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Solid story out of Israel with a king-sized hole left for journalists to fill

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Solid story out of Israel with a king-sized hole left for journalists to fill

The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) officially announced details Oct. 6 on a major archaeological project in northern Israel south of Haifa near present-day Harish. The inland En Esur site has remains of a town that covered 160 acres, indicating that an estimated 6,000 residents lived there in the Early Bronze Age 5,000 years ago.

This remarkably early date for such a large settlement is an unprecedented find not only within Israel but for the entire region. Without later technological developments, that’s about as big as a municipality could have been. Not only that. The archaeologists found another settlement lying underneath En Esur that dates back 7,000 years. These towns were strategically located along an ancient trade route and with access to fresh-water springs.

The IAA team reports that the Bronze Age settlement demonstrates careful urban planning, with streets, drainage and public spaces that included a notable temple with a sizable basin that contains burned animal bones signaling ritual sacrifices, a town square, storage facilities and a mausoleum. There are many figurines, showing artistic culture and a possible religious purpose. Tools on the site are identified as Egyptian. Huge stone blocks for construction were somehow hauled from a quarry a half-mile away.

The site has long been known, but was only excavated in earnest starting in 2017 by a team led by Itai Elad, Yitzhak Paz and Dina Shalem. Work was funded by Netivei Israel, the transport infrastructure firm that is building a highway interchange at the site. Some 5,000 students volunteered to help with the massive archaeological dig.


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Pondering how to cover religion news for readers in the 'nones' generation

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Here at GetReligion we write a lot about how the news media wrestle — successfully and otherwise, but mostly otherwise — with religion stories that have public policy consequences. That makes sense since these stories constitute the bulk of what religion reporters produce. They dominate because they’re far and away the easiest for journalists to make sense of.

Reporters spend far less time tackling religion’s deeper, less linear realms. Including, how we make sense of our lives. 

For traditional believers, religion is key to extracting sufficient meaning from life to keep its bewildering complexity and insecurity from rendering us dysfunctional. For religion journalists, historically that’s meant concentrating on the minutia of faith group wrangling over the day’s public issues. 

Comprehend the jargon, restate it in more universally understood language, organize it in dramatic fashion, and — voila — you’ve mastered the formula of successful religion journalism.

But as with so much about contemporary journalism, that was then and this is now — the hallmark of which is radical change.

A dominate trend in today’s America, and the West in general, is the move away from traditional religious expression. I’m referring, of course, to the growing cohort of the religiously disengaged “nones,” who by some estimates now account for a fourth of all Americans and 35 percent of those under age 30. Click here for the Pew Forum research on that.

A hefty percentage of these people have tired of public policy religion stories, so many of which seem to defy resolution year after year, decade after decade. Religiously disengaged, they have no interest in hearing about the ongoing squabbles of groups they feel have nothing to offer them.

Now combine that with the growing trend in journalism away from what we like to call the historical American model of fact-based, balanced, “objective” reporting. And remember that it’s replacement is opinion and expository writing.


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GetReligion drinking game: Trends, demographics and Ryan Burge's newsy charts

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It’s been a while since we had a good GetReligion drinking game.

So here’s the rule for this one: You take a drinking of an adult beverage whenever a GetReligion post mentions demographics, birth rates or, what the heck, “81 percent.”

These discussions may increase in the future, because a very interesting progressive Baptist fellow, who is also a political scientist, has said that it is fine with him if your GetReligionistas reproduce some of this fascinating charts that focus on religion, politics and, often, religion and politics.

The main thing is that these charts often point to valid news stories. Here at GetReligion, we like that. Here’s a large chunk of a recent “On Religion” column that focused on this scholar’s work. This is long, but essential:

Earlier this year, political scientist Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University dug into the 2018 General Social Survey, crunched some data and then took to Twitter to note that Americans with ties to no particular religious tradition were now about 23% of the population. That percentage is slightly higher than evangelical Protestantism and almost exactly the same as Roman Catholicism.

"At that point my phone went crazy and I started hearing from everyone" in the mainstream media, said Burge, who is co-founder of the Religion In Public weblog. "All of a sudden it was time to talk about the 'nones' all over again."

Burge recently started another hot discussion on Twitter with some GSS statistics showing trends among believers — young and old — in several crucial flocks.


