Douglas LeBlanc

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Doug LeBlanc bids farewell: I enjoyed my time in a journalism niche within a niche within a niche

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Doug LeBlanc bids farewell: I enjoyed my time in a journalism niche within a niche within a niche

Terry Mattingly had been my faithful friend of about a decade when he invited me to help him launch GetReligion.org at the start of February, 2004.

The timing was right. I had reached a point of uncertainty about what new direction my journalism career would take.

GetReligion became a rewarding place to continue writing and learning basic skills in working with World Wide Web platforms. For any platform nerds who are keeping score, my favorite software remains WordPress.

I was never quite at ease as a religion-beat critic, but I found a niche of critiquing heavily flawed material and praising articles that reflected an understanding of religion’s importance in journalism.

Looking back, I think these posts best represent moments of enjoying my work with GetReligion.

* Johnny Cash’s table fellowship (Sept. 22, 2004)

* Jimmy Swaggart and the hairy swamp monkey (Sept. 23, 2004)

* NASCAR, Cabela’s — and Catholicism? (Feb. 18, 2005)

* Rick Warren’s tipping point (Sept. 10, 2005)

* Esquire explains it all for you (Nov. 6, 2005)

* Gangster of love (Nov. 13, 2008)

* Covering Rep. Gabbard’s American path to Hinduism, including some complex, tricky details (June 18, 2019)


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Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

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Rolling Stone readers will be shocked: Flamy Grant's cock-and-bull tale of oppression

Ethan Millman of Rolling Stone had an amusing story on his hands, if ideology had not prevailed and rendered it into an uncritical public relations piece.

The story is this: The Recording Academy changed the category of the album “Bible Belt Baby” by Flamy Grant from Contemporary Christian Album to Best Pop Vocal Album. Millman reports that the change was the result of vulgarities in the song “Esther, Ruth, and Rahab,” which includes this line: “God would only hear a prayer/If it came from a person with a cock.”

Millman quotes this statement from the Recording Academy that confirms its reason for making the change: “Re-categorizing recordings with explicit language/content has been a standard practice for the Gospel & CCM genre committee, given that the Gospel & CCM Field consists of lyrics-based categories that reflect a Christian worldview.”

And that’s the point when the detachment of traditional journalism concludes. I am sure that is shocking to Rolling Stone readers.

The rest of the story hands the microphone to Matthew Blake (the offstage name of Flamy Grant), who has a sense of humor about a great many things other than his victimization narrative. In this story, his word is printed as gospel.

First Blake complains about the category change — one that most purveyors of Contemporary Christian Music would welcome, given the genre’s reputation as being bland and dull.

But Blake believes the change “completely buried me” because, as Millman explains, Blake would “now be measured against the likes of the world’s biggest superstars as opposed to a smaller niche of peers from the Christian music community.”

Next, Blake presents as a naif in the woods of Big Music: “This is all so new to me; I’m pretty clueless about the inner workings of the music industry.”


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Let the palace intrigue over at Disney+ palace begin

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Let the palace intrigue over at Disney+ palace begin

Screenwriter and director Tony Gilroy, showrunner off “Andor” in the Star Wars universe (premiers Sept. 21 on Disney+), spoke recently to a Television Critics Association event.

If even one member of the Religion News Association had been present, we might have an encyclical to discuss.

But let’s give credit where it’s due to Lance Gose of CBR.com (Comic Book Resources). Gose captured a few sound bites from Gilroy, who compared the guardians of Star Wars canon with the Vatican.

“If you think about Star Wars as the Roman Catholic Church, if you think about it as a religion, it has all kinds of factions, groups, and within it, there are all kinds of canon,” Gilroy said.

“We are constantly in touch with the Vatican about what we do, we are constantly checking everything we do,” he added. “We have a very complicated relationship with how we deal with everything that exists. We’re telling a story that we want to tell, and we are not violating the grand canon, let’s put it that way.”

Gilroy’s comparison prompts a few immediate questions for me. These are just for fun, but there may be some perfectly valid religion-beat hooks in here. As people frequently say here at GetReligion: Hold that thought.


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When assisted suicide becomes 'a crossing over' church rite and a mere 'procedure'

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When assisted suicide becomes 'a crossing over' church rite and a mere 'procedure'

Writer Emily Standfield drew a challenging assignment recently for Broadview magazine: write about Betty Sanguin, who chose to hasten her death as part of a religious rite performed inside the church she loved for many years, amid a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Here’s the full headline: “Manitoba’s first medically assisted death in a church was an ‘intimate’ ceremony — Betty Sanguin spent her last day with family and friends at Churchill Park United.” And this is the overture:

At around noon on March 9, Betty Sanguin arrived at her church, Churchill Park United in Winnipeg, on a stretcher.

