Terry Mattingly

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Generic, very modest Christians walk across America for some vague reason

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This is one of those posts where readers really need to be able to see the art that ran with a specific newspaper story, but that isn't possible because of copyright issues.

So let's start off by saying that you need to go take a look at The Denver Post story, the one with this headline: "Family ends hike across America at Union Station on Saturday."

OK, so you surfed over and looked that the photograph. What did you see?

With that in mind, here is the top of the story:

With 45-pound packs on their backs and a lifetime worth of tales, an Alabama family strode in front of Union Station on Saturday afternoon, marking the end of their walk across America.
Cheerfully sporting a broken collarbone, Jennifer Sunde said it was her idea to embark on the American Discovery Trail with her husband, Chris, and 18-year-old daughter, Katlyn.
The trail is more than 6,000 miles long and connects cities like Washington, D.C., and Colorado Springs with national and state forests, parks and historical sites. The motive of the trek was to spread love and encouragement to whomever they met along their journey while enjoying the sites.
"We are Christians," Sunde said. "We're told to love one another, so we wanted to show everyone that someone out there loves you no matter your religion, social status, class and so on."

Once again, think about the photo. Again, what did you see?

Describing the family, The Post team went with this:


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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

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Sing it! Going to the 'chapel' (maybe) and we're gonna get married (on our terms)

There is an old saying in the religion-beat world that goes something like this: You can always find interesting news trends if you keep looking at what happens when each generation moves through the symbolic crossroads of life -- being born, getting married, having children and dying.

During this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I talked about a number of different trends linked to marriage in this day and age, spinning off from two New York Times stories. One was about people flocking to New York City for secular weddings in a state-run marriage bureau chapel. Yes, "chapel." The other was about the trend toward very sexy -- but still white -- wedding dresses.

All kinds of issues came up in this discussion. For example: Lots of churches have had to establish policies on how to handle couples who have been "living in sin" -- that's what people used to call it -- before marriage. There are still interesting stories to be found linked to that topic. But times move on. I am curious. In the age of R-rated wedding dresses, are religious leaders going to have to have wedding dress codes for brides? Do priests and rabbis need to approve wedding dresses in advance?

Truth be told, there is a big, big subject looming in the background during this chat. We are talking about radical American individualism and its whole "this day is all about you" wedding ethos that produces both gigantic, break-the-bank church weddings and all of those destination weddings on beaches, mountain cliffs and who knows where.

The bottom line is even bigger than the financial bottom line: Is the wedding a sacrament or not? Is the rite defined by individuals or by worshipping communities?


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Washington Post offers another 'omniscient anonymous voice' clinic in synod report

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One of the most frustrating things in journalism these days (your GetReligionistas write about this all the time) is the blurring line between news and commentary.

It's not simply a matter of snarky material on Twitter by reporters about topics, institutions and people that they are also covering in hard-news stories. That's a problem, but not the biggest problem, from my point of view.

Meanwhile, I'll be honest. If I was a reporter right now, instead of a columnist and an opinion blogger, I do not know how I would handle Twitter.

No, I'm talking about the material that is actually being produced by newspapers, wire services and major news websites. Some use clear labels for "analysis" work and others do not. There are reporters who do straight news and also analysis and, at times, there are no graphics or labels to clearly tell you which is which and what is what.

Some standing online features with titles are news and some are not. There are "reported" blogs and blogs that are totally opinion. The logos often look the same to me. There are online-only features that look like news, but they are not, and people who only see certain newspapers in digital forms have no way to know which is which.

I don't think this digital swamp will be cleared up anytime soon. Still, I want to confess my frustration. This leads me to another example of a related trend, the writing style that your GetReligionistas call "omniscient anonymous voice." Here is how I described this journalistic trend in an earlier post:

Normally, hard-news journalism is written in third-person voice in past tense, with a heavy emphasis on the use of clear attributions for quoted materials, so that readers know who is speaking. That crucial "comma, space, said, space, name, period" formula is at the heart of traditional, American Model of the Press journalism.
The bottom line: It's a key element in retaining the trust of readers. Traditional journalists are, as a rule, going to tell the reader the sources for the information they are reading.

So what are we dealing with when journalists publish copy with paragraph after paragraph of material with little or no clear attribution? You know that this material has sources; but you also know these sources, for some reason, are not being cited. What does this look like?

