Evangelicals

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Strikeout! Faith angle missing in story on suspended Orioles slugger Chris Davis' 'hope for redemption'

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The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball.
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.
This field, this game, it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.
Ohhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
— James Earl Jones (“Field of Dreams,” 1989)

Baseball is back!

Last night, my beloved Texas Rangers said "Hello, win column!" for the first time in 2015. Meanwhile, tmatt's Baltimore Orioles improved to 2-0 in the young season.

Speaking of the Orioles, slugger Chris Davis (a former Ranger) is about to return after a suspension that shocked fans, his teammates and the entire baseball world.

The Baltimore Sun opens its in-depth story on Davis' comeback this way:

The Orioles slugger had been holed up in his home for the better part of two days after news broke Sept. 12 that his season was over. Chris Davis had taken the attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder drug Adderall without a therapeutic-use exemption.
Davis' wife, Jill, needed something from Target that Saturday evening, and Davis volunteered to go, just to get out of the house. But he wasn't prepared for the drive through downtown Baltimore, where an Orioles game recently had ended. The air was cool and crisp, and as Davis looked around, he yearned for postseason baseball.
"I felt like everybody that was at the game was out walking on the streets. They were wearing all kinds of Orioles jerseys, Orioles shirts. People were flying Orioles flags out of their apartments. Dogs were wearing Orioles [gear]. You could really tell how excited the city was about us," Davis said. "That's kind of when it all hit me. I told Jill after that Saturday night, after I came back home, I thought: 'I don't know if I'm ever going to get over this.'"
Why?
In late March, Davis sat down with The Baltimore Sun for a candid, hourlong interview about his mindset and hope for redemption. There were some new revelations, or at least clarifications, regarding his 25-game suspension, which doesn't expire until he sits out one more regular-season game.


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An Easter gift: The perfect, easy solution to America's gay marriage conflict

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An Easter gift: The perfect, easy solution to America's gay marriage conflict

While TV offered reverential bathrobe-and-sandals programs on Easter Sunday, the principalities and powers at The New York Times were helpfully offering America the perfect solution to its troublesome gay marriage conflict. Since religious conservatism underlies much of the resistance, the conservatives should simply become religious liberals. It's that easy.

That proposal from columnist Frank Bruni was reminiscent of the infamous 2009 Newsweek magazine cover article on “The Religious Case for Gay Marriage,” which never explained whether there were any reasons why some believers might dissent. With only one side to the question taking part in the debate, however, the problem magically vanishes.

In the Religion Guy’s dim past at Northwestern University, legendary journalism Prof. Curtis MacDougall  taught us that editorial,  op-ed and column writing is like formal debate. You need to study and acknowledge the strengths of the opposite side in order to effectively answer them and offer your competing viewpoint. That strategy is in decline in venues like cable news and the Times editorial pages. The business of journalism becomes not information and persuasion but group reinforcement of prior opinions.

Bruni’s reaction to religious freedom claims is important to consider because he was the newspaper’s first openly partnered gay columnist. Moreover, he’s a figure with some Godbeat credentials as the former Times Rome bureau chief and author of a 1993 book on the Catholic molestation scandals.


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ESPN probes Jeremy Lin's 'inner life,' while paying little or no attention to his soul

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I think it's time for a short break from the Indiana wars, at least for a day. So what do you remember about "Linsanity"?

I am referring, of course, to those crazy weeks in 2012 when an unheralded point guard from Harvard University took over professional basketball, which is the kind of thing that can happen when you start playing out of your mind in Madison Square Garden wearing a Knicks jersey.

Jeremy Lin also received attention here at GetReligion because of the role that his Christian faith played in his life. Two headlines capture the tone  -- Sarah Pulliam Bailey's "Jeremy Lin, the Knick's Tim Tebow?" and a piece that I wrote, looking ahead, called "So, is Jeremy Lin a good fit in New York City?" One quote from the New York Times coverage says it all:

If Lin’s storybook week captured the imagination of New York City and the wider sports world, it hit the community of Christian Asian-Americans like a lightning bolt.

You get the picture. The world is not full of over-achieving evangelical Christians from Harvard who are also Asian-Americans and play point guard in New York City. So what happened? First he was traded to a city where, to be blunt about it, he was not as unusual -- playing for the Houston Rockets. But then he was shipped to one of the darkest black holes in the current NBA universe, the rebuilding with little to build with Los Angeles Lakers.

