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I am, to be blunt, a church-history fan and that affected both my undergraduate and graduate educations as I prepared to seek work on the Godbeat. To get personal about it, this is also the sort of interest that can inspire a Baptist to swim the Bosporus.
If your GetReligionistas wished to do so, we could open up a second weblog this month and do nothing but write about the mainstream coverage of the upcoming changes in the English translation — repeat, the translation — of the Catholic Eucharistic texts used in Western Rite.
While the Penn State scandal has riveted most of the nation, Washington, D.C., has also been caught up in a scandal that is, in its own way, almost as shocking — especially with the bad timing on the calendar.
It’s not every week your own congregation gets a write up in the New York Times. This happened last week to members of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn with a piece entitled “A Congregation in Skinny Jeans.”
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.
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.
