Catholicism

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'Open marriage?' The New York Times Magazine hopes, hopes, hopes that it's a trend

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So, now the culture warriors at The New York Times Magazine have gifted us with a piece titled “Is an Open Marriage a Happier Marriage?” This was followed by an umpteen-word piece about couples for whom one of the major sacraments of Christianity (and most other world religions) is now a three-some, four-some or whatever radical individualists want it to be.

I can just hear some folks screaming: “We knew it was going in this direction! Say 'yes' to same-sex marriage, single parenting and it’s down the slippery slope.” I don't quite follow that line of logic, but here we are. You know many people do think that and you also know that many journalists know that there are red-zip-code people who think that. 

There's even a movie out called "Open Marriage", but the results of this social experiment aren't as rosy as the magazine imagines they could be.

 The article started out with a couple named Daniel and Elizabeth and, how several years into it:

Daniel would think about a radical possibility: opening up their marriage to other relationships. He would poke around on the internet and read about other couples’ arrangements. It was both an outlandish idea and, to him, a totally rational one. He eventually even wrote about it in 2009 for a friend who had a blog about sexuality. “As our culture becomes more accepting of choices outside the norm, nonmonogamy will expand as an acceptable choice, and the world will have to change as a result,” he predicted.
He was in his late 30s when he decided to broach the subject with Elizabeth gingerly: Do you ever miss that energy you feel when you’re in love with someone for the first time? They had two children, and he pointed out that having the second did not detract from how much they loved the first one. “Love is additive,” he told her. “It is not finite.” He was not surprised when Elizabeth rejected the idea; he had mostly raised it as a way of communicating the urgency of his needs. 

Then Elizabeth gets Parkinson’s disease; she meets another man with similar symptoms and their relationship turns physical.

Now up to this point, the couple has a light relationship with religion.


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Trump returns to Liberty University, a safe zone -- it appears -- for all kinds of speakers

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In the midst of all the latest craziness in Washington, D.C., it appears that President Donald Trump is going to return to one of his favorite safe zones.

That would be Liberty University, of course, home of uber-Trumpster Jerry Falwell, Jr.

The Donald has, of course, spoken during campus convocations at Liberty, including a rather ahead-of-its-time appearance in 2012. Now he has been asked to speak at the most symbolic campus event of all -- commencement. The key here is that this is a safe trip for Trump (hint, hint).

The Washington Post is all over this with an education-beat feature under this headline: "Excitement and caution as Liberty University awaits Trump’s commencement speech."

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- It’s exam week at Liberty University and everywhere are signs of last-minute cramming. Study groups are bunched around tables inside the student union. The Jerry Falwell Library is unusually packed. And the weekly campus worship service has been postponed to allow more time to study.
But final exams aren’t the only tests facing the outwardly placid campus this week.
Students at the nation’s largest Christian university are also preparing for the arrival of President Trump, who is to deliver the commencement address for the Class of 2017 on May 13. He will be the first incumbent president to speak at the school’s commencement since George H.W. Bush in 1990.
If Trump needed a safe space to deliver his first commencement address, he would be hard-pressed to find a more accommodating school.

Right, right. As this story noted, it's hard to imagine what kind of protests would have been staged if Trump had tried to speak at commencement at the University of Notre Dame (as opposed to walking in the footsteps of pro-abortion-rights President Barack Obama and [a] speaking there and [b] picking up an honorary doctor of laws degree).


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Los Angeles Times misses the boat on a key element (think religion) of diversity in Houston

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It’s been more than 25 years since I lived in Houston, but even in the early 1990s it was already quite the melting pot.

The city seemed evenly divided between black, Hispanic and white inhabitants and its religious diversity approached that of Los Angeles. And then there was the internationals. When I began my work at the Houston Chronicle in the mid-1980s, I was one of the few religion reporters covering Muslim immigrants, of which there were already a great deal in the country’s fourth largest city.

There was so much religion news happening in the area, the Chronicle hired two of us to be religion reporters. That was rare on newspapers. 

Now the Los Angeles Times has chronicled what this apex of diversity looks like in the second decade of the 21st century. The place is even more diverse than I remember it and one of its greatest hallmarks is its religious melting pot. Not for nothing did Pope Francis award a cardinal’s hat –- first one ever in Texas- – to then-Archbishop Daniel DiNardo..

But did the left-coast Times include faith in its paean to Houston’s multi-ethnic diversity?

Take a guess.

The Margaret Long Wisdom High School soccer team hails from Central America, Mexico, Africa and points between. Its bench hums with Spanish, Kinyarwanda, Swahili and often English. But its real unifying language -- soccer, played hard -- is universal.
The high school is in southwest Houston, a city whose stunning growth and high-volume immigration have turned it into the most racially and ethnically diverse major metropolis in the country, surpassing New York in 2010.


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Note to The Independent: There's no way this MP candidate thinks that she healed a man

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I've never been sure why, but the subject of prayer causes problems for many mainstream news reporters. I think part of the problem is that some reporters think they have to believe that prayer "works" in order to take prayer seriously.

