That’s all folks (for now)

July 31, 2005 By

With this post I take my leave of GetReligion. Terry Mattingly should be along either later today or early tomorrow to announce further changes. I’m skedaddling to devote time to a book-in-progress about hypocrisy, which should land in finer retail outlets next year. Don’t know if I’ll be back to these cyber pages, but I wouldn’t rule it out. It has been fun.

Before I go, let me say a few things about my co-bloggers.

I bumped into Doug LeBlanc when he was the book review editor for Christianity Today and found him to be a remarkably understanding editor. He let me write about things that caught my interest, insisted on changes when I went off the rails, didn’t meddle needlessly, and helped to negotiate my work through what can become an editorial buzz saw. So when he sent an e-mail asking if I’d like to work with him on this site he was associated with called GetReligion, I didn’t give it much thought. I didn’t have to.

At GetReligion, Doug has saved me from numerous embarrassing mistakes and some truly traumatic typos. He has also been a great friend, and I’ll miss some of our bull session-like and “Hey can you please fix this?”-oriented phone calls. No doubt he’ll now have exponentially more free time.

And what does one say about Terry Mattingly? The guy is so tireless he’s almost a force of nature. The passion he brings to teaching and analyzing journalism makes Howie Kurtz look like a lazy part-timer. “On deadline” should be the epitaph they carve on his tombstone. He’s also sweet and quirky and funny and he evinces a remarkable ability to crash any computer program known to man.

Terry cared enough to give a down-on-his-luck freelancer a regular gig and a lot of rope. For that I will always be grateful.

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Get your Freak on

July 7, 2005 By

It appears to be abortion week at GetReligion, so I don’t feel too bad about this shameless plug. Several weeks back, an editor from Beliefnet (host of Blog Heaven) approached me about a project that her website had in mind. There was this new book called Freakonomics, maybe I’d heard of it . . .

Beliefnet had permission to run an excerpt, and the site wanted a pro-lifer to subject Levitt and company to some scrutiny. I was asked to criticize the book’s abortion arguments on ethical grounds. Here’s the setup in the piece:

[S]uppose that economists and social scientists from other disciplines subject Levitt’s conclusions to a battery of tests and find he has proved not only loose correlation but ironclad causation. In other words, suppose that more abortions do translate into lower incidence of crime, and go from there. Should that affect how we think about abortion?

Short answer: no.

My only problem with this proposal was that I didn’t want to leave readers with the impression that Levitt’s findings on abortion are unassailable, so I offered to do a piece arguing against both the economics and the ethics of the abortion arguments in Freakonomics. The website turned this offer down, but promised to link prominently to Steve Sailer’s criticism of the book, and has done so.

Fun moment along the way: I was riding the Metro from D.C. to my home in Virginia. I took my seat along with a young woman who I’d never met.

“Well that’s weird,” I said, when I glanced over at her.

She agreed, and we traded stupid smiles.

We were both reading Freakonomics. Even more eerie: We were both on the same page in the middle of the book. Any other book and I would have started a conversation, but I didn’t want to accidentally start an argument about abortion on the Metro, so we’ll just have to add her to the long list of ones that got away.

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Filed Under: First Person, Politics, Pop Culture

Reaching tmatt (but not today)

July 6, 2005 By

high elevation blue ridgeA personal note from the DotCom Cafe in beautiful Burnsville, N.C. I had to come in this a.m. to ship the column to Scripps Howard News Service.

Next stop — Mitford. Anyone get the reference?

From time to time, people write to ask how to send us stuff (while promising not to be cyber stalkers) for personal reactions. In my case, it just became a lot easier to tell people how to reach me. All you have to do is look up the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, where I am moving next week to start work on a semester-length journalism program. This is growing out of the 11-year-old Summer Institute of Journalism project.

All you have to do to reach me now is consult the contact us information at cccu.org and that’s that. Thanks! Now back to the mountains.

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On the road: Did Google get religion?