Consider this recent story in The Washington Post.


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Angels and religion ghosts in American Bible Society's flight from New York City

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Angels and religion ghosts in American Bible Society's flight from New York City

Let us now praise the fact that The New York Times offered a story about the departure of the American Bible Society from the Big Apple, even if that story was labeled as a "Building Blocks" feature that focused on the architecture of the building at 1865 Broadway, rather than covering some of the cultural implications of this symbolic evangelical group's flight to a less demanding location.

As the old saying goes: New York, New York. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Well, what about the opposite?

There are moments when this piece hints at the larger dramas behind the architectural lede. Still, let's let the Times team start where it wanted to start:

“Behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”
Angels have never been especially conspicuous around Columbus Circle in Manhattan. But it is hard to look at 1865 Broadway, the former headquarters of theAmerican Bible Society, and not think for a moment about the ladder of Jacob’s dream, as described in Genesis 28:12.
If the bold, Brutalist rungs of the main facade do not persuade you of a biblical provenance, you are also free to read symbolism into the 12 deep recesses at each floor. Might they represent the 12 tribes of Israel? Or the Twelve Apostles?


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(Cue: audible sigh) 'Who am I to judge?' errors continue in basic AP wire report

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One of the most positive developments of the online age, for journalists, is the number of full verbatim texts of interviews and speeches that are only a few mouse clicks away.

Of course, this is a positive development if journalists actually use those resources. At some point, one still has to care about the details of what people actually said.

Like what? Several weeks ago, while working on a Universal syndicate column ahead of the papal visit to the United States, I ran a simple online search for the terms "Pope Francis" and "Who am I to judge?" The results, I thought, were pretty eye opening, with nearly 200,000 hits, including 4,540 in current news articles and commentaries.

Trust me that very, very few of these articles actually focused on what Pope Francis actually said in that 2013 encounter -- here is that link to the full text again -- with reporters on Shepherd One. We will come back to that subject.

I just ran the same search and, to my surprise, the current Google News files contain even more references than in the past -- with 5,300 in recent stories -- even though the we keep moving further and further from that event. Also, the the pope has had more to say on this and related topics that illustrate his actual views.

This flawed coverage includes the following in a new Associated Press story about Francis and the 2015 Synod on marriage and family issues. As always, AP reports are especially crucial since they go out to, literally, several thousand newsrooms across the nation and around the world and are seen by the copyeditors as basic, accurate stories. Let's walk through some of the summary material about what happens when the synod is done and submits its report to the pope:

What Francis does with the final paper is up to him: He can use it as a basis for a document of his own, he can ignore it, or he can publish it as a synod document. During Round One of the bishops’ family meeting last year, Francis not only published the final document in full, he published the three paragraphs that didn’t receive the necessary votes to pass -- those that dealt with the vexing issues of ministering to gay Catholics and civilly remarried Catholics.
The key question of Round Two has been how the bishops would pick up those two outstanding issues, after Francis called for a more merciful, less doctrinaire approach.


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Blest be the strong, but vague, ties that bind in remarkable Knoxville neighborhood

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What is the boomerang art about? We will get to that in a moment.

One of the nice things about being back in the Hills of East Tennessee is that I am living in a part of the world in which newspapers devote quite a bit of ink to the lives of ordinary people, often when they are doing rather ordinary things that still have great meaning.

Yes, part of me misses the daily snark of The Washington Post Style section. I am also struggling to get used to living in a zip code in which SEC football is pretty much all that matters in sports. There is a rumor that an NFL franchise exists in Tennessee, but you have to dig into the back pages to find that out. Oh, but the Lady Vols are a big deal in the hoops world, which is good.

I have lived in East Tennessee before -- teaching for six years at Milligan College up near the Virginia line -- and I get the rhythms of all of this. I have also read The Knoxville News Sentinel for a long, long time, since that is the newspaper that first asked the old Scripps Howard New Service to start a weekly religion news column. So 26 years later, it's nice that the News Sentinel is the newspaper that lands in my driveway each morning.

So the other day, the editors in the Life section there ran a very interesting and touching story about something that used to be normal, but is very unusual today -- members of several generations of a family going out of their way to live right next to each other, right there in a normal neighborhood.

