International News

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Where is the national news coverage of current surge of vandalism at Catholic churches?

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What kind of year has it been for news?

Consider this: At the start of 2020, Australian wildfires raged, President Donald Trump was acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial, former basketball star Kobe Bryant, his daughter and seven others were killed in a helicopter crash and disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape.

None of these would likely make it into a top three list of the most-important news stories of the year.

Then came March 11. It was the night Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for the coronavirus, forcing the NBA to suspend games. It was the same night we learned actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson had tested positive as well. It was the day our reality was changed and the United States had officially entered the COVID-19 era, a pandemic that has altered the lives of millions and millions of Americans. It continues to do so for the foreseeable future.

The decision to report on the aforementioned stories involved something journalists employ while reporting and delivering information — news judgement. That’s the fuel — motivation if you will — that keeps journalism moving. Without deciphering what is news and what isn’t, it’s impossible for editors and reporters to package what’s happening around the world to readers.

One important trait of news judgement is the word “new.” After all, if it’s not new to those who consume it, then it really isn’t news. That isn’t all. The decisions that newsroom managers, beat writers and journalists in general — no matter the size of the publication — make each day can be very difficult, involving matters that include importance, audience interest, taste and ethics.

What does this have to do with the defacing and destruction of so many religious statues — predominantly Catholic ones — around the country and the world these days?

As Americans go from the racial reckoning that has engulfed America for the past two months to the start of the general election season, vandalism involving the burning of a church or the decapitation of a Jesus statue can become highly symbolic and significant.

That was the case last year when France — a nation seemingly proud to have moved on from its Christian past into secularism — saw widespread church fires and other acts of vandalism. It was a wonderful piece of journalism by Real Clear Investigations that delved into this frightening trend. The feature by Richard Bernstein, a former foreign correspondent at The New York Times, even called these acts “Christianophobia,” a term U.S. news outlets never use.


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Epic New Yorker 'chin stroker' meets thin Guardian 'head scratcher' in no-news showdown

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Among the varieties of “news” stories dumped on an ever more skeptical clientele by the rapidly metastasizing news business are two categories I’ll call the “chin stroker” and the “head scratcher.”

Examples of both recently caught my eye. One was unquestionably high brow, the other decidedly not. I’ll get to them soon enough, but first some clarification.

Never confuse a “head scratcher” with a “chin stroker.”

The first is confounding — as in, what the *&#@ is this? Or, why’d they bother to publish this useless collection of words and punctuation, the point of which eludes?

The chin scratcher, in contrast, can be stimulating and have value, even if it leaves you wondering, why run this feature on this subject right now? Thus, chin stroking here is meant to conjure the image of the serious reader massaging their chin in thought.

My GetReligion colleague Richard Ostling recently tackled one such chin stroker in a post about a super-long New Yorker piece about the search for archeological evidence that the biblical King David was a historical figure. It’s the same one that caught my eye.

It’s a great read — if one has the time and patience to explore 8,500 words on the political and religious differences that infect the field of biblical archeology in Israel. Because I do — the coronavirus pandemic has me hunkering down at home with considerable time to fill — I found the piece an interesting, solid primer on the subject.

Journalistically, however, and as Richard pointed out, why did the New Yorker choose to run this story now? We’re in the middle of a scary pandemic and a brutal presidential election campaign complicated by great economic uncertainty and racial and social upheaval.

One need not be an ace news editor to conclude there’s plenty of more immediate fodder that readers might prefer. And given that it’s the New Yorker, why give it, as Richard put it, “10 pages of this elite journalistic real estate” when there’s no discernible news peg?

If you missed it, read Richard’s post — fear not, it’s far, far shorter than 8,500 words — because I’ll say no more about it here. Richard covered the finer points of the piece’s journalistic questions. Should you care to go straight to the New Yorker article, then click here.

Now let’s pivot from our chin stroker to a definite head scratcher, courtesy of the The Guardian.


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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

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Clock keeps ticking: Will Turkey dare to turn Hagia Sophia into a mosque -- again?

