Defining depravity downwards in Deutschland

November 27, 2012 By

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Der Spiegel‘s English-language bulletin reports that conservative deputies on the Agricultural Affairs committee of the Bundestag have introduced legislation banning sex with animals. I never knew the farm beat for German reporters was so, so … so edgy?

Let’s pause for a  moment to contemplate the work of government. Courage mon amie … be brave and join me for a look at the article “Germany to Ban Sex with Animals”:

The German government plans to ban zoophilia — sex with animals — as part of an amendment to the country’s animal protection law, but faces a backlash from the country’s zoophile community, estimated to number over 100,000. Zoophilia was legalized in Germany in 1969 and animal protection groups have been lobbying for a ban in a campaign that has been fuelled by heated debate in Internet forums in recent years.

Now the center-right government wants to outlaw using animals “for personal sexual activities or making them available to third parties for sexual activities and thereby forcing them to behave in ways that are inappropriate to their species,” said Hans-Michael Goldmann, chairman of the parliament’s Agricultural Committee. In the future, having sex with an animal could be punished with a fine of up to €25,000 ($32,400).

The article continues with a response from Michael Kiok, who is identified as chairman of zoophile pressure group ZETA (Zoophile Engagement for Tolerance and Information). Mr. Kiok appears to be channeling Harvey Fierstein and one can hear echoes of “I just want to be loved, is that so wrong?” in his arguments.

He argues the new law is unfair telling Spiegel: “We see animals as partners and not as a means of gratification. We don’t force them to do anything.” Mr Kiok goes on to describe his relationship with an “Alsatian called Cessie” and argues that the cruelty animals undergo as they are prepared for slaughter in the meat packing business should be addressed before the police come looking for him. The author rounds out the story with a summary of European laws banning zoophilia — illegal just about everywhere but Denmark — and this scientific nugget:

Sexual research in the 1940s suggested that 5 to 8 percent of men and 3 to 5 percent of women engaged in zoophilia. “That would put the figure in Germany at 1.6 million but that’s definitely too high. Taking a wild guess, I’d say it’s well over 100,000,” said Kiok.

From what I have seen, this legislation appears to follow a February 2012 article in the Frankfurter Rundschau. Its article “Verbot von Sex mit Tieren gefordert” reported on the efforts of an animal welfare office in Hesse to criminalize zoophilia in light of her experiences in working on farms. This story has also been an occasion of journalistic fun — some of the French accounts of this story I have read are a delight. “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge … What can you expect from the Germans.” The Mail and other English newspapers also have fun with this story. The Guardian has the best, most complete story, I’ve seen so far and it is written in a matter of fact tone that attempts to keep a straight face — yet the Minister of Agriculture’s face is prominently plastered a top the story.

The Guardian‘s thorough reporting brings out the information that the zoophilia group, ZETA, has 100 members and gives details about Herr Kiok.

But it is the British tabloid, The Sun who has the best quotes, has the most fun and raises the best question.

Bestiality dropped off the statute books as a crime in 1969 but in recent years incidents of it have mushroomed along with websites promoting it. There are even “erotic zoos” for perverts to visit and abuse animals ranging from llamas to goats. Hans-Michael Goldmann, chairman of the agriculture committee, said the government aimed to forbid using an animal “for individual sexual acts and to outlaw people ‘pimping’ creatures to others for sexual use”.

But pro-zoophilia campaign group ZETA — Zoophiles Commitment to Tolerance and Enlightenment — vowed to challenge any ban on bestiality. Chairman Michael Kiok said: “Mere concepts of morality have no business being law.”

Leave it to the tabloids to be the only forum where issues of ethics and morality are raised in conjunction with this story.

Perhaps this issue is clear there was no need to have an explanation why it is necessary to re-criminalize zoophilia after its having been made legal for 43 years. It is not necessary to explain why Nazi race theory, for example, is repellant and its arguments not disseminated. Yet, I believe Michael Kiok’s assertion that “mere concepts of morality have no business being law” need be addressed.

The Frankfurter Rundschau story raises the issue of mutual consent. Bestiality is wrong because an animal cannot give consent to participation in sexual acts with a human. But should not the ethical and moral tradition that lay behind laws banning bestiality be acknowledged — and perhaps a word or two from an ethicist or moral theologian on why this has always been considered wrong?