This brings us to the current ESPN: The Magazine feature on Lin, that ran under the massive double-decker headline: "Isolation Play -- It isn't Kobe's taunts or humiliating viral videos that have made this the toughest year of Jeremy Lin's life. It's the feeling that, as hard as he tries, he just doesn't fit in."

So while examining this young man's dark night of the soul, want to guess which part of the Lin story ESPN all but ignored?


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Crystal Cathedral's Robert Schuller dies, and gets one last slap from the Los Angeles Times

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Robert Schuller, founder of the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County, has died, and the Los Angeles Times just ran a lengthy obit on him. Schuller must be turning in his grave at this point.

After a short opening anecdote about his "Come as you are, in the family car!” era, complete with reference to his $83.75 offering plate take on the first Sunday in his old drive-in movie theater church, the newspaper of record in Southern California radically switched gears:

Schuller, who built the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove as the embodiment of an upbeat, modern vision of Christianity, only to see his ministry shattered by family discord and financial ruin, died Thursday at a care facility in Artesia. He was 88 and had esophageal cancer.
After a working life of great success and influence, Schuller was forced to watch from retirement as much of what he built was laid to waste. In October 2010, his church, then led by his daughter Sheila Schuller Coleman, declared bankruptcy. That led to the sale of the cathedral and surrounding property to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange in February 2012.
Changing tastes, financial overreach and squabbling over a successor were factors in the collapse. Schuller had turned over his pulpit first to his son, Robert A. Schuller, and then to Coleman. In March 2010, he and his wife formally cut ties to the ministry they had founded, bemoaning the “negative and adversarial atmosphere” enveloping the church's leadership.
It was an ignominious end to what had been one of the greatest success stories of postwar American Christianity. The silver-haired evangelist rose from humble beginnings to become one of the late 20th century's most recognized religious figures.

I agree that Schuller’s last 10 years weren’t his best. But did he deserve an obit front-loaded with all his mistakes?


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How will its doctrinal shift on gay marriage affect the Presbyterian Church (USA)?

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How will its doctrinal shift on gay marriage affect the Presbyterian Church (USA)?

DUANE’S QUESTION:

What do you think will happen to the Presbyterian Church (USA) now that it has voted to officially sanction gay marriage?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Maybe not much.

The Presbyterian Church (USA) announced March 17 that a nationwide referendum among regional bodies (“presbyteries”) has redefined marriage as “between two people, traditionally a man and woman” so same-sex couples can wed in church. This historic change will be very upsetting for a sizable minority but eruptions could be muted, for three reasons.

* First, some who consider Bible-based tradition a make-or-break conscience matter have already quit the PC(USA).

* Second, conservatives who remain risk loss of their properties if they leave.

* Dissenting clergy and congregations are told they won’t be forced to change their stand or conduct gay nuptials.

But Carmen LaBerge, president of the conservative Presbyterian Lay Committee, is wary.


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Military Times team forgets to ask a crucial question about that Navy SEAL chaplain

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Time to take a quick dip into my folder of GetReligion guilt, where some important stories have been calling for my attention. In particular, I wanted to note that debates about military chaplains, always a controversial church-state subject, have flared up once again in the news.

At the center of the debate this time around is Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Modder, a chaplain who has in the past handled the rather difficult challenge of keeping up with Navy SEAL units. Now, a Military Times article notes that he may be tossed out of the Navy after 19 years for "allegedly scolding sailors for homosexuality and premarital sex." Readers are told:

Lt. Cmdr. Wesley Modder was given a "detachment for cause" letter on Feb. 17 after his commanders concluded that he is "intolerant" and "unable to function in the diverse and pluralistic environment" of his current assignment at the Navy Nuclear Power Training Command in South Carolina.
Modder denies any wrongdoing and is fighting the dismissal with attorneys from the Liberty Institute, which advocates for religious expression in the military and in public institutions. Modder has served more than 19 years and could lose his retirement benefits if the Navy convenes a board of inquiry and officially separate him before he completes 20 years of service.

As often happens in these stories, the crucial question of what actually happened in these encounters between the chaplain and the soldiers making complaints is hard to discern, since the details all come from the accusers. Also, military chaplains treat the details of these one-on-one encounters as completely confidential (even chaplains who are not in traditions that include Confession).

Thus, the Gannett newsroom notes that the Navy's letter of complaint included offenses such as:


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Surprise! Herald's Gay South Florida section isn't into balanced coverage of adoption debate

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Surprise! Herald's Gay South Florida section isn't into balanced coverage of adoption debate

According to that Gallup LGBT population survey that is getting so much news media attention right now, the population of that long stretch of concrete, sand and palm trees running from West Palm Beach to Miami is 4.2 percent gay. Thus, the greater South Florida area is America's 17th ranking urban zone in terms of percentage of gay population -- 10 slots lower than (who would have thunk it) Salt Lake City.

