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Looking for faith in the Washington Post's bittersweet look at Chicago Cubs heaven

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Does anyone know where the whole concept of baseball as an alternative religion got started, I mean other than in classic Hollywood flicks?

We're talking about a level of symbolism that's even deeper than the unwritten law that all pre-game montages for pivotal baseball contests must include a shot of nuns -- hopefully wearing baseball hats. Images of rabbis and priests are optional, but producers have to find some nuns to put on camera or it's just not a real baseball game.

Maybe it has something to do with baseball's golden age being linked to the heartbeat of life in the great American cities of the Northeast and Midwest. That was back when Catholic families had lots of children and large Catholic schools -- with lots of nuns, of course -- where so important to urban, ethnic Catholic parishes.

Then there are the rituals of baseball. Football happens once a week, like a blowout bash of a spectacular tailgate kegger (think Ole Miss). But for fans, baseball is part of the familiar rites of daily life, involving a radio (or television), a father's stuffed chair, peanuts, the right beverage, the common wisdom of the box scores and, for the truly devout, even the sacred process of keeping score -- just like your parents or grandparents taught you to do it.

This brings us to God and the Chicago Cubs. We're talking about the theological questions (for some, theodicy was a relevant topic) surrounding the fact that a loving God allowed so many Cubs fans to live and die during the club's 108-year trek through the baseball wilderness, with the promised land of a World Series championship hovering off in the distance.

This brings us to that Washington Post story with the headline: "What of the lifelong Cubs fans who departed before it came?" You got it. Were these fans able to watch the game from prime seats located up in heaven?

You want baseball religion?


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MVP! Cubs' Ben Zobrist - 'a missionary in the big leagues' -- wins World Series again

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A holy ghost in the story of Ben Zobrist, the Chicago Cubs' World Series MVP?

You bet!

On Twitter last night (or was it early this morning?), CNN Religion Editor Daniel Burke offered insight on the Cubs' righteous dude:

Ben Zobrist almost followed his father into the ministry but decided to try out for some @Mlb scouts.
How's that for a curse-breaker?

Of course, Zobrist's devoted Christian background is not news to faithful GetReligion readers or — presumably — Kansas City Royals fans.

We wrote about this last year when Zobrist helped lead another team to baseball's Promised Land.

A year later, the Kansas City Star's terrific piece on Zobrist the baseball player — and the man of faith — still makes for great reading. 

Some of the crucial background from that story:


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Latest Amy Grant controversy: This tale has a new chapter that some have missed

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Baby, baby, how long have I been writing about controversies involving Amy Grant and fights about what is and what is not Christian music?

Well, so long that I cannot link to the "On Religion" column I wrote about the topic a quarter of a century ago. You see, the World Wide Web didn't really exist at the time for normal people -- so that column isn't stored anywhere online, at least not where I can get to it.

But back in 1991, people started worrying about whether Grant's "Heart in Motion" album (containing "Baby, Baby," which led to that controversial music video) was "too secular" and part of the "crossover" trend that would undercut Grant's public witness, etc., etc.

Well, now Grant is back in the news and, alas, it appears that some people have not noticed that lots of water has gone under the bridge and there are new issues in play. This brings us to the top of the story in the singer's local paper, The Tennessean:

LifeWay Christian Resources will not be selling Amy Grant's new Christmas album this year, and the manager for the Nashville-based singer says it's because it's not Christian enough for the Southern Baptist retailer.
Manager Jennifer Cooke said in an opinion piece for the Washington Post that LifeWay's decision not to carry "Tennessee Christmas" reignites a debate about how Christian a product needs to be in order for Christian retailers to sell it.
"'Is it Christian enough for Christian retail to support?' LifeWay Christian Resources, the large Southern Baptist retailer, decided it was not. It’s their choice, and it’s okay," said Cooke, in the column posted Tuesday.
LifeWay, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, confirmed its retail stores are not carrying the album, but would not comment on the reasons for the decision.

Of course, the Southern Baptist Vatican, as the locals call it, is in Nashville, so this is a local story on every possible level.


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Harper's produces a masterful longread on Iraqi rescuer of Christian hostages

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There’s no lack of reporters running about Iraq these days getting some very gripping stories. Most are tracking the purported last gasps of revived Islamic caliphate in the country’s northwest quadrant as the battle for Mosul grinds on.

The story that your GetReligionistas passed around this week was something a bit different: A story in Harper's magazine of a Christian Iraqi who wheels and deals in Christian hostages held by those within ISIS who are willing to sell them back for the right price.

