Here at GetReligion we’ve protested when writers draw glib connections between religious belief and heinous behavior. “Follow the Mullahs,” Stephen Grey’s report in the latest Atlantic, is a refreshing exception to that pattern. Writing about efforts to authenticate a message attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Grey introduces the phrase forensic theology:

Authenticating terrorist documents is just one of its uses. It can also help identify perpetrators, and targets for surveillance, sometimes far more effectively than conventional intelligence practices. Its greatest potential, however, may be strategic: with theologians at the center of the battle, forensic theology may help us pinpoint the groups that present the greatest threat.

Grey, who formerly led an investigation team for the Sunday Times of London, Yigal Carmon of MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute) as a pioneer in the field. (On this page of specialists who can comment on this year’s presidential campaign, Washington University in St. Louis lists Frank Flinn, an adjunct professor of religious studies, as a consultant in forensic theology.)

Here is a central warning from Grey’s report:

According to Alastair Crooke, the former European Union negotiator with Hamas and other radical Islamic groups, who is now working on a project to increase Western policymakers’ understanding of Islam, many such groups, including Hamas and Hizbollah, are utterly opposed to the activities of bin Laden and Zarqawi — indeed, to any form of jihad outside what they regard as occupied territory. Yet the U.S. government classifies Hamas and Hizbollah in the same terrorist category as al-Qaeda. “The biggest mistake the West makes is to disregard these differences and to demonize almost the entire spectrum of political Islam,” Crooke says.

The Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker (not yet available online) includes an eight-page article about Creflo Dollar, who preaches what is widely called prosperity theology. The article, by New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, mines some of the rich details a reader would expect in a New Yorker profile, such as these:

Dollar has also become something of a hip-hop icon. He appears in the music video “Welcome to Atlanta,” by Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris, and 50 Cent recently rhymed “Creflo Dollar” with “pop my collar.” When the rapper Ma$e decided to devote himself to God, Dollar became his spiritual father.

Sanneh deftly pokes fun at the widespread corporate-speak at Dollar’s World Changers Church International. We read of a man in charge of “ministry systems,” of the sign designating Dollar’s office as an “Executive Suite” and of the weekly “cabinet meeting” by the church’s leaders.

But he also uses a disdainful tone that veers between a meaningless list of clichÃ(c)s (“Dollar is a slick TV preacher who sometimes impersonates a down-home Holy Roller”) and gratuitous adjectives (“This was, in a sense, his second conversion, and he describes it with the shivery enthusiasm of a true believer”).

Sanneh is amazed that Dollar is friends with both Evander Holyfield and Oral Roberts, which should surprise no one who knows much about Roberts (who never met a prosperity preacher prosperity teacher he hasn’t liked). Sanneh defines prosperity theology in an overly ecumenical fashion: “Dollar’s commitment to the combined power of faith and finance puts him firmly in the American mainstream, alongside P. Diddy, President Bush, and a lot of other people in between.” By that definition, Dollar has just as much in common with Senator John Kerry or Sir John Templeton.

Sanneh’s worst mistake, though, is one that suggests he doesn’t understand the meaning of evangelical, one of the most common words in American religion: “An earlier generation of Evangelicals found their own style — Jimmy Swaggart was the lachrymose drama queen, Pat Robertson was the down-home scholar of world events, Reverend Ike was the shameless hustler.”

Fair enough on the Jimmy Swaggart joke — it’s timely comic relief after Swaggart’s cringe-inducing remarks about killing any potential gay suitor.

But please pay attention, all you acclaimed New Yorker fact-checkers: evangelicals are keen on the authority of Scripture over their lives. Evangelicals are not known for saying Scripture is flat-out incorrect about wealth, as Reverend Ike frequently has done in asserting that the lack of wealth, rather than the love of it, is the root of all evil.

GetReligion often complains when reporters use fundamentalist as a synonym for evangelical. A promiscuous definition of evangelical is no less troubling.

Journalists cannot always predict which stories will cause a ruckus, but reporter Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News knew that his report about a local “Bus 19″ exhibit was going to raise eyebrows. The bus had been attacked by terrorists, with 11 people dead. Now it was being used as part of a tour to promote the cause of Israel. It was being displayed in North Dallas as part of the Yom Kippur holy day.

The congregation doing this? Baruch HaShem Messianic Synagogue, which is linked to the movement that calls itself “Messianic Judaism,” with Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. (The photo is from the massive 1997 Promise Keepers rally on the National Mall.) Weiss notes:

Here’s the problem: “Messianic Jews” say they can both be Jewish and believe that Jesus was the Messiah foretold in Jewish Scripture. Every other group on earth that calls itself Jewish says that’s impossible.

That dispute was at the heart of my story: Some local Jewish leaders who consider Baruch HaShem deceitful objected to its use of a symbol of Jewish martyrdom on a day sacred to Jews. Baruch HaShem leaders said they were acting in accord with their values — Jewish values — and offending no one.

