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New York Post probes Greek tragedy at ground zero, while asking few Orthodox questions

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To be perfectly honest, this is a story that tears my heart out.

I have been reporting and writing about the destruction of the St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in lower Manhattan ever since Sept. 12, 2001. This was, of course, the tiny sanctuary crushed by the fall of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

I have also written columns about the long and complicated efforts by Orthodox officials to obtain a site near ground zero so that a new St. Nicholas could be built as a memorial and sanctuary. When I am in Manhattan, l live and teach nearby and pass the new construction site almost every day. My favorite pub is 50 paces away.

Now there is this, a recent headline from The New York Post: "How a church destroyed on 9/11 became mired in controversy." The overture states the basic facts:

St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was to be a “beacon of hope” at the World Trade Center site, glowing at night as a symbol to the faithful and those seeking solace on hallowed ground.

Thousands of visitors were to walk through the church doors on Liberty Street to worship, light a candle or just sit quietly in a nondenominational meditation room overlooking one of the 9/11 Memorial’s reflecting pools.

Now the church is a half-built eyesore, and when those doors will open is uncertain. The project has been stalled for five months and become a quagmire of accusations and millions of dollars in missing donations and cost overruns. What was to be the proud symbol of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, and the only house of worship tending to the masses at Ground Zero, is now mired in controversy. ...

GetReligion readers will not be surprised to know that the main thing missing from this long and detailed report is (wait for it) religion. And here is the big irony in this story: If the Post team had probed the religious elements of this story if would have been even more painful to read, especially for the Orthodox.


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Religion News Service -- irreplaceable and rocked by turmoil -- faces key journalistic issues

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The specialized Religion News Service is irreplaceable, not only for its media subscribers but religious leaders and anyone interested in this complex field.

Now it has suddenly been rocked by turmoil as depicted by GetReligion here and here and then here. To grapple with the state of things, let's start with some history.  

America owes a debt to two Jewish journalists and this media innovation they built. Founder Louis Minsky ran “Religious News Service” (later renamed) from 1934 until his death in 1957. Then his longtime assistant, the inimitable Lillian Block (well remembered by The Religion Guy), took charge until she retired in 1979.

Through those 45 years, the agency was subsidized by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, established to counter prejudice when Catholic Al Smith became a presidential prospect. But RNS was strictly independent, not an NCCJ propaganda mill. It fused journalistic and democratic ideals, believing that reliable, knowledgeable and non-sectarian religious information enhances interfaith understanding. That remains true, and vital, in 2018.

With strong editors and NCCJ’s hands-off policy, day by day, year by year, RNS chronicled religious affairs with objectivity, accuracy, respect and fairness -- values then shared across the news industry.

The agency thereby gained the trust of “secular” media and, harder to achieve, from a wide range of religious outlets.


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Waffle House hero vs. Waffle House gunman: Lots of religion here, but no answered questions

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As you would imagine, folks here in Tennessee are still talking about the Waffle House shootings, even though the national media -- this is the age in which we live -- have moved on to other gun-related stories.

Nevertheless, The Tennessean in Nashville produced a massive story the other day about the lives of the two almost-30 men at the heart of the story -- the hero, James Shaw, Jr., and the troubled gunman, Travis Reinking.

There is all kinds of religious material in this story, and that material was used in a way that raised all kinds of questions -- that the story didn't answer.

Believe it or not, in this case that's a compliment. Once again, we are headed into news territory defined by the theological word "theodicy."

Why does evil exist? Why do some people choose to do good, while others choose to do evil? Why does mental illness exist? Why do some people raised in Christian homes cling to that faith, when push comes to shove, while others fling the faith and lash out at others?

You'll ask all of those questions, and more, when you read this story: "One came to Waffle House to eat. One came to kill, police say. How two worlds collided."

Don't expect answers, especially not about Reinking and his family's years of struggles to understand and manage his mental illness -- which followed him like a cloud, even as his behavior in other parts of life seemed perfectly normal.

Let's start with Shaw, and church:

Nashville is Shaw's home.

He has attended Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church since he was an infant, the same iconic North Nashville church his mother attended as a girl.

The youngest of three Shaw children, and the only boy, he was fun-loving, quiet and respectful to adults. He became humbler as he got older.


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Christian Science Monitor details how conservatives are fleeing to start-up colleges

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I’ve long been impressed with how the Christian Science Monitor manages to ferret out hidden trends and do a great job on complex, hard-to-nail-down topics.

