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Howdy, partner: In Lone Star State, gospel with a front-page twang

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"Gospel with a little twang" was how The Dallas Morning News billed its front-page Sunday story on cowboy churches.

The writer, Charlie Scudder, had a whole lot of fun with that little bit of twang.

The result: a nice trend feature (accompanied by video interviews and an excellent photo gallery) that took readers inside two western-themed congregations in Fort Worth:

FORT WORTH — At high noon in the Stockyards Station, just after the
longhorn cattle drive down Exchange Avenue and just before the
gunfight show, a congregation comes to worship.

Pastor George Westby has been leading services here at the Cowboy
Church at the Fort Worth Stockyards for 23 years. His services attract
visitors from all over the country as well as a handful of regulars.

But just off Exchange Avenue, down in the old horse-and-mule barn
where there’s real manure and fewer vacationing families, a second
cowboy church is here for the same reason.

The Cowtown Cowboy Church, led by pastor Sonny Miller, started meeting
in spring 2013 on a dirt patch under the vaulted ceilings of the old
stables.

The newer church is part of the Western Heritage Ministry of the Texas
Baptists, a group of more than 200 churches statewide that embrace the
Gospel with a little twang.

Next, the Morning News provides a nut graf designed to put the Fort Worth churches into a larger context.


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It's time to say the obvious: Yes, the late Steven Joel Sotloff was Jewish

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Now that journalist Steven Joel Sotloff is gone, it's time to talk about one of the issues that loomed over this tragedy (which was the subject of an earlier post by Dawn).

I thought that CNN was going to finally state the obvious, when its piece on the Sotloff execution by the Islamic State included this subhead: "Who was Sotloff?"

Good question. And the answer is? 

Sotloff disappeared while reporting from Syria in August 2013, but his family kept the news secret, fearing harm to him if they went public. Out of public view, the family and government agencies had been trying to gain his release for the past year.
Last week, Sotloff's mother, Shirley Sotloff, released a video pleading with ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi not to kill her son.
"Steven is a journalist who traveled to the Middle East to cover the suffering of Muslims at the hands of tyrants. Steven is a loyal and generous son, brother and grandson," she said. "He is an honorable man and has always tried to help the weak."

That, of course, is not all that she said, as Dawn noted the other day. The family had every reason to fear the worst and for multiple reasons.


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ISIS is the 'in thing' for German jihadis? Please explain, Reuters

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ISIS/ISIL/the Islamic State, whatever it's called this week, is supposed to be the "in" thing, a "more authentic" organization, according to a recent piece from Reuters.

Like how? That's where it gets murky.

There is a link between the successes IS has had so far in Iraq and the activities here in Germany and the propaganda and canvassing activities aimed at young jihadists," said Hans-Georg Maassen, head of Germany's BfV domestic intelligence agency.

"The Islamic State is, so to speak, the 'in' thing - much more attractive than the Nusra Front, the al Qaeda spin-off in Syria," the BfV chief told Deutschlandfunk public radio.

"What attracts people is the intense brutality, the radicalism and rigor. That suggests to them that it is a more authentic organization even than al Qaeda," he said. "Al Qaeda fades besides the Islamic State when it comes to brutality."

OK, we get it. ISIS is brutal and radical. All of us who have read stories of their rhetoric, or seen videos of their murders -- including that of Steven Sotloff just yesterday -- have noticed. But ... a "more authentic organization"?

More authentic in terms of loudness or effectiveness? Just maybe. Al-Qaida, the estranged parent of ISIS, has favored big targets like the World Trade Center and the U.S. embassies in eastern Africa. Al-Qaida also hasn't targeted other Muslims and blown up their mosques, as ISIS has.

More authentically religious? Reuters doesn't say. And it's important for Germany to know given the numbers in this story:

 


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Women as clergy: The stained-glass ceiling and one-sided journalism

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For the Chicago Sun-Times, the question of whether to ordain women as preachers has only one right answer.

In a story headlined "Female ministers find obstacles on path to pulpit," the Sun-Times makes it clear which direction it leans:

Carol Jamieson Brown was in her early 20s when she told her pastor she had answered a call from God to pursue ministry and enrolled in seminary.
But he put the brakes on her plans — he didn’t acknowledge women ministers.
“He had been my pastor since I was 5 years old,” Brown said. “So it was like your father telling you that God didn’t call you. He had to be right, and I had to be wrong. There was no room for him to be wrong in my life.”
Many years later, she found room. Today she is pastor of First Baptist Church of Park Forest and among those who’ve made cracks in a stained-glass ceiling that continues to block women clergy and is nowhere close to being shattered.

In this story, "progress" is defined in terms of whether churches allow women in the pulpit or not.