In the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) bestiality is a sin. Beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament passages from  Exodus 22:19, Leviticus 18:23, Leviticus 20:15-16, and Deuteronomy 27:21) the Western religions have held that sexual contact with animals is a form of self-abuse, defiles the body and dishonors God and his creation. It is, to use that wonderfully old fashioned word, an abomination.

While little studied, the current state of medical knowledge classifies zoophilia as an illness. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III R 1987), zoophilia (bestiality) is a mental disorder in which human beings have sexual desires for animals. The DSM-IV, (1994) placed it under the residual classification “paraphilias not otherwise specified”. Paraphilias are inappropriate sexual deviant fantasies and fetishes, such as bestiality, pedophilia, sadomasochism, and other inappropriate forms of sexual thoughts, urges, and actions.

All of which brings me back to Der Spiegel. There is a hesitancy by the German news weekly to say that this is wrong. Is that the business of a newspaper? Should the moral voice be extinguished in modern newspaper reporting? Is Herr Kiok’s argument that morality should not govern law true?

Der Spiegel appears to think so, as it has framed this story in such a way as to remove the moral element. By not providing contrary voices to the Zoophilia activists, the newspaper does not address the issue as to why this conduct should be governed by law. Popular disgust with the practices under consideration might make such arguments appear superfluous, but when Der Spiegel writes from the philosophical presupposition of antinomianism — the rejection of socially established morality — it concedes the argument to the Michael Kioks.

Zoophilia was illegal for centuries. Has been legal for 43 years, and now will be criminalized once again. Why?

Filed Under: Ethics, Journalism, Science, Sex, World Tagged With: , , ,

Godbeat scribe’s diabetes, and what he did about it

June 22, 2012 By

One of the first rules journalists learn is that you don’t generally write about yourself. The gist goes something like this: the story is about other people and their story, not the reporter who personally experiences the story. Every once in a while, you’ll see a reporter like Michael Luo pop up and write something drawing from his own experience, but it’s not the usual style for many reporters.

Recently, though, we read a piece by a religion reporter who deviated from the usual to write about weight loss. The name Bob Smietana, religion reporter for The Tennessean, might ring a bell for many regular GetReligion readers. We’ve interviewed him, looked at his pieces and he chimes in and comments on occasion. Eight months ago, right after I saw Smietana at the Religion Newswriters Association conference, he was diagnosed with diabetes. This week, he wrote for his paper about becoming 40 pounds lighter.

His piece really raises interesting questions about reporters being comfortable enough in their own skin (literally for Smietana) to write something so vulnerable. It’s not a religion piece, and it’s not something we would typically dissect, but it raises interesting questions for journalism and how religion fits into that possibly more personality inclusive journalism. How much do you insert your own background or experience and how does it inform the story for other people?

Here’s an intro that will make you pretty hungry, literally and figuratively:

A mile into my workout at the gym and I start dreaming of cake.

Chocolate cake with buttercream frosting that’s chilled but not frozen — cold enough so the cake and frosting are firm and rich and so sweet that you can get lost in the flavor.

And French fries, crinkle-cut and just snatched from the deep fryer, so crispy that they almost snap when you take a bite. With buckets of ketchup on the side and a Blue Moon beer with a slice of orange to wash them down.

I could eat these things.

Then I would die.

The reason the piece works better than a random post about weight loss on just anyone’s blog is how Smietana uses his own story to put it in context of a larger issue of what other people are probably experiencing. “That blood sugar test meant that I — like about 25.3 million other Americans, according to the American Diabetes Association — had diabetes,” he writes. Being a religion reporter, of course faith pops up.

A preacher once told me that the New Testament Greek word “metanoia” — which my Bible translates as “repentance” — really refers to a complete transformation or metamorphosis.

He said that it literally means to stop walking in one direction, to turn around, and begin walking the opposite.

Diabetes for me has meant that kind of transformation.

Smietana explains how he lived on fast food, pasta and rarely exercised, and now he walks two or three miles every day. He’s down to 212 pounds, 40 pounds down from his diabetes diagnosis.

I’m guessing a lot of people will relate to this section of the piece:

Before that call from the doctor’s, I would not have believed that this kind of change was possible.