If you want to see a perfect example of this, check out the Monitor's latest story on how poisonous the atmosphere in college campus has become for the typical conservative student, especially religions and moral conservatives.

These students may not quit the institution they’ve enrolled in, but they’re often permanently silenced for four years, knowing that once they express their views, they can become outcasts quickly.

Sooner or later, this is going to lead to news stories in lots of zip codes.

BOSTON -- As high school students across the US receive college acceptance letters, many are wrestling with the same kinds of questions: How much financial aid will I get? How far from home should I go? Are the course offerings what I want? 

But for conservative students, there’s often an additional, even more important factor to consider: Will the institution welcome, or at least tolerate, our viewpoints?

To hear many conservatives tell it, the answer on many campuses is increasingly, “No.” One student, a standout from a Christian academy, came to MIT last fall to pursue his passion, computer science. But during the freshman diversity training, though there was a theme of encouraging discussion between people of different backgrounds -- including different political backgrounds – he came away with a feeling that it favored a liberal point of view, especially on issues like sexuality and marriage. So he rarely discusses his perspective with fellow students.

Another, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put a Trump-Pence sticker on his dorm room window, only to find it shattered. And a mother in Texas became afraid for her daughter’s safety after members of an organization she belonged to swore in a chat group they would ban or even kill anyone who voted for President Trump.

It’s not that college students tend to be liberal. Everyone knows that. It’s that one side believes their views are now being met with violence of various forms and that some professors are giving them failing grades for merely expressing their views.

It’s a whole new academic game.


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Hey big spender: NPR highlights another side of embattled EPA administrator Scott Pruitt

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Scott Pruitt — the former attorney general in my home state of Oklahoma — has been making a lot of national headlines lately.

Not-so-positive headlines, I might add.

A week ago Sunday, the New York Times featured Pruitt — now the administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency — in a front-page investigative piece. The headline: "Scott Pruitt Before the E.P.A.: Fancy Homes, a Shell Company and Friends With Money."

Religion did not figure in that story. Nor, let's be honest, did the fascinating details revealed by the Times portray Pruitt as a choir boy.

(Just this afternoon, I got an emailed news alert from the Washington Post with this headline: "Lobbyist helped broker Scott Pruitt’s $100,000 trip to Morocco.")

But now comes NPR with a new, in-depth report with quite a different headline: "'On Fire For God's Work': How Scott Pruitt's Faith Drives His Politics."

NPR notes:


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Southern Baptists and domestic violence: It's a tough issue to cover after Twitter explosion

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In case you have been on another planet for several years, let me state the obvious: One of the toughest challenges in journalism today is covering an important, valid story that has already been framed, defined and, well, set on fire by several thousand Twitter bombs.

We all know this game. For every calm and reasoned tweet -- by people on both sides -- there will be dozens of howls of outrage or acidic messages written to signal virtue.

After all of that, reporters are supposed to call people who have been Twitter bombed and ask some variation on that old question: Are you still beating your wife? This past weekend, that question sounded like: Are you still using the Bible to justify asking wives to be patient with abusive husbands, hoping that they will repent of their sins?

Please note, at this point, my earlier emphasis on the fact that we are talking about a valid subject for serious coverage -- which is certainly the case with anything related to domestic violence, in the homes of religious believers or anywhere else.

This brings us to a serious report at The Washington Post with this headline: "Southern Baptist leader pushes back after comments leak urging abused women to pray and avoid divorce."

Now, the word "leak" in that headline is strange, since we are talking about remarks by a major Southern Baptist leader that have been the subject of debate in the past. Here is the overture for this story:

The leader of a major Southern Baptist seminary issued a statement Sunday pushing back after a 2000 tape surfaced purporting to quote him saying that abused women should focus on praying and “be submissive in every way that you can” and not seek divorce.

Paige Patterson is president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, a Fort Worth school whose Web site says it is one of the largest seminaries in the world. ...

Patterson, who declined to comment Sunday, is heard on an audiotape being interviewed in 2000 about what he recommends for women “who are undergoing genuine physical abuse from their husbands, and the husband says they should submit.”

“It depends on the level of abuse, to some degree,” Patterson says. “I have never in my ministry counseled anyone to seek a divorce and that’s always wrong counsel.”


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Anti-Semitism in Germany: Prime your sources, Israel-Iran conflict could make it far worse

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The supreme irony of German anti-Semitism is that it took the horrors of the Holocaust and the near-total destruction of German Jewry to banish it from wholesale public acceptance.