Thus, I have heard mainstream journalists say that it's a "fact" that prayer does not work and that real journalists must strive to present solid facts and nothing more. After all, academic studies of the effectiveness of prayer -- linked to medical issues -- have been mixed.

Yes, from the viewpoint of a skeptical editor it's hard to prove -- as a fact -- that prayer "works" (although some academic studies of miracles are fascinating). Nevertheless, journalists need to remember that it is a fact that millions of people in many faiths around the world believe in the power of prayer and that their actions in real life, based on those beliefs, frequently affect real events and trends in the news.

I bring this up because of a revealing error in a story, and headline, that ran in The Independent about a British woman named Kristy Adams who is running for Parliament. The problem is clearly seen in the double-decker headline:

Tory MP candidate 'claims she healed deaf man through prayer '
'I don't know if he was more surprised than me,' says Kristy Adams

That's right. The journalists behind this story seem to think that Adams thinks that SHE healed someone. Here is the overture in this report:

A Conservative party candidate has reportedly claimed she healed a deaf man with her bare hands by channelling the power of prayer.


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Weekend think piece: The New York Times offers R.R. Reno's take on America's new cold war

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If you have been paying attention to gossip about the news industry lately, you may have heard that many New York Times readers were not amused when the leaders of the great Gray Lady's editorial pages decided to add another conservative voice to the mix

Ever since the first column by one Bret Stephens -- a piece criticizing how the cultural left pushes climate change (but he does not reject the reality of climate change) -- large numbers of Times nation citizens have been voicing their wrath about this invasion of a beloved safe space, primarily by canceling their subscriptions.

I have not heard of a similar reaction to the recent Times opinion essay by the Catholic scribe R.R. Reno, who is editor of the conservative interfaith journal First Things. The title: "Republicans Are Now the ‘America First’ Party."

Now, let me stress that this Reno think piece does not contain large chunks of theology or commentary about religion. Instead, it's about how one Donald Trump has moved the ground under the feet of Republicans who had, for a long time, assumed that the GOP orthodoxy of Ronald Reagan would last 1,000 years or so.

The central theme: The new GOP enemy is globalism, not big government.

As I read this Reno piece, I kept waiting for religious material, for cultural and moral material, to show up. After all, I read newspapers through the lens of the great historian Martin Marty, as described in an "On Religion" column I wrote a year after 9/11 (at an event that started the dominoes falling that led to the birth of GetReligion). Here is the top of that 2002 column (this is long, but essential):

It is Martin Marty's custom to rise at 4:44 a.m. for coffee and prayer, while awaiting the familiar thump of four newspapers on his porch. ... America's most famous church historian prepared for a lecture in Nebraska by ripping up enough newsprint to bury his table in headlines and copy slashed with a yellow pen.
A former WorldCom CEO kept teaching his Sunday school class. A researcher sought the lost tribe of Israel. Believers clashed in Sudan. Mormon and evangelical statistics were up – again. A Zambian bishop said he got married to shock the Vatican. U.S. bishops kept wrestling with clergy sexual abuse. Pakistani police continued to study the death of journalist Daniel Pearl.
Marty tore out more pages, connecting the dots. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey feared an Anglican schism. Public-school students prayed at flagpoles. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explored the border between church and state. And there were dozens of stories linked to Sept. 11, 2001.


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After Trump's religious liberty show: Press hears groans on right, as well as that ACLU snicker

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After Trump's religious liberty show: Press hears groans on right, as well as that ACLU snicker

So what was that big show in the Rose Garden all about, the one with the smiling President Donald Trump serving up waves of Godtalk to a large assembly of religious leaders from various religious traditions?

This was supposed to be an important moment for those working to protect the First Amendment rights of believers whose commitment to ancient doctrines on marriage and sex have clashed with new laws, and court decisions, crafted to defend the Sexual Revolution, in all of its myriad forms.

However, even before the ceremony began, there were signs that a big dose of fake news was ahead. That was the subject of my Thursday morning post, "Big question in Rose Garden today: A victory, or Trump white flag, on religious liberty issues?"

By the time "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I talked, a few hours after that political rite (click here for the podcast), it was clear that most mainstream journalists had tuned into a crucial fact: The only people who were celebrating this executive order were people who are on the president's payroll or who may as well be (hello Jerry Falwell, Jr.). Their fundraising letters will come later.

But anyone who listened to the church-state voices that mattered knew what was going on.

On the religious and cultural right, Robert P. George of Princeton University issued a devastating tweet that said:

The religious liberty executive order is meaningless. No substantive protections for conscience. A betrayal. Ivanka and Jared won. We lost.

What about the left?

If that George blast wasn't enough to blow the fog away, this press release from the American Civil Liberties Union clarified matters nicely. Yes, there were voices elsewhere on the church-state left that released familiar statements of outrage. Their fundraising letters will come later.


