Journalism

Why military chaplains matter

Last Sunday’s 8,000-plus-word takeout in The Washington Post Magazine on military chaplains is a tremendous example of why long-form journalism is so helpful in dealing with complex religious issues. The magazine’s editors gave Kristin Henderson, the wife of a Navy chaplain and author of While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront, the space needed to tell the story of why chaplains are a necessary part of the U.S. military operations and some of the immense challenges they face:


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Does Da Vinci need a disclaimer?

One thing I’m looking forward to seeing in the launch of The Da Vinci Code next weekend (besides everyone laughing at Tom Hanks’ career-damaging hair) is what type of on-screen language it will open with and what, if any, type of language it will end with.


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What will the Associated Press do?

One of the reasons some editors and reporters shy away from reporting about religious issues is because their ignorance on the topic can cause outrage among readers. You get a businessman’s name wrong and you run a correction. Get a detail wrong about Mennonites and you field angry calls from Pennsylvania for weeks. Connie Coyne, the reader advocate for the Salt Lake Tribune, deals with an example of this in her column this week:


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More "moderate" than thou (Rumble III)

Remember that soul-searching June 23, 2005, memo that New York Times editor Bill Keller wrote to his staff? This was the one called “Assuring Our Credibility” (PDF) that talked about the newspaper needing to do a better job of covering religion and being fair to people whose beliefs seem strange to people who work in the world’s most powerful newsroom.


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China-Vatican deal goes boom over bishops

Alessandra Rizzo of the Associated Press reported Friday that the Vatican excommunicated four bishops because two of them were ordained by the state-controlled church without consent from the Pope. The two bishops who ordained them were also excommunicated. Except they weren’t quite cut off from church fellowship.


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Let's get ready to rumble!

Last summer I attended a worship service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I went so that I could witness the congregation’s interfaith Eucharistic prayer. The sermon text was Mark 7 and the priest told us that it showed how Jesus was xenophobic, racist and sexist.


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Why does Time see religion as irrelevant?

Many of you know World as a publication that strives to compete with other newsweeklies, but with an avowed evangelical Christian slant.


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