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New York Times: Death threats shadow anti-ISIS imams who denounce terrorism

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Why don’t Muslim leaders ever condemn terrorists? Actually, they do, over and over. They just don’t get the daily coverage that the killers do.

The New York Times helps offset that with a sweeping, detailed newsfeature on the many leaders who are, in fact, denouncing ISIS on religious terms -- and drawing death threats from the terrorist group in return.

"As the military and political battle against the Islamic State escalates, Muslim imams and scholars in the West are fighting on another front -- through theology," the Times says. The article has two or three rough spots, which we'll get to. Overall, though, the 1,300-word story is alert and perceptive when it details the variety of imams, sheikhs and others who have attracted ISIS' hate.

Highlighted are four men in the United States and Canada, plus eight others -- including and three in the U.S. government. And in their remarks, they can get caustic

* Imam Suhaib Webb in Washington, holds live monthly video chats -- called "ISIS and ice cream" to belittle the terrorists.

* Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, of Berkeley asks calls ISIS "these fools amongst us" and asks Muslims to turn away from the "stupid young boys."

* Mubin Shaikh, a Canadian and a former extremist himself, says that "This is what hurts ISIS the most."

* Sheikh Yasir Qadhi of Tennessee, who has said that "None of our senior scholars of any school -- any school -- has justified these deeds [of ISIS]."

They and other leaders have used mosques, conferences and social media, yet they’ve seldom gotten into secular media.


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Evangelicals and Trump, chapter 666: In which The Washington Post misses one crucial detail

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Let's talk about evangelical Protestants and Donald Trump, shall we? After all, that has been one of the two or three dominant storylines of the entire Republican race for the White House. Your GetReligionistas have poured out an ocean of digital ink on press coverage of this topic.

But now the reality is beginning to sink in, out there in some pews and pulpits, that this race is really going to come down to Trump vs. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Viewed as a political choice, that is agonizing. Viewed as a theological choice, things are even worse for Christians who embrace centuries of church teachings on moral theology.

If you peel off the layers of political language, the Washington Post has offered a piece -- "‘There’s nobody left’: Evangelicals feel abandoned by GOP after Trump’s ascent" -- that features a few key voices describing this agonizing puzzle in their own words.

In terms of journalism, this is business as usual. In terms of coverage of doctrinally conservative believers, this is called progress. Still, this story is sadly simplistic. Hold that thought.

The key voice early on is the Rev. Gary Fuller of the Gentle Shepherd Baptist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, who was a supporter of Sen. Ted Cruz. By the way, in this piece it would have helped to have known that Fuller is not a Southern Baptist (it took two clicks to find that out), since other key voices in this piece are from the SBC or an institution on the left edge of Southern Baptist life. Why does this matter? It only matters if you think this is a religious story, as well as a political story.

Here is a key passage near the top:

... Fuller has a hard time stomaching Trump as the Republican nominee and plans to vote for Cruz on Tuesday, even though the senator has dropped out of the race.
“In a sense, we feel abandoned by our party,” Fuller said. “There’s nobody left.”


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London elects its first Muslim mayor and the journalism world rightly notes its importance

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London elects its first Muslim mayor and the journalism world rightly notes its importance

If you keep up with international news at all, you should know by now that London has a uniquely newsworthy new mayor, a Sunni Muslim of Pakistani heritage.

Its a first. But on the chance you don't, let me introduce you to Sadiq Khan, a second-generation Brit.

His connections to Islam are strong but clearly on the social liberal side. He supports same-sex marriage and has questioned the wearing of face coverings by Muslim women in public situations.

The mainstream international media has welcomed his election as proof positive that Muslims can, just as members of any non-Western religious or ethnic immigrant group, embrace Western-style democratic politics.

Khan's victory last week makes him the West's highest-profile Muslim politician, which means he'll be under a media microscope for the foreseeable future. Here's a selection of international media reports on Khan's election pulled together by Britain's Guardian newspaper.

Further spiking interest in Khan's election is the strong effort he made to reach out to London's Jewish voters. That's all the more noteworthy because he is a member of the UK's leftwing Labour Party, which has been wracked of late by the purging from its ranks of some 50 leading members -- including Khan's predecessor as London mayor -- for making anti-Israel comments understood by their own party to be anti-Semitic.

Khan's first official action as London mayor was to attend a city Holocaust commemoration event. 


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When Gordon College disciplines a dissident prof, RNS leaves out some crucial details

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Just when we thought the narrative of Christian college professors getting fired for unorthodox statements had finally died down, up pops another case.

