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The National Football League’s 2008 regular season is underway, and once again the issue of religion is sliding through the cracks of the league’s public image control machine. For starters, The Indianapolis Star kicked off the 2008 season with a nice front-page feature on Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy as a run-up to that night’s season opener.
I meant to post this flashback last night, but was caught up in that server crash that shut GetReligion down for several hours.
About the time that I was finishing up my studies at Baylor University, a remarkable young football player arrived on the campus named Mike Singletary.
Here is your opportunity to cast your vote on the state of Michael Vick’s soul or, at the very least, the quality of his press-conference performance the other day.
You knew that the religion ghost in the Michael Vick story would wake up. I mean, last week I put it this way in a post responding to a Michael Wilbon column in The Washington Post that veered into faith language:
A long, long time ago, I was the religion writer and columnist for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. It’s a fascinating city in a beautiful region (heaven, you know) and I envy people who get to work out there.
It should be clear to just about anyone who reads major newspapers that we live in an age in which it is is safer to use religious language when describing secular sins than when describing what used to be called religious sins. It’s safer to talk about the sin of burning too much gasoline than the sin of lust. It is acceptable to judge certain secular forms of behavior, but not other forms of behavior that we have said are purely religious and private.
As I rode home on the MARC train the other night, I saw several people reading the sprawling Washington Post features section piece on the sad lives and early deaths of professional wrestlers Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit. This led into a series of hard-to-answer questions about why so many wrestlers die young, other than the assumed impact of illegal steroids on their hearts.
Michael Kress is the assistant managing editor at Beliefnet and a freelance religion reporter. I’ve come across a few of his articles recently as he’s published in Slate, The Dallas Morning News and other sites.
