alone in thinking this. I mean, click on over and check out this take on “Tinsel” by Rod “Crunchy Cons” Dreher.

Stuever asked three Frisco families to let him hang out with them constantly — even on Christmas morning — to see the season through their eyes, from before Black Friday right on to the trashing of mountains of ripped wrapping paper.

This is the end of my column. Once again, note that Stuever is being absolutely candid about what he does and does not believe. You have to salute him for that.

Stuever argues that the binges of shopping and feasting are as ancient — and more significant today — than the rites of praying and believing.

For Stuever, Christmas is fake, but that’s fine because fake is all there is. He argues that millions of Americans struggle to find the “total moments” of nostalgia and joy that they seek at Christmas because they are not being honest about why they do what they do during the all-consuming dash to Dec. 25.

“It’s so easy to see all of the craziness on TV and say, ‘Oh, those poor, stupid people,’” he said. “But when you get down there in the middle of it with them and listen to what people are saying and try to feel what they are feeling, you realize that all of that wildness is not just about buying the new Wii at Best Buy. … It’s a religious experience for them, even though it couldn’t be more secular. They’re out there searching for transcendence, trying to find what they think is the magic of Christmas.”

That’s hard to hear. Has anyone else read the book?

How do you sum up how billions of Christians across the world observe the birth of Christ? It’s difficult to do. This Associated Press round-up begins with a completely unfazed Pope Benedict being knocked down by a deranged woman and ends with 47,000 Filipinos, displaced by an erupting volcano, eating Christmas dinner at shelters. It includes the sad news that some Christians in Pakistan fear marking the day, still scared by the Muslim riots targeting them from earlier this year.

A major chunk of the report looks at Bethlehem, where thousands of pilgrims have come from around the world to be in same town where Jesus was born. That town has seen strife over the years. A reader pointed out this section:

Christmas in Bethlehem has its incongruous elements — the troops of Palestinian boy scouts who wear kilts and play bagpipes in one of the town’s holiday traditions, for example, or the inflatable Santa Clauses hanging from church pillars and storefronts looking out of place and overdressed in this Middle Eastern town with not a snowflake in sight.

Jeffrey Lynch, 36, a sanitation worker from New York City, was taking a tour through the Church of the Nativity, the fourth-century Crusader era structure built atop the grottos that mark the spot believed to be the birthplace of Jesus.

“It’s a miracle being here on Christmas Eve. It’s a lifetime opportunity. I wish everybody could be here,” he said.

So the Church of the Nativity is a fourth-century Crusader era structure? What does that mean? As the reader who submitted the item notes, it can either be 4th-century or it can be Crusader-era. But it can’t be both.

The Crusades went on over a period of about 200 years, beginning around the end of the 11th century and extending until the end of the 13th century.

The first basilica for the Church of the Nativity was begun by Constantine I’s mother and was completed in 333. After a fire during the Samaritan Revolt of 529, the church was rebuilt in 565. Even when various groups invaded or attacked in subsequent years, the structure was not destroyed. It has been expanded over the years and is quite large now.

Tmatt has written about media confusion over this church structure before. Back in 2002, Palestinian militants took over the building in an attempt to seek shelter from Israeli Defense Forces who were after them. The church has various parts operated by Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic authorities. All three have religious communities on site. TMatt wrote after a tour there:

The main lesson I learned was that the Church of the Nativity is not one building. Nevertheless, most news about the recent Bethlehem siege described it has one church served by 30 or more priests, monks and nuns. Sadly, the reality is more splintered than that and recent events may have deepened the cracks.

Journalists said Palestinians in “the monastery” exchanged fire with Israeli troops. Which monastery? There are separate Roman Catholic and Greek monasteries and an Armenian Orthodox convent. “The priests” said they were not held hostage. Which priests? Gunmen raided food supplies and trashed monastic cells. In which cloister?

It’s just a good reminder that there are two churches on this often tense and highly symbolic site, a key element that is missed in much media coverage. The facts, as always, matter in this kind of story.

And Merry Christmas everyone!