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Here's a hot story many have missed: Cost of those 91 Episcopal Church lawsuits

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Here's a hot story many have missed: Cost of those 91 Episcopal Church lawsuits

Sometimes a news story drags on bit by bit, piece by piece, over the years and becomes so tedious that reporters miss the dramatic cumulative impact. It also doesn't help that long, slow-developing, nuanced religion stories have been known to turn secular editors into pillars of salt.

So it seems with the lawsuits against conservative congregations and regional dioceses that have been quitting the Episcopal Church, mostly to join the Anglican Church in North America, especially since consecration of the first openly partnered gay bishop in 2003.

The Religion Guy confesses he totally missed the eye-popping claim last year that the denomination has spent more than $40 million on lawsuits to win ownership of the dropouts’ buildings, properties, and liquid assets. If that’s anywhere near accurate it surely sets the all-time record for American schisms. And that doesn’t even count the millions come-outers have spent on lawyers. For more info, click here.

Note immediately that these elaborate data were pieced together by an obviously partisan if qualified source, “Anglican Curmudgeon” blogger A.S. Haley. He’s an attorney who specializes in church property law and represents the departing Diocese of San Joaquin in central California.  No reporter should simply accept Haley’s say-so and recycle his data unchecked. But a full accounting, working through his numbers with Episcopal officials, would make a good piece.


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The New York Times (surprise) offers saint-free coverage of St. Patrick's Day Parade in Boston

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If you have, through the years, followed the legal and cultural wars about gay rights and the New York City and Boston St. Patrick's Day parades, you know that these battles have often included discussions of a very interesting question.

That would be this question: Do these St. Patrick's Day events have anything to do with one of the greatest missionary saints in Christian history, the bishop now called St. Patrick? The saint associated with these words:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in height,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation.

As is often the case, fair-minded journalists should note that this is an emotional story about a debate that has, at the very least, two sides.


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Blue laws and blue ghosts: Story on Sunday business closings lacks religious voices

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I've spent the last few days "Where the West Begins" — in Fort Worth, Texas.

I've eaten some chicken-fried steak, waited for roughly 300 trains to pass — typically at speeds slower than cattle — and enjoyed quality time with my parents, brother and sister, all of whom call Cowtown home.

After Mom grabbed the coupons from Sunday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram, I noticed this banner, front-page headline: "Through with blue laws?"

The subhead in the print edition:

Lawmakers look at easing longtime limits on Sunday sales of cars and liquor

I hate to jump ahead, but anybody think there might be a religion angle on this story?

Let's start at the top:

Texans are nothing if not loyal to the past.

But some are starting to wonder whether all ties to the past need to be honored.

Take Sunday blue laws.

The laws, enacted decades ago to limit what people can do or buy on Sundays, required people to attend church and prevented the sale of items such as knives, nails and washing machines.

Most of the laws were repealed in 1985, but two remain: Vehicles can’t be sold on consecutive weekend days, and package liquor sales are banned on Sundays.

Now lawmakers have revived proposals to eliminate the car sales ban and to eat around the edges of the liquor sales prohibition.

“At one time, some enterprises could not even open one day on weekends, either Saturday or Sunday,” said Allan Saxe, an associate political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. “Sundays were usually very quiet with few large stores open.

“Now, Sundays are much like other days,” he said. “It is not surprising that some strong conservatives would introduce laws eliminating blue laws.”


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Why is the mainstream press (and Congress and churches) silent as Christians are literally being crucified?

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Last fall, I took out an online subscription to ForeignPolicy.com, because I love international news. Although it’s chiefly for foreign policy wonks, I’ve been pleased at the occasional religion piece they’ve posted such as why certain Buddhists detest the Dalai Lama by FP’s Asian editor. Or this story about a former Rocky Mountain News reporter who’s become an “Islamic Lenin.”