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Media 'break out the pitchforks' after Pompeo's speech on 'Being a Christian Leader'

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In a recent speech, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicted that “some people in the media will break out the pitchforks when they hear that I ask God for direction in my work.”

Was he right?

Well, Pompeo certainly was correct that his speech to the American Association of Christian Counselors would draw some media coverage — and not necessarily positive coverage.

Let’s consider USA Today’s story, headlined “State Department website promotes Mike Pompeo speech on 'Being a Christian Leader.’”

Before we get to the nuts-and-bolts of that report, a bit of quick, crucial background: First, as I reported in an April 2018 Religion News Service story during Pompeo’s confirmation proceedings, he is a former deacon and Sunday school teacher for an Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Kansas. He made headlines earlier this year when he liked President Donald Trump, his boss, to the biblical queen Esther. And his invitation-only briefing with faith-based media caused a stir that we discussed here at GetReligion.

So Pompeo’s evangelical Christian faith isn’t exactly breaking news.

But back to this latest headline: Here’s the top of USA Today’s story:


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Holy baptism as photo op: Do journalists know anything about Kim Kardashian's faith?

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I don’t follow the Kardashians at all –- but you’d have to be on Mars not to notice all the photos out there about Kim Kardashian’s trip to Armenia for the baptism of her three youngest children. I wasn’t aware she was particularly devout.

But she has named her kids Saint, Chicago and Psalm. All were baptized at the Etchmiadzin Cathedral in Vagharshapat. There are Armenian churches in this country (such as this one in Evanston, Ill.), so I’m not sure why she felt the need to fly back to the old country, other than to bring attention to the Armenian genocide (by the Turks) a century ago.

This being the Kardashians, much of it was on camera and the mother’s Instagram post of being “baptized along with my babies” the event got 5 million likes. Even though she’d previously had an older daughter, North West, previously baptized in Jerusalem, was Kardashian herself ever baptized? And by whom? No one seems to know.

Here’s what CBN said:

Socialite and business mogul Kim Kardashian West visited her family's homeland of Armenia to get baptized with her children at what scholars say is one of the oldest churches in the world.

"So blessed to have been baptized along with my babies at Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Armenia's main cathedral which is sometimes referred to as the Vatican of the Armenian Apostolic Church. This church was built in 303 AD," West wrote in an Instagram post.

West is pictured lighting candles in the cathedral, an orthodox tradition that symbolizes Jesus being the light of the world.

I’m curious if the Kardashians had to jump through hoops to get their kids baptized like most people have to do. This article notes that most believers have to apply months ahead of time, have their baptisms approved by a religious council and other requirements.


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Might even 'Trump's Court Artist' (per The Atlantic) have a sense of humor?

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Here’s a tug of the LeBlanc beret for Jennifer A. Greenhill for “Trump’s Court Artist” in The Atlantic. Being described as a court anything to President Trump qualifies as apostasy among his snarkiest critics. Consider, for example, historian John Fea’s frequent designation of “court evangelical” on his weblog, The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

Greenhill, professor of art history at the University of Southern California, concentrates her remarks largely on McNaughton’s full-barreled support of Donald Trump and his pointed depictions of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, even Woodrow Wilson.

I have lived through the past several years without realizing that McNaughton does so much to provoke the cultural left, including art critic Jerry Saltz of New York magazine. Saltz, as Greenhill mentions, called one McNaughton painting (of a glowering President Obama holding a burning Constitution) “bad academic derivative realism,” “typical propaganda art, drop-dead obvious in message” and “visually dead as a doornail.” (Props to the TV affiliate CBS DC for seeking his thoughts.)

Greenhill too quickly moves on from McNaughton being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (his attending Brigham Young University is one clue). This is the one church that teaches the most exalted perspective on the nation’s founding.


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Nothing scarier than the press ignoring Catholicism in all of those Halloween features

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It’s Halloween season. You may have noticed that by walking on the streets near your home and encountering those all-too-familiar garish orange-and-black decorations. Then again, maybe you have visited stores with shelves packed with bags and bags of candy and scary kids’ costumes.

This is also a time when some Catholic churches advertise Halloween get-togethers or parties for children and their families. That’s a reminder that Halloween and religion aren’t such strange bedfellows.

It’s also the time when newspapers and websites start rolling out those often predictable Halloween stories. The reason for this is two-fold.