These days, anti-Semitism still has a bad name in Germany, at least under the law. It's illegal there to incite hatred against Jews (and other ethnic and religious groups) or to deny and even minimize the nation’s Nazi-era Holocaust crimes.

But that hasn't been enough to keep anti-Semitism from reemerging in Germany in a big way of late, particularly among the far-right and Muslim immigrants. I’ll say more below, but for now just keep this in mind: the Israel angle.

Germany, of course, isn't the only European nation to fall prey to a re-run of what many over the years have labeled the world’s oldest hatred. Examples abound in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and elsewhere.

Nor is rising anti-Semitism in the West confined to Europe. It's being more freely expressed in the United States -- remember Charlottesville? -- and in Canada, as well.

By way of illustration, here’s a bit from a recent story from Poland by JTA, the global Jewish news wire service. (Journalists and others with an interest in Jewish-related news should read it regularly; it's free.)

Things went from bad to worse following a row between Poland and Israel over Warsaw passing a law in January that criminalizes blaming the Polish nation for Nazi crimes. The dispute unleashed the worst wave of anti-Semitism since the fall of the Iron Curtain, according to Rafal Pankowski, co-founder of the Polish anti-racism group Never Again.

In the wake of the fight over the law, he told JTA: “In the space of one month, I have seen more anti-Semitic hate speech than in the previous 10 years combined.”

Ah, another Israel-angle tease. But first, a personal aside to make my bias clear.


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A tearjerker of a faith story: Three members of Texas family killed in crash, and four others hurt

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Try to look at that photo and not shed a few tears.

The three children pictured were hurt — badly hurt — in a crash that killed their parents and an infant sister. Another brother also was hospitalized but released after a few days.

I came across the story on the Metro & State section cover of today's Dallas Morning News.

Before I saw the photo, the headline grabbed my attention:

Orphaned siblings lean on one another, faith

So apparently, there is a religion angle to this sad story. I read the lede and then turned to the jump page, interested in learning more.

The Dallas newspaper quotes the children's great-aunt Teresa Burrell, whose home state offers the first clue about the family's possible religious affiliation:

"They've come so far," said Burrell, who flew south from her Utah home to be with her niece and nephews, "but we know there's a a tough road ahead. They're in so much pain." 

Angela, 8, was in a coma for days after the crash. She's stable and able to speak now, but casts cover half of her body to support her legs, which were crushed. Brain trauma also caused her to suffer memory loss, and she had to be told twice that her parents and sister did not survive. 

Zachary, 5, suffered a broken back and internal injuries, and has recently been fighting fevers and other complications. Burrell said he was conscious throughout the crash and has had night terrors because of it.

He lost his first tooth after waking up from his coma and was happy to discover that the tooth fairy makes hospital visits.  

Wyatt, 4, also suffered severe head trauma and was in a coma. Several strokes left half of his body paralyzed, but with the help of physical therapy and lots of prayer, Burrell said he's now walking again, and even trying to run around.


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Guilt folder chatter: What happens when newsworthy topics are 'covered' in entertainment?

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Faithful GetReligion readers are familiar with our "folder of guilt" concept. If you live online, you have one, too.

It's the large stack of emails that you know you need to deal with, but more urgent (or less complex) emails keep arriving, day after day, week after week. The digital layers between you and the "guilt" emails get bigger and bigger.

The difference here at GetReligion is that some of us have -- literally -- created "guilt" folders in our email software to protect certain stories or op-eds or online discussions that we know we should deal with, somehow, someday. Like today.

This brings me to a 5-star "guilt" discussion that took place recently among the GetReligionistas. This one was important because it cut to the heart of what we do here and, to be blunt, what we may or may not be doing in the future.

The basics: GetReligion has, for 14-plus years, attempted to critique the good and the bad in mainstream coverage of religion. We have deliberately tried to avoid writing about opinion and analysis journalism, other than making references to add depth or perspective to posts about hard-news coverage. We also have the weekend "think piece" feature that points readers to all kinds of journalism about issues linked to religion and, thus, religion news.

Meanwhile, trends in the Internet age have weakened the wall between straight news and advocacy news (#DUH). We know that and we have struggled to cope with that.

But we also know that many of our culture's most important discussions of religious issues and events are taking place OUTSIDE of the journalism world -- in entertainment. That's one of the reasons I left a newsroom in 1991 to teach mass-media studies at a seminary.

So what is GetReligion supposed to do with debates about "news" topics that take place, to cite one example, in a show like HBO's "Silicon Valley"?


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