I felt terrible but was too overwhelmed with the pressures of life — work, raising a family, this never-ending recession — to do anything about it.

Getting diagnosed made the problem simple: Change now or die.

I’m kind of curious how his editors felt about him somewhat subtly inserting some sort of faith-y-ness. Obviously he is the religion reporter, but he’s also covering Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., so I would not be surprised if another editor gave him pushback for inserting any sort of particular Scripture into his piece. But I think the piece reads better because he did, since it’s clearly a part of his thought process in the entire weight loss experience.

The great irony is that I feel better knowing I have diabetes than I did before my diagnosis, when I was sick and didn’t know how near to death I was.

In the Old Testament book of Numbers, the people of Israel stand outside the Promised Land with their leader Joshua.

He gives them a choice: “This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to His voice, and hold fast to Him.”

That’s not all, but I don’t want to give away the end. Go read it.

With blogs, social media and other less traditional media, personalities thrive, and some of the old school, traditional reporters appear to be navigating what that means for their roles. The story is still about something or someone else, but perhaps some journalists are getting a little more comfortable with personality. You’ll see reporters emerge with a little humor or personal experience on social media (not always a great thing, but it’s happening), tweeting or Facebooking something they would never say on an “official” website or in print.

In some way, personalizing something can seem humanizing for an industry that has acted all “Objectivity (whatever that is) trumps all.” These reporters have real lives, real families, real struggles, real triumphs, as much as anyone else. As they navigate new media territory, journalists will have to figure out how much they insert themselves or their experience, whether it really adds to the overall story, whether it means more personality or not. For me, Smietana’s piece was a winner.

Images courtesy Bob Smietana.

Filed Under: Evangelicals, Journalism, People, Religion

A blot on ESPN’s escutcheon?

February 21, 2012 By

I was in New York City last weekend when the infamous and seemingly racist headline ran about the Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. The phrase that was used — a chink in the armor — is not racist on its own. If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, you can read about it here. But one of the words in the idiom can be a racist slur. I was talking about it with friends and no one could believe that the headline was posted. We freaked out, actually. But one friend wondered if there was any way that the editor was younger and didn’t know about the racist connotation. It certainly worked under the non-racist definition — the article was discussing Lin’s turnovers as his Achilles’ heel, a fatal flaw in his performance.

So I was interested to read this story in the New York Daily News:

The ESPN editor fired Sunday for using “chink in the armor” in a headline about Knicks phenom Jeremy Lin said the racial slur never crossed his mind – and he was devastated when he realized his mistake.

“This had nothing to do with me being cute or punny,” Anthony Federico told the Daily News.

“I’m so sorry that I offended people. I’m so sorry if I offended Jeremy.”

The headline was up for all of a half hour at 2:30 AM on Saturday. But Federico was fired and an anchor who used the phrase separately was suspended for a month:

Federico, 28, said he understands why he was axed. “ESPN did what they had to do,” he said.

He said he has used the phrase “at least 100 times” in headlines over the years and thought nothing of it when he slapped it on the Lin story.

Federico called Lin one of his heroes – not just because he’s a big Knicks fan, but because he feels a kinship with a fellow “outspoken Christian.”

“My faith is my life,” he said. “I’d love to tell Jeremy what happened and explain that this was an honest mistake.”

I thought that was interesting, not just that he said it but that the Daily News included it in its report about the incident. One of the things I find interesting about the Lin story is the effect he’s having on people. For instance, I don’t like basketball but I really enjoy watching him (my husband thinks this is an awesome development since he’s a huge basketball fan). But it’s certainly true, as that great Michael Luo piece in the New York Times showed, that his faith and testimony resonate with people as well.

The other thing I think will be interesting to see in coverage is how Lin’s faith affects how he handles his work and the attention he receives:

A gracious Lin, who led the Knicks to another dazzling hardwood victory Sunday, gave Federico and Bretos the benefit of the doubt.

“They’ve apologized, and so from my end, I don’t care anymore,” Lin said. “You have to learn to forgive, and I don’t even think that was intentional.”

I just wanted to point out that the Daily News did a good job of naturally incorporating religion into this story, both from Federico’s perspective and Lin’s. For what it’s worth, the guy who was suspended also used the phrase with its non-slur meaning, and pointed out that he would have avoided it if he’d thought of the racial meaning. He added that his wife (and child) are Asian.