So should the newspaper describe them as Messianic Jews? Christians? Religious frauds? True believers? How can we be fair and accurate and not confuse our readers?

This is part of a hot debate within journalism. Should newsrooms allow controversial groups to define themselves?

For years, these debates centered on abortion coverage. Journalists called one side pro-choice, its label of choice, and the other side anti-abortion, a term it hated. It was a classic example of slanted language. Some let the groups self-identify, then put the terms inside of quotation marks — “pro-choice” vs. “pro-life.” Eventually, most newspapers dropped the slanted pro-choice term and substituted something literal, such as pro-abortion rights.

These word games are incredibly important on the religion beat, perhaps even more so than in political coverage. Weiss noted ongoing controversies about what to call members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons? Mormon Christians? Christians? It’s even hard to work with a group as vanilla and, in Dallas almost all-powerful, as the Southern Baptist convention. A few claim they are not Protestants, because the try to trace their roots back to John the Baptist.

The battle over the Messianic Jews is especially hot, because of the bitter debates over who is and who is not “Jewish.” Hardly anyone knows how to define that term. I discovered this once again last year writing about the long-delayed National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001, which is based on interviews with 4,500 Jews. Sponsors at the United Jewish Communities called it the most detailed statistical portrait of American Jews ever assembled. Critics had less flattering things to say.

That survey defined a Jew as someone whose “religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing.” Say what?

… (All) definitions include some and exclude others, said research director Laurence Kotler-Berkowitz. This survey, for example, was clear to include Jewish Buddhists. But its “non-monotheistic religion” clause excluded two people who had converted from Judaism to Islam. The “whose religion is Jewish and something else” clause created another problem.

“We included people who said they were both Jewish and Catholic or Jewish and something else,” he said. “But if they identified themselves as Jewish Christians or we found some evidence that they were Messianic Jews, then we excluded them from the study. We had to draw that line.”

I was confused. So a person could be Jewish and Christian? That depends, I was told. A person could be Jewish and Catholic, in light of the teachings of Vatican II. Say what? And a person could be Jewish and an Episcopalian, but not an Episcopal evangelical. Or Jewish and Unitarian. But not Jewish and Southern Baptist or Jewish and Eastern Orthodox. Jewish and United Methodist? Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps in New York, but not in Texas. Jewish and Lutheran? Not Missouri-Synod Lutheran.

The key was that the person could be a Christian and a Jew, in this survey, as long as the researchers did not sense that the person was part of a Christian movement that insisted that belief in Jesus was directly linked to salvation. Put that in your newsroom stylebook.

Clearly, this is dangerous territory. Anyone who has worked on the religion beat for a month knows that.

But it is possible to do solid, careful work that lets voices on both sides of these issues define their own views and speak their peace. This approach may make lots of people mad, but it’s the path that journalists have to walk if they want to be fair. Want to hear an example of what I mean? Click here to hear Barbara Bradley Hagerty negotiate this journalistic minefield.

This is one of many stories that I intended to write about last week or even earlier, but let me bring it up here on a quiet non-hurricane weekend. As regulars to the blog know, I have been highly interested in recent stories in the New York Times, the Associated Press and elsewhere, in which reporters seemed to be tiptoeing around a tense area in journalistic style — the rule about referring to an unborn child as a “fetus.”

In part, this journalistic question seems to be rooted in coverage of a leap forward in technology — those amazing 4D-imaging machines now being used virtually everywhere. This digital window is having an impact. It is hard to refer to these images as pictures of fetuses.

Recently, this issue came up again in the newspaper of record. This time, reporter Sam Lubell — in a story called “The Womb as Photo Studio” — carefully walked the edge of the razor and followed the letter of the stylebook law. Thus, here is the lead:

It’s a rite of passage for many expectant parents: baby’s first ultrasound. The fuzzy images of the fetus, produced during an examination in an obstetrician’s office, are prized by couples, passed around proudly among friends and relatives.

Now, trying to capitalize on this phenomenon, a number of companies are selling elective ultrasounds that have little to do with neonatal health. The services, often in small offices or shopping malls, amount to fetal photo studios and use newer 3-D ultrasound technology to produce more realistic images than conventional machines.

Another tricky issue soon follows, as Lubell mentions that one of the most common uses of the technology is to determine the gender of the unborn child. Might this be linked to the controversial issue of gender-selection abortion? Perhaps that is an issue for another story.

When dealing with third-person paraphrases, the story stays with the medically correct “fetus.” The problem is that the story also quotes real, live people. Thus, there is a somewhat awkward dance of journalistic vocabulary. For example, note this reference to the emotional impact of the new technology:

“Women love it,” said Matt Evans, a lawyer, who started his company, Baby Insight (baby -insight.com), about a year and a half ago. “They get to see their baby and have an emotional experience with their baby.”

