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Since 2004, eight Episcopal congregations have split apart or left the Central Florida Diocese because of the direction of the national church body. Mark Pinsky, the Orlando Sentinel‘s ace religion reporter, wrote that 500 members and the ministerial staff of Trinity Episcopal Church in Vero Beach are leaving their historic church building to form a new congregation separate from the Episcopal Church.
Hear me, people, I am very familiar with the competing truth claims connected with the great barbeque churches of the American Southeast.
When the Jeremiah Wright scandal first broke, I was one of the voices here calling for more context. Well, I’m done with contextualizing. Sometimes it’s nice to just get a news story that asks hard questions while treating a subject fairly.
It never ceases to amaze me how much media coverage of denominational politics we get for The Episcopal Church vis-a-vis all other denominations. It seems like every time an Episcopal clergyman sneezes, it’s worthy of massive coverage. But a major church body — the United Methodist Church — holds its quadrennial convention in Fort Worth over the last two weeks and we get nothing. Or at least something close to nothing.
Yesterday, I looked at how media coverage of Jeremiah Wright sourced a proverb from Abraham Lincoln to the Book of Proverbs. The two were similar, but distinct.
Your GetReligionistas do not, as a rule, offer much comment about editorials and op-ed page columns. However, we do, from time to time, point out columns and commentaries that add actual insight and information to ongoing news stories.
I am completely confused by the media coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. I feel as if the media went from providing a bit too much context for his incendiary remarks to completely abandoning the man. Is there any substantial difference between what he said this week at the National Press Club and what we saw in televised snippets from his sermons? Has he said anything different about his famous parishioner Barack Obama than he did in his old interviews with the New York Times or Rolling Stone?
As Mark noted earlier, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., came right out and made a statement — a statement about religion — that reporters should be able to investigate and challenge. In a way, Wright focused on the very angle that GetReligion has been trying to focus on from the start of this media firestorm.
For their story about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.’s comments yesterday, Shailagh Murray and Peter Slevin of The Washington Post focused on the politics of his appearance and speech. Their emphasis is understandable for obvious reasons. Yet the reporters underplayed the religion angle in their story — and thus also weakened their political angle.
