Godbeat

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Crux offers exotic, National Geographic-style look at Catholic traditionalists? Or not?

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Try to imagine the mayhem that would be created in the religion blogosphere if a major controversy hit the news that involved gay rights, Mormonism, atheism and (wait for it) the Latin Mass. I think you'd need to call in the online equivalent of the U.S. Marines to control it.

Everyone who covers religion news knows that the Latin Mass is a hot-button topic, a Maypole around which a number of other emotional Catholic issues dance. As the old saying goes: What's the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist? You can negotiate with a terrorist.

So the folks at Crux just ran a massive on-site report about the recent Sacra Liturgia USA meeting. To say this is a colorful piece would be a great understatement.

This is, on one level, a classic example of the neo-National Geographic feature in which the tiniest details of life in an exotic tribe are placed under the microscope in order to contrast these folks with normal people. Yes, think trip to the zoo. In this case, "normal people" are the progressives in the post-Vatican II academic establishment and their journalism friends. Here's the view of one faithful GetReligion reader of the Crux feature:

In this article and the accompanying photos it seems to me as if Crux Now is treating this like they were reporting on and taking pictures at a zoo. "Oh, look! There's the scarlet Cardinal with flocks of admirers around him! Oh, and see over there? That's the white-hatted, red-breasted lionheart with an old-fashioned chasuble on!"

I can see some of that, in this coverage of the Cardinal Burke show. However, I was impressed with two elements of this story, which we will get to in a moment. There is one major wince moment at the very end for the suddenly old new Catholic left.

My problem with this piece?


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Can anyone explain celebrity news to me? #ConfusedAboutCurryTebowDuggarsDunham

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Can anyone explain celebrity news to me? #ConfusedAboutCurryTebowDuggarsDunham

Let me start with a personal confession. I love sports, college and pros. I love almost all kinds of jazz and popular music. I love old movies, and a few modern ones, and while I'm not a fan of most mainstream television, I love series mini-series from BBC and now the "binge" television era in cable land.

So I am a media-savvy guy, in some ways -- but not others. They key: I have absolutely zero understand of "celebrity culture" at the level of entertainment-news shows, the morning talk shows on major networks, the grocery store tabloids, etc. In other words, I don't know anything about anyone whose last name is or has ever been "Kardashian."

You get the picture?

So with that in mind, let me ask the following question -- which is directly linked to this week's "Crossroads" podcast about recent media storms, large and medium-sized in this case, about the Duggars and Tim Tebow. Click here to tune that in.

My question: In terms of actual talent and importance in American culture at this moment in time, name the hottest, the most significant, "celebrity" powerhouse brand out of the following three options (hyperlinks are to recent GetReligion posts):

(1) Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar.

(2) Tim Tebow.

(3) Stephen Curry.

Ah, you say, but Curry is not a "Christian" celebrity.


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Battlefield PTSD, the healing power of community and one giant religion ghost

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Battlefield PTSD, the healing power of community and one giant religion ghost

Sebastian Junger is as fine a reporter specializing in war and conflict coverage as there is today. He shot to fame in 1997 with his book "The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea" (a non-military saga, of course) and ever since has been producing award-winning journalism for print and screen, most of it conflict related.

His work includes the extraordinary feature documentary "Restrepo," a 2010 Academy Award nominee. Restrepo resulted from his spending a full year embedded along with photojournalist Tim Hetherington with an Army airborne platoon manning a highly vulnerable forward position in the mountains of Afghanistan. Restrepo was the name of a platoon member KIA.

Junger's now produced an absorbing piece of long-form magazine journalism (more than 7,100 words) published in the June issue of Vanity Fair on the subject of battlefield PTSD, now more prevalent than it's ever been for U.S. military personnel. Junger writes that it's also probably the highest military PTSD rate in the world, following more than a decade of American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(Exact PTSD rates are hard to determine for various reasons, including some fraud cases and some conflating of military PSTD with pre-existing conditions. Here's some numbers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

But Junger's piece is about way more than psychological battlefield wounds that often do not manifest until a soldier reenters civilian society.


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Offering sociological journalism about the mosques of New York City

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Offering sociological journalism about the mosques of New York City

ake your pick. Tony Carnes is either a sociological journalist or a journalistic sociologist.

Either way, since 2010 he’s led a team that walks the 6,375 miles of New York City streets, block by block, for interviews, documentation, and analysis of local religious activity -- with remarkable findings. Any newswriter interested in religion or immigration in America’s largest city can acquire ample material from the online magazine Carnes edits, “A Journey through NYC Religions.”