First, journalists need to find a “news hook” when doing a story. As part of the five Ws — who, what, when, where and why — the reason for doing the story is often answered in the why. Timeliness is a major reason for why a story is being done at this moment in time. It’s the reason why this very piece you are reading is being posted at this moment in time.  

Second, the internet has impacted news coverage in all the ways some of you already know. One big way has been in the use of “keywords” and “algorithms.” All news organizations with a website rely on these two for clicks (readers, that is) and the little money from advertising that they can reap from those page views. Halloween is one of the most-searched words during October. It’s a word that trends on Twitter. Therefore, content is created for this very purpose.   

That sets up my point: Halloween stories are popping up this month because or both timeliness and SEO (Search Engine Optimization, the function that helps you find stories when you use a search engine). It’s this process by which keywords appear in headlines that readers can access them on Google News.

It’s the content in these Halloween stories, however, that often lacks a religion angle.


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Try telling this NBA player's story without mentioning his faith? Actually, The Ringer did

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God talk silenced on the sports page?

No, it’s nothing new.

But still, it can be jarring. Especially when a journalist attempts to profile an athlete for whom faith is a crucial part of his story — without ever, you know, mentioning his faith.

Such is the case with The Ringer’s recent feature on Jrue Holiday of the New Orleans Pelicans.

For those familiar with Holiday, the story’s compelling opening seems to hint at the holy ghosts that become clear by the end:

If you ever need to borrow $25,000, Jrue Holiday is your man. It’s a running joke between his wife, Lauren, a retired midfielder for the United States women’s national team, and her former teammates: If they were in a pinch—say, a quarter-of-a-hundred-grand kind of pinch—they’d just ask her husband. Holiday wants to help, always. Help you, help me, help his teammates on the Pelicans. He’d say yes in a heartbeat, the joke goes. Holiday is the mom of his friend group, the hype man for his family. “The supportive one,” Lauren said. A $25,000 loan is a bit hyperbolic, sure. At least, I’m assuming it is. That’s the joke. This is the point: Jrue, I’m told, will always come through. It’s his campaign slogan, should he ever run for office. But that’s the other thing about Holiday, the thing that assures me he’d never want to run for any office of any kind: Jrue Holiday does not want this—does not want anything—to be about Jrue Holiday.

“I like to assist people,” he told me in his backyard by the pool. It was August and 87 degrees in Santa Rosa Valley, California, where the Holidays spend the offseason. He leaned back into the patio chair, squinted at the sun, and smirked. “That was a pun. But no, I like to assist people.” Holiday is a starting combo guard for the New Orleans Pelicans. His game is often described in terms of what he does for others. Lobs and dimes, help defense and spacing, deflections and blocks. Assistance is where Holiday earns a living. And for the past six years, superstar Anthony Davis was his main beneficiary.

The Ringer touts Holiday as “the NBA’s Best-Kept Secret.”

The reader who shared the link with GetReligion wondered, though, how The Ringer managed to keep Holiday’s Christian faith a secret.


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Deja vu all over again: BBC does another fun cathedrals story that skips somber facts (again)

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So here is the journalism question for today: Is the implosion of the Church of England, especially in terms of worship attendance, so common knowledge that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned in a news story linked to this topic?

It was news when attendance slid under 1 million, earlier this decade. Then the numbers kept falling. Here’s a Guardian report from a year or so ago. The big statistic reported in 2018 was that Sunday attendance was down to “722,000 — 18,000 fewer than in 2016.”

The story I want to look at did not run on a small website or in a niche-market newspaper. It was produced by the BBC, one of the top two or three most important news organizations on the planet.

Maybe this subject is too bleak to be mentioned in what is clearly meant to be a fun story? Here’s the headline on this long feature: “Why are cathedrals hosting helter-skelters and golf courses?” And the overture:

From giant models of Earth and the Moon to a helter-skelter and crazy golf course, cathedrals are increasingly playing host to large artworks and attractions. Why are buildings built for worship being used in the pursuit of fun?

Cathedrals might traditionally be viewed as hallowed places meant for sombre reflection and hushed reverence.

Vast, vaulted ceilings soar high over whispering huddles of wide-eyed tourists as robed wardens patrol the pews to silence anything that could detract from the sanctity of worship.

But cathedral chiefs across the country have been keen to shake free from the shushing stereotype.

Let’s see. There is a glimpse of the “why?” in this story. Why are these Anglican leaders so intent on opening the doors to let people have some fun of this kind?


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