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Why do some Catholics oppose the Girl Scouts? The Kansas City Star leaves out lots of details

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It’s no more Thin Mints, Trefoils or Do-Si-Dos for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City -- which is cutting all ties to the Girl Scouts, whose troops often meet on church property.

The Kansas City Star tried to explain it all in the article I’ll be dissecting below.

Before that, I do want to mention that my daughter is in her second year of Girl Scouts here in Washington state and she sold 132 boxes of cookies this past winter, which is pretty good for someone who did it door to door instead of having her mommy strong-arm fellow employees (which is what goes on in some families).

Plus, I was part of a troop in Connecticut many moons ago. I had to slog through the snow to sell cookies. Those have jumped from $4/box to $5 this year, of which the local troop only gets a fraction.

So what is going on in Kansas City. It appears that, these days, Girl Scouts is more of an ideology than an after-school activity for some folks:

Saying that Girl Scouts is “no longer a compatible partner in helping us form young women with the virtues and values of the Gospel,” the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas is severing ties with the organization and switching its support to a Christian-based scouting program.
“I have asked the pastors of the Archdiocese to begin the process of transitioning away from the hosting of parish Girl Scout troops and toward the chartering of American Heritage Girls troops,” Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann said in a statement released Monday.
“Pastors were given the choice of making this transition quickly, or to, over the next several years, ‘graduate’ the scouts currently in the program. Regardless of whether they chose the immediate or phased transition, parishes should be in the process of forming American Heritage Girl troops, at least for their kindergartners, this fall.”

As I scanned through the rest of the article, there was no mention of how many girls or troops this involves. How many troops meet at local Catholic churches? We’re not told.


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Big question in Rose Garden today: A victory, or Trump white flag, on religious liberty issues?

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First Amendment pros on both the left and the right are bracing themselves to find out what is in new, revised executive order on religious liberty that will be signed by President Donald Trump today, which is the National Day of Prayer.

So are reporters. So are millions of religious believers and unbelievers who care about First Amendment rights.

If you fit into one of those categories, then you are probably reading the advance reports on the rumors about this executive order.

Let me provide a piece of advice: Skip the report in USA Today. It is totally predictable and one-sided.

Instead, read the advance report in The New York Times and note, in particular, that the Times allowed its veteran religion-beat reporter to take part in the coverage. I wish the Times team had made one or two more telephone calls -- or followed some rather prophetic folks on Twitter -- to include the views of Trump critics who (a) are on the cultural right and (b) have solid credentials on religious liberty issues.

We will come back to the Times. Let's take a hard look at the USA Today piece. Here is the overture:

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to appeal to social conservatives who backed him in heavy numbers, President Trump will issue an executive order Thursday designed to "protect and vigorously promote religious liberty" and "alleviate the burden" of a law designed to prohibit religious leaders from speaking out about politics, according to senior administration officials.
The order aims to make it easier for employers with religious objections not to include contraception coverage in workers' health care plans, although it would be up to federal agencies to determine how that would happen.
It would also ease IRS enforcement of the so-called Johnson Amendment, which says tax-exempt religious organizations cannot participate in political activity. While only Congress can formally do away with the law, this will pave the way for churches and other religious leaders to speak about politics and endorse candidates without worrying about losing their tax-exempt status.

First of all, note the meaningless language that the Johnson Amendment says that "tax-exempt religious organizations cannot participate in political activity." That does little or nothing to help readers understand what is actually at stake.


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Same old, same old: The Charlotte Observer tilts one way in women-as-Catholic-priests story

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Way back in the 1970s and very early 1980s, a Christian singer named Keith Green was quite popular. At the end of "Jesus Commands Us to Go," one of his more heartfelt songs, Green addresses his audience, saying, "I don't know what you think a Christian is. I've known so many people that think [being] a Christian means going to church a lot. You may have heard this before, but going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to McDonald's makes you a hamburger."

That analogy has stayed with me, and it popped up when the Charlotte Observer informed us on the last Sunday in April that a "Rebel Catholic group defies church, ordains woman priest in NC."

Although the story somewhat begrudgingly points this out, it should be clear to serious observers that the church-Christian-McDonald's-hamburger analogy fits here: Calling yourself a Catholic "priest," even if done by a "rebel group," doesn't make you one, any more than calling myself a Big Mac would, you know....

From this oh, oh, oh so familiar article:

An international group defiantly opposed to the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests Sunday ordained its first woman Catholic priest in the 46 counties that make up the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte.
The ordination ceremony for Abigail Eltzroth happened in Asheville at Jubilee! – a nondenominational faith community – with Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan presiding.
Eltzroth, 64, said she is the second woman in North Carolina ordained by the rebel group, called the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests. ...
But reached for comment Sunday, David Hains, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, said: “I hope that Catholics in the diocese will understand that it would be sinful to receive a fake sacrament from a woman priest and that includes attending a fake Mass.”

Although the Observer puts an official Roman Catholic Church spokesman's comments relatively high in the story, the overall tone of the piece is at least sympathetic towards, if not promoting of, the pro-women-priest camp. #Surprise


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