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A few years ago, I had an encounter on an elevator in the National Press Club that stuck with me. Thinking back, it’s easy for me to connect that particular moment with a recent New York Times feature that has stirred up some interesting chatter online.
Forgiveness, redemption and transformation stories tend to fascinate us. Often those themes don’t appear out of thin air, though. Sometimes there’s a life-changing moment, perhaps a conversion or decision. The Associated Press has a fascinating piece on a reformed skinhead who endured years of agony to remove tattoos, a story that touches on race, belief, family, recovery and more.
Just yesterday, I praised a member of the Washington Post team for weaving valid religious content into the obituary of a former Washington, D.C., police official whose life led him from trailblazing work as an advocate of racial equality into a remarkable final act as a Catholic monk and priest. The story showed unusual grace in portraying the themes that were woven through the life of the man who died as Father James Murray.
Yesterday I mentioned that I had been thinking about how we cover stories about suspected terrorism. A couple of weeks ago, a reader submitted a story about a disrupted flight that seemed to have a bit of a ghost. I thought I’d wait for more details to come out and revisit it. Here’s the original story from the Amarillo Globe-News:
During the past decade of so, pollsters have begun paying attention to an interesting phenomenon. A growing percentage of young Protestants who would ordinarily be called “evangelicals” have started running away from that word.
For this week’s Crossroads podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discussed media coverage of the spirituality of Wall Street protestors. We’ve frequently noted the hostile posture that many news outlets have toward those religious activists who have conservative positions but in many ways the treatment received by religious activists who have liberal positions is even worse. That’s because they’re largely ignored. This was definitely a problem with early coverage, although it has improved, as we discussed in a recent post.
Last night, I was reading a couple of stories that suffered from the same problem. Don’t you hate it when that happens?
Since day one, a major theme here at GetReligion has been the need to portray the specific beliefs of specific believers whenever possible, instead of taking the easy road and settling for simplistic labels.