“The moment we rolled her in … and sat her up in her recliner, she lit up like a Christmas tree,” Lynda Sanguin-Colpitts, one of Sanguin’s daughters, recalls. “I hadn’t seen that much life in her eyes, so much joy [in a long time]. And honestly I think part of it was just being in the church.”

But this was no ordinary church service. Sanguin chose to die in the sanctuary that day.

Let’s stipulate some points up front:

First of all, Standfield is an editorial intern. Also, it’s crucial that Broadview, a publication affiliated with the United Church of Canada, has many ideological commitments and states them explicitly on its website. Here are some quotes:

— “Broadview’s values include LGBTQ2 inclusion, environmental sustainability and ethical investing, as well as increasing the presence of diverse contributors.”

— “In October 2020, we pledged to have one-third BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) staff and freelance contributors by 2025, and we’ll check in on our progress annually. Our governing board has also committed to achieving a similar target among its 11 members.”

— “In our writing, we refer to diverse communities with their preferred cases and spellings. For example, we capitalize ‘B’ in ‘Black’ and ‘I’ in ‘Indigenous,’ and use our Indigenous writers’ and subjects’ preferred spellings for Indigenous nations.”


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Was the life of Dorothy Day too Catholic for the New York Times to grasp?

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Was the life of Dorothy Day too Catholic for the New York Times to grasp?

The New York Times veers close to self-parody in publishing “Was Dorothy Day Too Left-Wing to Be a Catholic Saint?”

The very deck beneath the headline undercuts it: “The Archdiocese of New York has asked the Vatican to consider the social activist for sainthood. But church leaders are not entirely comfortable with her politics.”

Actually, Day has always made Catholics on the right and left uncomfortable. The key is making sure that readers know why this is true.

What Liam Stack has to report is pretty straightforward.

Martha Hennessy was upset with what Cardinal Timothy Dolan preached during a Mass in Day’s honor:

“He has reduced her to ‘she lived a life of sexual promiscuity and she dabbled in communism,’” she said. “What worse enemy could we have, saying those things about her?” Ms. Hennessy is active in the [canonization] movement and did a reading at the Mass. “We have got to focus on her policies, we have got to focus on her practices.”

Stack’s report does not link to the cardinal’s homily, which is available on YouTube and embedded in this post (the homily begins at one hour and 15 minutes).

Viewers will note that there is no indication in Cardinal Dolan’s remarks that he is anything other than an admirer. He calls Day “one of our greats,” and mentions that he asked Pope Francis to declare her venerable: one major step toward becoming a saint.

While Dolan’s brief homily did not dwell on Day’s political life, he referred to the significant detail of her being on assignment by a Catholic magazine to report on a Hunger March in 1932 in the nation’s capital. Dolan added a detail omitted by the Times: after observing this march, Day prayed in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and took another step toward integrating her politics and her emerging faith.


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Welcome to New York Times 'religion' feed? A kissy-kissy chat with exiting NARAL boss

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Welcome to New York Times 'religion' feed? A kissy-kissy chat with exiting NARAL boss

Does anyone else remember RSS feeds?

The whole idea of RSS — Really Simple Syndication — is that websites can allow you can set up an automated feed that feeds you updates on specific topics in a standardized, computer-readable format.

The key is that computer algorithms are supposed to detect when stories address issues that interest a specific reader.

Anyway, I received this item the other day in my RSS feed devoted to New York Times stories about religion. In this case, the Times defines the RSS criteria, not me.

In terms of religion news, this one is pretty weird — even for today’s Times. The headline: “Ilyse Hogue, Influential Abortion Rights Advocate, Will Step Down as NARAL Chief — In an interview, Ms. Hogue discussed a tumultuous era for abortion rights and the future of Roe v. Wade.”

In other words, this is a kissy-kissy Q&A marking Hogue’s exit after eight years as leader of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The Times informs readers that “abortion rights are at something of a crossroads, with Democrats facing the choice of whether to try to deliver on their promise of codifying Roe v. Wade.”

All right, says I, let’s see the many points in this report that touch on religion. After all, the RSS algorithms put this in the “religion” feed.

I found three, and even that it is stretching it. Can you spot the religious content in the following three bites from this news feature? The questions, obviously, are in bold type:

Let’s start with perhaps the biggest question: Is Roe v. Wade safe?


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Lost in the digital morgue: David Caleb Cook (1850-1927), founder of a global publishing powerhouse

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Lost in the digital morgue: David Caleb Cook (1850-1927), founder of a global publishing powerhouse

Alicia Fabbre, a freelance writer for the Elgin Courier-News, wrote a lovely story recently about Ramona and Sam Jones, who have rescued a former mansion in that city from a long abandonment.

Fabbre had a more dramatic story to tell but for one considerable detail that did not appear: Who was David Caleb Cook, and how did he afford to build this mansion in 1885?