So I was intrigued to see this article that asks why Congress and churches alike are silent as Christians are getting literally crucified in Syria and their churches are demolished all over the Middle East: 

Last August, President Barack Obama signed off on legislation creating a special envoy charged with aiding the ancient Christian communities and other beleaguered religious minorities being targeted by the Islamic State.
The bill was a modest one — the new position was given a budget of just $1 million — and the White House quietly announced the signing in a late-afternoon press release that lumped it in with an array of other low-profile legislation. Neither Obama nor any prominent lawmakers made any explicit public reference to the bill.
Seven months later, the position remains unfilled — a small but concrete example of Washington’s passivity in the face of an ongoing wave of atrocities against the Assyrian, Chaldean, and other Christian communities of Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State has razed centuries-old churches and monasteries, beheaded and crucified Christians, and mounted a concerted campaign to drive Christians out of cities and towns they’ve lived in for thousands of years. The Iraqi city of Mosul had a Christian population of 35,000 when U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003; today, with the city in the hands of the Islamic State, the vast majority of them have fled.
Every holiday season, politicians in America take to the airwaves to rail against a so-called “war on Christmas” or “war on Easter,” pointing to things like major retailers wishing shoppers generic “happy holidays.” But on the subject of the Middle East, where an actual war on Christians is in full swing, those same voices are silent. 

The article goes on to tell how various people — most of them in Washington – are trying to change this indifference by pressuring Congress, 2016 presidential candidates, the State Department. I found remarks by John Eibner, the CEO of Christian Solidarity International-USA, closest to the mark as to why the White House – and hence the media – has been silent about this genocide. 


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How bad can the Pope Francis vs. Pope Benedict XVI frame game get? Check this out!

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How bad can the Pope Francis vs. Pope Benedict XVI frame game get? Check this out!

Several months ago, your GetReligionistas created our "What is this?" logo to salute a question that we have found ourselves asking over and over during the past decade.

Here's the deal. So you are reading something in a newspaper or online source that is supposed to be producing old-school hard news. Then you hit a passage or two that, simply stated, are wildly opinionated or built on what appears to be secret information, without a source that is shared with readers. In other words, you hit a patch of blatant opinion in the middle of a "news" article, like a patch of black ice on a highway that at first glance appears to be safe.

So you look at the top of the "news" article, trying to find evidence of a columnist logo or an "analysis" tag line. But it's not there. That's when you say (all together), "What is this?" There should probably be "!!!!" marks in there, too, or worse (as in What *& %^ #* is this?!).

Want to see an instant classic? Here's one, from an Agence France-Presse story -- drawn from Yahoo! -- sent to team GetReligion by an stunned reader (who thought some of the adjectives were way over the top). Let's look at the passage in context. Remember, this is drawn from a news report about the second anniversary of the election of Pope Francis, not a commentary or analysis piece:


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Church bombings in Pakistan: Mainstream media provide powerful coverage

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Mainstream media have often been accused of caring more about the persecution of other religions than Christianity. But with the horrendous suicide bombings of two churches in Pakistan yesterday, they focused a welcome spotlight.

One of the punchiest ledes is in one of the earlier reports -- by the Wall Street Journal, filing just before 6 a.m. eastern time yesterday:

ISLAMABAD—Twin suicide bombings at two churches in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore killed at least 13 people, including two policemen, and wounded more than 65 people on Sunday, police officials said.  
The back-to-back blasts shook the majority Christian neighborhood of Youhanabad as churches in the area held prayer services, police officials said. Emergency-services officials said several of the wounded are in critical condition and the death toll is expected to rise.

The Journal, unfortunately, was right: Most reports through the day placed the deaths at 14, with 70-80 injured.

Special kudos go to the Times of India for its detail-rich coverage. The newspaper did such street-level reporting as:

The first suicide bomber detonated his strapped-explosives outside the main gate of St John's Catholic Church after the security guard prevented him from entering the church where Christian families had gathered for Sunday service, a senior police officer. The second blast occurred minutes later in the compound of Christ Church.

The article then tells of the Christian protests who turned violent, including the attacks on two men suspected of taking part in the church attacks:


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When faith enters the spotlight, should reporters dig into the personal details?

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When faith enters the spotlight, should reporters dig into the personal details?

