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'Soothing sounds meet church liturgy' -- AP needed more facts about 'sound bath' prayers

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There are few liturgical rites used in the global Anglican Communion that are more beautiful then the service known as “Compline,” “Vespers,” “Evensong” or simply “Evening Prayer.” Similar services are common in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

The blending of music, prayers and biblical texts in the Compline rites at Magdalen College, Oxford, are world famous. The historic Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street offers a variety of Evening Prayer rites, including its well-known Sunday evening “Compline by Candlelight” service.

Worshipers who attend these rites are used to hearing texts such as this one from Psalm 74: “Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the
earth; you made both summer and winter.” Psalm 141 includes this poetic image: “Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as incense, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."

As believers move from the trials of daily life into the evening hours, these rites almost always include some kind of confession of sins, such as this “Book of Common Prayer” text:

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

According to a long, fascinating Associated Press report — which combines text and video — something rather different is taking place in an Episcopal sanctuary in Park Slope, one of New York City’s trendy neighborhoods.

Readers are given quite a bit of information about some of the contents of an evening prayer rite at this parish. At the same, readers learn next to nothing — other than a few strategic hints — about what has been edited out of this liturgy or added to it. Both halves of that equation could be news. Let’s start with the overture:

NEW YORK (AP) — Meditation and immersion in soothing sounds meet church liturgy at All Saints Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. The combination takes on stress — and self-examination. Welcome to sound bath Evensong.

The first time Alexis Dixon attended a sound bath Evensong at the church, she cried.


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Plug-In: Mickey Mouse + Harry Potter + Joe Biden = fantastic ledes in world of religion news

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Plug-In: Mickey Mouse + Harry Potter + Joe Biden = fantastic ledes in world of religion news

The best news stories start with a fantastic lede.

For those unfamiliar with journalistic lingo, the lede is “the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.”

Every year, Poynter Institute writing guru Roy Peter Clark recognizes the Pulitzer Prize winner with the best lead (as he spells it). Yes, there’s a whole debate over which spelling is best.

Clark argues that even some of the stories that earn journalism’s most prestigious honor provide “evidence that we have lost the art of the great news lead.”

But this week, I came across two ledes in the world of religion that I really enjoyed. I can’t resist sharing them.

The first comes via the Orlando Sentinel’s Chabeli Carrazana:

For the better part of two decades, Orlando’s holiest theme park has hung on from its perch on Interstate-4, a struggling David among Orlando’s Goliaths: Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter.

Now it seems it’s time to concede defeat. The news came earlier this year: The Crucifixion is canceled. So is the resurrection and all the other stage shows portraying stories of the Bible, which play out five days a week at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience, a part biblical museum, part ministry that has withstood 19 years of financial trouble.

The second was penned by Politico’s Ryan Lizza:


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Helpless in Seattle: How journalists are/are not covering coronavirus, churches and conferences

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Here’s a dispatch from the center of the evolving pandemic — which where I live.

When the national epicenter for the coronavirus is 13 miles away from one’s home, life becomes a place somewhere between Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Gabriel Garcia Márguez’s “Love in a Time of Cholera.”

If you live in major urban areas — think New York City and greater Washington, D.C. — you can expect to see these patterns sooner, rather than later. What’s in your newspapers this morning?

Back to Kirkland — the expensive suburb (described here by the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have never been). Kirkland is merely one of several cities on Seattle’s Eastside where this thing has hit. Kirkland used to be the place we’d go for some beach time on Lake Washington when I was in high school. It was unglamorous and kind of shabby until the tech boom hit, Microsoft moved into neighboring Redmond and Google began gobbling up reams of office space in Kirkland, sending rents soaring.

Living two suburbs away as I do, I can say that the pall over Kirkland is now upon us all. Visiting local stores is like entering the Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen the shelves at Trader Joe’s so empty. Target has zero, I repeat zero, cough drops. Lines are forming at the local Costco first thing in the morning so folks can get toilet paper. The King County bus system greets you with hygiene announcements when you board.

We will get to religious groups and coverage in a moment. Hang in there with me.

Traffic for the past few days has been delightfully free of gridlock but it feels, writes one Seattle Times columnist, like Seattle is being symbolically quarantined from the rest of America. Conventions, conferences and meetings are being cancelled left and right. The Seattle-based Alaska Airlines put lots of flights on sale, begging folks to fly or buy before the end of March. But interestingly, while one school district has totally shut down, the others are not.


