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Anyone who knows anything about mainstream American religion knows that the Southern Baptist Convention is our land’s largest non-Catholic flock. Despite the word “Southern” in the name — and SBC leaders are thinking about changing that — this is an increasingly national church and one with significant ethnic presence, as well.
The other day, Sarah Pulliam Bailey walked GetReligion readers through an essential piece for all who are interested in the immediate future of The New York Times. I am referring to the New Yorker profile of Jill Abramson, the new editor of the great Gray Lady.
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.
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.
Back in my reporting days, there was no assignment that I feared more than writing a simple obituary. I know many other reporters who feel the same way.
As the old saying goes, if you want to blow up a church all you really need to do is change the hymnal. You could say that, and much more, about efforts to change the texts at the heart of life in all liturgical churches.
Year after year, the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has — as our resident liturgical Lutheran — played the role of liturgical enforcer here at GetReligion. This is not a small role, since so many of the traditional holidays in various faiths (can you say Chanukah? Or Hanukkah?) have been turned into secular festivals or twisted into forms that have almost nothing to do with their historic meanings.
The Baltimore Sun — the newspaper that lands in my yard — has done another story related to the vocations crisis in the modern Catholic Church. Regular GetReligion readers know what that means.
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.
