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Khizr Khan calls Donald Trump a 'black soul': Is there a spiritual connotation?

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Donald Trump has been called a lot of things in the 2016 presidential race.

On Sunday, Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a U.S. Army soldier killed in Iraq in 2004, labeled Trump a "black soul."

Is that term new to you? It is to me. A quick Google search turned up this definition at urbandictionary.com:

black soul
An individual who lacks the capacity for empathy and compassion

My immediate question: Is there a deeper spiritual connotation — perhaps a religious or theological history associated with that description of which I am not aware? 

Here is the context of the quote, via CNN:

Washington (CNN) Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim US soldier slain in Iraq in 2004, said Sunday that Donald Trump has a "black soul," indicating he lacks empathy and compassion.
Khan told CNN's Jim Acosta on "State of the Union" that he hopes Trump's family will "teach him some empathy."
"He is a black soul, and this is totally unfit for the leadership of this country," Khan said. "The love and affection that we have received affirms that our grief -- that our experience in this country has been correct and positive. The world is receiving us like we have never seen. They have seen the blackness of his character, of his soul."
Khan moved into the national spotlight after he pulled out a pocket copy of the Constitution during his speech at the Democratic National Convention. He said Trump would have barred his Muslim family from entering the United States.


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Wait a minute: Does Islam's Quran really say that husbands can beat their wives?

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Wait a minute: Does Islam's Quran really say that husbands can beat their wives?

THE QUESTION:

What does Islam’s holy book, the Quran, say about husbands beating their wives?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The Guy is posting this item himself rather than our usual answer to a question posted via the Website because this oft-discussed matter has become an important public dispute. In heavily Muslim Pakistan, the nation’s Parliament is advised by a Council of Islamic Ideology, experts assigned to make sure laws fit the faith’s mandates. The Senate’s human rights committee now wants to amend the constitution in order to abolish the Council, in part because it ruled that husbands are allowed to beat their wives.

Muslim authorities emphasize that only beating “lightly” is permitted, The Wall Street Journal said, reporting this explanation from Council Chairman Muhammad Khan Sherani: “In Islam you cannot hit a woman in a way that bruises her, or break her bone, or hit her on the face, or cause bleeding.”

Amid widespread concern over spousal abuse, feminist and Christian critics of Islam regularly cite concerns about the Quran passage the Council relies upon. As with modern Jews and Christians dealing with violent Old Testament passages that disturb modern sensitivities, Muslim interpreters warn Muslim husbands about harsh misapplication of the teaching.

Here is the scriptural text involved, from Majid Fakhry’s literal-minded English translation (New York University Press) approved by Sunni Islam’s chief seat of learning, the venerable Al-Azhar University:

“Men are in charge of women, because Allah has made some of them excel the others, and because they spend some of their wealth. Hence righteous women are obedient, guarding the unseen which Allah has guarded. And those of them that you fear might rebel, admonish them and abandon them in their beds and beat them. Should they obey you, do not seek a way of harming them, for Allah is Sublime and Great!” (4:34).


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Italy's trend away from church weddings: That might connect to stories close to home

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I don't know about you, but this kind of thing happens to me all the time when I am reading the news.

Let's say that you are cruising along and you hit an interesting story. Then, as you keep reading, the hard-drive in your mind starts spinning and eventually a thought balloon pops up that says something like this: "Wait a minute. Maybe this story is connected to ...."

Trust me. This happens to journalists all the time. This process is part of the mental tool kit that reporters develop when they work on a beat for a decade or two (or in the case of the members of the GetReligionista team, a combined 150-plus years or more on the religion beat).

Here's a recent example, which is a pretty obvious one. We start with a Crux story I saw the other day with the headline, "Study suggests Catholic marriage will be dead in Italy by 2031." Here's the overture:

Pope Francis has made family life and marriage a keen priority, and if he ever needed proof of the urgency of the cause even in his own backyard, a widely respected Italian research group has provided it: According to its recent projection, by the year 2031 absolutely no one in Italy will be married in church.
Censis (“Center for Social Investment Studies”) has a quasi-official status in Italy, with its analysis often relied upon by the government in forming policy decisions. In a recent study on marriage in Italy, based on trends over the last 20 years, it found that the number of Italians entering into formal marriages has been in freefall.
In 1994, according to its data, there were 291,607 marriages in Italy, a country of 60 million people where Catholics still account, formally speaking, for 95 percent of the population. By 2014, the number of marriages had fallen to 189,765, a drop of 35 percent.

We are, of course, talking about sacramental, Catholic marriages -- as opposed to civil rites.


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Into the guilt file: Another strange story about a newsroom that contains no telephones

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Just the other day, our own Bobby Ross, Jr., did a great job of explaining the concept of the "guilt folders" that your GetReligionistas keep, either in the back of our minds or literally in a digital folder in an email program.

