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Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent for Western Christians. On this day, Christians have traditionally focused on their utter and complete sinfulness and the necessity of Christ’s suffering and death to earn their salvation.
It’s time for a flashback to an earlier stage in the story of the Idaho Baptists and the Haitian orphans. You may recall that, while tracing the trail of Laura Silsby and her short-term mission team from Idaho, the New York Times heard people discussing this name — Philippe Murphy.
If you want to be truly depressed, read this New York Times report that ran under the headline: “Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears.” Here’s the start of Ginger Thompson’s report from Port-au-Prince:
When I broke into mainstream religion writing about 1980, one of the leaders of Religion Newswriters Association was Louis Moore of the Houston Chronicle, which during that era had one of America’s dominant religion sections.
I attended my seventh National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, so it’s been fun to read journalists’ interpretation of the snake handling going on there.
I know it’s a really busy day, with the blizzard blowing in and all, but I wanted to make sure that your received a copy of the following letter from a strategic leader of the American Baptist Churches/USA. I think I received at least three copies of it by email yesterday and it seems that it was sent to news organizations across the nation.
GetReligion readers who are closely following that twisted story of the Southern Baptists from Idaho and the case of the 33 Haitian “orphans” — the quote marks will be explained shortly — need to know that there has been an important development.
In “The Jihadist Next Door,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andrea Elliott’s Sunday cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Elliott turns her laser focus on the journey of one American youngster who decides to join a Somali terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.
We have a very complex and ugly story developing right now down in Haiti, one than calls up the demons of all the tensions that exist in that nation between Americans and Haitians and, it must be stressed, between competing religious groups inside Haiti.
