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Check this out: This New York Times analysis takes ISIS at its prophetic word

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If you go to YouTube and do a search for the terms "ISIS" and "prophecy," what you will get is several pages of material that has next to nothing about what the leaders of the Islamic State believe is their role in the future of Islam and the world.

Instead, what you will find is links to videos that examine ISIS in light of prophecies about the end times that some Christians see in the Bible. If you are looking for a likely candidate to ignite the apocalypse, ISIS is at the top of almost all of the lists.

But what about debates INSIDE ISLAM about what has or has not been revealed about the future and the end of all things?

That was the subject of a recent analysis piece at The New York Times that dedicated a refreshing amount of attention to a controversial issue in Islamic thought and tradition. The headline: "U.S. Seeks to Avoid Ground War Welcomed by Islamic State."

The starting point in this equation: ISIS elites want the United States to get involved in a ground war in the Middle East.

Why? That's the complicated question.

... When the United States first invaded Iraq, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the move was the man who founded the terrorist cell that would one day become the Islamic State, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He excitedly called the Americans’ 2003 intervention “the Blessed Invasion.”
His reaction -- ignored by some, and dismissed as rhetoric by others -- points to one of the core beliefs motivating the terrorist group now holding large stretches of Iraq and Syria: The group bases its ideology on prophetic texts stating that Islam will be victorious after an apocalyptic battle to be set off once Western armies come to the region.


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Washington Post makes nice to Liberty University -- again!

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Has lightning struck twice at the Washington Post? In November, the newspaper ran a nuanced, fair-minded look at Liberty University. And this week, they did it again!

"For many at Liberty University, guns and God go hand in hand," says the new headline, which used to be equivalent to "Coordinates set -- commence bombardment." But no, this is a full-bodied, 2,100-word feature that uses a broad array of voices and avoids cheap shots.

True, the story is occasioned by the "fiery call" by university president Jerry Falwell Jr. for staff, students and faculty to start carrying firearms in the wake of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. "Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here," WaPo reports him saying Dec. 4 at a student convocation.

But the Post counters the image of wild-eyed yahoos that many mainstream media might have raised. One way is quoting students like senior Kyle Garcia: "It's not about Christians waving guns around. It's about protecting yourselves from some people who want to kill." Another is noting, as the Post did in November, that Liberty has hosted talks by the liberal Bernie Sanders as well as the conservative Ted Cruz.

Here's a good summary from the new story:

Falwell’s comments on guns — including pointed language about "those Muslims," which he later said was referring only to Islamic terrorists — put a fresh spotlight on a fast-growing university with a distinctive blend of cultural conservatism, religious faith and academic ambition. Liberty aspires to be a flagship for the nation’s evangelical Christians, a position that would offer power to influence society far beyond the campus. Politicians already recognize the potency of Liberty’s stage, which can reach the nation’s evangelical audience on a mass scale.

The sizable workforce -- reporting by Godbeat veterans Michelle Boorstein and Sarah Pulliam Bailey, with Nick Anderson as the main writer -- gets a satisfying range of facts in this article. We learn that the university is big on sports but not fraternities; that morality is left more to individual judgment than a few years ago (although shorts are still banned from class); that the campus includes an osteopathy college and a cinematic arts program that produces full-length films. And although Liberty teaches creationism, readers may be surprised to know it boasts a gene sequencer and a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer.


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Case of the Wheaton professor who wore a headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims

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"We know the real God," a Christian minister told me when I interviewed him after the San Bernardino massacre. "God is not Allah."

“My job is to take a Muslim and turn him away from Muhammad, who is still dead, and turn him to Jesus Christ, who rose and sits at the right hand of God," another minister told me on that same reporting trip for The Christian Chronicle.

I thought about those comments as I read a developing story from the Chicago area.

Manya Brachear Pashman, the talented Godbeat pro for the Chicago Tribune (and the new president of the Religion Newswriters Association), reported the news this morning.

The top of her story:

A tenured Wheaton College professor who, as part of her Christian Advent devotion, donned a traditional headscarf to show solidarity with Muslims has been placed on administrative leave.
Larycia Hawkins, a political science professor at the private evangelical Christian college in Chicago's west suburbs, announced last week that she would wear the veil to show support for Muslims who have been under greater scrutiny since mass shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.
"I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book," she posted on Facebook.
But it was that explanation of her gesture that concerned some evangelical Christians, who read her statement as a conflation of Christian and Muslim theology.
"While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God's revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation and the life of prayer," Wheaton College said in a statement.

