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Press coverage of the Episcopal House of Bishops is rather low key at this point, since anyone who has covered this story for a decade or two knows this “pastoral oversight” document isn’t going anywhere.
The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops churns out pastoral documents every time it meets. They are without fail rich illustrations of the bishops using many words while committing themselves to very little.
It may seem strange to blog the “competition” on the God-beat beat, but so be it. Jeff Sharlet over at New York University and TheRevealer has spotted a major ghost in the mainstream press coverage of the death of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Everyone is talking about the fall of the “spiritual leader” of Hamas and the militant Palestinians, yet no one seems to be putting any content behind that loaded word “spiritual.”
Kelly McBride has a thought-provoking essay up in the Ethics Journal at www.Poynter.org dissecting the case of the lesbian journalists at the San Francisco Chronicle who were removed from major roles in coverage of the ongoing same-sex marriage story after they got married.
On Sunday the Boston Herald published a sobering report about Feroze Golwalla and his small Parsee Ministry Team, also called Baruch Ha Shem International. Golwalla, 36 and a native of Pakistan, describes Baruch Ha Shem as an effort to take the message of Christ to Parsee Zoroastrians (who live in India and Pakistan). But some students who became associated with Golwalla while they studied at Wheaton College in Illinois describe him as a cult leader who used frequent violence to control them.
In a quick glance through some of the coverage of the United Methodist trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann (shown at right in a United Methodist News Service photo) I found something interesting — a newspaper bravely steering to the left of the New York Times in coverage of a moral and religious issue.
In its coverage of the charges against two Unitarian Universalist ministers for celebrating gay marriage ceremonies, The New York Times shows an atypical concern for state intrusions into matters of faith.