A transplanted Texan turned patriotic New Yorker, Carnes – full disclosure: a personal friend – has been a college teacher, wrote academic publications, and leads a university seminar in social science methods. But he’s also been an active journalist, including years as a senior writer for Christianity Today. His non-profit research organization, founded in 1989, has done field work in mainland China, the dying Soviet Union and rising Russian Federation, and the United States. A college convert to evangelical Christianity, Carnes attends Manhattan’s noted Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

A series of Journey articles launched May 18 is taking a fresh ground-level look at Islam. After the 9/11 attacks, the media widely reported that New York City had 100-plus mosques (“masjids”). But an early “Journey” report  located 175.


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#DUH — Key to Boy Scouts story is located in pews, pulpits and debates on doctrine

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When I was growing up in Port Arthur, Texas -- certainly one of the most racially divided cities in America -- one of the primary forces for change was the Boy Scouts of America. My father was the pastor of an inner-city Southern Baptist congregation and working with children in the neighborhoods around our church was one of his priorities.

As you can imagine, some of the people in church pews in the late 1960s didn't share his perspectives on that issue. My father did what he could.

Thus, there was a simple reality: Look at a church's Boy Scouts troop and it told you quite a bit about the leadership of that church, as opposed to the policies of the Boy Scouts.

That's why I was interested, to say the least, in the following passage in the recent Washington Post story about the remarks by Boy Scouts of America President Robert M. Gates in which he urged the organization to reconsider its ban on openly gay Scout leaders.

... Steeped in tradition as they were, the Boy Scouts often struggled to handle change. Though the Girl Scouts formally banned segregation of its troops the 1950s -- prompting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to call the group “a force for desegregation” -- the last Boy Scout troop wasn’t integrated until 1974, according to NPR. ...

And unlike the Boy Scouts of America, from the beginning the Girl Scouts declared themselves to be “non-sectarian in practice as well as theory.” In 1993, when a prospective member protested the phrase “serve God” in the Girl Scout Promise, the organization ruled that members could substitute whatever phrase fit their beliefs. The Girl Scouts have never had a policy on homosexual members and have admitted transgender members since 2011.

The Boy Scouts, on the other hand, have long been inextricably tied to tradition and religion. The Scout’s oath pledges boys to “do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law; to help other people at all times; to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” A 2011 study of messaging in the Girl Scout and Boy Scout handbooks found that the Boy Scouts handbook relied on “organizational scripts” rather than autonomy and critical thinking, promoting “an assertive heteronormative masculinity.” Meanwhile, more than 70 percent of all troops are chartered to faith-based organizations, most of them Christian.

It doesn't take a doctorate in gender studies to find good and evil in that paragraph.


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News question? What should church folks say, or not say, to guests who visit pews?

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News question? What should church folks say, or not say, to guests who visit pews?

As most GetReligion readers know, I am in my 27th year writing a weekly national religion column commenting on what's going on in the news. At the same time, when your syndication deadline is pretty early in the week, and most people read your work in weekend pages, it's often hard to precisely define what "news" means.

Every now and then you can find spot something with some real newsy bite and get to it ahead of the crowd that is writing on a daily deadline or, in the Internet age, with a deadline that's mere minutes into the future. Most of the time, I try to write about speeches or events or online debates that other people have missed or written off. Sometimes -- this is no surprise to readers of this blog -- there are angles in religion-news events that I think deserve more attention that many other scribes.

But here is a simple fact that led to this week's "Crossroads" podcast discussion with host Todd Wilken (click here to tun that in). During the past quarter century, some of the columns that have inspired the most reactions from readers were not about "news" at all, but focused on facts and trends about what goes on in ordinary sanctuaries week after week, month after month, year after year, etc.

You want to start a war in the pews? Yes, you can preach about the Iraq war or the mysteries of marriage and sex. Or you can change the hymnal or the worship band. Oh boy, play that one wrong and you're sure to cause eyebrows to rise and checkbooks to snap shut.

So my United syndicate column this week grew out of reading a column by a Southern Baptist leader named Thom Rainer, whose Twitter connections pull in thousands and thousands of readers all the time (less than half of them Southern Baptists, apparently). While his LifeWay Christian Resources people do all kinds of interesting research, much of this commentary focuses on the basic DNA of daily church life in a changing world. In this case he wrote about "Ten Things You Should Never Say to a Guest in a Worship Service."