Art historian Andrew Gould had studied many copies of the exquisite mosaic of Jesus found high in Istanbul's 6th Century Hagia Sophia cathedral.

But that didn't prepare the architect and sacred artist for what he felt when he stood under the icon, illumined by the soaring windows in the south gallery that overlooks the main floor, under the central dome that is 184 feet high and 102 feet in diameter.

The Deesis ("supplication") icon -- at least twice the size of life -- shows the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist with their heads bowed, framing an image of Christ Pantocrator ("enthroned"). The glass mosaic cubes were set at angles to create a shimmering effect across the gold background and the many-colored images, whether viewed in daylight or with lamps and candles.

Much of this icon was destroyed a century ago as workers probed to find priceless mosaics under layers of plaster and paint added through the centuries after 1453, when the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II conquered Constantinople.

Now, Turkish leaders want to convert Hagia Sophia -- a museum for decades -- back into a mosque.

"There is no more refined icon of Christ anywhere," said Gould, of the New World Byzantine Studios in Charleston, S.C. "Just in terms of information, we have copies we can study. … But visiting Hagia Sophia and seeing this icon under natural light, seeing it in the context of the sanctuary, was crucial to the development of my whole understanding of Orthodox art."

If the "Deesis" is covered again, along with other icons, "this is not something that can be replaced with photographs in art books," he said. "It would hurt artists and believers around the world in so many ways."

The current controversy is rooted in politics, more than lingering tensions between Muslim leaders and Turkey's tiny Christian minority, which has little power other than through ties to Greece, Europe and the United States.

Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1934, a symbol of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's drive to build a modern, truly secular state. Now, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent many signals that he wants Turkey to return to Islamic principles.

Debates in Turkish media have swirled around whether modern leaders retain the "right of the sword" to reclaim Hagia Sophia, noted Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and author of the book "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty."


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Editors should pay attention when King David bursts into news 3,000 years later 

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Merriam-Webster’s definition 2(b) of the term “peg,” as a noun states: “something (such as a fact or issue) used as a support, pretext, or reason,” for example “a news peg for the story.”

When it comes to media peg-manship and the Bible, it certainly appears that any old pretext will do.

The Religion Guy toiled on several of those Time magazine Bible history cover stories pegged to Christmas or Easter, often analyzing the pros and cons of the latest sensations sent aloft by skeptics in academia and elsewhere.

The Guy successfully used a new book as the peg to sell Time on the 1997 cover “Does Heaven Exist?” What could be more “off the news” than that?

Yet news pegs of any kind are remarkably absent with the most recent example of the genre, in The New Yorker dated June 29. The 8,500-worder by Israeli freelance Ruth Margalit consumes 10 pages of this elite journalistic real estate.

The cute headline announces the pitch: “Built On Sand.” Subhed: “King David’s story has been told for millennia. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.”

Was David the grand though flawed monarch the Bible depicts, or merely some boondocks bandit or sheik?

The debate affects current Israeli-vs.-Palestinian settlement politics, but in archaeology the last major news peg on David occurred 15 years ago while this pretext-free article appears in most news-crazed year imaginable.

That should tell media strategists something. Margalit’s reputation as a writer and skill at story pitches presumably helped, but the magazine’s editors knew that multitudes gobble up this stuff. The New Yorker’s long-form journalism is well suited to exploring such matters.

Pegs from the past? Any claims that David never even existed were all but eradicated by the 1993 discovery of the “House of David” inscription within a century of the king’s reign.


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Disturbing news trends in Turkey: What if Hagia Sophia returns to being a mosque?

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In recent years, Orthodox Christians around the world have watched as headlines kept appearing on obscure websites that mainstream journalists rarely visit.

Rumors grew that the famous Hagia Sophia sanctuary in Istanbul — a 6th Century wonder of Byzantine Christianity — would once again be claimed as a mosque, after decades of protection as a neutral-ground museum. Gradually, the rumors turned into symbolic actions by the Turkish government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggesting that this strategic move might become a reality.