Yes, there is a religion angle here.

Fabbre referred to Cook only as “a publishing magnate.” Imagine if someone bought the former mansion of the legendary and volcanic Robert R. “Colonel” McCormick and the Elgin Courier-News, which is owned Tribune Publishing, referred to him only as “a former Chicago newspaper editor.”

McCormick’s onetime home, Cantigny, was spared that fate and is under the protective shield of the McCormick Foundation. Still, the comparison is valid for Christians who have worked in Sunday schools that have relied on the extensive curriculum developed by David C. Cook, the global publisher that still bears its founder’s name.

A Courier-News story by Mike Danahey in May 2018 had this minimal detail about Cook:

Born in 1850, David C. Cook founded what would become the nation’s largest interdenominational publishing house. The Cook home is a 12-room mansion that cost $10,000 to build in 1885, the city said. It became a nursing home in 1945, and additions were added over the decades.

It appears the background on Cook’s former mansion may be the victim of morgue decay, in which good details fall to the side based on various reporters’ limits on column inches, or their greater interest in other matters.

Certainly the primary focus of this story belongs on the visionary couple from the suburbs of Atlanta who knew they had found a neglected jewel with an asking price of only $1.


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Here's a very fluid take on evangelicalism: New York Times obituary of a progressive pioneer

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Penelope Green’s recent New York Times obituary of Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is noteworthy to anyone who has followed churches’ long 20th-century debates about same-sex relationships and marriage. Mollenkott was far ahead of the curve in bringing a progressive, liberationist perspective to the evangelical Christian subculture.

The book “Is the Homosexual My Neighbor: Another Christian View”, which she wrote with Letha Scanzoni, was one of the central texts cited by The Other Side magazine and others on the sexual-revolution left.

As a video of Mollenkott’s address at Harvard Divinity School in 2002 shows, she was a captivating speaker, combining a native Philadelphian’s self-assurance with pleas to her sister feminists not simply to dismiss the Bible in their efforts to root out all traces of patriarchy.

Mollenkott stressed that wrestling with the contents of the Bible was key, along with the writing of John Milton, in her stepping away from the Plymouth Brethren theology in which she grew up.

If a reader leaves it there, it becomes easier to take the Times at its word that Mollenkott remained an “evangelical,” but in this case that would be to treat an adjective as a noun.

The Times links to a page on Mollenkott’s website in which the longtime professor and activist gave her own explanation of what she was “evangelical” about:

John Milton was a 17th century Puritan who loved Scripture. From studying his interpretive method, being challenged by feminist thinkers, and interpreting my dreams, I gradually began to trust my own experience. And I began to read the Bible with attention to literary formats, historical context, what words meant at the time the text was written, the use of imagery, analogy, symbol, and so forth. The text was transformed by these standard interpretive methods, and I in turn was radicalized by the Bible. I am now a member of the evangelical left, working with other Christian feminists toward a world in which all people are respected and cherished as made in God’s image, and in which the natural environment is respected and cherished as being created and sustained by one Great Spirit. I guess you could call me and Evangelical Universalist.


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The Washington Post analyzes an assumed hate crime that became something else

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First things first. You are not seeing double.

Terry Mattingly and I have, in fact, written separate responses to a very interesting feature story called “The Confession.” This has happened two or three times in 17 years, with our pattern of calling dibs on new articles via email. After seeing that our pieces focused on different angles in the report (click here for tmatt’s take), he suggested that we hold my post for a bit and then run it as a kind of year-ender. I thought this was one of the best long forms of the year. Here, then, is how I saw it.

The Washington Post’s series on hate crimes has delivered another wonderfully complicated story, and this time it includes notes of forgiveness and grace.

The 5,300-word story by Peter Jamison does not engage this point directly, but calling the behavior of Nathan Stang a hate crime illustrates the occasional oddities of the category. Stang, an atheist gay man pursuing doctoral studies in music at Indiana University, served as the paid organist about 35 miles away at St. David’s Episcopal Church in Bean Blossom.

Stang claimed to have discovered the swastika and two messages left in black spray paint on the church’s exterior. “Heil Trump,” one message said. “Fag church,” said the other. 

The latter invective led to rapid cries of a hate crime. Within six months, the Brown County Sheriff’s Department arrested the perpetrator, and it was not a neo-Nazi wearing a Make America Great Again cap or carrying a sign filled with vile insults. It was Stang, who confessed his act of vandalism to sheriff’s deputy Brian Shrader. 

The deputy had suspicions about the malicious graffiti from the beginning, and Jamison’s choice of adjective for the congregation helped unlock the mystery.

 Jamison writes:

The detective had put his finger on what was bothering him: the words “Fag Church.” St. David’s was indeed a beacon of support for gay rights. But the fact had gone all but unnoticed outside the church’s several dozen parishioners.


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