Which leaves me with one last religion-related question and it’s the kind we don’t typically touch here. But I’m curious what you all think. The Daily News writes that the offending headline was the last headline Federico wrote before heading home at 2:30 AM and that it may be the last headline he ever writes. Now, I know that not everyone practices forgiveness or related religious concepts, but why, exactly, was the guy fired? For not knowing that a completely legitimate phrase that has been used for hundreds of years also contains a word with a racist meaning of more recent vintage? Is that a standard we want to use in newsrooms? A requirement that editors have perfect knowledge of racism? I do think that editors should be aware of racism and racist words and strive to avoid causing offense, but when I look at this story, I’m wondering if newsrooms shouldn’t do some soul-searching of their own.

Filed Under: Evangelicals, Journalism, Pop Culture, Sports

The Jeremy Lin factor

February 19, 2012 By

Jeremy Lin’s winning streak may have ended Friday, but he picked right back up today with 28 points and 14 assists during the Knicks’ win against the Mavericks.

Headline writers are having a field day with potential puns, but that hasn’t worked out well for ESPN, which fired a staffer for writing “Chink in the armor” in a headline and suspended an anchor. Lin’s popularity certainly has something to do with ethnicity, which some outlets may struggle to cover.

On the other hand, some outlets are covering several different angles, including a profile from the Mercury News and an interesting interview with Lin’s pastor from the Washington Post‘s On Faith, among other pieces on religion and sports.

I’ve been pretty impressed by several articles from The New York Times that have captured some of the nuances of both race and religion. We’ve already looked at Michael Luo’s first-person piece and talked to him for more background. I laughed out loud at the quote the Times captured from Lin’s grandmother. “I know nothing about basketball.

I only know when Jeremy puts the ball in the basket he has done a good thing.” I also appreciated a Times piece on what Lin’s rise to prominence has done for Christians in China. American Protestant missionaries converted Lin’s great-grandfather to Christianity, the article reports.

Lin’s combination of success in the N.B.A. and strong Christian faith — he has spoken in the past of becoming a pastor someday — has fired the imagination of many Asian-American Christians. There are some early signs that he may also be catching the attention of Christians in China, who continue to face varying levels of persecution.

Only 1,500 of the initial 1.4 million microblogging messages on mainland Chinese Web sites that mentioned Lin also mentioned Christianity.

The article mentions twice the fact that Christians in China are persecuted, but it doesn’t go into too many specifics. It does, however, show how the government tries to temper the spread of Christianity.

Chinese authorities allow one Protestant seminary per province, as a way to limit the number of pastors and slow the spread of Christianity, which by some estimates may have more than 100 million adherents among China’s 1.3 billion people.

Mao ordered the merger of Protestant denominations in China in 1958; while different strands of Protestantism have informally re-emerged since Mao’s death in 1976, they must share a small supply of seminary graduates and other pastors trained at Bible schools operating informally.

Kudos to the Times for looking deeper, showing how one athlete’s popularity spotlights something larger about Christianity in China. And we hope you enjoy this week’s podcast.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Filed Under: Evangelicals, People, Podcasts, Race, Religion, Sports

Luo on Linsanity, faith and ethnicity

February 14, 2012 By

Linsanity is alive and well tonight as Jeremy Lin gave New York a nice Valentine’s Day present: a last-second three-pointer to nail the Knicks’ win over the Raptors.

As journalists are trying to capture Lin’s rise to popularity in the NBA, some might look to Poynter for tips for how to cover the phenomenon, potential pits to watch for and story ideas to consider. Naturally the organization offered some tips for covering the Linsanity phenomenom. In trying to capture the uniqueness of Lin’s story, Poynter urges journalists to avoid falling into stereotypes when covering an Asian American Harvard graduate who is a “devout Christian.”

When you think of “Ivy League grad,” what stereotypes come to mind? Brainy, elitist, arrogant? “Asian American man”– inscrutable, passive, reserved? “Devout Christian” — judgmental, moralistic, holier than thou?