Or there was this quotation from new mother Shirlesa Glaspie, of Lanham, Md., who said the experience has been both frightening and revelatory.

“He’s yawning, he sticks his tongue out, he smiles,” she said. “It gives you a realization of what’s going on when your stomach is moving around and bouncing around.”

And so forth and so on, swinging back and forth between the voices of people and the style of journalism. The tension is real and there is no easy way around it. But this points to a larger story: When will the people who lobby against abortion realize that this form of technology is on their side? Is the future of pro-life work linked to ultrasounds, rather than picket signs? Might be a story hidden in this style issue.

Some of you may remember that, while stuffed inside my shuttered concrete and metal fortress West Palm Beach fortress, I sent out a missive the other day on the theological implications of being hit multiple times by hurricanes in the space of a few weeks.

It included the following lines that were went in jest, sort of. Maybe. Maybe not. I am not a Calvinist, so I can say it is all a mystery.

God shows up in quite a few of the news stories during hurricane season, but, so far, no one has put in print the question that you actually hear down here on the sidewalks and in the pews. The question is simple: Why is this happening? Close behind that question is this one: Why is God doing this to us? And then this one: Was it something we did? Why is Pat Robertson mad at us this time?

In the past few days, more than a few people have sent me the graphic that accompanies this post, which has been floating around in people’s email listservs. Has it actually been published anywhere? It proposes a somewhat partisan explanation for what has been happening to Florida, in light of the 2000 election. It is sort of Pat Robertson for Unitarian activists at www.MainstreamCoalition.org.

The thing’s pretty funny, if you ask me. However, look at one tiny detail on that pre-Jeanne map — that blue-tinted Palm Beach County. Let me assure you, as a resident of this fair locale, that we have not been missed by the storms. (Wait, I need to save my work because I think the campus computer network is still shaken by storm damage. There, I’m back.) Also, St. Lucie County as been pounded.

So, while I have questions about the fine details in this map, I stand by my statement that the whole subject of theodicy and hurricanes is fair game. Some one ought to take it seriously.

And that someone is not columnist Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle. Still, I have to admit that he gets off some funny lines in his “Does God Hate Florida? After four brutal hurricanes, why aren’t Bush evangelicals talking about the Almighty’s wrath?” Here’s the opener:

You know it’s true. You know if, say, San Francisco had just been blasted by not two, not three, but fully four lethal trailer-park-eating earthquakes, why, the Right-wing Bible set would be yelping with barely disguised joy.

Of course they would. They’d be jumping up and down and saying I told you so and pointing to Volume 18 of “Left Behind” and claiming that this was, of course, God’s wrath upon the sinners and the gays and the heathens and sodomites and the tofu eaters and the Toyota Priuses and the yoga studios and the anal sex and the incense burners and the Zen meditation centers.

Ha ha snicker, they’d say. Serves you right, they’d sneer. Shoulda voted Republican, they’d add.

And so forth and so on, paragraph after paragraph (some of which are actually funny), while adding zero content to the discussion. Maybe, even though he is a columnist, he could have tried interviewing an actual theologian or two, offering competing perspectives. Just a thought. The religious left is easy to find out there, but, hey, the Southern Baptists even have a seminary nearby. Give ‘em a ring.

All together now: Charley and Frances and Ivan and Jeanne.

It kind of sounds like a Cold War-era Southern sex farce movie from the 1960s, doesn’t it?

Suffice it to say that people down here in the fifth or sixth ring of Florida are not laughing at the moment. Hurricane Jeanne has turned straight toward us and may hit as a Category 4. I think I read somewhere that Texas was hit by four hurricanes in 1886 or something like that. This will be number four for Florida. One more and we can chant: We’re number one. We’re number one.

Therefore, it’s time to start asking ultimate questions, such as: Are we absolutely positive that the governor of this state’s name is Jeb and not Job?

Here is the end of one of the waves of Hurricane Jeanne stories down here:

“After this I don’t want to hear the word hurricane ever again,” said Anna Faustini of Port St. Lucie, who lost her rental home to Frances and fears Jeanne will finish off her worldly possessions. “I stacked all my stuff that wasn’t ruined in the driest part of the house, the garage, and covered it with a tarp, but I don’t have anywhere to move it to.

“If I can’t find another house I can afford in St. Lucie County, my daughter will miss out on her senior year at Westwood and our lives will be destroyed,” said a teary Faustini, who is living with friends in Lake Worth. “I’ve called everywhere, and no one has anything for $650 a month. It’s in God’s hands now.”

God shows up in quite a few of the news stories during hurricane season, but, so far, no one has put in print the question that you actually hear down here on the sidewalks and in the pews. The question is simple: Why is this happening? Close behind that question is this one: Why is God doing this to us? And then this one: Was it something we did? Why is Pat Robertson mad at us this time?