The man’s name is Matti, he is based in the mixed Arab-Kurdish city of Kirkuk and he’s part fixer, part Mafioso-style godfather and star of a lengthy article titled “Escape from the Caliphate.”

Emad Matti had not received a photograph of the hostages. Two months had passed, and several Iraqi Christian families that had been detained by the Islamic State in an old folks’ home in Mosul were still imprisoned. From Kirkuk, Matti had been transferring $500 each month to a bank to feed the families, and he was afraid that they were dead, or that his informant in Mosul, one of their captors, was planning to prolong their imprisonment and collect even more money before demanding an impossible sum to drop them at the Kurdish border. For now, though, Matti just wanted photographic proof that they were still alive.
He checked his watch, a gold Breitling made from the weapons of martyrs in the Iran–Iraq War. The phone rang. He put a finger to his lips.

What follows is a fascinating read about the ordinary world of Iraqis who deal with ISIS (or what they call ‘Daesh’) like the next-door neighbors they are.

Everyone knows each other in this tribal society of Sunnis, Shi’a, various groups of Christians, Yezedis and Kurds whose lives have been linked for centuries.  Everyone has their informants, friends and family members, just in the same way as long-time residents in any American state have reams of contacts, old school buddies and family members scattered about.

Matti is like a 21st –century Oskar Schindler, trying to save as many Christians as possible before the deluge.


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Faith vs. works: Hillary Clinton's 'public and private faith' draws CNN's attention

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Faith vs. works? 

For many Christians, that question makes for a great debate.

Galatians 2:16 of the New Testament says:

Know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. 

Meanwhile, James 2:24 proclaims:

You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.

Of course, for most believers, faith vs. works is less of an either/or scenario than a both/and imperative.

Why do I bring up the question here at GetReligion? Because it figures heavily in the compelling opening to CNN Religion Editor Daniel Burke's roughly 4,000-word opus this week on "The public and private faith of Hillary Clinton":

(CNN) At a Catholic charity event this month, Hillary Clinton, a onetime Sunday school teacher, made a small but telling theological slip-up.
After trading jokes with her Republican rival, Donald Trump, at the Al Smith dinner in New York, Clinton got serious, praising her Catholic hosts and Pope Francis' fights against climate change and inequality.
"I'm not Catholic. I'm a Methodist," Clinton said. "But one of the things that we share is the belief that in order to achieve salvation we need both faith and good works."That's only half-true. Neither the United Methodist Church nor the Catholic Church teach that believers can work their way into heaven. Good deeds are important, both churches agree, but God's grace is freely given -- and the only means of salvation.
Clinton likely knows this. She's correctly stated the doctrine before, including at a church service in Washington last year.
Maybe her salvation stumble was the work of a sloppy speechwriter -- or perhaps, with apologies to Freud, it was a Pelagian slip. (Pelagius was a monk accused of teaching the heresy that humans could earn their own salvation.) Either way, Clinton's remark revealed a deep strain in her religious thought: There are no freeloaders in heaven.
"She didn't believe it was how high you jumped for joy in church," said the Rev. Ed Matthews, Clinton's pastor when she lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the 1990s, "but what you did when you came down."


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C'Mon Washington Post! Tell us more about that new Smithonian religion expert

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If you pay attention to sports, and I know that some GetReligion readers do, then you are probably familiar with the ESPN "C'Mon Man!" feature.

The whole idea is rather simple. When a player, referee or fan does something strange or inexplicable -- usually it's an embarrassing mistake -- this phrase is what you are allowed to shout at the field or television screen. When this happens in journalism today, people make references to spitting coffee on keyboards.

However, I do not drink coffee. So we are going with a "C'Mon Man!" reference when dealing with an interesting detail in that short Washington Post feature that ran the other day with this headline: "The Smithsonian now has its first religion curator since the 1890s."

Let me be clear: There is a lot of fun and fascinating material in this piece. I just have a question or two about the need for follow-up on one prominent detail right at the top. Let's see if you can spot it.

Peter Manseau was born for this job.
The son of a priest and a nun, Manseau was meant to be a scholar making sense of religion. Now his job, as the Smithsonian’s first curator of religion in more than a century, is to remind Americans of our nation’s religious history, in all its diversity, messiness, import and splendor.
“You can’t tell the story of America,” he said, “without the role of religion in it.”

Yes, I am talking about that phrase noting that Manseau is the "son of a priest and a nun."


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Does megachurch pastor Paula White deserve to be trashed? Yes, says The Forward

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While many Christians of the evangelical and charismatic variety have run for cover whenever a discussion of Donald Trump comes up, others have run into the spotlight. One of the latter is Pastor Paula White, a Florida preacher who’s the closest thing the candidate has to a spiritual guide.