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What is this? Concerning that Time anti-news essay on modern nuns

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At least once every month or two I get a junk-mail letter -- with spam emails coming more frequently -- from the business office of Time magazine, a publication for which I happily paid good money for several decades. 

Perhaps you get these as well, the messages that say, "We want you back!" urging me to renew the subscription that I cancelled a year or two ago. Apparently these people do not pay attention to return messages or even the people who do their telephone research with former subscribers.

Does Time want me back? If so, why do the magazine's editors keep dedicating oceans of ink -- real and cyber -- to opinion essays about religious, moral and cultural topics that deserve serious journalistic attention? Is this just the spirit of the MSNBC-Fox age spreading over into the old prestige media? I assume so.

Take, for example, the new essay that ran under the headline, "The Great Nunquisition: Why the Vatican Is Cracking Down on Sisters." This piece is the complete anti-news package.


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New York Times tiptoes around religion angle in UK child sex-abuse story

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The front page of today's New York Times offers a sensitively written account of the ordeals suffered by child sex-abuse victims in Rotherham, England, where an investigation has revealed that, between 1997 and 2013, "at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were groomed for sexual exploitation while the authorities looked the other way."

Why did authorities ignore the abuse? The article takes its time arriving at the answer, and when it does, the answer it offers is incomplete.

We are first given an account from Lucy, a victim now 25, who tells of how she was targeted by a gang whose members raped her daily from when she was 12 until she was nearly 14:

At night, she would come home and hide her soiled clothes at the back of her closet. When she finally found the courage to tell her mother, just shy of her 14th birthday, two police officers came to collect the clothes as evidence, half a dozen bags of them.
But a few days later, they called to say the bags had been lost.
“All of them?” she remembers asking. A check was mailed, 140 pounds, or $232, for loss of property, and the family was discouraged from pressing charges. It was the girl’s word against that of the men. The case was closed.

The story then shifts to the recently released investigation of Rotherham child sex abuse, which revealed the extent to which local authorities failed to prosecute cases such as Lucy's:


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Paging Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The ghost that haunts many urban teens

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Two or three paragraphs into this riveting Wonkblog essay in The Washington Post I began having flashbacks, and not the good kind. 

The key thought: Where is the late, great Democrat Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan when we really need him?

The headline opens the door and it's a very important door, if you care about social justice and the urban poor: "What your 1st-grade life says about the rest of it." Here is the opening of the report, which has a Baltimore dateline for perfectly logical reasons:

BALTIMORE -- In the beginning, when they knew just where to find everyone, they pulled the children out of their classrooms.
They sat in any quiet corner of the schools they could claim: the sociologists from Johns Hopkins and, one at a time, the excitable first-graders. Monica Jaundoo, whose parents never made it past the eighth grade. Danté Washington, a boy with a temper and a dad who drank too much. Ed Klein, who came from a poor white part of town where his mother sold cocaine.

They talked with the sociologists about teachers and report cards, about growing up to become rock stars or police officers. ... Later, as the children grew and dispersed, some falling out of the school system and others leaving the city behind, the conversations took place in McDonald’s, in public libraries, in living rooms or lock-ups. The children -- 790 of them, representative of the Baltimore public school system’s first-grade class in 1982 -- grew harder to track as the patterns among them became clearer.

What shaped these young and, quickly, troubled lives?


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Veiled references: Reuters feature doesn't get the hijab done

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British Muslim women are increasingly wearing head veils, although the faith doesn't require it -- and despite growing attacks targeting them, says a new feature article from Reuters. But the story doesn't prove any of that.

This is the kind of reporting in the lengthy feature on the topic. Starting with 18-year-old Sumreen Farooq, we get:

"I'm going to stand out whatever I do, so I might as well wear the headscarf," said Farooq, a shop assistant who also volunteers at an Islamic youth centre in Leyton, east London.

While just under five percent of Britain's 63 million population are Muslim, there are no official numbers on how many women wear a headscarf or head veil, known as the hijab, or the full-face veil, the niqab, which covers all the face except the eyes. The niqab is usually worn with a head-to-toe robe or abaya.

But anecdotally it seems in recent years that more young women are choosing to wear a headscarf to assert a Muslim identity they feel is under attack and to publicly display their beliefs.


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Yes, this is The Onion: Why do newspapers publish PR pieces for some churches?

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OK, so the graphic over there is wrong. This is a GetReligion post about an alleged religion "news" item from The Onion.

On one level, that makes no sense. We try to critique the mainstream press, so why bother our readers with an item from a satirical, pretend newspaper?

Well, your GetReligionistas also, from time to time, like to write about op-ed page pieces and commentary essays that are clearly linked to life on the religion-news beat. Most of those are pretty serious.

Obviously, that is not the case this time around.

In fact, I am not sure WHAT is going on in this piece of pseudo-news. But I do have some theories and I'd like to know what GetReligion readers think.


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