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There was a gay pride march the other day in Utah and The Salt Lake City Tribune, in it’s basic report about the event, certainly didn’t shy away from publishing a provocative lede:
Although I lived in the mountains of Tennessee for six years, I am not an expert on the small — but well documented — bands of Christians who choose to handle snakes as part of their worship services. Yes, there was this mainstream Greek newspaper that decided that I was an expert on this subject (one of the most bizarre episodes in my career), but that was the kind of mistake that happens when one writes a singe column that somehow shows up high in a Google search.
The former newspaper copy editor in me has been watching the development of the whole “Polish death camp” debate this week, which led, of course, to a political resolution of this rather small-scale media storm.
From time to time, your GetReligionistas have joined with the general public in moaning about the degree to which mainstream journalists are obsessed with matters of political “process” and that whole “inside baseball” school of news coverage in which reporters pounce on tiny changes in process or personnel as alleged evidence of earthquakes in national or world affairs.
When you’re talking about Doc Watson, the place to start is here: He was a superstar in old-time folk music, which is the rare art form in which the word “tradition” is not a curse.
So, let’s let the whole progressive nuns vs. the Vatican thread spin on a bit, since the regional stories continue to pop up in the mainstream press.
At the heart of the whole U.S. nuns vs. the Vatican media storm is the April 18th “doctrinal assessment” in which the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith expressed its concerns about the theological orientation expressed by the leadership of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The report mentions a host of concerns about a decade or two of LCWR educational events, speeches, national conferences, etc.
It would be hard to find a subject that would be rank much higher than natural family planning on the religion-news beat’s “high degree of difficulty” list. As if that were not enough, I would assume that editors at The Denver Post assigned the following story because of the current tsunami of coverage about You. Know. What.
OK, readers, it’s time for a quiz about Catholic higher education. I don’t think that any readers will remember this column I once wrote for the Scripps Howard News Service (that would be a bit scary if anyone did), but I will provide enough of the content to help readers answer this question: Can you guess within five years when the following was written?
