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The Associated Press reported on the return to the pulpit of a Minnesota Lutheran pastor. He’d taken some time off after a gay publication crashed a support meeting for those facing unwanted same-sex attraction. The journalist did so under false pretenses and it created quite a bit of a firestorm because the pastor in question was a vocal opponent of changing church doctrine to affirm homosexuality.
Only yesterday I was happily writing about how great it is when media coverage of a given topic improves over time. But then you read a story like this one from the San Diego Union-Tribune and you wonder if things are actually going downhill.
Last year, I wrote a news story for Christianity Today titled “Modern-Day Lepers,” on the effort by churches to balance grace and accountability toward sex offenders:
So when it comes to Bible Belt religiosity, is the unique glass that is the city of Asheville, N.C., half empty or half full?
You’d hope that with all the navel gazing (live blogging!?) that led up to Chelsea Clinton’s marriage to Marc Mezvinsky — with all the speculation about the role of religion in the wedding of the Methodist former first daughter to a Jew from a powerful stock — that someone would have cared to provide a little nuance to the different religious imagery that made appearances in their no-luxury-spared ceremony Saturday.
There’s a scandal — A BIG ONE, BABY! — brewing in America’s churches. I know because I read it in The News Journal of Wilmington, Del., which featured in-depth coverage Sunday of the problem of church embezzlement.
I started to put this post up this morning but decided that it was not worth the risk. I did not want people spewing their coffee onto their keyboards.
You can oppose something and still think it shouldn’t be opposed by the government. Many people seem to have trouble with this distinction and its corollaries. The media tend to have trouble with this distinction because many journalists consider the provoking of government action as a good metric of success for their rabblerousing or reporting. But it’s true — you can oppose things and still think they should be legal.
