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Thank you, British friends: Here is the most fun eclipse story I've read (and most lacking in context)

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I'm on a Southwest Airlines flight to Los Angeles as I type this.

So if something wacky happens and the world ends during the much-ballyhooed eclipse, let me just say that it's been a whole lot of fun writing for GetReligion.

Speaking of fun, The Daily Express — according to Wikipedia, that's a "daily national middle market tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom" — has an, um, interesting story on Christians and the eclipse.

I mean, this was news to me:

TODAY'S total solar eclipse will be the first for 99 years to cross the US from coast to coast.

Many fundamentalist Christians see this as a significant warning of the impending apocalypse, the second coming of Christ and the rapture.

The “Great American Total Solar Eclipse” as it is called is said to be a warning sign from God, as it allegedly fulfils a Bible prophecy.

Pastor Paul Begley, host of the Coming Apocalypse radio show, said the eclipse could possibly fulfil a prophecy recorded in the book of Joel.

This states: “The sun shall be turned to darkness before the Day of the Lord come.”

Mr Begley said “somebody sound the trumpet” because the eclipse may mean “we are living in the last days.”

The (tabloid) newspaper proceeds to quote a few more sources fitting with the general theme.

What's missing? Well, this is probably not a major surprise given the media source, but no context at all is offered to judge the assertion that many see this as a significant warning of the impending apocalypse.


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The Boston Globe writes on Catholic priests, sex and the kids who resulted from it

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The Boston Globe, which made headlines, won a Pulitzer and starred in a movie about its investigations into a vast scandal of sexually abusive priests, has come up with a postscript. Of the priests who didn’t go after underage children but who slept with consenting adult women, what happens to the resulting child?

The Globe has come out with a two-parter this month that answers that question. And it’s a depressing answer. Fifteen years have passed since its reporters first broke the sexual abuse stories and this time, there's videos to accompany the stories; videos of teary priests' children who can't get through a taping without breaking down.

The answer as to what happens to these kids is dismal. Most are heartbroken for life. Their only consolation is that, in knowing who their dad really is, all sorts of pieces in their lives that never made sense before suddenly do.

The first part begins with Jim Graham, a 48-year-old man who is realizing some things about his past do not add up. Then -

By any reasonable measure, there are thousands of others who have strong evidence that they are the sons and daughters of Catholic priests, though most are unaware that they have so much company in their pain. In Ireland, Mexico, Poland, Paraguay, and other countries, in American cities big and small — indeed, virtually anywhere the church has a presence — the children of priests form an invisible legion of secrecy and neglect, a Spotlight Team review has found.
Their exact number can’t be known, but with more than 400,000 priests worldwide, many of them inconstant in their promise of celibacy, the potential for unplanned children is vast. And this also comes through loud and plain: The sons and daughters of priests often grow up without the love and support of their fathers, and are often pressured or shamed into keeping the existence of the relationship a secret. They are the unfortunate victims of a church that has, for nearly 900 years, forbidden priests to marry or have sex, but has never set rules for what priests or bishops must do when a clergyman fathers a child.


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Daily Telegraph backs old guard in row over Church of England's 'Alpha' evangelicals

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The Daily Telegraph has leapt into a dispute between two factions of a London church, offering its support to traditionalists who dislike changes brought by a new priest and the younger crowd of worshipers he has attracted.

The author of the 14 August 2017, article entitled “Proms conductor in row with musicians' church after it bans 'non-religious' concerts” would most likely reject this summary of her story. Yet the journalistic shortcomings of this article turn it into a club for traditionalists to beat modernizers.

Congregational conflicts are seldom newsworthy. But they are often vicious, taking their cue from the command to smite the Amalekites and “utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass" (1 Sam 15:3). And these church spats seem to revolve around the same set of problems that often boil down to a battle for power.

The exceptions to the rule, however, are often great news stories.

Who would not relish reading about the conflict in this Tennessee church:  “Pastor’s Wife And Mistress Fight At Communion Day Service In Church.”

The Daily Telegraph picked up a story about St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate Church in the City of London over a power struggle within a church, which has widened to include comments and criticisms from non-members.

The lede telegraphs the Telegraph’s construction of the story. We are told who are the villains and who the heroes.


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Your depressing 'think' podcast: Faith, hate and details that mattered in Charlottesville

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Warning: This post is going to be rather depressing, especially for (a) old-school journalists, (b) religious believers seeking racial reconciliation and (c) consistent, even radical, defenders of the First Amendment.

