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Longtime GetReligion readers may recall that I grew up in Texas in the 1960s and early ’70s, the son of a Southern Baptist pastor. Suffice it to say that I have been to my share of Billy Graham meetings, back then and as a reporter on the religion beat in Denver and elsewhere.
Whenever my Washington Journalism Center students start covering speeches and major public events, always I tell them that they face three major journalistic challenges. They have to:
In 2011, I traveled to rural Oregon to report on a minister who helped bring healing to his small town after a string of suicides.
The folks who edit and operate the newspaper that lands in my front yard are having a Devil of a time trying to figure out what to do with Dr. Ben Carson. Frankly, their struggles are beginning to remind me of their struggles to understand the role that the church plays in the lives of many African-Americans in the politically liberal state of Maryland.
If you wanted to know who John McCandlish Phillips was, as a New York Times journalist, all you really needed to do was listen to the words of other journalists. Here are two of my favorite quotes along those lines, drawn from a classic profile in The New Yorker (which is now behind a firewall, unfortunately).
Of the many sad stories this weekend, one was the news that Rick Warren’s son Matthew killed himself. Suicides are difficult to cover and there’s some (though probably not enough) debate about when and how to cover them. In this case, the news was announced in emails to the congregation and staff of Saddleback Church, the megachurch founded by Warren. It’s reasonable to cover this death, I think.
The New York Times has been taking quite a bit of heat for its shockingly erroneous understanding of Christianity. Earlier this week, it published a brief story about Pope Francis’ Easter message and went on to say that “Easter is the celebration of the resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life.”