July 3, 2005 By

Whoa! Is it just me, or did everyone click on Google News this a.m. and find the following section available in the main page? If this change has somehow been made in the Google template, the timing could not be better.

The Rt. Rev. LeBlanc may need to cue up the Freak Out theme music again.

Religion »

Religion: God and money
U.S. News & World Report — Jun 14, 2005
You might think so. After all, the father of modern sociology, Max Weber, saw that there was a pretty powerful connection between being a good Protestant and being a good capitalist. But people have been arguing . . .

Tech Central Station
After thinking about it, justices decide to let us think about it
Chicago Daily Southtown — 53 minutes ago
By Marlene Lang. The US Constitution doesn’t name all the messy potential manifestations of “establishment of a religion,” as forbidden in the First Amendment. What we need is a tidy list of all possible situational . . .

Thou shalt not waffle
Marion Chronicle Tribune
Kentucky congressmen back amending the Constitution
Louisville Courier-Journal
Palm Beach Post — commercialappeal.com (subscription) — Roanoke Times Washington Times — all 83 related »

Economist
Believers, Save the Republic!
Washington Post — 8 hours ago
By Jon Meacham. On July 4, 1827, a leading clergyman of the day, the Presbyterian minister Ezra Stiles Ely, preached a controversial sermon in Philadelphia that was published around the country. Its title could . . .

Founding Fathers, founding faith
Orlando Sentinel
THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT RELIGION Yahoo News
Economist — Useless-Knowledge.com – all 5 related »

Scalia’s scary America
St. Petersburg Times — 4 hours ago
By ROBYN E. BLUMNER, Times Perspective Columnist. Justice Antonin Scalia would remake our secular republic into a quasi-theocracy; and with the pending retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, we may soon . . .
Hoisting Liberals on Their Own Petard: Thank You, Justice Scalia MichNews.com
American Rhythms | The court’s delicate dance between church and . . . philly.com
all 6 related »

Etc. Etc. Etc. I don’t even know where to start on this, especially stopped along the roadside on the way to the mountains in a spot of wi-fi.

Speaking of roadside — I saw an interesting kitsch sign about 67 miles into Georga headed north on I-95 yesterday. It said: “America’s smallest church, exit right.” I thought about that and it sort of made sense. Churches on the right tend to split a lot as they fight over doctrine.

I wonder if, somewhere, there is a roadside sign that says: “America’s smallest church with an endowment, exit left.”

Back to the road. Where is the next cyber cafe in the hills?

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A kitschy story as I hit the road

July 2, 2005 By

RoadsideCoverNow this is fun.

The Dallas Morning News has a fun book-related feature up today called “Grace Lands: Professor hits the road in search of religious kitsch, and finds true faith along the way.” The book is called Roadside Religion and it’s about a mainline Protestant attempting to dissect the strange people who live in strange lands dominated by traditional forms of faith, which means that, in many ways, it has the exact same journalistic point of view as the entire Dallas Morning News, especially its nationally known religion section.

But I digress.

The basic idea is that the world is full of very strange religious people and sometimes they make strange religious roadside attractions. What happens if a really smart person visits Ave Maria Grotto, Precious Moments Inspiration Park or Biblical Mini-Golf? So what if he interacts with the natives?

Frequent News contributor Mary A. Jacobs sums up the Presbyterian journey of Dr. Timothy K. Beal thusly:

Don’t judge this book by its cover. The kitschy postcard design may hint at snarky humor and postmodern posturing. Instead, Dr. Beal opened his heart on the open road and found hospitality on the fringes of American religious life. His fascination with roadside icons began on an earlier family trip, when he spotted a sign along Interstate 68 in Maryland: “Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here.”

“There was this big reddish brown steel girder structure next to the highway, languishing in a field,” he said. “We wondered, ‘Who would do something like this? And why?’”