Is that percentage surprisingly low, in terms of the region's image and clout in gay culture? Quite frankly, speaking as a former resident of West Palm Beach, that No. 17 ranking did surprise me.

The region is also, of course, known as a rather secular region, even with it's large Jewish population. Still an older survey found -- back in 2002 or so -- that just a whisker under 40 percent of people in South Florida were affiliated with a religious congregation, with 61 percent of the affiliated Catholic, 14 percent Jewish and 9 percent Southern Baptist.

So, if you were a newspaper editor in the region's big city, would you be operating a special Gay South Florida news section to serve that slice of the population? Obviously the answer is "yes." But why would you -- in terms of image and clout -- be operating that news operation and not one about, oh, Jewish news? Or, statistically speaking, Latino Pentecostal (Catholic and Protestant) news?

And if you were Miami Herald editor, would you assign basic news coverage of a very hot-button religious-liberty issue linked to gay rights to the staff of Gay South Florida? As opposed to a mythical news section called, oh, Judeo-Christian South Florida?

Believe it or not, the answer appears to be "yes." And if you made this editorial decision, what would one expect the coverage to look like in terms of balance and fairness?


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Charlotte Observer offers a mega nice gesture to its local megachurch

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Is the Charlotte Observer trying to be nice to Elevation Church?

Sure looks that way in two articles: a friendly feature last weekend, with a shorter item this past Saturday.

The first one is 1,500 words of mostly "Huzzah!" on the megachurch's 13-campus expansion, 17,000 attendees, weekly income of $484,000, and explosive growth since its first 121 people in 2006. We get stats a-plenty from chief financial officer "Chunks" Corbett. We learn from Outreach magazine that Elevation is the nation's 11 fastest-growing Protestant church and its 15th largest.

And we get some reasons for the growth, starting with Pastor Steven Furtick:

The main draw is Furtick, whose dynamic preaching style, casual persona and fluency with Bible verses and pop culture references are popular with many people, including teenagers and those in their 20s, who are turned off by more formal and traditional churches. Elevation’s congregation also appears to be more racially diverse than most Charlotte churches.
Other attractions: The Christian rock music, its investment in multimedia messaging, and its history of funneling several million dollars and many volunteers to charities such as Crisis Assistance Ministry.
Plus, like a lot of megachurches, Elevation tries to steer its regulars into small groups that meet and pray in homes. Each site has its own full-time campus pastor, its own live band, and a staff that works with children during the weekend services.

The follow-up column, about 350 words, appears to be what people in the trade call a "Reporter's Notebook": bits and pieces that are interesting but didn't survive trims in the larger story. It has bulleted paragraphs on the symbolism of the church logo, the origin of Corbett's nickname "Chunks," and the fact that the newest site was bought from members of the family that launched the Amway company.

Ah, but something is missing in this lovefest: quotes from Furtick himself. As the Observer acknowledges, he hasn't given the newspaper an interview since 2008.

Thereby hangs a tale.


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Your weekend think piece: M.Z. spots religion wrinkle (sort of) in #RaceTogether campaign

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You can take M.Z. Hemingway out of GetReligion (although I am still struggling to get used to that), but it does appear that you can't take those GetReligion instincts out of Mollie the journalism critic.

Consider for a moment what is actually going on in this recent short written by the GetReligionista emeritus over at The Federalist. It focuses on that whole Starbucks (with help, believe it or not from USA Today) #RaceTogether campaign that has been getting so much mainstream news ink and commentary lately. Here's the headline on her piece: "With Race Together, Starbucks Is Using Worst Of Evangelical Practices."

Evangelicals? Wait for it.

Now, lots of that commentary has been either nervous or critical or both. Is it really a good idea for a major corporation to try to push its customers -- people who just trying to mind their own business while buying a cup of overpriced coffee -- into a hot-button conversation that may or may not be constructive in the long run?

Still, Starbucks is one of those urban prestige brands that must be taken seriously buy the press. Right? Mollie's insight, if you read between the lines, was to ponder what kind of press reception this campaign would have received if attempted by another institution on another hot-button topic. What kind of reception would, let's say Hobby Lobby, have received with a #TalkMarriage campaign or even a safer #TalkParenting effort?


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