Mollie Hemingway

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Here they stand, er, leave

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Man, the hits keep on coming. The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh voted to leave the Episcopal Church and realign with an Anglican province in another yet-to-be-determined country. Ann Rodgers, who writes religion news for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and is a board member of the Religion Newswriters Association, has been covering the story. Apparently Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori warned the diocese that she would remove Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan (pictured) from office if the diocese voted to leave. Rodgers went to the annual convention where laypeople and clergy voted by very large margins to leave:


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A new resource: readers

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On Friday, I posted a look at an article about a West Virginia university permitting students to take off for pagan holidays. A lively discussion ensued about whether pagan should be capitalized and which religious groups should be under the pagan umbrella. And that’s just the last post I wrote. Hardly a day goes by where readers don’t add significantly to the value of this site and the content we produce. We also receive topic suggestions from readers and a good number of emails from the Godbeat journalists whose work we analyze. All this to say that GetReligion benefits greatly from our community of readers.


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Parsing pagans properly

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Tom Breen is an extraordinarily good newsman in the Associated Press’ Charleston, West Virginia, bureau. He manages to write compelling national stories by focusing on local trends and events. I’ve been reading his coverage of the sad case of a 20-year-old black woman who was raped and tortured. Six white individuals have been charged in the crime. Terry highlighted his story this past summer about small-town churches struggling to keep their doors open. His thoughtful comments have enlightened many discussions here at GetReligion, too.


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Going to the source

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Catholic social thought is all the rage these days. Or so says Michael Gerson, in his never-ceases-to-annoy-me Washington Post column. I think Terry is going to look into the column and some of the recent media coverage of Gerson. But here’s just a snippet in which he argues that Catholic social teaching is battling for the soul of the Republican Party:


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As I lay dying

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Last week religion reporter David Crumm was featured in our 5Q+1 series. He said that aging is the most important religion story the mainstream media just do not get. Gary Stern of The Journal News had a fantastic story that Crumm may want to check out. He followed a local hospice worker as she attended to the spiritual needs of the dying. Here’s how it begins:


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Lutherans in our midst

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I was quite surprised to see the story Terry sent me from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Written by religion reporter K. Connie Kang, the story is about the holy day being celebrated today by millions of Lutherans, as well as Christians of various Protestant denominations: Reformation Sunday.


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Underpromise, overachieve

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Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball (with Suzanne Smalley, Eve Conant, Babak Dehghanpisheh, Pat Wingert, Dan Ephron, Rod Nordland, John Barry, Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, Richard Wolffe and Thijs Niemantsverdriet) profiled Blackwater CEO Erik Prince for Newsweek. It’s the kind of story that offers such balanced and illuminating insight as this:


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