By the time the Beals got home to Shaker Heights, Ohio, he’d hatched a plan. The family would take off on a pilgrimage to discover how many other Ark-like attractions there were out there. He found a warm welcome, so to speak, at Cross Garden in Prattville, Ala., an 11-acre park whose wooden crosses and junked appliances are adorned with messages including, “NO ICE WATER IN HELL! FIRE HOT!” and “YOU WILL DIE” and “IN HELL FROM SEX SEX.”

The final quote from Beal captures the whole “everybody has a story in the postmodern world” approach of this bookish trip into the fringes of normal America. Enjoy.

“I went into this as a scholar, and my scholarly tools maybe were a means of steeling myself against being too vulnerable to these ‘strange’ strangers,” he said. “These people welcomed a visitor whom they didn’t know and shared their stories and their deeply felt experiences. I found that disarming.

“We tend to think about faith in terms of belief. I started to think of faith as being about relationship and hospitality — opening oneself up to the other, to the stranger who drives up in a motor home and wants to know what’s going on. It’s about opening oneself to another and being vulnerable.”

With that, I am out the door to the winding mountain roads of North Carolina, where there are more Baptist churches than there are, well, almost anything else other than trees and highway signs. If I find any strange forms of religion, I will try to get to the only local cyber cafe to send out some word.

Meanwhile, everybody pitch in and send Master Jeremy and the Rt. Rev. LeBlanc lots of input on the unfolding Supreme Court drama. We are especially interested, of course, in MSM coverage of the religious left and the Religious Right. Wonder why the latter is upper case and the former is not?

Bye now.

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Doing that left-right MSM thing

June 24, 2005 By

Those on the left view MSM as mainly conservative. See mediamatters.org.

Posted by wildwest at 11:01 am on June 23, 2005

MSM = corporate owned, lilly-livered, roll over and don’t make waves, sensationalist, full of schmuck reporters standing around in the cold and dark in front of the “scene of the incident” live at 11 pm HOURS after the incident is over and cleaned up and everyone has gone home, site of the pained look of consternation (or constipation, take your pick) while reading grammatically questionable sentence construction about the latest celebrity falderal, really only useful for lining bird cages (print edition).

Posted by Molly at 2:54 pm on June 23, 2005

Clever, but wrong. She describes media in general. All media succumb to the sensational, etc. The MSM manage to do all this and remain utterly unaware of their extremist left-wing bias. Quite talented, really, to juggle both.

Posted by Stephen A. at 9:57 pm on June 23, 2005

Well now.

Let’s pause for a moment for a brief worldview statement about GetReligion, even though I know that can’t speak for my non-Borg partners. This Indianapolis Star bias case is the kind of thing I hear about all the time, since most of my speaking engagements are linked to issues of religion and journalism.

I wonder, is there anyone else out there in the blogosphere/academia/news biz who has, on the within-reach bookshelf above his or her desk, a copy of Ben Bagdikian’s classic The Media Monopoly sitting right next to a copy of Marvin Olasky’s Prodigal Press?

The first is a touchstone book for the left and the latter plays the same role for the right.

Both books argue that the basic structures of journalism are biased. And both of them, I believe, are right. The problem is that these books are focusing on totally different issues, when it comes to media bias.

Bagdikian is a classic political progressive — old school. He is right that the corporate media of our day tend toward a brand of economic conservatism, especially on issues that are close to home. It is hard to get more conservative than a newspaper within shouting range of a military base that is about to be shut down. If corporations are conservative, then we live in an increasingly conservative age in journalism. Your basic one-newspaper-city newspaper is not going to be “liberal” when it comes to groups that attack the economic status quo.

The enemy is Gannett, with all of its top-down corporate culture.

Olasky is a religious, social-issues conservative. He is primarily interested in issues of faith, morality and public culture. He is a political conservative, but he bleeds on media-bias issues linked to abortion, sexuality, religious liberty, etc.

The enemy is, well, Gannett, with all of its top-down, rules-based liberalism on social issues.

