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I’ve just returned from a vacation in Colorado and am catching up on the news of the past few days. I’m pleased by the amount of coverage we’re seeing of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s recent convention, although the depth of the articles varies wildly. Some are fantastic and cover a lot of ground and some are somewhat lacking.
Since I became a member of my congregation almost a dozen years ago, we’ve had a huge increase in the number of young children attending. Hang on, this is linked to a news story.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America is having it’s biennial convention this week and we’re seeing coverage about the most politically exciting topic that will be debated — homosexuality.
Some days, posting for GetReligion requires a great deal of work to explain some theological nuance that a reporter failed to understand. Other days, the work is downright easy. As is the case with pointing out the bias and problems in this hacktastic Associated Press piece on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
One of my favorite types of stories is the follow-up. Journalists love to pile on when a story is fresh and hot and breaking. But rarely, if ever, do they check back in to see what’s happened after the storm dies down. There are obvious reasons for this but it’s so nice when a journalist does take the work to follow-up on an old story and, further, when it pays off.
Some sex scandals are sad but exciting and some are just unseemly. This Louisville men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino one is a doozie. The married father of five had unprotected sex six years ago with a woman he had just met earlier in the evening and when she claimed to have gotten pregnant from the encounter he gave her $3,000. He says the money was for insurance. She says it was for an abortion. And then years later he went to the FBI after, he says, her extortion attempts got out of hand.
At the beginning of the month we looked at the various and sundry ways the mainstream media reported on the stabbing of an 8-months-pregnant woman and the kidnapping of her baby. Some people called the child, who was taken from the mother’s womb, a “fetus” while others called it a “baby.”
The August cover story for Christianity Today, a magazine I write a column for (here’s the latest) has been making a bit of a splash. Mark Regnerus’ “The Case for Early Marriage” discusses how the chastity advocates forgot to mention that waiting until you’re old to get married might not be the most effective strategy for abstaining from sex until you’re married.
Earlier today we looked at some of the mainstream media reports of the American Psychological Association’s resolution on treatment for those dealing with same-sex attraction. The Wall Street Journal took a completely different approach than almost every other report out there. Religion reporter Stephanie Simon writes on a new therapy for people whose faith and sexual identity are in conflict and how the APA changed its treatment guidelines to allow counselors to help clients reject their same-sex attraction. It was certainly different than the headlines over most of the AP reports. Here’s how she began:
