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NPR files a toothless story on fired, pregnant professor suing Christian college

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For those of you who’ve never signed up to work at a religious school, such entities make it very plain before you work there that certain behavior is expected. 

We are talking, of course, about ink-on-paper doctrinal and lifestyle covenants. Whether it’s drinking alcohol, smoking, drinking coffee (in the case of Mormons) or having sex outside of marriage, certain expectations are made very clear to you before you sign a contract to work in this voluntary association, which is what a private school is, of course.

NPR just did a story on one college professor who didn’t get that message.

A former professor at Northwest Christian University in Oregon is suing the school for allegedly firing her for being pregnant and unmarried, violating the faith-based values of the institution. She says it's discrimination.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: Now a story about a professor in Oregon who says when she told her employer she was pregnant, she got a pink slip instead of congratulations. That's because she worked at a Christian school and because she's not married. NPR's Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Coty Richardson spent four years teaching exercise science at Northwest Christian University. She says she loved in the small classes at the school in Eugene, Ore., and she loved its values and caring environment…
JOHNSON: But Richardson says that tolerance was put to the test earlier this summer when she told her boss she was pregnant.


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Some crucial faith facts, in New York Times report on the young ISIS honeymooners

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When telling stories involving people motivated by faith, it is crucial for readers to be able to hear the voices of these individuals describing their beliefs and motivations. But what happens when it is either impossible to interview the key people, perhaps for legal reasons, or they have no intention of answering questions from journalists or anyone else?

This is where the Internet and, especially, forums linked to social media have become so important in this day and age. You can see how this works in a recent New York Times story, which centers on the latest shocking tale of young people from the American heartland who have been arrested while trying to flee the evils of America to join the Islamic state.

The story, this time, unfolds in Starkville, Miss., a university town in which the locals, as the Times team states in classic elite mode, "tend to be proud of Starkville’s relative tolerance." The key players are Muhammad Dakhlalla, a young man from an outgoing, community oriented Muslim family known as "a walking advertisement for Islam as a religion of tolerance and peace." His fiancé, 19-year-old Jaelyn Young, is an honor student, a cheerleader and a  recent convert to Islam. The two tried to marry as Muslims, but her father refused to grant his permission. Their plan was to say they were flying to Turkey on their honeymoon.

Obviously, legal authorities have been following their activities via email and social media. That leads to this brief, but revealing, exchange:

Ms. Young, who three years ago was broadcasting silly jokes on Twitter and singing the praises of the R&B singer Miguel, had more recently professed a desire to join the Islamic State, according to an F.B.I. agent’s affidavit in support of a criminal complaint. On July 17, the day after a young Muslim man in Chattanooga, Tenn., fatally shot five United States servicemen, Ms. Young rejoiced, the affidavit alleges, in an online message to an F.B.I. agent posing as a supporter of the Islamic State.
“Alhamdulillah,” she wrote, using the Arabic word of praise to God, “the numbers of supporters are growing.”


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Uh, that historic church that burned down? We are missing a key fact ...

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Every now and the, a GetReligionista (or in this case a GetReligionista emeritus) reads a short news report about some religion event or topic then pauses, a bit perplexed. It's like something basic is missing.

Consider the following perfectly ordinary story from The Argus Leader, a smallish Gannett newspaper in Sioux Falls, S.D. Does anything strike you as strange about the top of this story? Is something missing?

Three Dewey County men have been federally charged with arson and burglary, accused of burning down a nearly 100-year-old historic church.
Cody Yellow, 27, Robert Grindstone, 28, and Ake Kyle Eagle Hunter, 28, are charged with third-degree burglary and arson. Each faces 30 years in federal prison if convicted.
According to court records: Eagle Hunter told authorities he picked up Yellow and Grindstone in Eagle Butte then drove to the church on July 19. He said he went to the church to visit a friend’s grave.
Eagle Hunter said he was walking from the cemetery towards the front of the church when he heard a crash. He said he walked back to the front of the church a saw Yellow going into the church and knocking things over.
Grindstone, then, came in with some diesel fuel and started dumping it everywhere. Then, Yellow leaned down and lit the fuel, starting the fire.

OK, this is an interesting event. Perhaps even some kind of hate crime? Is this a church burning or merely a church that was burned? 

But what very basic, key fact is missing? How about this: What is the NAME of this historic little church? Isn't that a rather crucial detail?


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Campus ministry: Last shot at focusing on Catholic 'nones' before the exit door?

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Campus ministry: Last shot at focusing on Catholic 'nones' before the exit door?

On one level, this week's GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast is about young Catholics, Confession and campus ministry, using my Universal Syndicate column from this past week as a starting point.

But "campus ministry," narrowly defined, is not what this podcast is about.

What host Todd Wilken and I ended up discussing (click here to tune that in) was a much broader topic. The key is that my column grew out of a very specific statistic that I saw in a blog post by Marcel LeJeune, who is assistant director of the massive campus ministry program at St. Mary's Catholic Center across from Texas A&M University. He wrote:

We know that of those that no longer identify as Catholic 79% do so by the age of 23 (Sherry Weddell, Forming Intentional Disciples, Page 33). So, young adults should be the focal point of our efforts and if we want to get even more narrow, then the best way to influence young people is to start with the most influential ones in their age group, the leaders. Most who end up becoming influential leaders will go to college. Finally, since 90% of Catholic college students go to non-Catholic schools, we MUST focus our energies on continued growth and dynamic evangelization in campus ministries at non-Catholic schools (mostly public).

Now, that reference to young Catholics leaving the church by age 23 made me, as a journalist, think -- yes, here we go again -- about one of the interesting wrinkles in that "Nones on the Rise" study back in 2012, by the Pew Research Center. Let's jump back in time to a column I wrote about that:


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Does the Trump phenomenon tell us something about state of American religion?

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Does the Trump phenomenon tell us something about state of American religion?

The news media are understandably going ga-ga over Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign for president and its surprising success. What would analysts of U.S. popular religious culture tell journalists about the long-term trends this displays, especially regarding evangelicals who are at the heart of today’s Republican coalition?

Some themes to test out:

To begin, a mid-July Washington Post/ABC poll showed Trump is by far the current favorite among white Republicans who identify as evangelicals, at 20 percent (compared with 24 percent among Republicans as a whole). Yet Trump spurns characteristics thatpious churchgoers would have wanted not so long ago. Are those values changing, or is the old-time religion  losing its grip on the nationalsoul?

Let's leave aside Trump's signature issue of immigration, on which evangelicals hold various views, and turn to this:  A campaign joke making the rounds says Trump believes so much in traditional marriage that he’s had three of them. Some figure triple marriage and double divorce undercut Newt Gingrich’s Bible Belt showing in 2012. It’s possible  Democrat Adlai Stevenson was hurt by his divorce three years before the 1952 campaign, though he did not remarry. Hard to know since he was up against the Eisenhower tsunami.

Most pundits figured Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and 1963 remarriage to Margaretta (“Happy”) Murphy doomed his 1964 presidential prospects. The remarried Ronald Reagan broke the taboo in 1980, yet he remains the only U.S. President to have been divorced. Along with that, actor Reagan overcame conservative Protestants’ longstanding suspicion toward Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

Marital issues lead into gender issues.


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Just asking: Does anyone know faith identity of Croatian killed by ISIS in Egypt?

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These stories are, of course, becoming old news.

There is another semiprofessional video modeled on trailers for entertainment media. Another image of a captive kneeling in a desert in an orange jump suit. Another Islamic State soldier, face covered, holding a knife. More bloody photos that mainstream media cannot use, yet become fodder for the dark side of social media and independent websites.

The coverage is fading, along with -- apparently -- any interest in the faith element of these stories. This time around, the key was not who ISIS killed but where, apparently, the latest victim was located at the time he was killed. The Washington Post coverage was typical of what ran in numerous publications, Here is the top of that report:

CAIRO -- An Islamic State affiliate claimed ... to have beheaded a Croatian national held hostage for weeks in what would be the group’s first killing of a foreign captive in Egypt.

If confirmed, the death would mark a fresh challenge to Egypt’s economy and the country’s effort to stem a rising Islamist insurgency that has targeted major tourist sites and military outposts.

The Croatian hostage, Tomislav Salopek, worked for a French geoscience company in Egypt, which depends on many foreign firms for construction and other major projects.

A purported photo of Salopek’s decapitated body was posted Wednesday by an Islamic State-linked Twitter account. The caption said Salopek was killed because of his country’s “war” on the Islamic State but gave no further details.

Yes, and who -- in addition to tourists -- might ISIS threaten in Egypt?


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New film looks at prayer, but RNS advance feature mainly sees racial issues

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A bold new movie on the power of prayer to heal relationships rightly gets a sizable feature from Religion News Service. But what does RNS fixate on? The color of the cast.

War Room, due out Aug. 28, follows "a flood of faith films starring white actors" last year, says the article. It "arrives at a time when racial tensions in America have intensified as a result of police brutality cases and the racially motivated slaying of black worshippers by a white shooter in Charleston, S.C." And its main actor, T.C. Stallings, says he took the role "because of the positive picture it paints of the African-American family."

And what's the plot of the film? Well, the article never quite gets around to that, despite the 800-word count.

Much of the story quotes Stallings, who tells of his own disadvantaged upbringing in Cleveland, then gives his views on how Hollywood treats urban African Americans:

“What I saw on TV and in movies growing up was all negative. The picture of African-Americans in urban areas was all bad language and bad credit scores and bad habits,” Stallings said. “There were many upstanding, Christian black families in the world, and they needed to be talked about as well.”
Stallings rejected the black family stereotype he was seeing, graduating from high school and college. Today, he resides in California with his wife and two children, whom Stallings helps home-school.
“There are many people out there — white and black — who stay with their families and work through their problems. They aren’t thugs or gang leaders,” He said. “’War Room’ tells the truth about society by showing the reverse of that stereotype.”

Sure, valid views, and he has a right to give them. But six paragraphs worth? And his thesis would have been more solid if the producers, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, had confirmed it. The most for which RNS quotes them is a vague statement from Alex: “There is an element to the way we tell this story that has power and desperation that would be different if we tried to tell it any other way." Howso? Doesn't say.


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An ISIS 'Theology of Rape' — strong New York Times story retreats from Quran details

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It would be hard to imagine a story much more hellish than the lengthy New York Times piece that is racing around the Internet today that ran under this blunt headline: "ISIS Enshrines a
Theology of Rape."

However, it is the second piece of the double-decker headline that will be the most controversial and discussed part of this piece: "Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool."

The bottom line: To make that statement, the Times team needs to show readers specific references in the Quran, by quoting them, and then show proof of how ISIS leaders are interpreting those passages, perhaps through a lens from earlier expressions of the faith. It would then help, of course, to show how mainstream Islamic scholars, and experts outside of Islam, read those same passages today.

The Times gets most of that done and must be praised for making the effort. It is interesting, however, that the weakest parts of the piece concern the actual contents of the Quran and the doctrines being debated. The piece is stronger -- brutally so -- when dealing with the people. 

The Times claims that this "theology of rape" essentially begins on Aug. 3, 2014, with the invasion of the Yazidis communities on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Among those captured, men and older boys were forced to prostrate and then were sprayed with machine guns. Women and younger children were separated and carried away in trucks, with other goals in mind. Much of this reporting is based on documentation gathered by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

This brings us to the thesis passage of this massive news feature:

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets. ...
A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous. 

In other words, rape is a form of spiritual discipline when the woman being raped is part of a religion that is considered heresy. Or, as a young girl described what happened before and after she was raped:

“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.


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North Dakota's InForum showcases some solid stories about faith in Fargo

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Every so often I like wandering the cyber highways and byways to find religion reporting that’s off the beaten track -- especially out here in the West.

One state that intrigues me is isolated North Dakota, which has more religion stories than one might think. 

There’s the Baptist-turned-Catholic Bethlehem Community in Bathgate. There’s Becky Fischer, the Pentecostal trailblazer for children’s ministry best known to the outside world for her role in the 2006 film “Jesus Camp.” Her ministry is still going strong in Mandan.

Or there’s Lutheran Social Services in Fargo, which is resettling refugees in this sparsely populated state even though the locals aren’t happy about it.  This story just broke in InForum, a Fargo newspaper also known as The Forum along with another story that explains how new arrivals from Somalia and Bhutan aren’t exactly fitting in with the local culture. 

Well, this post isn’t about that topic, fascinating as it is.

It’s about a columnist for InForum, a freelancer who has taken it on herself to report on faith in Fargo. North Dakota is a state of mostly small newspapers and no fulltime religion reporter (listed with the Religion Newswriters Association, that is). What caught my eye was a simple advance for an upcoming visit to town by Bible teacher Beth Moore:


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