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I went to church on New Year’s Eve, as many do. In the Lutheran church, we mark the eve of the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord. Many black Protestant congregations have Watch Night services, commemorating the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Many other Christians simply mark the new year. It’s so easy to take for granted the peace and ease with which we attended church in the United States.
It’s that time of year when we tend to reflect on the good, bad or ugly in 2010 and resolve to do something better in the next 12 months. Earlier I wondered whether sites like Facebook downplay the value of reflection as it feeds us update after update about our friends’ birthdays and such. Through RSS feeds, Twitter and other mediums, I find stories after stories after stories worth reading, and one of my friends and I sometimes joke: “the Internet had a really good day today.”
It’s been a while since we discussed anything related to Wikileaks. A few weeks ago we looked at a story that discussed the morality of the Wikileaks model. When this got going, I wondered if any of the documents that would come to light would include religion news.
Once upon a time, Ted Olsen at Christianity Today gave me the GetReligion treatment. Fortunately for me, the story that caught Ted’s web-crawling eyes was one of the finest from my days as a cub reporter at The Sun in San Bernardino.
As is our practice this time of year — everyone say “Duh” — your GetReligionistas like to roll out some of the “year’s top religion stories” lists and allow readers to join us in making comments.
Typically we discuss how the mainstream media handles religious news. Occasionally we look at treatment of religion outside of news pages. A former GetReligion contributor alerted us to the New York Times house editorial for Christmas Day. It’s short, but here’s the first paragraph:
Let me start by offering a “Merry Christmas” to all of you pro-tradition Christmas lovers who are celebrating the full season between Dec. 25th and the all-to-overlooked Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6th. We are talking about two crucial days that form bookends that support one another.
When I think back on Christmas coverage in the past few years, stories about the plight of Christians in Iraq always stand out for me. Things have been unbelievably bleak for a while and yet somehow this year they took a turn for the worse. It was only Oct. 31 that Muslim terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda seized the Syriac Catholic cathedral in Baghdad. Some 44 worshipers, two priests and seven security personnel died and 60 were wounded.
GetReligion was launched around the idea of ghosts — religious aspects to stories that went unexplained or ignored. Sometimes those ghosts are very straightforward. Sometimes they’re more about subtext and nuance. In this week’s Crossroads podcast, we discuss some of the lingering ghosts surrounding that provocative New York Times celebration of a marriage built on the failure of two previous marriages.
