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My family’s roots are in East Texas and I love old stories about small towns in the great Piney Woods region. One of my favorites concerns a radio announcer in Huntsville, back in the era when stations used to play sermons on the air during the church hours on Sunday morning and evening. The sermons were so old that they were on records instead of tapes.
It seems that religion columnist Bill Tammeus of the Kansas City Star recently went to a seminar in the Washington, D.C., area that focused on issues in religion news coverage. While he was there he met religion writer Neela Banerjee of The New York Times and, since then, the two of them, and the 30 or so other journalists who attended, have been trading emails about their work.
Our semi-retired blogger and ghost editor, the Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc, is punching keys at the moment — only not for us. Anyone who wants to follow his work at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention should keep an eye on the websites of Christianity Today and, on the other side of the pond, The Church Times.
Veteran religion scribe Julia Duin of The Washington Times has written one of those stories that simply had to be written, taking readers inside what I once called the Anglican Web Wars.
Well folks, I really don’t know what to say about this news except: Cue the theme from Jaws. Let’s go straight to the Hollywood Reporter story by Paul Bond, which I am amazed has not inspired more coverage. Where is Frank Rich?
Several GetReligion readers have sent me information linked to my recent post on the lasting influence of the late Monsignor Thomas Wells, an influential Roman Catholic priest in the Washington, D.C., area whose murder shocked the region back in 2000. I want to pass along one or two, since it is clear that his impact on others was personal, spiritual and intellectual. That’s a potent mix.
The year was 1979, the place was the Astrodome in Houston and, for legions of Southern Baptists on the left side of the nation’s largest non-Catholic flock, what took place there forever changed how they looked at church buses.
I think Episcopalians get a lot of ink because: (a) there are a lot of Episcopalians in the newsrooms, (b) they tend to be urbanites and well-educated (c) the opposing camps are incredibly well-funded with huge PR machines, and (d) Americans tend to have Anglo-envy.