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Do it yourself tradition: Many Millennials are creating individualistic versions of Lent

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Headline writers love short words.

If you were a copy-desk pro, which of the following two terms would you prefer to use in a bold one-column headline when describing one of the biggest and most complex trends in American religion today (hello omnipresent Pew Research Center folks)?

Would you prefer to call people linked to this trend “religiously unaffiliated Americans” or “nones”?

You see my point, right?

Now, one of the problems associated with the term “nones” is that many people seem to think that this word means that these Americans have no religious beliefs.

That’s inaccurate and misses the main point, which is that the “religiously unaffiliated” are just that — people who have cut their ties of affiliation to organized religious groups. Instead of religious traditions, they have their own personal approaches to religion and ultimate issues. Does the term “Sheilaism” mean anything to you? It should. It’s a term linked to the work of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, author of the landmark book, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.”

This brings us back to the season of Lent and to this weekend’s think piece, care of The Lily website operated by The Washington Post. The key is that large numbers of Millennials, many of them “nones,” have not given up on Lent. Instead, they have — this is America — created their own versions of the season, using the “give up one thing” motif as an opportunity to express themselves. Here is a key section of this breezy feature:

Millennials are leaving religion in greater numbers than ever before, but they are more likely to observe Lent than baby boomers, according to 2014 research from Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling group. Twenty percent of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) responded that they were planning to fast, compared with 10 percent of boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964).


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Ryan Burge on nondenominationalism: This is a strategic piece in many news puzzles

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Since the opening of this site nearly 17 years ago, I have argued — over and over — that the demographic collapse of oldline Protestantism is one of the most important religion-beat stories of our age.

Why? Well, to cite only one factor out of many: It’s hard to imagine evangelicalism playing the huge role that it plays in today’s public square without the decline of the old mainline world’s power and even, to some degree, its prestige. I know that the old “Seven Sisters” of the mainline world still have cultural clout, especially in newsrooms. You can ask Mayor Pete Buttigieg about that.

GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge of Religion in Public has also done some fascinating work looking at data in the mainline world. But the goal of this post is to point journalists and readers to some of his emerging work on another complicated and powerful factor in the American religion marketplace — the swift rise of radically independent, nondenominational churches. Many of these churches are huge it would be totally wrong to believe that this is merely a white evangelical phenomenon.

In a way, the nondenominational churches play a key role in several major stories. One would be the small, but import, decline in Southern Baptist Convention membership totals. Consider this piece of a Religion in Public blog post on that topic:

Are there differences in theological orientation?

The General Social Survey asks respondents about their view of the Bible and offers three choices: the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally, the Bible is the inspired word of God but should not be taken literally, and the Bible is an ancient book of fables recorded by men. It’s interesting to note that nondenominational Christians stand about halfway between evangelical and mainline Christianity on matters of the Bible. While 44% of nondenominationals think that the Bible is literally true, 16% more of Southern Baptists espouse literalism, while about 16% less of United Methodists are theologically conservative.


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Podcast: Stop and think. How will coronavirus affect nurseries, worship and last rites?

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At this point, it’s clear that the coronavirus story has moved past concerns about whether members of ancient Christian churches can catch the disease from wine in golden Communion chalices.

People will debate that issue for one simple reason — people have researched that issue for centuries and argued about the results. That story is the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to reporting on how religious congregations — past and present — have reacted during times of plague.

So read up on the “common cup” issue and then move on. Oh, and resist the temptation to spotlight the inevitable proclamation from the Rev. Pat Robertson. And there will be more to this story than Episcopal bishops turning a scheduled meeting into a “virtual” gathering.

That’s the message at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). And while many journalists tend to focus on Catholic churches — lots of people in sanctuaries that photograph well — I think that editors and producers need to consider how this crisis could impact highly independent Protestant megachurches and institutions linked to them. Mosques and synagogues will be affected.

Everyone will be effected. Reporters will need to focus on specific facts and broad trends.

While we were recording the podcast, I told host Todd Wilken that journalists may want to note that spring break is not that far away. In addition to sending legions of young people to jammed beaches and crazy watering holes, this is also a time when churches and colleges organize short-term mission trips to locations around the world. Sure enough, I saw this notice on Twitter a few hours later, from a campus in Arkansas:


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Looking ahead: What Super Tuesday means for American Jews, Israel and Bernie Sanders

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One of my wife’s cousins, a guy who has spent his life on a kibbutz in northern Israel, telephoned last week to ask what I thought of Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I have strong reservations about both men, I responded.