I really struggled as host Todd Wilken and I recorded this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in) and I think you'll be able to hear that in my voice. From my perspective, the media coverage of the tragic events in Charlottesville, Va., descended into chaos and shouting and the public ended up with more heat that light, in terms of basic information.

The key question, of course, is what did these demonstrations/riots have to do with religion?

That's where this post will end up, so hang in there with me.

But let's start connecting some dots, starting with a shocking headline from the op-ed page of The New York Times, America's most powerful news operation. Did you see this one?

The A.C.L.U. Needs to Rethink Free Speech

As a First Amendment liberal, that made me shudder. The whole idea is that the ACLU is struggling to defend its historic commitment to free speech -- even on the far right. In the context of Charlottesville, that leads to this (in the Times op-ed):

The American Civil Liberties Union has a long history of defending the First Amendment rights of groups on both the far left and the far right. This commitment led the organization to successfully sue the city of Charlottesville, Va., last week on behalf of a white supremacist rally organizer. The rally ended with a Nazi sympathizer plowing his car into a crowd, killing a counterprotester and injuring many.
After the A.C.L.U. was excoriated for its stance, it responded that “preventing the government from controlling speech is absolutely necessary to the promotion of equality.” Of course that’s true. The hope is that by successfully defending hate groups, its legal victories will fortify free-speech rights across the board: A rising tide lifts all boats, as it goes.
While admirable in theory, this approach implies that the country is on a level playing field, that at some point it overcame its history of racial discrimination to achieve a real democracy, the cornerstone of which is freedom of expression.

The key, of course, is that the rally descended into violence.

 


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Losing my religion (or gaining a new one): This is what's surprising about conversions in America

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The best stories contain surprising twists.

I already was fascinated with "Convert Nation," an interview piece by Emma Green in The Atlantic.

But then Green served up not one but two satisfying twists — and before the story barely got started.

Let's start with the first two paragraphs:

Jane Picken didn’t know much about religion growing up. Her parents were Christians, but she was orphaned at a young age, and the person who helped raise her “utterly rejected” revealed religion. Years later, when she met Abraham Cohen at a party, they really hit it off—they were engaged within three weeks. But first, they had a religion problem to fix.
Cohen was the son of a cantor, or worship leader, at a Philadelphia synagogue. His father wasn’t comfortable with him marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish. At first, Cohen didn’t want to push his faith on his fiancée, but Jane really loved Jewish rituals like lighting Shabbat candles and eating with family on Friday nights. She decided to convert, taking the name Sarah.

That anecdotal lede seems pretty standard for an article with a subtitle pointing to one-third of Americans identifying with a religion different from the one with which they grew up.

But then the third paragraph slaps you in the face and declares, "Hey, this scenario isn't as simple as it first appeared":


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The New York Times got it right: Faith had something to do with Sister Ruth Pfau's ministry

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If you drew up a list of the 10 most common complaints made by GetReligion readers about mainstream religion news coverage, this would be one of them.

The complaint: Why do so many journalists ignore the role that faith plays in the lives of prominent and inspirational figures, especially when writing major profiles or, most symbolically, in their obituaries?

No, we're not just talking about sports heroes and entertainers.

In this latest case, we are talking about one of the world's most courageous Catholic nuns, the woman often called the "Mother Teresa of Pakistan." Here is the top of a major report from Al Jazeera:

Tributes are pouring in for a German nun who spent more than half a century in Pakistan battling leprosy and helping the country's most vulnerable people.
Pakistan's Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi announced in a statement that a state funeral would be held for Ruth Pfau who died on Thursday, aged 87.
"She gave new hope to innumerable people and proved through her illustrious toil that serving humanity knows no boundaries," the statement said. ...
Pfau trained as a doctor in her youth and went on to join a Catholic sisterhood. She arrived in Pakistan, where she spent the rest of her life, in 1960. She specialised in the treatment of leprosy, a disease that causes discolouration of the skin, sores, and disfigurements.

Now, some of the stories -- because of her medical training -- referred to this Catholic hero as "Dr." Ruth Pfau.

However, it took some time to find a report that included a rather important word -- "Sister." As a GetReligion reader noted: "Might this woman's faith have had something to do with her work?"


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Imported Charlottesville clergy: When a simple narrative overtakes the complex facts

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Everyone is doing their Charlottesville post-mortems, which is why I was interested in what the New Yorker had to say about how church leaders there prepared for white supremacists.

The local clergy, and visiting clergy, played a crucial role in this story and many reporters made little or no effort to separate this group of counter-protesters from the highly confrontational, and ultimately violent, Antifa crowd that came in from outside.

