Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
You may recall, especially if you are haunted by the hellish details of murders, a post that I wrote a year ago about the death of a 16-month-old boy named Javon Thompson while in the hands of his mother, Ria Ramkissoon, and other members of a small alternative religious group called One Mind Ministries.
I’ve previously come across kung fu ministries. When I worked in the Inland Empire, I even attended a church event where former wrestlers and football players broke burning stacks of bricks instead of breaking bread. But did you hear the one about MMA — not watching it but actually doing it — was the latest trend to take over evangelical America?
As I prepare this morning to go through the indignity that is modern air travel, I can’t help but nod my head in agreement with this article about how new body scanners violate some religious sensibilities. These are the scanners that show your naughty bits to the friendly TSA agents who are trying to detect bombs.
The Rt. Rev. Douglas LeBlanc, co-founder of this here weblog, is not writing for GetReligion at the moment, but he’s still out there in media land — seeing things through GetReligion eyes.
One of the most important ways in which stories favor one perspective or another is in how they are framed. Which "side" of an issue does a story begin with? How is that side presented? After story selection itself (deciding which stories to report on and which to bypass), framing is one of the most important decisions journalists make. I thought of that when reading this highly informative piece in the Chicago Tribune:
If ever Carol Gaetjens becomes unconscious with no hope of awakening, even if she could live for years in that state, she says she wants her loved ones to discontinue all forms of artificial life support.
But now there's a catch for this churchgoing Catholic woman. U.S. bishops have decided that it is not permissible to remove a feeding tube from someone who is unconscious but not dying, except in a few circumstances.
People in a persistent vegetative state, the bishops say, must be given food and water indefinitely by natural or artificial means as long as they are otherwise healthy. The new directive, which is more definitive than previous church teachings, also appears to apply broadly to any patient with a chronic illness who has lost the ability to eat or drink, including victims of strokes and people with advanced dementia. ...
Gaetjens, 65, said she did not know of the bishops' position until recently and finds it difficult to accept.
"It seems very authoritarian," said the Evanston resident. "I believe people's autonomy to make decisions about their own health care should be respected."
The story goes on to explain this directive from the bishops and how it would affect Catholic hospitals.
To my amazement, the Baltimore Sun managed to get some newspapers delivered earlier this week — in between the record-shattering snow storms that keep rolling through the Mid-Atlantic region. As I type this, we are in the middle of storm No. 3. and, OMG, the word “snow” is in the Monday forecast.
When the late Richard John Neuhaus argued for greater participation in civic life by people of faith in his classic 1984 book, his title was metaphorical. The Naked Public Square warned about the crisis of faith confronting a democracy that legislates religious faith to the periphery of cultural life.
