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Every week, in churches around the world, Christians engage in a peculiar practice in which they confront and correct fellow believers on a range of issues, which are often lumped into a general category called âsins.â The process for this practice was first outlined by a popular religious leader named Jesus and recorded in a book known as the Gospel of Matthew:
Let us return, for a moment, to that interesting quote the other day from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams. You may recall that he said, concerning public debates in the West about religion:
A Religion Dispatches blog post this week noted that CNN Godbeat pro Eric Marrapodi will receive the first annual Vine & Fig Tree Award for excellence in reporting on religious liberty issues.
You’ve probably heard of some variation of the Slow Movement, a trend which advocates a cultural shift toward slowing down life’s pace. There are subcultures devoted to Slow Food, Slow Gardening, Slow Travel — even Slow Church. But what we really need, especially in religion reporting, is Slow News.
One of the many products offered by Religion News Service is its daily round-up of news items, a chatty summary that is almost always infused with opinion. Here’s an example from earlier this month:
The largest Lutheran group in the United States is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I’m part of the next largest group, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. We really don’t have much in common, oddly enough. The ELCA just elected their first female presiding bishop. We retain male-only ordination. We have major differences in confessional subscription and requirements for our clergy and congregational membership. So for non-ELCA Lutherans, we flinch when we see headlines such as this one from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
As a famous religious figure once said, âAsk and you shall receive.â Sometimes even we media critics get what we ask for. Last month I asked for more â and deeper â coverage of hipster churches, and then this week veteran Godbeat reporter Michelle Boorstein fulfills my request (at least partially).
I didn’t know much about the Rt. Rev. David Leighton — the 11th diocese of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland — before reading the recent Baltimore Sun news article about the funeral rites held in his honor.