On one level, this past week's "Crossroads" podcast added a few extra layers of information to my recent Universal Syndicate "On Religion" column about the ministry of the late Father Jack Heaslip (video clip above), an Anglican priest who for several decades was the behind-the-scenes pastor to the members of U2.

But there's more to the podcast than that. Click here to tune into the whole discussion.

The key to the discussion is the conflicted feelings that I experienced, back in 2001, when I met Heaslip at a private gathering on Capitol Hill in which Bono address a strategic circle of Hill staffers who shared his convictions about hunger, AIDS and the Third World debt crisis.

The band's pastor asked if I was with the press and I admitted that I was. He said something like, "Well, we're here to hear that man speak," gesturing toward Bono, and slipped away to the back of the room.

I was very disappointed not to "land" a rare interview with this man, yet, at the same time, I admired the degree to which he managed to stay out of the spotlight and do his work without great fanfare. He didn't want to be turned into a "Father Jack Heaslip, secret pastor of U2 superstars!" headline. Instead, he wanted to continue his pastoral support for four men he had known since they were brash young teen-agers in the nondenominational school in which he was their guidance counselor.

So that journalistic tension is what the podcast is about, really.


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Catholic school teacher's blunt Facebook post turns into media free-for-all

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When a Catholic high school theology teacher posted some thoughts on her Facebook page, she never expected that two Hollywood actors and an online lynch mob -- including professionals at several newspapers -- would make her take it down.

So here are the basics. Note that much of the reporting turned into cheerleading for one side of the debate.

Patricia Jannuzzi teaches at Immaculata High School in Somerville, N.J.  When she read an article on theyoungconservatives.com web site about an obscene tweet by gay activist Dan Savage -- posted about presidential hopeful Dr. Ben Carson -- she saw red. She posted a jumbled response on her Facebook page that said in -- in part -- that homosexuals have an “agenda” and “they argue that they are born this way and it is not a choice to get the 14th amendment equal rights protection … bologna.” And that gays “want to reengineer western civ into a slow extinction. We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of humanity!!!!”

 A 2001 graduate of Immaculata saw her post and created a change.org petition calling it “hate speech” and asking for “action” to be taken at Immaculata. One of the 953 people who supported the petition was Greg Bennett, an openly gay 2004 alumnus of the school who once acted in “Real Housewives of New Jersey” and had Jannuzzi as a teacher. He signed the petition and asked his 165,000 Twitter followers to do the same.

Another gay alum, Scott Lyons, got his aunt, actress Susan Sarandon, to weigh in on her Facebook page:


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Prostitution in Rome: Washington Post goes for the wrong 'hook'

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Oh, those blue-nosed Catholics. Opposing prostitution in Rome on vague "moral grounds."

The Catholic Church flickers, ghostlike, in and out of a story by the Washington Post on attempts to deal with prostitution in Rome. The story looks at the dilemma of limiting a trade that many people seem to want, yet can't seem to tolerate.

It's a decent issue for an indepth, but the writing is a curious mélange of serious and snickering. In the latter, the Post calls the controversy a "very Italian opera." It tells of hookers in "lingerie and ­vertigo-inducing heels." And it leads with an "Oh no, you didn't!" clutch of clichés:

ROME — The Eternal City is colliding with the world’s oldest profession — and the sparks, as they say, are flying.
The ranks of streetwalkers have surged here in the heart of Catholicism, a swell that Rome’s officials are decrying as a stain on the dignity of the city’s citizens. But in a town of sinners as well as saints, outright bans on selling sex have failed before, leaving city authorities to put their faith in a new approach.

The new hook, if you will, is for the city to designate red-light districts, where the sex trade could be plied without police harassment. The rest of Rome, meanwhile, would be spared the sight of streetwalkers -- not to mention flashers, used condoms and pantyhose wrappers. (Yep, those are all in this story.) But the measure would imply permission for the sex trade, an attitude the Romans are still unwilling to give.

The Catholic Church is mentioned six times, yet the Post asks no one in the Vatican about the matter. The paper says generally that the Church is "fighting it on moral grounds." And it quotes a priest who works with a ministry to prostitutes, who says the city plan would "have the state become the pimp." A basic Church position? No room for that in this 1,100-word piece.


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