I would try to write that column myself, but I don’t think that I’ll have power much longer. In Hurricane Frances, I sent out some emails linked to a question I asked here at GetReligion: For what should people pray when in the path of a storm? That turned into a Scripps Howard column a few days later — just in time for Hurricane Ivan. Here is some commentary on some of these issues from Father Joseph Wilson of St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Whitestone, N.Y.

Roman Catholics have long wrestled with these issues in liturgies, he said. The altar missal includes a rich variety of “Masses for Various Needs,” including prayers about the weather and harvests. The “Procession for Averting Tempest” begins with church bells, a litany of the saints and the following:

“Almighty and ever living God, spare us in our anxiety and take pity on us in our abasement, so that after the lightning in the skies and the force of the storm have calmed, even the very threat of tempest may be an occasion for us to offer You praise. Lord Jesus, Who uttered a word of command to the raging tempest of wind and sea and there came a great calm: hear the prayers of Your family.”

Finally, the priest makes the sign of the cross and sprinkles the surroundings with holy water. At that point, quipped Wilson, “I guess everyone assumes the crash position.”

OK, that’s kind of funny.

But the whole point is that these issues are timeless. Believers who ask these questions are in good company. The question I want to ask is more mundane: Is this a story? Should reporters down here be interviewing sacred and secular thinkers and putting this issue in the headlines?

UPDATE: The fine religion writer Ann Rodgers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was hit with hurricane-related stress all the way up north. She has posted an interesting reflection on religion news and disasters on the blog she does for the Religion Newswriters Association. Check it out.

Well, what do you know? For all of its weaknesses, it does seem that this experimental little blog must be doing something right. At least, the principalities and powers at the World Wide Web’s most prominent interfaith free-for-all think so.

The folks at Beliefnet.com have posted an item called: “Best Spiritual Blogs — Beliefnet’s picks for the coolest, most interesting faith-based weblogs.” And the opening category is dedicated to “General Religion Blogs” and there we are, listed just beneath Jeff “The Hulk” Sharlet and the commanding crew at TheRevealer.org.

Honest. I’m not making this up. Here’s what Beliefnet had to say about this blog and then its remarks on TheRevealer:

Get Religion: This joint blog between conservative-leaning religion reporters Terry Mattingly and Douglas LeBlanc offers smart analysis of major religion stories and how they’re reported in the mainstream press.

The Revealer, run out of New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, describes itself as a “daily review of religion and the press.” Though a big part of its mission is to review how religion is portrayed in the media, it’s a great place to start for the latest — and often obscure — religion news, as well as excellent links to a wide range of religion news resources and other blogs.

I don’t know if I am qualified to address the “smart analysis” bit, but I do want to note the accuracy of the “conservative-leaning religion reporters” statement. Both of us are conservative Christians of one stripe or another and have been pretty open about that. What matters to me is that people grasp our strong commitment to accurate, balanced and diverse coverage of religion in the mainstream press. We are here to cheer and to jeer, but we do hope people remember that our main goal is to be pro-journalism. There are legions of “conservative-leaning” believers out there that, quite frankly, don’t like journalism very much.

Perhaps Beliefnet also should have mentioned that we are small. This is especially important in comparing what we are able to do with the waves of links and copy that pour out of the crew at New York University. Our hats are off to them, in terms of the ground they can cover! (Snazzy design, too.)

Now, one tiny critical comment. If Doug and I are “conservative-leaning” (and we are), what might the proper adjective be to describe TheRevealer? It seems that Beliefnet has decided that its perspective is normative or neutral. Anyone out there — including Sharlet — who wants to propose an adjective that is appropriate? “Progressive” is the hot political adjective at the moment.

Please note that Beliefnet has appealed to readers to submit URLs for other blogs worthy of recognition in the future. What are they seeking?

Not every spiritual blog is worth reading, of course. Many blogs aren’t updated frequently; others are updated far too often with everyday minutiae. Some blogs function as the daily organs of established media outlets or institutes. Beliefnet has chosen to highlight some of the best spiritual blogs on the web. These blogs are all worth checking in with daily or weekly. The list is far from exhaustive — with seemingly endless numbers of blogs for every religion (for example, this list of Quaker blogs, My Scientology Blog, this Unitarian Universalist blog), we couldn’t begin to try to accomplish that.
We’ll keep updating this list with our favorite picks as we discover new blogs. And we encourage you to submit your own favorites…

By all means, go to the site and do that. And let’s start with a shout out for Ted Olsen and the crew at the Christianity Today blog. And while we are at it, let’s ask the folks at CTi to consider creating a really bright, user-friendly graphics button of some kind on the front page at Christianity Today to help readers get to the blog.