Bagdikian has lots and lots of facts on his side when it comes to labor issues, economics, etc. Olasky has lots of facts on his side when it comes to social issues and religion.

In other words, the heart of the MSM is a kind of moral Libertarianism. It’s kind of Clintonian economics and morality. Leave us alone and let us make lots of money. It’s a Hollywood conservatism. It’s a corporate thing. It’s a moderate Republican thing, the brand of faith that dominates business elites.

The problem is that our age is dominated by the politics of social issues. When the first non-conservative seat on the U.S. Supreme Court bench goes open, do you expect hotter-than-hot arguments over economics or morality? Foreign policy or religion?

Do the same dynamics affect the journalism wars? Absolutely. We should expect the Indianapolis Star case to boil down to corporate leaders clashing with the morally conservative beliefs of individuals. You can read all about it in Olasky and Bagdikian.

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The ghosts in Google News

June 12, 2005 By

Young master Jeremy Lott is on to something important with his post yesterday about trying to find a natural niche for religion within Google News. This whole task is not easy and, yes, it is closely related to the overarching purpose of this blog and our search for religion “ghosts” between the lines of many news stories in the MSM.

A few weeks ago, I tried to do the new Google thing where you set up your personal version of the News page that searches the Google world and creates a special section. I, of course, wanted a religion section.

So I started — with the user-friendly Google interface — trying to select a few search terms that would give me a nice Google religion section.

It didn’t work. Why?

Well, what search terms would you select? You can start with the usual names for religious groups — Catholic, Jewish, Baptist, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, Presbyterian, Charismatic, Disciples, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Methodist, Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal, etc., etc. Get the point? How many names and niche groups would you need, just to handle the North American scene?

When I left the religion beat at the Rocky Mountain News, I had file folders up and running on 250-plus religious denominations, groups, leaders and movements.

Google that.

And this kind of online search would yield next to nothing about the subtle parts of religion news that most fascinate me.

A denominational search gets you, well, the “usual suspects.” As the Catholic uber-blogger said in a comment to Jeremy:

Yeah, I did a “Catholic” section on my customized page.

Problem is that 75% of the stories are sports scores.

But I can get through them pretty quickly.

But I think you’re right — a built-in religion section would be good.

Posted by Amy Welborn at 1:01 pm on June 12, 2005

Does a denominational search get you the “ghosts” in the world of entertainment, sports, business, politics, science and academia? It will net some of them, but not many. And it would miss the most interesting ones, since they are rooted in faith elements that are hard to pin down. It will miss most of the true ghosts.

It’s like the work of our best MSM Godbeat reporters. The better the journalist, the harder it is to lock them up on a niche page. We have commented on this before and it will remain at the heart of the GetReligion task.

We’ll keep trying and we want you to join in. For example, if you get some great Google “religion page” search terms, let us know. We can send them to the Google powers that be, to help them create a lively home for this crucial news content.

Search on.

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A word from li'l ol' neocon conservative Democrat me

May 20, 2005 By

I am in Washington, D.C., at the moment up to my eyebrows in the first few days of the 11th annual Summer Institute of Journalism here at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities — about a 10-minute walk from the U.S. Capitol. See this if that interests you.

I am, however, having quite a bit of trouble getting online enough to do serious blog work. I hope this note makes it online. WiFi is a blessing and a curse, at times.

It is interesting being here and getting to read The Washington Post as my daily newspaper. There is so much there on which to comment, since this is a paper that is clearly making an attempt to take religious news more seriously. I hope I do not bore you with too much Beltway stuff in the month ahead, while I am here temporarily, and then after August 1, when I start work here full time.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying your comments on the “find your label” thread. Thus, to keep a good thing going, and in response to on the record and private suggestions from readers, why not click here and give a different political-template survey a try. Hey, I didn’t know I was Jewish!

Does anyone know of any other similar online surveys we might want to try out, in the quest for self-discovery? Any that seem to take the pew gap more seriously?

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