Like the hijab-wearing Larycia Hawkins, who got the boot at Wheaton College because of her comments likening Christian theology to Islam (and possibly some controversial stances on sexuality), here's a new case involves a professor who accused her employer of an "ugly practice" in a letter to the editor of a local paper.

This narrative is about hiring non-celibate homosexual teachers and a tenured professor who feels her employer is deeply wrong. The employer likewise disagrees with her and has demoted her.

The professor recently sued. Religion News Service picks up there:

BOSTON (RNS) -- A Gordon College philosophy professor is suing her employer for allegedly breaching her free speech rights and retaliating after she publicly criticized the Christian school for its policy of not hiring sexually active gays and lesbians.
Lauren Barthold’s suit, filed April 28 in Essex Superior Court, claims she lost a leadership role and was denied an opportunity to seek a promotion after she spoke with news media and published a letter to the editor of The Salem News, a local newspaper.
“As a direct result of Professor Barthold having publicly voiced her opposition to the discriminatory practices of Gordon, Gordon retaliated against her,” the suit alleges, “first by threatening to terminate her, and later disciplining her by demoting her from her position as Director of the Gender Studies Minor.”
In her July 2014 letter to the editor, Barthold, who has academic tenure, called Gordon’s hiring policy “discriminatory” and urged sympathizers to help change it by bringing economic pressure to bear on the school. According to the suit, Gordon College President Michael Lindsay and the Board of Trustees confronted her and disciplinary measures followed.

These next two paragraphs are also important:


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This one will make you chuckle: You'll never guess what kind of Christians pray before meals

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Full disclosure right up top: I'd never heard of Chloe and Halle before a few minutes ago.

But according to New York Magazine, the teenage sisters are "the first Superstars of the Beyonce Generation."

At the very beginning, the magazine hints at a potential religion angle:

You were not expecting this, but here you stand, transfixed, in the doorway of a Hollywood rehearsal studio, your throat clamping up and your chest tightening, watching 16- and 17-year-old sisters Halle and Chloe Bailey sing a single word, “Hallelujah,” in gorgeous, repeating crescendos, like a church choir sending a dying loved one off into the light. Those harmonized “Hallelujahs” aren’t even a song, just their way of saying grace. You are not religious. But you will start to cry.

Alas, as my wife described it, the religion content in this piece doesn't turn out to be too deep. It's — as my wife described it — "vending machine God for happy giggly girls." So this will not be a long post.

But it will be a happy one — if you're looking for a nice chuckle to start the week. As the person who tipped GetReligion to this story put it, "This is a tidy profile, but the media really doesn't get religion."


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The New York Times tries to explain Texas to America: Oh my God they just don't get it

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For years now, my online GetReligion mini-biography has identified me as a "prodigal Texan." That has been my way of saying that I will always, to some degree, be a Texan, but that my view of the Lone Star state is not quite the same as the natives who cannot conceive of living anywhere else.

But I get Texas. Please trust me on that, by which I mean that I understand the forces that make Texas tick. I keep a can of Wolf brand chili in my kitchen pantry just in case any visiting Texans ask me That Question.

This leads me, of course, to that first-person piece called "What Makes Texas Texas" written by Manny Fernandez of the New York Times office in Houston.

First things first: You mean he isn't based in Austin? I can't believe that someone from the Times would consent to work in Texas and not be based in the people's republic of Austin. Seriously. Well, I guess there are a few Austin-friendly neighborhoods in hip Houston.

This isn't a hard-news piece, but it contains some crucial information that news consumers on planet earth need to read in order to understand the elite cultural forces that shape our news. Let's start with this church of personal material by Fernandez right up top:

I was born and raised in Central California, and I moved to Houston from Brooklyn in June 2011 to cover Texas for The New York Times. I live here with my wife, my 7-year-old son and my 3-year-old daughter, who keeps a pair of pink cowboy boots outside on the porch or inside by the front door. I have covered stories in the South, the Midwest and other parts of the country. People in those places identified with their political party, their job, their cause, their sexual orientation, their city, their race. Almost no one identified with their state the way Texans do.
Who are these people, these Texans?

Well, for starters, hit pause. Look at that list of life-shaping forces: That would be "political party," "job," "cause," "sexual orientation," "city," "race" and "state." OK, Texans, can I get a witness? What is missing from that list?