The preacher's kid in me was intrigued by that one, in part because I've followed -- since the late 1980s -- the whole "seeker-friendly worship" debates about what appeals to, or offends, modern people who are "unchurched" or who have been outside the church for some time (maybe even those about to become "nones").


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Concerning GetReligion and our history of openly biased commentary on news

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Anyone who has ever taken the time to read the first essay published at this blog more than 11 years ago -- "What we do, why we do it" -- or who knows how to use a mouse and a search engine well enough to reach Wikipedia knows that one of my closest friends in journalism is a writer whose byline, back when she was a nationally known religion-beat professional, was Roberta Green.

Roberta and I were on the beat during the same era, primarily when I was at The Rocky Mountain News and she was at The Orange County Register. Then, in the pre-Internet era, she vanished from the beat when she married someone she met in a church Bible study. Our paths crossed again a few years later, at a Columbia University conference on religion-news issues, linked to the famous Freedom Forum study called "Bridging The Gap (.pdf here)."

As it turned out, Roberta had married a philanthropist named Howard Ahmanson, who at times has been a controversial figure in Southern California cultural and political life. At this point, I will simply say that if you want to know more about his evolving views on a host of subjects, you should check out his blog -- "Blue Kennel." For those who know political symbolism, it's logical to note that blue kennels might house blue dogs, a label Ahmanson embraced a few years ago when he left the Republican Party and registered as a Democrat.

For the past two decades, Roberta and I (and a host of other journalists and academics) have been involved in many journalism-education projects working with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the Global Media Project, Poynter.org, Oxford University Press and now The McCandlish Phillips Journalism Center, a project at The King's College in New York City that honors the legacy of the great New York Times reporter John McCandlish Phillips. My work with GetReligion.org has been part of all of this, for 11 years.

Like I said, these connections were put into print the day this blog opened. Still, I was not surprised when the GetReligion reader named "Jay," or whoever resides at the lambda98 address at Hotmail, had this response to my recent post about GetReligion, Religion News Service and debates about "church" and "state" conflicts in newsrooms.


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Concerning RNS and GetReligion: Yes, there are 'church' and 'state' debates in journalism

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For weeks, I have been hearing from readers asking me when GetReligion was going to address the Catholic News Agency report about the $120,000 grant from the Arcus Foundation to the Religion Newswriters Foundation, which owns Religion News Service.

In one article, CNA noted that the grant listing said that its purpose was to "recruit and equip LGBT supportive leaders and advocates to counter rejection and antagonism within traditionally conservative Christian churches." When announcing the grant, Arcus officials said this grant would help foster a "culture of LGBT understanding through the media” by funding news reports and blogging posts “about religion and LGBT peoples of color.”

RNS Editor Kevin Eckstrom defended his wire service's editorial independence, stressing that this public relations represented "Arcus’ description of their funding, not ours.” It is also crucial to note that the funding connections between RNS and the Religion Newswriters Foundation are complex, to the degree that CNA needed to correct some fine details. Please read that whole report carefully.

In that story, Eckstrom also noted that GetReligion frequently criticizes RNS because its work does not meet our blog's "standard of theological orthodoxy.”

I did not respond, although there is much to be said on these matters. First of all, please note that GetReligion frequently praises the work of RNS and we certainly recognize its crucial role as the only mainstream news operation dedicated to covering the religion beat. Second, let me acknowledge that -- over the past decade -- RNS frequently took interns from the Washington Journalism Center (which is now being rebooted in New York City). Eckstrom and his team, frankly, did a fantastic and gracious job working with my program's students and I will always be grateful for that.

So what can I say about the "theological" issues involved in this discussion? Let's start with some background on journalism "theology."


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Three keys to quality journalism on the Godbeat, and one All-Star who's mastered all three (updated)

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A GetReligion reader sent us a link to a story on Christians who are gay and celibate.

The reader said:

Been reading for some months now and learning much about assessing news story content. The above got picked up by my local paper, the Augusta Chronicle, today. I was pleased to note the quote distribution and the sympathetic ear given Mr. Hill, whose work I've often read. Your thoughts?

After clicking the link, I immediately recognized the byline.

Peter Smith is the award-winning Godbeat pro for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Based on past posts, you might say we're fans here at GetReligion.

What makes Smith's story on Christians who are gay and celibate a journalistic success?

Two of the same factors cited by the discerning reader who emailed us stood out to me — although I'll characterize those factors slightly differently. Plus, a third factor deserves mention.

 


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