One of the things I love the most about being back in Washington, D.C., once a year is the joy of reading a great newspaper — on dead tree pulp. There is nothing like reading an old-fashioned analog newspaper to help you see the ghosts drifting through the lines of inky type.

Which brings us to a ghost I have been thinking about all week. The excellent Style section of the Washington Post recently ran a haunting article about the state of sexual ethics among some young women on university campuses and in the jobs that come right afterwards. Clearly, this was some kind of post-Sex & the City meditation.

The main focus is on “The Number.” What is that? This refers to a debate among young women about the meaning — the moral significance even — of the number of men with whom they have had sexual intercourse. What is too few? What is too many? Should one be able to remember all their names?

Perhaps it is best to keep a diary or even a computerized, annotated list. And, in the end, what does this “numbers game” say about love and life? Are there limits of any kind? At some point, is the soul damaged? Actually, the Post did not ask that last one. I did.

It is interesting to note that this article was written by Laura Sessions Stepp, a reporter with experience at religion coverage. But tricky issues of faith, the Bible and centuries of Judeo-Christian values never appear, even if traces of the past seem to haunt some of the voices who tell their stories. Listen to this:

Jennifer Broussard, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania a year ago, used to tally up her companions on a sheet in her organizer, attaching dates and footnotes. She’d dial up a girlfriend to ask things like, “What counts? What doesn’t? I’m about to pass my benchmark. Is this guy worth it?” …

These women analyze their numbers as if they were comparison shopping for the right size and color of shoes. They tell each other that sex is separate from love. And few adults tell them any different. Sex education teachers lecture on body parts and disease, and we know that parents would rather throw themselves in front of a truck than talk in depth about sex and romance.

Is sex the same as “hooking up”? Does it add a new number to the list to double up and sleep with an old, discarded boyfriend? What if a young women sleeps with a few too many men and then meets Mr. Right and, gasp, he is the kind of man who might care if his fiance has, well, worked her way past a certain number? Who can see into the future and see if any particular moral standard will be required? Does using the right “protection” for your body also protect your heart?

So maybe 10 is a good number and number 11 needs to be the husband, the real thing. How does that sound? Or is 10 too high? Who can tell? And, oh, is honesty a requirement? Back to the Post story:

By the time the third or fourth year of college rolls around, a little creative accounting may be required.

Julia Baugher, who graduated this month from Georgetown, wrote about numbers in her sex column for the student newspaper. “If x = Number [that women] say they’ve slept with,” she wrote, “then the Actual Number is x + Number she wishes she hadn’t slept with.”

“I used to be really [picky] about my number,” says Baugher, who keeps a running total on a computerized spreadsheet with side comments such as “weird teeth” and “future med student.”

“I said everything counted,” she continues. “I was approaching double digits and I didn’t like it, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it.”

Then she read “The Catholic Girl’s Guide to Sex,” which offered advice on clever accounting tricks. It doesn’t count if you are drunk. You were on vacation. It was an accident.

It seems that this is the only kind of advice that is available these days, even at on a modern Catholic campus. The wisdom of the past remains safely out of sight, even if it is not totally out of the minds of these young women. This story did leave me curious about one thing. Are there any priests at Georgetown?

A personal note: Doug is traveling and I am on the road, as well. So we are both away from computers much more than normal. This will affect our ability to post every day, which is our goal. I am reading your comments and doing what I can to respond. And I keep reading the God-beat news. I simply takes me longer to get from the reading to the blogging.

The last time we checked in on Thomas Monaghan, the former czar of Domino’s Pizza, his newborn Ave Maria University was rolling out ambitious Phase 1 plans for a campus and surrounding town near Naples, Fla. The headline grabber was a 60,000-square-foot, 150-foot tall sanctuary for 3,300 worshippers that looked like a stack of gigantic metal-and-glass mitres for bishops.

I mentioned that Ave Maria was causing a heated debate between mainstream, that is progressive, Catholic educators and a new tribe of conservative, pro-Rome educators who are starting a small wave of highly traditional Catholic schools. I like to call these institutions the “new old Catholic colleges” as opposed to the mainstream “old new Catholic colleges.”