Recently there was this headline at OrthoChristian.com (all caps in the original headline, along with alternative spelling “Agia”):

‘TURKISH LEADER CALLS TO PAINT OVER SERAPHIM IN DOME OF AGIA SOPHIA, CONVERSION TO MOSQUE REPORTEDLY ALREADY UNDERWAY

The question, of course is this: Is this a news story? Other questions flow out of that: Is this a “religious” media story? Is it a “conservative” media story? One more: Is it a story for hard-news media in Europe, but not America?

Meanwhile, it would be hard — from the Orthodox point of view (I have twice visited Hagia Sophia) — to offer a more distressing overture than the top of that latest OrthoChristian.com report::

As Turkish officials await the court hearing on the possibility of converting the world-famous Agia Sophia Museum back into a mosque, preparations for the change are reportedly already underway.

In this vein, the leader of the Saadet Partisi Islamist political party, Abdullah Sevim, called for Turkey to immediately take action and paint over the faces of the seraphim in the dome of the 6th-century Orthodox cathedral-turned-mosque-turned-museum, reports the Orthodoxia News Agency.

“There’s no need to wait for the decision of the State Council. We’ve already purchased the lime,” Sevim wrote on his Twitter page, calling everyone to join in a Muslim prayer to be held at Agia Sophia by President Erdogan.


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Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

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Next big pandemic news story: Missionaries brace for coronavirus in the Third World

While fighting the coronavirus, medical professionals have offered a strategy now seen everywhere in America, Europe and other First World cultures.

Here's the battle plan: Stock up on food and other essentials and then stay home. Wear masks when in public and practice safe social distancing. Everyone should wash their hands frequently for 20 seconds using soap and hot water. People with fevers or other symptoms should go into quarantine.

There's more. City and state lockdowns are essential to "flatten the curve" of new cases. Governments encourage waves of coronavirus tests. Hospitals collect ventilators to save critically ill patients. Mass transit is discouraged. Scientists rush to create a vaccine and develop new treatments, such as transfusions of antibody-rich blood serum from recovered COVID-19 patients.

Now, imagine selling those plans to the million-plus people jammed into the Kibera shantytown near Nairobi, Kenya -- Africa's largest urban slum.

“Our solutions are primarily for those who can afford it," said Dr. Mike Soderling, organizer of the Health for All Nations network for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization. "To whose advantage? … The big question: What are we going to do -- what can be done -- in the slums of Kibera?"

In America, news coverage of the crisis continues to be dominated by infection rates and death statistics, while politicos focus on the New York Stock Exchange and political polling about the 2020 elections. The lockdown-weary public celebrates any signs of normality witnessed in restaurants, big-box stores and sports stadiums.

Missionary doctors and activists active in Third World lands have a different point of view. Thus, 200 or more took part in a recent Lausanne webinar focusing on strategies for the COVID-19 battles they know will eventually reach the people they serve. Participants in this discussion kept asking painful questions, such as:

* How do slum-dwellers practice "universal hand-washing hygiene" without running water?

* Is it possible to practice respiratory hygiene in cultures in which masks are a stigma -- signs that individuals are carrying a life-threatening disease?


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The New Yorker profiles a disgraced missionary and comes to a surprising conclusion

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Many of you may remember a story that broke last summer about a disgraced evangelical missionary who faces a lawsuit in Uganda for practicing medicine at a quasi-clinic where numerous children died. Complicating the matter was how many of these children were hopelessly malnourished and gravely ill when they were brought to her in the first place.

I wrote about Renée Bach’s situation here at GetReligion last August while everyone was ripping into her for being a white woman trying to save black African babies. I thought the amount of venom directed against this woman was over the top in that she didn’t have to take these kids on at all. The parents of these kids had other medical choices in Jinja, the city on Lake Victoria in which Bach’s clinic was set up. Jinja is Uganda’s second-largest city, so we’re not talking about a hamlet here.

So when I heard that the New Yorker had written about this story on the whole matter last month, I figured this would be another screamer of a piece ripping up folks who go to Africa for evangelistic reasons.

Instead, I found a nuanced piece by Ariel Levy, a Jewish writer who brought her faith into the picture to give a whole different read as to why a young Christian woman set up a health clinic, called Serving His Children, over there in the first place. I started digging into who Levy is and found some pretty surprising stuff.