This story is actually downright countercultural. Here is how it starts:

Boomerang kids move back home because they have to. But in a small neighborhood off Emory Road, kids move back because they want to.
One at a time, about half the kids who grew up in Imperial Estates have moved back from places like San Francisco, Australia, Kenya and New York City. They decided that life along Beaver Creek couldn't be beat. They bought houses just down the street from their parents. They want to raise their children as happily as they were raised.


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Guns, the f-word (the other one), Disney, evangelicals and Denzel Washington, oh my

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What we got here is FAILURE to communicate.

That's a movie reference, you see, to one of the great religion-haunted films in the history of Hollywood. But never mind, I thought that might be a good place to start in a short post about some bizarre mangling of religious language in a piece by The Hollywood Reporter. I've been wanting to get to this one for some time now.

So there is this new documentary film called "The Armor of Light" and the key player behind it is one Abigail Disney. The trouble starts right in the epic double decker headline. See if you can follow this one:

Walt Disney Heiress Courts Evangelicals With Anti-Gun Movie
Well versed in her family's conservative politics, Abigail Disney discusses her new film 'The Armor of Light' (out Oct. 30), which tackles the gun controversy while also reaching out to fundamentalist Christians in a new way: "This film goes to them on their own terms, and they appreciate that."

OK, GetReligion readers already know that use of the term "fundamentalist" is very tricky, for journalists who have any intent of using religious language accurately or, well, paying any attention to the Associated Press Stylebook. As the bible of daily journalism notes:

"fundamentalist: The word gained usage in an early 20th century fundamentalist-modernist controversy within Protestantism. ... However, fundamentalist has to a large extent taken on pejorative connotations except when applied to groups that stress strict, literal interpretations of Scripture and separation from other Christians.
"In general, do not use fundamentalist unless a group applies the word to itself."


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Sunday think pieces: Is it time for Catholics to split into three different flocks?

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The 2015 Synod of Bishops is winding down to crunch time and several key participants have certainly given reporters, and Catholic leaders back home, plenty to think about.

There's too much going on to write it into one summary. So let's just do a kind of math progression and, for now, sets aside the clearly pivotal role that Pope Francis will play in wrapping things up. 

So journalists here stateside, let's do this: Click here, click here, click here and then click here. Then sit down, pop open something cold, and think things over. Do some math.

First, there is The Chicago Tribune coverage of statements by the leader of the Archdiocese of Chicago -- arguably the most powerful in the United States -- stating that he sees a way for Catholics who are divorced and remarried outside the church to take Holy Communion. He then stated that the same logical -- do what your conscience leads you to do -- applies to gays and lesbians, those who are single and those who are in relationships.

Take it away Archbishop Blasé Kupich:

"In Chicago I visit regularly with people who feel marginalized, whether they're elderly or the divorced and remarried, gay and lesbian individuals, also couples," Cupich said. .... "We need to get to know what their life is like if we're going to accompany them.
"I try to help people along the way. And people come to a decision in good conscience," he said about personally counseling Catholics.
"Then our job with the church is to help them move forward and respect that," he said. "The conscience is inviolable. And we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I've always done that."


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Spotting two Catholic 'ghosts' in the lives of Paul Ryan and David Daleiden

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Spotting two Catholic 'ghosts' in the lives of Paul Ryan and David Daleiden

This week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in) is about "religion ghosts" in mainstream news, which is about as basic a GetReligion topic as you can get, seeing as how that was the subject of the very first post on this weblog back on Feb. 1, 2004.

In this case, host Todd Wilken and I were talking about posts in which I focused on Catholic ghosts in the lives of two public figures caught up in very big stories in the mainstream press.

First there was this one: "Spot a religion ghost? Paul Ryan is a busy father who wants to help raise his kids." And the second post was about the young man at the heart of the hidden-camera Planned Parenthood videos: "Washington Post meets David Daleiden, whose Catholic faith is less important than his socks."

In both cases, we were dealing with features stories that were supported to help readers understand what makes these men tick, when dealing with major moral and ethical issues. In both cases, their Catholic faith was all but ignored.

Which brings us back to that "ghost" concept, as explained on GetReligion Day 1. Let us attend:

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.
They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.
One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels.


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