That's a nice, evenhanded summary that, it seems to me, fairly quotes both sides.


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That New York Times headline about Catholics witnessing to Jews? Look again ...

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Trust me, I know that it is hard to write accurate, easy-to-read articles about complicated Vatican theological documents. This is especially true when dealing with materials focusing on very nuanced issues that continue to cause behind-the-scenes debates among Catholics.

It's even harder to write informative, catchy and, yes, accurate headlines for these kinds of stories.

This brings me to a recent New York Times report that ran with this headline: "Vatican Says Catholics Should Not Try to Convert Jews."

The problem with that headline is that it is simplistic to the point of being inaccurate -- that is, if the goal is for readers to understand the document ("The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable") addressed in this story.

Now here is the ironic part. You can tell that the headline is inaccurate by carefully reading the actual Times story, which means reading past the flawed lede on which the headline is based. Let us attend.

ROME -- Catholics should not try to convert Jews, but should work together with them to fight anti-Semitism, the Vatican said on Thursday in a far-reaching document meant to solidify its increasingly positive relations with Jews.

Then, in the third paragraph, there is this:

Addressing an issue that has been a sore point between the two faiths for centuries, the commission wrote that the church was “obliged to view evangelization to Jews, who believe in the one God, in a different manner from that to people of other religions and world views.” It specified that “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.”

Did you catch the subtle, but very important, difference between the lede and the actual quote from the document? 


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How much longer might British headlines exclaim, 'God save the Queen'?

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How much longer might British headlines exclaim, 'God save the Queen'?

The Telegraph, a United Kingdom center-right broadsheet, recently ran this headline: "Britain is no longer a Christian country and should stop acting as if it is, says judge."

It topped a story about the findings of a two-year study on the place of religion in official British life in today's multicultural milieu. The judge referred to is an ex-judge, who's also a baroness, who chaired the study conducted by the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life, a non-government body.

Good piece of work, I thought the first time I read the head (an abbreviation cherished by newspaper copy editors in a universe fading, alas, into the far, far past). Then I read the story. And I concluded that, as with so many headlines that try to compress a complicated story line into a few words, it actually mislead.

Journalism truism: Headline writing is much more difficult than it looks.

OK, enough with the Journalism 101 stuff. Let's get to the meat of the story.

Yes, British churches have witnessed a steep decline in attendance. Nearly 60 percent of the British population still calls itself Christian, but only 25 percent say they are religious, according to a 2011 national census report.

Church of England attendance decline has been particularly steep. Sunday attendance was reported in 2012 to be about half of what it was 45 years earlier.

But where the aforementioned headline failed is in its conflating traditional Christian belief and practice with the more nebulous, and harder to measure -- but still critically important -- touchstone of cultural Christianity. Cultural Christianity may fall short in the minds of church officials and traditional believers, but it's still the ground of self-identity for the majority of Brits.


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Denver Post paints local religious scene with too broad a brush

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This is that time of year when under-researched or over-generalized articles about religion sprout up around the country.

Usually, an editor has realized that Christmas is around the corner and someone needs to throw together a piece about religion. It helps if the story as good color art. Content and a strong news hook? Maybe. Maybe not.

This seems to be the case in a recent piece that ran in the Denver Post. It certainly has one of those broad, sweeping trend-story headlines: "Here's what's bringing millennials back to churches."

The newspaper's former religion writer seems to have moved to the health beat and there being no specialist currently on the beat, the assigning editor nabbed a writer who is the Post's travel and fitness editor. Her street cred is that she has collaborated with a Catholic priest on a book, which may be why she took on the story excerpted below: 

Five friends cluster for conversation among hundreds pouring out of a Sunday service at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette. The five are in their 20s and 30s. And at this church, they don't stand out for their age or their attire -- it's easy to come to church dressed casually when the pastor gives the sermon in jeans and a hoodie.


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Hey media, in the name of journalism, can we please stop the 'Islamophobia' bias?

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There's that word again — this time on the front page of the New York Times.