There’s nothing like a “judgmental, moralistic, holier than thou” description to hammer down what journalists think of when they think “devout Christian.” Thankfully, though, the author pointed journalists to Michael Luo’s first-person narrative in the New York Times, where Luo compared his own background as an Asian American Christian who went to Harvard to give examples for why the basketball star has particularly resonated with so many people. Luo isn’t usually in first-person mode. He is an investigative reporter for the Times who has also worked at the Associated Press, Newsday and The Los Angeles Times. We looked at the piece a few days ago and saw a few pieces of background on his Twitter feed, but we thought it would be interesting to talk directly to Luo about religion and ethnicity, why he felt vulnerable writing his piece and the state of religion and the media.

You have gotten quite a bit of response to your first-person piece on Jeremy Lin. Do you think the media misses potential distinctions when covering religion and ethnicity?

Yes, the response on Twitter, Facebook and in reader emails has been pretty stunning. More than 1,500 people tweeted the story link, according to Topsy.com, the social media search engine. At one point over the weekend, it was the most tweeted story on nytimes.com, other than our Whitney Houston obituary. All this for a little essay than ran in the back of the Sports section in the print edition.

In response to your question, I grappled a good bit with what exactly I could say in my essay that was new and potentially instructive about Jeremy Lin. I thought about just explaining my emotional connection as an Asian American, which is arguably applicable to a broader swathe of people. But I realized writing about him as an Asian American Christian, specifically, could be illuminating, because it is a sub-category on the religious continuum that is not widely known. It is also a huge part of Lin’s identity. Understanding that he is an Asian American Christian, specifically, is important to understanding him, I felt. Of course, that is not what the entire piece was about. I was trying to explain this welter of emotions inside of me that he evokes and this multi-layered sense of connection.

Certainly, there is a danger in lumping all theologically conservative Christians, or “evangelicals,” together, because there are distinct differences in the histories, cultural milieus and general orientations of white, black, Asian and Latino evangelicals. Has the media papered over these distinctions? Sure. Part of it is our under-coverage of religion in general. The other part of it is just getting out there and covering these communities in thoughtful, in-depth ways.

When you tweeted that it was a vulnerable column, did you feel like you were risking something by writing about yourself? How do you think reporters who are open about their faith are perceived internally at their media outlets or externally as a reporter?

As a journalist, my instinct, in general, is to shy away from making myself the story in any way. The risk in identifying myself, as I did in the article, as one of these “every-Sunday-worshiping, try-to-read-the Bible-and-pray” types is on two levels. There’s the personal risk in terms of what others might think of me, whether they will instinctively try to put me in a certain box, or ascribe certain stereotypes onto me, which no one likes. There’s also the journalistic risk, in terms of whether it might affect my ability to do my job and be credible as an objective journalist. I weighed the latter a good bit with Joe Sexton, the sports editor, and Phi Corbett, the Times’ standards editor. Both thought that the piece did not cross any inappropriate boundaries.

A top-tier newspaper is like any other institution filled with a lot of highly educated people, many from elite schools. Religious belief is not the rule, but I would contend that there are more committed Christians and others who take their faiths seriously at the New York Times than you might think. I’m definitely not the only one. In terms of how reporters who are open about their faiths are perceived, I don’t know exactly what people think of me privately. Have there been times, with a comment here, or a remark there, when I have felt uncomfortable as a Christian? Yes, certainly. But I can also say that it has never been held against me at the newspaper. In fact, I think higher-ups at the paper consider it an asset, just as it’s an asset to have people of varying racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and life experiences at the paper.

You wrote, “I like to think of my approach to faith as nuanced and not fitting easily into anyone’s standard boxes.” Do you think reporters understand how to write about faith in a nuanced way?

I think newspapers and the media in general could do a better job on this front. We tend to write about religion from the perspective of conflict. It’s a general journalistic trope, not just in religious coverage. I think we could do a better job seeking out stories about how faith plays out in people’s everyday lives. That’s where nuance comes out.

In comparing Lin to Tim Tebow, you suggest that Asian American Christians are rarely culture warriors. If someone like Tebow might be considered part of the culture war, is that due to the way he acts out his faith or perhaps the way he’s portrayed by the media? Or maybe both?