Like he said, sometimes things just stack up and you forget about news stories that you intended to feature in a post. It's like those days when you see that you have 500 emails in your personal in-basket and you really don't know how they got there.

However, there's another kind of "guilt folder" story. Sometimes you read a story and your mind says, "What the heck?" You know that there's something there but it takes you a long time to put your finger on it.

This is one of those guilt-file stories. It comes from The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., and it focuses on two actions -- one by the board of Southwest Community Church and the other by its pastor. Long ago, it was a timely story, with a timely headline: "California pastor resigns over gay marriage stance."

Here's the top of that story. Try to spot the journalism landmine that it took me some time to figure out.

A few months ago, Pastor Gerald Sharon -- who has been lead pastor of Southwest since 2013 and previously served at Saddleback Church in Orange County -- asked the church hierarchy to look into “the extent to which a homosexual individual could be involved in the life of Southwest Church.”
While the church leadership initially seemed engaged in the discussions, they recently sent Sharon a letter in which they unanimously affirmed Southwest’s current position on homosexuality.
Southwest’s LGBT policy is written down in a document titled “Homosexuality and Human Sexuality.” The document does not appear to be publicly available.


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The reason Religion News Service covered the Democrats this week and not the GOP last week

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Sorry, conspiracy theorists (including myself).

There's a logical reason why Religion News Service provided extensive coverage of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this week after skipping Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week. And no, it has nothing to do with bias. I'll explain in a moment.

First, a little background: RNS national correspondent David Gibson has been all over various religion angles in the City of Brotherly Love, from asking "Can Hillary Clinton finally close the 'God gap?'" to exploring "Who boos an opening prayer? The Berniacs of 2016, that’s who." 

Other topics have included "The divided soul of the Democratic Party" and "Can Clinton-Kaine bring Democratic voters back to the Democrats?"

But here's a question posed by a reader: Where was the RNS last week when Donald Trump and the Republicans were holding their convention?

My first thought: Did nobody on the RNS staff want to go to Cleveland? I hear it's nice this time of year.

Seriously, it's a legitimate question to ask: How can a news service that claims to be impartial cover one national political convention and not the other?

"Well, you know, religion and GOP politics just don't mix," quipped Terry Mattingly, GetReligion's editor.

But RNS editor in chief Jerome Socolovsky, who joined RNS less than a year and has been open to addressing questions of RNS' perceived liberal leanings, said there's a simple reason why the wire service didn't cover the GOP convention.


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One more time: The death of Father Jacques Hamel is part of two crucial, larger stories

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One more time: The death of Father Jacques Hamel is part of two crucial, larger stories

Do you remember that old journalism parable, the one about the cynical poster that is supposedly hanging in a wire-service newsroom somewhere?

The poster, supposedly, explains how the U.S. press covers disasters, in terms of the number of deaths. To be blunt: 1,000 people dead in Afghanistan equals 500 dead in Egypt, which equals 250 dead in Mexico, which equals 100 dead in Japan, which equals 50 dead in France, which equals 25 dead in Canada, which equals 10 dead in Texas, which equals one celebrity/politician dead in Hollywood or Washington, D.C. Or words to that effect.

So why is the death of one Catholic priest at an altar in rural France so symbolic? Why were we still talking about Father Jacques Hamel on this week's Crossroads podcast? (Click here to tune that in.)

I thought of that when I read this summary material in an interesting report at FoxNews.com:

In 2015, more than 2,000 Christian churches in Africa were attacked by terrorists, and more than 7,000 Christians were killed, according to the advocacy group Open Doors USA. Those figures show terrorist groups like ISIS, which claimed credit for Tuesday's attack, as well as Al Shabaab and Boko Haram, will not hesitate to kill inside a house of worship.
"News of the murdered priest in Normandy has shaken many to the core,” David Curry, president and CEO of Christian Watchdog group Open Doors USA told FoxNews.com. “While in Nigeria, an average of five churches are attacked every Sunday, this is the first documented case of Western Christians being attacked by ISIS during a worship service."

Five churches attacked every Sunday. In Africa, that would include Catholics, but also Anglicans, Methodists, Pentecostal believers and others. The story notes that, in 2015 alone, 2,400-plus Christian churches were struck by terrorists in Africa. Yes, many of those attacks were by forces aligned with Boko Haram and, thus, the wider Islamic State.

That's a lot of desecrated churches. There must be thousands of victims and eyewitnesses to these scenes of hellish violence. Are we hearing those voices in our newspapers and on our 24/7 digital screens? Are we seeing those images?

Not very often. Yet the death of Father Hamel is part of that ongoing story around the world. That's story No. 2. for those with the eyes to see.


