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We’ve been living under the “fact check” era at newspapers for three or four years now. I tend to agree with the Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto when he writes:
“Stop the presses!” I joked three months ago when I critiqued a USA Today story on the years-old practice of churches renting public school facilities on Sundays.
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.
On Sunday, my congregation celebrated the Reformation rather gloriously. As one might expect for the day one commemorates the good news of the salvation of all sinners by grace alone through faith alone because of Christ alone, our pastor preached an amazing sermon. The organist pulled out all the stops. We even did the German Mass, which includes many, many hymns. But we didn’t sing “Salvation Unto Us Has Come.” And this disappointed me.
During one of my college newspaper internships, the reporter who sat next to me told me nearly every day to flee journalism to find a more stable profession. He shares plenty of angst with others in the field, many of whom were watching their colleagues drop like flies in newsroom after layoffs and buyouts.
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.
We joke about the overuse of “fundamentalist” to describe people that reporters don’t like, but I think we need a special award for whatever happened in this Associated Press report filed from Paris:
I’m munching on a jack-o-lantern-shaped Butterfinger as I type this, so I suppose I’m not one of those “conservative and fundamentalist Christians” who think “Halloween is a celebration of evil and has no place in the life of a believer.”
As a woman takes the helm at The New York Times for the first time this fall, many will be watching whether Jill Abramson takes the paper in a new direction editorially. The New Yorker‘s profile of Abramson has been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a while, and it was worth a weekend read to consider future issues the new executive editor will face.