I think part of it has to do with him and part of it—maybe even much of it—has nothing to do with him at all. Yes, as you pointed out, he did appear in a Focus on the Family television commercial. And, yes, there’s the way he “Tebows” and wears the eye-black with the Bible verses. He also has this in-your-face, warrior persona, not necessarily specific to the culture wars but just as a football player. But I think the manner in which Tebow has become such a polarizing figure is also, in large measure, because of how he has come to represent the stereotype of all evangelicals—specifically white evangelicals who are part of the so-called religious right. That’s partly the media’s fault. But that’s also partly just the way the word, “evangelical,” has morphed since the 1980s into a political term, synonymous with Christian conservatism, as opposed to a theological one, which is how it really began.

You are not on the religion beat per se, but your stories often overlap with religion. How do you decide when to follow a religion angle in an otherwise more general story?

I work in the investigations cluster at the New York Times, so I don’t really cover religion as part of my normal job at all these days. I spent the last year doing a series of investigative stories on gaps in gun laws. And now I’m working on political investigative stories. I did briefly cover religion for the metro desk several years ago. And I have been sometimes asked to lend a hand on certain religion stories, particularly when it comes to coverage of evangelicals. But I’ve also just stumbled upon religion stories when I’ve covered other beats, just because they’re there for the taking. When I was doing a rotation in our Baghdad bureau back in 2006, I did an article on the plight of Iraqi Christians. When I covered politics, I inevitably found myself doing various stories relating to religion, like one I did on Hillary Clinton’s faith. Reporters are always looking for something new and fresh to write about. Sometimes the most fertile ground that has not been trodden upon relates to religion.

Filed Under: 5Q+1, Journalism, People, Race, Sports

Jeremy Lin, the Knicks’ Tim Tebow?

February 11, 2012 By

This morning I asked my sports reporter husband if he knew who Jeremy Lin was. He laughed and responded: “Do you know who Billy Graham is?” Feeling a little silly, I started reading up on the couch-surfing basketball star who is apparently taking the world by storm, or at least the NBA. “Forget Tebowing,” the Associated Press says. “Linsanity is the new sports sensation.”

Lin, an undrafted point guard from Harvard who wants to become a pastor, led the New York Knicks past the LA Lakers with a career-high 38 points Friday night. In two parts, the New York Times looked at how the star is impacting a particular community with a fantastic quote from a party of Asian American Christians. “I don’t even follow football,” one woman said. “Wait, this isn’t football.”

If Lin’s storybook week captured the imagination of New York City and the wider sports world, it hit the community of Christian Asian-Americans like a lightning bolt.

I especially appreciated this fascinating piece from Michael Luo, an investigative reporter for the Times, who draws on Lin’s popularity and his own experience to make a point about Asian American Christian culture.

Like Lin, I’m a Harvard graduate, albeit more than a decade ahead of him, and a second-generation Chinese-American. I’m also a fellow believer, one of those every-Sunday-worshiping, try-to-read-the-Bible-and-pray types, who agreed with Lin when he said to reporters after the Jazz game, “God works in mysterious and miraculous ways.”

Being a believer can mean different things in different circles. In a lot of the ones Lin and I have traveled, it can mean, essentially, you are a bit of a weirdo, or can make you an object of scorn.

Lin’s ethnicity is definitely part of the media’s storyline, since he is the NBA’s first American-born player of Taiwanese or Chinese descent and just the league’s fourth Asian American. But there’s a faith backdrop that a few outlets are picking up on, making the inevitable Tim Tebow comparisons. Luo makes the case that Lin will not, in fact, become a Tebow for the NBA because of how he approaches his faith.

Some have predicted that Lin, because of his faith, will become the Taiwanese Tebow, a reference to Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, whose outspokenness about his evangelical Christian beliefs has made him extraordinarily popular in some circles and venomously disliked in others. But my gut tells me that Lin will not wind up like Tebow, mainly because Lin’s persona is so strikingly different. From talking to people who knew him through the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship, and watching his interviews, I have the sense that his is a quieter, potentially less polarizing but no less devout style of faith.

Lin comes across as soft-spoken and winsome; he comes across as thoughtful. He comes across, actually, as a distinctly Asian-American Christian, or at least like so many that I know.

What I would love to see are some examples of how Tebow is more vocal than Lin about his faith. Is he perhaps interviewed more often? Are the NFL athlete’s outward displays of faith (Tebowing!) more visible than what Lin does on the court? Might Tebow’s role as quarterback play a factor in why the two athletes come across differently? When I look at Lin’s social media outlets, he seems just as vocal as Tebow.