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Is capitalism biblical? You don't have to be a pope to ask that question

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Is capitalism biblical? You don't have to be a pope to ask that question

JOHN’S QUESTION:

It has always been my understanding from Proverbs (condemning the “sluggard”), and Paul’s instruction that missionaries earn their keep and not be a burden, that the Bible encouraged hard work and a responsibility to give of our blessings to the poor — personal responsibility vs. government responsibility. The trend toward government socialism seems to discourage that. Is capitalism biblical?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In America, it’s springtime for socialism. A Harvard survey of those ages 18–29 showed 33 percent support socialism compared with 42 percent for capitalism, and socialist support reached 50 percent among Democrats. A poll of Iowa Democratic caucus-goers found 43 percent considered themselves socialist vs. 38 percent capitalist. Sliding regard for big business accompanies the related success of Socialist-plus-Democrat Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Sanders is arguably the most secularized candidate ever to wage a major presidential run (can you name any competitors?). Even so, he was the only U.S. politician the Vatican invited to speak at an April economics conference (Sanders cited no Bible verses), where he briefly met Pope Francis. That was called a courtesy, not endorsement, but the pontiff appears soft on socialism, which sets conservative Catholics abuzz.

Francis joins previous popes in teaching biblical tenets of concern toward the needy and against the sins of greed and materialism. But he’s more outspoken than his predecessors in assailing free markets and urging government redistribution of wealth.


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Will Dr. Dawn Eden Goldstein touch a third rail in Catholic doctrine? Of course not ...

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First things first, to update our recent former-GetReligionista watch post, congratulations to Dr. Dawn Eden Goldstein today as she receives her doctorate in sacred theology -- magna cum laude -- from the University of St. Mary on the Lake (Mundelein Seminary).

And congratulations, as well, on that A1 Chicago Tribune story that managed to cover quite a bit of Dawn's complex and fascinating life -- from rock-beat journalist to teaching seminarians -- up to this rather historic moment in Catholic higher education.

The story, for example, mentioned that her faculty appointment -- which still has not been announced -- will be overseas. Interesting. Does Dawn speak Italian?

As you would expect, there are some interesting editorial nuances in a mainstream news report about a person as complicated as Dawn. For example, even though (a) her journey into this work began in the Pope Benedict XVI era and (b) women have been appointed to interesting leadership posts (for several decades, actually) in conservative as well as progressive dioceses, the hook for this story (it's a news-media law) must be linked somehow to the current occupant of the chair of St. Peter.

She is earning the degree, issued by the authority of Pope Francis, at the same time Francis is pushing to raise the profile of women in the Catholic Church, most recently in his 260-page apostolic exhortation "Amoris Laetitia," in which he praised some aspects of women's liberation, though he did not go so far as to say women should be priests.
Goldstein is not calling for women's ordination. She's not condemning celibacy, and she voluntarily took a vow herself. She's simply pursuing an education to shape the church's ministers of tomorrow and mentor women who feel called to serve the church.

Of course, there is a reason this pope didn't "go so far" as to support female priests. There is, after all this document from St. Pope John Paul II called "Ordinatio sacerdotalis" in which he ruled that church teachings on this subject are "definitive," and part of the church's ancient "deposit of faith."

As is customary in most news coverage of Catholicism, the story -- over and over -- discusses contemporary issues in language that hints that they are (a) personal opinion, (b) political or (c) both.


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More questions about demographics: Who bothers to remember the Sabbath, these days?

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More questions about demographics: Who bothers to remember the Sabbath, these days?

Longtime GetReligion readers know that I have always been interested in demographic questions and their impact on religious life in America and around the world. As the old saying goes, "Demographics are destiny." I have been known, from time to time, to add another "D" into that equation, producing something like, "Doctrine and demographics are destiny."

Say what? All I am saying is that you can often see connections between what people believe, in terms of doctrine, and the size and shape of their families and religious communities. Why do some parishes have more children (and priests) than others? Why is Orthodox Judaism growing in many cities while liberal forms of the faith are not?

These kinds of questions were at the heart of this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in), which centered on a few statistics in a new poll commissioned by the national edition of The Deseret News. While one poll is never definitive, there were numbers in this one that stood out for me, raising questions I explored this week in my "On Religion" column for the Universal syndicate.

In particular, I was interested in what might be evidence of a change in one of the most stable religion statistics in the American marketplace. That led to this overture:

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, many news reports claimed that stunned Americans were seeking solace in sanctuary pews and in private rites of faith.
But then the Gallup Poll came out, with its familiar question asking if people had recently attended worship services. The number who had, which has hovered between 38 percent and the low 40s for a generation or two, had risen to 47 percent -- a marginal increase. By mid-November, the Gallup number returned to 42 percent.


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