More on her in a moment. First, the story. This section is long, but essential:

Twalali was one of more than a hundred babies who died at Serving His Children between 2010 and 2015. The facility began not as a registered health clinic but as the home of Renée Bach — who was not a doctor but a homeschooled missionary, and who had arrived in Uganda at the age of nineteen and started an N.G.O. with money raised through her church in Bedford, Virginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help the needy, and she believed that it was Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished children. Bach told their stories on a blog that she started. “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote in 2011. “I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”

In January, 2019, that blog post was submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed against Bach and Serving His Children in Ugandan civil court.


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AP covers Orthodox Easter around the world -- except in the churches of America

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All news is local? I guess not, when it comes to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

I looked forward to coverage of Pascha (Easter in the West) this year for several reasons — in part because bishops in America have cooperated with “shelter in place” orders, but have also been creative in some of their responses. It’s hard to capture Orthodox liturgy with one digital camera, but monasteries and parishes have been doing their best, often with beautiful results. (Click here to visit my old parish outside Johnson City, Tenn, in the Smokey Mountains.)

Thus, I was disappointed when I read the Associated Press feature about Pascha. It was an impressive effort to cover the global angle of this story — but completely ignored the fact that Orthodoxy is right here in North America, as well. The story ended with this reporting credit:

Daria Litvinova reported from Moscow. Theodora Tongas in Athens, Menelaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, Cyprus, Konstantin Testorides in Skopje, North Macedonia, Elias Meseret in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, contributed.

All valid. But who covered Dallas, Wichita, Kan., Pittsburgh, Southern California, Appalachia, Florida and Washington, D.C., among other obvious locations? Did I miss a story somewhere?

You see, Orthodoxy in America has turned into an interesting quilt of ethnic traditions and thriving parishes packed with converts, from lots of other flocks or folks who had no faith at all.

Yes, the Greeks are the Greeks and the Slavs are the Slavs. But there are also Orthodox red necks, Midwestern farmers and lots of other American archetypes. Here’s a rather normal pack of folks singing in lockdown:


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It's a fact that the Holy Fire in Jerusalem is a hoax? Associated Press appears to assume that

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What, pray tell, are journalists supposed to do when people report miracles?

This question isn’t as simple as it sounds. For example, here are two statements to compare: (1) Every year, X-number of people are miraculously healed. (2) Every year, X-number of people pray for healing and they say that they have been healed.

Wait, let’s add another: (3) Every year, X-number of people claim they have been healed and doctors report that, in some cases, there is no simple explanation for the changes in their symptoms and health.

OK, that first statement is a statement of faith. The second is a statement of fact, in that it is accurate that these believers said this and that they believe it. This “they believe it” construction is common in news reports about this kind of thing. The third statement, however, involves information from outside sources — a medical journal, perhaps — that in some way support (or at least do not contradict) the faith claim. In other words, this is a belief statement PLUS some additional reporting.

Personally, I appreciate news reports that include this third stage (such as reports about Vatican investigations of healing claims when an intercessor is being considered for designation as a saint).

This brings me to a recent Associated Press report about the annual Holy Fire rite at Jerusalem’s most important ancient Christian sanctuary. Here is the overture (and pay attention to the final statement):

JERUSALEM -- Israel is working with foreign governments and Orthodox Christian leaders in the Holy Land to make sure that one of their most ancient and mysterious rituals — the Holy Fire ceremony — is not extinguished by the coronavirus outbreak, officials said. …

Each year, thousands of worshippers flock to Jerusalem's Old City and pack into the Church of the Holy Sepulcher — built on the site where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected — for the pre-Easter ceremony.

Top Eastern Orthodox clerics enter the Edicule, the small chamber marking the site of Jesus’ tomb, and exit with candles said to be miraculously lit with “holy fire” as a message to the faithful. Details of the flame’s source are a closely guarded secret.

Note the double statement of authority for the authenticity of this rite and miracle claim. First there is a simple “said to be” structure, which is the safe type (2) form discussed above.

But what comes next, with “are” and the “closely guarded secret” language?


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