God is good during our ups and our downs! Glad we got the win!! Thanks to @landryfields for lettin me crash on his couch last night lol

Awesome church service to start 2012! My new years resolution: love God more deeply and intimately by dec 31 than I did on jan 1

Psalm 46:10 — “He says, ‘Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.’”

But I am open to Luo’s argument that there is something fundamentally different about Lin than Tebow, so let’s keep going.

Harvard’s Asian American Christian Fellowship, which started in the 1990s, is one of the most active student groups on campus. You will also immediately know it if you are part of a historically orthodox church in a major metropolitan center like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston or Los Angeles because your pews are probably filled with them. Like Lin, many Asian-American Christians have deep personal faith, but they are also, notably, almost never culture warriors. That is simply not what is emphasized in their churches and college Christian fellowships, including the one that played such a formative role in Lin’s life at Harvard.

Luo’s suggestion that Asian American Christians are not terribly vocal culture warriors is an interesting distinction if we’re keeping up with a Tebow comparison, who has been sometimes portrayed as a culture warrior. Yes, he appeared in a rather mild advertisement from Focus on the Family, but you have to know the back story to know it had anything to do with abortion. I’m not out to defend Tebow in any way, but he doesn’t actually really address any culture war issues when you think about it, unless Tebowing became part of the culture wars when I wasn’t looking.

Luo admits he kept up with Tebow’s season, in part because of their shared faith. “More than anything, though, I found the fierce emotions he incited on both sides of the religious divide depressing,” Luo wrote. Lin, on the other hand, has “a brand of faith, shaped by his background, that I can relate to much better than many I have seen in the public arena.”

I also read about his personal faith and the way he helped lead a small group for his Christian fellowship, harking back to the way I became a Christian in college, in part through some of these same small groups, in which we often wrestled with difficult questions deep into the night.

I like to think of my approach to faith as nuanced and not fitting easily into anyone’s standard boxes. I suspect Lin’s has to be as well.

Luo offered some reader response and a bit of background on his twitter feed today:

Got reader email who said he was “puking” from the xianity ref. Another said it made him “doubt” my “harvard credentials.”

Backstory on my @jlin7 essay. Sports ed asked if i wud consider doing Tues. I grappled w/ vulnerability, whether i had anything new to say.

I thot abt writing what Lin meant 4 asian-amers broadly but felt that’d been done. What i tried to do was introduce a-a xians specifically.

And more i thought abt it, Lin being asian american xian is a very distinctive thing, something country hadn’t seen and was significant.

Sports analysts who look try to tackle the Tebow vs. Lin question will likely consider pure athleticism. While I’m still grappling with the implicit idea of Tebow as culture warrior, Luo’s smart analysis of the Asian American Christian community is something few other reporters would think to spot. And perhaps some day we’ll get to read more about Luo’s nuanced approach to faith.

Filed Under: Evangelicals, Journalism, People, Race, Religion, Sports

Family + friends + faith equals …

June 3, 2009 By

atlantichappinessOne of the best things about making a 9-hour flight on an airliner is that it gives you enough time to read an issue of Atlantic Monthly. Thus, on the way to Kiev, I finally got to read the stunning “What Makes Us Happy?” cover story by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

The subtitle to that headline is an important one, seeing has how it has to lure the reader into consuming a 11,526-word piece of magazine journalism: “Friends matter. Cholesterol doesn’t. Lessons from an amazing 72-year study.”

I called the article stunning, not so much in what it reveals, but how it reveals it. You want to read this article. Trust me.

Yet, at the same time, there is a giant, gaping hole in the middle of the piece — literally a hole in the soul. I’m going to try to write a short post about this that will encourage you to wade into this long, long article about the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Here’s the crucial information that gets us rolling:

The project is one of the longest-running — and probably the most exhaustive — longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse — and now well into retirement — the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries. They sit in a wall of locked cabinets in an office suite behind Fenway Park in Boston, in a plain room with beige carpeting and fluorescent lights that is littered with the detritus of many decades of social-scientific inquiry: a pile of enormous spreadsheet data books; a 1970s-era typewriter; a Macintosh PowerBook, circa 1993. All that’s missing are the IBM punch cards used to analyze the data in the early days.

For 42 years, the psychiatrist George Vaillant has been the chief curator of these lives, the chief investigator of their experiences, and the chief analyst of their lessons. His own life has been so woven into the study — and the study has become such a creature of his mind — that neither can be understood without the other.

Some of the anonymous men involved in the study have openly discussed their participation, such as former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Study leaders have also stated that a young Harvard man named John F. Kennedy was another subject whose life was studied until his untimely death.

The article is built around italicized excerpts from the case-study files, offering insights into these anonymous men worthy of fine fiction. It is also clear that, in the end, one of the goals of this article goals is to find out, well, if Vaillant is himself a happy, healthy and fulfilled man. I will not reveal anything about the plot of that drama.

marriagehandsIt’s clear that stability and fidelity are crucial, especially in terms of family and friendships. It really, really helps to have a solid, happy marriage. And did I mention fidelity? That seems to be a crucial factor linked to mental and physical health, which is interesting for a study of men who came of age just ahead of the Sexual Revolution (or who wrestled with mid-life pains in the midst of that moral earthquake).

But wait. Might there be another crucial happiness factor, producing a trinity of family, friendships and, well, faith? The article does offer this:

… (H)appiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness — a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness — account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.) But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides? How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger) — yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?

So marriage and faith lead to happiness? They are crucial factors? What if those factors are turned upside down? Does the study reveal anything else about the faith factor?

No.

At least, this article does not contain another word of substance on that issue, other than a few references to church attendance. If you are looking for the role of faith and spirituality in human happiness, this is not the article for you.

I really, really miss Michael Kelly.

Filed Under: Academia, Marriage & family, People, Religion, Science

Give us the faith-based details

July 2, 2008 By

orwellIn his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell criticized modern writers for all manners of sins, not the least of which were a lack of detail and specificity. He cited a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong …” Then he translated it in modern English: “Objective consideration of temporary phenomena compels the conclusion …”

Though written more than 60 years ago, Orwell’s passage is still relevant today. Take the major print coverage of Barack Obama’s faith-based announcement yesterday.

Most of the stories focused on the right topic: the program’s hiring and firing provisions. But their descriptions were almost as general and opaque as Orwell’s second passage.

The New York Times, as Daniel noted, gave readers the most information about Obama’s plan. Yet reporters Jeff Zeleny and Michael Luo described the controversial provision in only the haziest of terms:

Mr. Obama’s plan pointedly departed from the Bush administration’s stance on one fundamental issue: whether religious organizations that get federal money for social services can take faith into account in their hiring. Mr. Bush has said yes. Mr. Obama said no.

“If you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion,” Mr. Obama said. “Federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples and mosques can only be used on secular programs.”

So, too, did Jennifer Loven of the Associated Press:

Obama’s support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions was likely to invite a storm of protest from those who view such faith requirements as discrimination.

Only Jonathan Weisman of The Washington Post filled readers in on the details, if partially:

Those aides said an Obama administration would get tough on groups that discriminate in hiring practices and doling out assistance. The groups would have to abide by federal hiring laws that reject discrimination based on race, sex and religion. Obama said he supports federal legislation that would extend those protections to gay people as well, a flash point with some religious organizations that say hiring or assisting gays would run counter to their beliefs.

Except for Weisman’s passage, those of the NYTimes and AP, as well as The Politico, were vague. An otherwise informed reader would wonder what’s the fuss all about. Little would the reader know that Obama’s plan is a big deal: An orthodox Jewish group would have to consider hiring gay Catholics, while a liberal Lutheran organization would need to consider bringing on board conservative Muslims.

In other words, while religious groups can receive federal funds to help the needy, they cannot do so to pick their own co-religionists. Was this not the policy in place before President Bush? If so, the reporters mischaracterized Obama’s plan as an expansion of Bush’s program. In fact, Obama’s plan would all but rescind it.

Another major deficiency in the coverage is a lack of specificity about how Obama would prevent religious groups from discriminating against employees. Does he propose adding an office to the Justice Department?

These stories suggest that God is indeed in the details. They also suggest that You Know What exists in their absence.

Filed Under: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Journalism, Mainline, Politics, Religion, Social Issues, World Religions