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Journalism f-word alert: New York Times serves up classic hit piece with Tim LaHaye obit

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You may have heard of hit pieces, which is journalism aimed at taking a person down. Here is a hit obituary -- The New York Times’ article on the passing of evangelical superstar Tim LaHaye.

Check out the headline: "Tim LaHaye dies at 90; fundamentalist leader’s grisly novels sold millions." That gives you an idea of where this article is headed.

Now tmatt has, through the years, written time and time again urging journalists to heed the advice of the Associated Press Stylebook and to avoid most uses of that particular f-word, along with Mollie Hemingway and others in the GetReligion pantheon.

Now, it is certainly true that LaHaye went to Bob Jones University, a campus that has long embraced the "fundamentalist" label, but he also led a Southern Baptist church and most members of America’s largest non-Catholic Christian denomination would never call themselves fundamentalists. Also, his audience as a writer and speaker was much larger than the "fundamentalist" niche.

Guess the Times didn't get that memo. Here’s how the piece starts:

The Rev. Tim LaHaye, a leader of the Christian fundamentalist movement and co-author of the best-selling “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic novels prophesying mass slaughters and the end of the world, died on Monday in a San Diego area hospital. He was 90.
His death, days after he had a stroke, was announced on the website for his Tim LaHaye Ministries.
In an age of seemingly endless natural and man-made disasters, the action-packed tales by Dr. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins struck readers as all too realistic, even if they were based on biblical accounts of the Second Coming, the appearance of an Antichrist and multitudes leaving a calamitous dying world for heaven.


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Catholic Church in Poland: 'Powerful' and 'conservative,' except when it isn’t

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World Youth Day is under way in Poland, with up to 1.5 million expected at the main events. American news readers, of course, have learned to expect something else on such occasions: a long, ponderous look at church and state by the New York Times.

And the Gray Lady comes through, with nearly 1,500 words on the church in Poland -- mainly how cozy it is with Polish conservatism and, of course, how out of step its traditional faith is with that of Pope Francis:

WARSAW -- When Pope Francis arrives in Poland this week to attend World Youth Day, one of the major events on the Catholic calendar, he will face a politically powerful church closely tied to the country’s new right-wing government. The church here carries a deep strain of social conservatism that does not always align with the pope’s more open and welcoming views.

Is there a contest for the number of liberal catch-terms in a single paragraph? Because it looks like the Times is trying to win it. You gotcher "right-wing." You gotcher "politically powerful." You gotcher "conservatism" -- a word used in various forms four times, including the headline: "Pope Francis Will Encounter a Socially Conservative Church in Poland."

One of our Faithful Readers fumed over what she saw as a "prism of anti-Catholic bias." She saw "socially conservative" as the Times' semi-curse term that means "following church teachings." 

Actually, I liked the article better than that. For one, it quotes Polish sources instead of using the "sources say" phrase, which often covers for a reporter's own opinion. The seven named sources include church leaders, a theologian and leaders of Poland's political parties. 

The Times also establishes the prominence of faith in Polish history and society. It says 92 percent of Poles identify as Catholic, and 40 percent attend weekly -- higher than other Catholic countries.


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What. It. All. Means. Symbolic details in a priest's death in parish named for St. Stephen

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In the aftermath of the murder of Father Jacques Hamel, there are two stories unfolding in France and, to a lesser degree, the rest of postmodern and post-Christian Europe. Let me stress that both stories are valid and deserve coverage.

One story is about the crime itself and the investigation into how it happened. At the heart of this story is the official dilemma facing the powers that be in government, which is how to stop as many terrorist acts as possible before they happen. The symbolic detail: One of the attackers -- 19-year-old Adel Kermiche -- was a known ISIS ally who was already wearing a monitoring device around his ankle.

The other story, of course, is a religion story. It is about an attack on a Catholic parish -- St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray -- named in honor of the first New Testament martyr St. Stephen, a connection I have only seen mentioned in the Catholic press. At the heart of this story is the murder of the elderly Father Jacques Hamel, who -- during Mass -- was forced to kneel at the church altar, where the attackers slit his throat. The terrorists critically injured one nun and tried to use other nuns as human shields, before police were able to kill the attackers.

The symbolic details in this story? If you want more on that, may I suggest following two hashtags on Twitter. The first is #IAmJacquesHamel, an obvious homage to the #IAmCharlieHebdo campaign after terrorists attacked the Paris staff of the famous satire magazine. The second hashtag is #santosubito. We will come back to that.

Which of these two stories are you seeing, when you open your local newspaper or click to the 24/7 news channels on your digital screens? I would argue that you should be seeing both. Are you?

It is likely that you are seeing language similar to this, care -- once again -- of The New York Times:

France is officially secular but Catholicism is deeply embedded in the country’s culture. That has made the shock and symbolism of the killing of the Rev. Jacques Hamel all the greater.


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