Reporter Burton Bollag of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently dug into this side of the story. Here is one of the money paragraphs from his feature story:

Dissatisfied with existing Catholic higher education, the new colleges aspire to train graduates who will raise a strong and orthodox Catholic intellectual voice in the debates over stem-cell research, gay marriage, and other social issues. They strive to maintain a conservative campus life, where students and faculty members attend Mass frequently, premarital sex is strictly forbidden, and gay support groups have no place.

The assumption, of course, is that the mainstream Catholic campuses — to one degree or another — represent an agenda that is the mirror opposite of this one. Either that, or they are environments in which people may practice this older, more orthodox, brand of Catholicism in private. But surely few would be so bold as to stand up in public and loudly proclaim this faith, let alone say that Rome has declared it to be the faith once delivered to the saints.

There is more to this story than millions and millions of dollars worth of education assets. In the end, this debate starts to sound very, very familiar to anyone who has covered the battles over the faith status of politicos such as Sen. John “Call me JFK” Kerry.

There is that question again. Who are the true Roman Catholics? The Catholics who support the teachings of Rome or those who oppose them or, at least, do not want to see those teachings advocated or enforced?

Mainstream Catholic educators are often peeved by perceptions that Ave Maria and the other new institutions set themselves apart not just from secular colleges, but from most Catholic ones, too. “What bothers us,” says Monika K. Hellwig, a former professor of theology who is president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, “is that they think we’re not properly Catholic.”

That would seem to be the issue. Those who support Ave Maria and the other “new old Catholic colleges” would, of course, state the issue differently. They would say the key is whether the Vatican thinks the progressive American Catholic schools are “properly Catholic.” And there is the rub. Once again, the American bishops stand in the line of fire. Who will advocate the teachings and policies of the Vatican? Does anyone dare do that? As Bollag’s article notes:

In 1990 the Vatican attempted to restore a degree of the church’s authority over Catholic higher education when Pope John Paul II issued Ex corde Ecclesiae — literally: from the heart of the church. After its release, American bishops said Catholic theologians had to seek a mandatum certifying that they were teaching “authentic Catholic doctrine.” The controversial order appears to have been largely ignored.

My first full-time job in journalism was working as a copy editor, which meant that I spent much of my trying to write good headlines to go over news stories. One of the first rules I learned was this: Don’t put a funny headline on a story unless you think there is something truly funny about the content of the story.

Which brings us back to my local newspaper — the Palm Beach Post — and its page-one story today about the giant plans for Ave Maria University in Collier County, Fla., near Naples. The driving financial force behind the Ave Maria (Latin for “Hail Mary”) story is Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza.

There are a lot of big facts about this story, and this project has generated strong opinions on both the left and right sides of the Catholic-education aisle. The key story this week was the announcement of the Phase 1 construction plans, including 15 buildings at the heart of what will eventually be a campus and the new town of Ave Maria. The centerpiece of Phase 1 is a glittering, 60,000-square-foot, 150-foot tall sanctuary that will seat 3,300 worshippers.

In its local print edition, the Post used this headline: “Church built with pizza dough: Extra large.” The online version had a variation on the same laugh line: “Ex-pizza magnate’s church to be extra large.”

The content of the story is, I guess, more serious than these headlines, but focuses totally on the size and novelty of this project. The basic idea is that some very strange and very rich Catholics are building a very large and bizarre church out in the middle of nowhere for reasons that are very mysterious.

Readers that are interested in matters of faith, or even higher education in general, are left with lots of unanswered questions, such as: Why would a university, as its first move on the academic chessboard, build a sanctuary of this size? Why will the sanctuary contain 14 confessionals? Why do the school’s leaders think it is going to be such a massive success? What does this say in an age in which most Catholic schools are going “mainstream” and, thus, downplaying religious rites and roots?

To find the answers to such questions, readers would need to head across the Everglades to the Naples Daily News. In fairness, this is a local story for this newsroom (which I should note is operated by Scripps Howard, the news service that carries my column) and, thus, will receive more attention. But even daily news reports can at least hint at some of the faith elements in such a story, and reporter Dianna Smith does so.

