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I came so close to being able to avoid the Michael Jackson worship service held at the Staples Center. But I caught a few minutes while feeding the world’s hungriest baby. (Seriously, I think I gave birth to Otesanek.) I caught the “We Are The World” group sing and a couple of teary eulogies.
Call me a dinosaur. While I don’t blink an eye anymore at sanctuary screens and televisions in the parish house, I’m still not convinced that cell phones and computers in the sanctuary aren’t a huge distraction, another manifestation of our ADHD society gone techno-nuts.
It’s time to take a trip deep, deep into the tmatt folder of GetReligion guilt. You see, with the Iran explosion and a bunch of other major news, I don’t think we made a single reference to coverage of the Southern Baptist Convention meetings in Louisville.
It’s very appropriate that the New York Times highlight one of the developing, perhaps major religious news stories. And it’s even better, most of the time, when that story is told by religion writer Laurie Goodstein, who has a gift for nuance and ability to give her readers revealing details about her subjects in a way that is spare, usually undramatic, but enlightening.
Does a saint’s intercession heal? Or are the faithful in the Roman Catholic Church praying with the saints to Jesus Christ?
One of concepts that causes my journalism students the most grief is finding the line between making statements of personal opinion and making statements that draw logical conclusions from facts that have been stated on the record or verified in a document. It’s the line between editorial writing and news, when you get right down to it.
When Amy Sullivan of Time wrote one of the finest articles about President Obama’s church options, she quoted a creative idea from Flo McAfee, former religious liaison for the Clinton White House. McAfee recommended worshiping in the chapel at the Army’s Fort Meyer, where security already is covered.
If you run a Google News search for “Michael Jackson” and “idol,” you’ll get tens of thousands of hits. If you watched any news coverage of the death of MJ, “icon” was the go-to word for describing the King of Pop. Here’s Agence France-Presse, for instance:
