Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
A long time ago, in a radically different age, then White House scribe Michael Gerson told a circle of mainstream journalists that the crucial internal battles during the first Geroge W. Bush term usually boiled down to a clash between the “libertarians” and the “small-c catholics.”
In my denomination, as in most other mainline Protestant ones and the Roman Catholic Church, among others, clergy and lay volunteers are required to undergo anti-sex abuse training, which includes a criminal background check.
So Sunday was Mother’s Day. I hope you all bought your mothers flowers and wrote her a nice poem or something. As is tradition in my family, I did pretty much nothing for my amazing mom other than call her. Mother’s Day is not on the liturgical calendar of my church although I think it’s probably marked more by most American religious institutions than Cantate, which is what Lutherans noted today.
For some reason, there’s just something about a billionaire pizza czar trying to build a neo-Frank Lloyd Wright Catholic college and a conservative, faith-friendly town to go with it that makes mainstream journalists get miffed. I mean, check out some of these earlier GetReligion visits to the press coverage of Ave Maria University near Florida’s west coast.
If you do a Google News search on the phrase “abstinence only,” you get hundreds of results and most of them are for one of two stories. There’s the media coverage of teen mother Bristol Palin and her promotion of abstinence as the only completely effective way to avoid teen pregnancy. And there’s the media coverage of the news that President Obama has removed hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for abstinence-focused programs.
With wonderful medical advances, humans are able to survive cancer and diabetes diagnoses that would have meant certain death not that long ago. And while these same medical advances and general economic prosperity mean there’s never been a better time to grow older, it also means that humans now have prolonged periods of demise that burden surviving family members. The average American lifespan has increased some 30 years since a century ago.
In a strange kind of way, a team of reporters at the Washington Post metro desk (including my long-time friend Hamil Harris) has written a fitting sequel for that recent news feature about the First Family’s struggle to find a church home, one that fits them in terms of political realities and the liberal Christian beliefs that drive the heads of the household.
