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I’ve just returned from a vacation in Colorado and am catching up on the news of the past few days. I’m pleased by the amount of coverage we’re seeing of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s recent convention, although the depth of the articles varies wildly. Some are fantastic and cover a lot of ground and some are somewhat lacking.
Since I became a member of my congregation almost a dozen years ago, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of young children attending. Hang on, this is linked to a news story.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America is having it’s biennial convention this week and we’re seeing coverage about the most politically exciting topic that will be debated — homosexuality.
When a story’s headline is as ambitious as “Why Newt Gingrich Converted to Catholicism,” a reader might hope for a meaty report that addresses the question with insights from friends rather than with speculation. Amy Sullivan’s report for Time mostly does not deliver, except for a few good quotations from the convert himself and from his third wife, Callista.
Let’s make one thing clear: I am a smidgen too young to be into this whole, “Hey man, did you make it to Woodstock or not?” thing that’s going on in the mainstream media right now. My priest, however, is another matter, since he was there and I still think he looks like Jerry Garcia.
We’ve got a Got News? feature here at GetReligion that highlights a well-documented story that has somehow been missed the MSM. Maybe it’s time to add a Not News feature.
One of my favorite types of stories is the follow-up. Journalists love to pile on when a story is fresh and hot and breaking. But rarely, if ever, do they check back in to see what’s happened after the storm dies down. There are obvious reasons for this but it’s so nice when a journalist does take the work to follow-up on an old story and, further, when it pays off.
Some sex scandals are sad but exciting and some are just unseemly. This Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino one is a doozie. The married father of five had unprotected sex six years ago with a woman he had just met earlier in the evening and when she claimed to have gotten pregnant from the encounter he gave her $3,000. He says the money was for insurance. She says it was for an abortion. And then years later he went to the FBI after, he says, her extortion attempts got out of hand.
Hats off to Robert Pigott, religious affairs correspondent of the BBC, who takes on the ambitious question of how God has fared during the first decade of the 21st century. The series title of “What Have the Noughties Done for God?” may be too precious by half, but I cannot dismiss it as being forgettable.