What word?:

Islamophobia

What does it mean? The Times doesn't say. But the newspaper reports that there's been a "surge" in it:

Hebh Jamal does not remember the Sept. 11 attacks. She was 1. Growing up in the Bronx, she was unaware of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and was mostly insulated from the surge in suspicion that engulfed Muslims in the United States, the programs of police surveillance and the rise in bias attacks.
But in the past year, especially in the past several months, as her emergence from childhood into young womanhood has coincided with the violent spread of the Islamic State and a surge in Islamophobia, she has had to confront some harsh challenges of being a young Muslim in America.

Similarly, as GetReligion noted yesterday, the Los Angeles Times used the I-phobia word in a recent story on Muslims women saying headscarves have made them a target for harassment:

The Washington-based nonprofit Council on American–Islamic Relations has documented dozens of Islamophobic incidents nationwide since last month, including many against women wearing headscarves.

Dictionary.com defines "Islamophobia" as "hatred or fear of Muslims or their politics or culture."

So what's my problem with journalists sprinkling their stories with that term? 


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I know this may be hard: But let's take the Jedi faith folks seriously for a moment

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Can't you feel the excitement building as the holy day draws near?

No, not Christmas. A am referring to the media build-up during this advent period before the arrival of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

I am old enough to remember the early conversations in newsrooms about whether, under the doctrines of the Associated Press Stylebook, stories about the Star Wars franchise should refer to "the force" or "the Force." Just about everyone on the religion beat back in those days wrote features about whether parents should tell their children that the Force was or was not another name for God.

If you follow discussions of Star Wars as a pop-culture religion, you surely know that fans on the other side of the pond took this discussion to a higher level about 15 years ago. Here is the background section of a new story in The Telegraph about the impact of the new film on the leaders of the Church of Jediism.

Jediism started as a joke, ahead of the 2001 census, in which respondents were asked to declare their religion for the first time. At the time, 390,000 people declared that they were Jedis, a number that fell by more than half, to 177,000, at the following census, in 2011.
Now the organisation, described by its members as “a set of philosophies based on focusing, learning and becoming one with the Force”, claims to have more than 250,000 followers. Patrick Day-Childs, a member of the church’s five-strong UK ruling council, said that more than a thousand people a day are signing up for the religion. He said: “It’s gone up substantially in the past couple of days. The real test will be in a couple of weeks when the film hype has died off. “
Daniel Jones, who founded the religion and who goes by the Jedi name Morda Hehol, said: “We’ve been rushed off our feet. People want to know more about it. It’s great for us.”

Now, the "leading figures in the Church of Jediism," as the Telegraph team identifies them, are saying that they are gaining about 1,000 new members a day as the holy release day nears for the new film.


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Anti-terrorism services: Stories log good intentions but don't help us understand

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If anyone invents a time machine, it won't work better than mainstream media these days. With the latest wave of jihadi violence, such as the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, we're getting retreads of stories on how Muslims have much in common with the rest of us -- with little explanation of what that means.

It's like 2001 all over again, when stories like this one in the Sun Sentinel, where I used to work, covered interfaith services and open houses at mosques in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Except that back then, we consulted our archives to see what had been already done.

Some in the current crop, of course, are better than others. WWSB, the ABC affiliate in Sarasota, Fla., puts up a local politician as the loyal opposition:

Multiple terrorist attacks have ignited strong dialogue, including GOP front runner Donald Trump's recent call to ban on all Muslims coming into this country.
Florida campaign manager and local Republican Party chairman Joe Gruters defended the controversial claim earlier this week.
"Certainly there's terrorist hotbeds in various countries, and we should be making sure the people we're letting into this country are vetted properly," said Gruters. "For that reason I think Donald Trump is taking a courageous stand."

Mind you, I'm not approving or disapproving Gruters' position. I personally don’t consider it courageous to hold an entire population responsible for the actions of a tiny knot of nuts. But that's not my call as a reporter, and it's not WWSB's call.

The station adeptly takes a local cultural event as a time peg. Station reporters found members of the Islamic Society of Sarasota and Bradenton taking part, using the International Food and Crafts Festival to mix with neighbors and introduce them to Islam. The station gets comments from two members of the local mosque and, of course, from a leader in the Florida chapter of CAIR. (However, the report doesn't say that it's a Muslim organization or even what the acronym stands for.) And it quotes a non-Muslim attendee who voices surprise that American Muslims "look like you and I, not just the stereotypes."


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