But that’s beside the point, which is: What could I tell him about the two Jews vying for the Democratic presidential nomination (following Super Tuesday it’s now down to one, with Bloomberg having wiped out). Being Israeli, what he really meant was, what did this mean for the Jewish state?

I’ve had permutations of that conversation — on the telephone, via Facebook and in person — with a number of Jews, both American and Israeli, of varying political persuasions. Both the American Jewish press and Israeli news media binged on the Sanders-Bloomberg intra-tribal political slugfest, and I gorged on that as well.

My takeaways?

Sanders scares the #@*% out of most Israeli Jews and more than a few American Jews. But the latter will likely vote for him anyway should he grab the nomination.

Why? Because priority No. 1 is defeating President Donald Trump in November. (More on this below.)

In this regard, the situation is akin to when many traditional Christians, for whom blocking abortion was the deciding issue, held their collective nose and voted for Trump because they could not abide voting for pro-choice Hillary Clinton. How ironic is that? (And no, I’m not saying Sanders is as bad to my mind as is Trump. Not even close.)

Bloomberg, on the other hand, scared no one, except for Bernie Bros.


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After five days that shook the political world, are there religious dots for pundits to connect?

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Three U.S. political axioms: African-Americans on average are more religiously devout than whites.

African-American Protestants pretty much determine who can win the Democratic presidential nomination and certainly boosted Joe Biden on Super Tuesday.

Black enthusiasm and turnout are all-important for the party’s prospects in any November.

Then look at the Democrats' two geezers. Former Vice President Joe Biden is sometimes befuddled, but he’s an appealing, old-shoe churchgoer (also pro-abortion-rights and he performed a wedding for two men, but who would still be the first Catholic president in 57 years). Sen. Bernie Sanders (a socialist independent, not a Democrat!) would be the first ethnic Jew in the White House, but would surpass Donald Trump as the nation’s most secularized chief executive.

Sanders swept non-religious Democrats in New Hampshire and South Carolina, then bombed with Sunbelt African-Americans, many of whom frequent churches.

Are there any faith-based dots here for pundits to connect?

The improbably rich Michael Bloomberg quit to back Biden — while at this writing Sanders’ ideological soulmate Sen. Elizabeth Warren stubbornly remained in the fray. (Update: She dropped out this morning, after this memo was posted.)

But pundits assure us it’s Biden vs. Sanders to the bitter end.


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Autism and Communion: Textbook social-media clash between parents, press and church

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Every now and then I get an email from a GetReligion reader who has, for all practical purposes, researched and written a perfect news-critique post for this blog.

It’s especially interesting when the email comes from someone who — in a perfect world — would make an ideal source for mainstream coverage of the very issue that he or she is concerned about.

So that’s what happened the other day when I received a note from Father Matthew Schneider, who writes at a blog called Through Catholic Lenses. He is also known, on Twitter, as @AutisticPriest — a fact that is relevant, in this case.

That is, the fact that Father Schneider is autistic is relevant because he has a natural concern for people facing autism and related challenges, which has led him to dig into church law and teachings on that topic.

This matters when facing a USA Today headline such as this one: “Boy with autism denied First Communion at Catholic church: 'That is discrimination,' mom says.”

What we have here is a perfect, 5-star example of a clash between parents — backed with press reports — and church officials who seem to think they have lots of time (In the social-media age? #DUH!) to figure out faithful responses to complex liturgical issues. It also helps, of course, when reporters fail to use search engines and plug into logical sources about Catholic teachings and even Canon Law.

Anyway, here is the overture to this story, which is long, but essential:

MANALAPAN, N.J. — Nicole and Jimmy LaCugna both grew up with a strong Catholic faith. Each attended religious education as children, married in a Catholic church and sent their first son, Nicholas, through a faith-based pre-K program.

So when their second son, 8-year-old Anthony, reached second grade last fall, he was on track to receive his first Holy Communion in April.

But just days ago, the couple learned Anthony would not be allowed to receive the sacrament at St. Aloysius in Jackson, New Jersey, the church the family has attended for years.


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