I first became aware of Paula back in 1994, when I encountered her second husband, Randy, at a prayer meeting I was assigned to cover for an article on the “holy laughter” movement so popular 20+ years ago. They were a husband-and-wife team leading the 10,000-member Church Without Walls in Tampa. 

As the years went by, Paula’s star went up as she founded her own media ministry in 2001, which included a TV show. By the time I heard her preach several years later at the National Church of God in Fort Washington, just east of Washington, DC, I was amazed at the wardrobe, her confidence and the professionalism of her entourage.

Recently, The Forward, a news and commentary publication that until last year was known as The Jewish Daily Forward, ran a piece proclaiming “David Trump’s favorite female evangelist wears a Jewish prayer shawl -- just like him,” referring to an incident last month where Trump was presented with a prayer shawl by a pastor, which I wrote about here. Here’s how it starts:

High Holiday appeals for money are nothing new to North American synagogue-goers.
But for sheer chutzpah, few could compare with the Yom Kippur video appeal from Paula White, Donald Trump’s most visible evangelical supporter.
White stares into the camera, with cascading blond hair and Botox-swollen lips. She tells those on her ministry email list that this is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, “God’s most holy day of the year [in a] supernatural miracle–working season.”
For the next three-and-a-half minutes, White, 50, explains why viewers need to contribute “sacrificially” to her Orlando-based organization -- $10,000, or just a thousand –- on this special day.


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Another sigh: Washington Post leaves theology out of big Mormon story containing theology

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The other day, I posted a piece that underlined a point that I have made several times during this long and depressing season of political/religious news. That headline: "Hey, Washington Post political scribes: So religion will have zero impact in GOP civil war?"

In that post, I argued (once again) that the political desk of The Washington Post just doesn't seem to get religion -- especially when it comes the role of evangelical Protestants, Mormons, traditional Catholics and others in the #NeverTrump #NeverHillary phenomenon. That's an important point to ponder as we prepare for the GOP wars that are ahead.

Some folks (including a former student who now works at NPR) were concerned that, while I said my target was the political desk, I had not done enough to note that other Post reporters (think religion-beat specialists) had done lots of coverage on other election-year religion angles, especially developments among evangelicals.

So let's stress that by making a similar point -- looking at two Post stories focusing on developments in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Can you spot the story by a religion-beat specialist?

The first story ran under this headline: "‘Mormon and Gay’? The church’s new message is that you can be both." It focuses on the content of an official LDS website with that title -- Mormon and Gay. As you would expect, the website supports the church's teachings on marriage and sex. Thus, the bitter debates about those teachings continue. The Post notes:

You can be gay while being Mormon, the new website says -- as long as you don’t have gay sex.
“They’re loved. They’re supported. They’re part of the church,” said L. Whitney Clayton, who serves on the Presidency of the Seventy, making him one of the most powerful leaders in the Mormon Church. “We want them to feel happy and included in the kingdom of God.”


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AP turns anti-Catholic superstar Jack Chick into an all-purpose fundamentalist hero

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This will be risky, but I'd like to talk about Adolf Hitler and religion for a moment.

The problem with creating a metaphor involving Hitler is that, as journalist Ron Rosenbaum told me long ago (this is a paraphrase): What people say about Hitler usually reveals more about their biases and beliefs than about those of Hitler. (Rosenbaum is the author of an amazing book, "Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.")

So here goes. Readers, especially Jewish readers, what would you think if you read a news feature covering the life and legacy of Hitler and, right at the beginning, it stressed that he was known for his oppression of Marxists, Catholics, faithful Lutherans, gays, Jews and gypsies?

On one level, all of that is true. That is an accurate list of groups in Germany, Poland, France and elsewhere that Hitler attacked. But isn't it rather strange to see his war on the Jews turned into a mere bullet item in a list of what appear to be similar offenses?

Now, please hear me say this: I am not about to compare the work of Jack T. Chick with that of Hitler. So what am I attempting here?

I am saying that, when I read the Associated Press obituary for the famous -- many would say "infamous" -- cartoonist the lede struck me as strange. Click here for the version that ran in The Los Angeles Times -- which is symbolic since Chick was based east of LA.

Now, Chick was famous for using his pen to attack lots of different targets. But there is no question that he attacked one body of religious believers more than any other and in ways that were uniquely scandalous. But read the AP lede and try to figure out which body got stabbed the most:

Jack T. Chick, whose cartoon tracts preached fundamentalist Christianity while vilifying secular society, evolution, homosexuality and the beliefs of Catholics and Muslims, has died. He was 92.


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