For example, the chancellor of Ave Maria is a conservative Jesuit, Father Joseph Fessio. He notes that the sanctuary will be built facing east because, in Smith’s paraphrase, the “east is where newness comes from.”

“Catholic churches here have always been built facing the east,” Fessio said. “We (designed) this church facing the rising sun. Our whole lives should be oriented toward the sun.”

By the way, I would be willing to bet that what the priest said next was that churches have traditionally faced east toward the “risen Son.” But, that’s the kind of detail that is hard to work into most news reports.

… up online at the Scripps Howard News Service side, if anyone wants to see the final step in the march from the God-beat blogosphere to dead tree pulp. Click here.

WACO — Every decade or so a journalism storm hits Baylor University, leading to a wave of ink about Baptists, sex and freedom of the press.

The most famous was a controversy two decades ago about Baylor coeds in Playboy. Right now, folks are hyperventilating about a student newspaper editorial supporting same-sex marriage. The Lariat editorial concluded:

Like many heterosexual couples, many gay couples share deep bonds of love, some so strong they’ve persevered years of discrimination for their choice to co-habitate with and date one another. Just as it isn’t fair to discriminate against someone for their skin color, heritage or religious beliefs, it isn’t fair to discriminate against someone for their sexual orientation. Shouldn’t gay couples be allowed to enjoy the benefits and happiness of marriage, too?

I know how these dramas tend to play out, because back in the mid-1970s there was another blowup in which a handful of students tried to write actual news stories — not editorials, but news stories — that Baylor administrators opposed. In that case, I was one of the journalism students who got caught in the crossfire. It’s interesting to note that some of the administrators who crushed us back them are often hailed in the media these days as the enlightened, progressive voices at Baylor. Times change.

The latest controversy comes in the midst of national headlines about Baylor, headlines focusing on scandals in the basketball program and bitter divisions in the faculty over what is and what is not `Christian education.` There is a lot I could say about all of that, since I speak fluent Baylor-ese. Maybe some other time.

But this is a journalism blog, so let’s pause for a second and consider a different journalism-education scenario for this latest Baylor storm.

Let’s say that the students did not resort to writing an editorial about one of the most divisive issues in American culture. After all, the quick-strike strategy of writing an editorial — when seen in the context of continuing Baylor controversies — was almost certainly a trial balloon seeking headlines in the Waco Tribune-Herald and through that coverage the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle and perhaps even The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Let’s say that, instead of writing that easy editorial, the editors assigned their best reporters to write two news feature stories.

Like any religious institution in the era after James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars, we can say that Baylor has its `camp of the progressives` (truth is personal and experiential) and its `camp of the orthodox` (revealed truth is eternal and absolute). This is, after all, what the ongoing Baylor academic warfare is all about.

So the Lariat devotes one 2,000-word story to the views of the Baylor progressives, who explain why they think that changing U.S. laws to favor same-sex marriage is a good thing. They also explain how this affects their views of public education, free speech, freedom of assembly and religious liberty. They say what they have to say on the record.

Then the Lariat devotes a 2,000-word story to the views of the orthodox, those who believe that America should not embrace a fundamental redefinition of marriage. Baylor has national-level people who can address this issue. They also are quoted, on the record, answering the same set of questions.

After these stories run, the Lariat editors might want to write an editorial. On an issue this hot, it would certainly help to offer dissenting voices a chance to speak, as well.

This is, in my way of thinking, a more journalistic approach. I also think it would create a different kind of controversy — a more constructive kind. Instead of fostering academic guerrilla warfare and media stereotypes, this would put more information on the record. This might even lead to informed debate.

What is the purpose of having student journalists write editorials that cause news, before they have gone through the journalistic process of writing stories that report both sides of the news? Why not treat this as a subject for news reporting?

Note that this approach would require leaders of both warring Baylor camps to speak on the record, placing their views out in the open for all the world to see — including regents, donors and parents.

I think this would be a good thing, journalistically speaking.

So here is my question, as a battle-scarred veteran of the Christian college journalism wars at Baylor and elsewhere: Which camp at Baylor would oppose this open, on-the-record, journalistic scenario? The progressives or the orthodox?