That brings us to this New Yorker piece. What I didn't expect was a romanticized version of local clergy activism and a de-emphasis on the amount of outside clergy reinforcements brought in to maintain that false impression. The key facts: What clergy took part? Who didn't join the protests? Why? Where are the other voices?

The story begins at a historic black school where a few hundred of the town’s residents gather to assess exactly what happened on their streets to cause three people to die there during the recent riots.

One of the local leaders at the school was instantly recognizable to everybody: a sixty-five-year-old reverend named Alvin Edwards. When Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, came to town on Sunday, he went directly to a service at the Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church, which is Edwards’s congregation. He’s been there for the past thirty-six years, and during that time he’s also served as the city’s mayor and as a member of its school board. His years in politics have only seemed to strengthen his ties to his parishioners, and he likes to joke, with folksy charm, about his “B.C. days” -- before Christ -- when he lived in Illinois, where he grew up with plans “to make money and to be an industrial engineer.” Edwards marched with the counter-protesters over the weekend, but these days he’s best known for founding a broad coalition of local faith leaders called the Charlottesville Clergy Collective.

The article goes on to describe how the Collective got wind of an upcoming Ku Klux Klan visit and decided to hold a counter rally. Two of the major churches involved were Mt. Zion and St. Paul’s Episcopal.


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News analysis articles can provoke valuable awareness of important societal trends

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News analysis articles can provoke valuable awareness of important societal trends

GetReligion emphasizes the importance of objective news reporting, and rightly so at a time when journalism’s old ethic is eroding.

Nevertheless, The Religion Guy -- with decades of experience in magazine journalism -- also insists that opinionated long-form articles by newsmakers and analysts have a place. For reporters in particular, they provoke reflection on broad societal trends amid the daily news parade.  

A buzz-worthy example about politics appeared in the “Review” section of The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) which is always worth perusing. An excerpt from Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla’s new book “The Once and Future Liberal” sought to convince the Democratic Party to shed identity-group fixations and return to FDR’s concept of Americans’ collective solidarity. Lilla pursues the theme in this extensive interview with Rod Dreher.

A different diagnosis comes from U.S. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. His lede: “For a generation, the Democratic Party of which I’m a member has steadily moved away from communities of faith,” which doesn’t “reflect the views of most American voters.” In a previous Christian Century piece, the senator recalled how upset his liberal Yale Law buddies were decades ago when he began simultaneous studies at Yale Divinity School.

Coons’s latest lament appeared at theatlantic.com, which has emerged as a major interpreter of religion’s role. However, a vastly more revealing Atlantic item is the cover story in its September print issue, headlined “How America Lost Its Mind” and excerpted from the new book “Fantasyland.” (Our own tmatt at GetReligion previously noted this item).  

Author Kurt Andersen fits snugly within our cultural establishment: Harvard grad; acclaimed novelist; Hollywood scriptwriter; Off-Broadway playwright; host of National Public Radio’s Peabody Award-winning arts show; and alumnus of Random House, The New York Times, New Yorker, New York and Time. (The Guy overlapped with Andersen at Time but didn’t work directly with him.) 

Andersen is derisive toward religious faith, thus maintaining fidelity with a Nebraska upbringing by “godless” parents


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Chris Pratt and Anna Faris announce a 'separation': Might faith play a role in this story?

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It was one of those zippy entertainment stories produced during the PR festivals that are scheduled before the release of major motion pictures.

In this case, journalists were covering a sci-fi flick called "Passengers."

As always, superstar Jennifer Lawrence -- who grew up in mainstream, middle-class America -- was candid to the point of near-embarrassment, producing the following fodder for Tinseltown discussion. This is from Vanity Fair:

“I had my first real sex scene a couple weeks ago, and it was really bizarre,” Lawrence admitted to fellow actresses Helen Mirren and Cate Blanchett during The Hollywood Reporter’s awards-season roundtable. “It was really weird.” ...
Lawrence said she couldn’t get past the fact that she had to film a love scene with a married man.
“It was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach,” Lawrence explained. “And I knew it was my job, but I couldn’t tell my stomach that. ...”

The married co-star on the other end of the kiss was, of course, rising superstar Chris Pratt.

Other than the fact that Pratt is married -- half of the Hollywood power couple with actress Anna Faris -- it also helps to know that he is one of the most outspoken evangelical Christians in Hollywood (click here for more Vanity Fair coverage). Hold that thought.

That leads us to the current explosion in tabloid America, care of People magazine, of course:

Chris Pratt has stepped back into the public eye after he announced his separation from wife Anna Faris.


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