Richard Ostling — finally! — sets up an online camp

November 29, 2012 By tmatt

Anyone who has followed GetReligion for very long knows what the letters WWROD stand for. I mean, the first reference of this kind showed up only a few weeks into the blog’s existence, way back in 2004.

WWROD? We’re asking, What Would Richard Ostling Do?

Ostling, of course, is the former religion-beat pro at Time, back in the days when that weekly magazine was a force in hard news, and then with the Associated Press. For those of us who arrived on the Godbeat in last quarter of the 20th Century, it would be hard to name someone we respected more or whose work carried more professional authority (with Russ Chandler of the great Los Angeles Times religion team joining him in the top ranks).

Thus, I am happy to pass along the following email from Ostling, which followed several chats on this topic during the recent Religion Newswriters Association meetings here in Beltway territory:

Forsaking lazy retirement mode I am about to launch a new “Religion Q and A” blog for patheos.com, probably the most important interfaith site on the Internet.

Most features on Patheos are opinionated, faith-specific (Buddhist, Catholic, Pagan) … whereas mine will be non-partisan and journalistic in approach and cover wide-ranging topics.

We’ll be asking folks in cyberspace to send in questions regarding any and all faiths, any Scriptures, current church-state and religion-politics issues, moral quandaries and other such puzzlements and curiosities. If I’m able, I’ll post an answer with others then welcome others to add comments.

To get this thing launched I need savvy folks to start providing some interesting questions for me to try to answer. If willing, would you, and contacts in your circle of friends who’d be interested in this, send in questions that I’ll consider for the first postings on the site? Simply go to http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionqanda/

On the right-hand side type in your question and click “Send” which transmits it to me to consider for a posted answer.

The name, in other words, is “Religion Q and A: The Ridgewood Religion Guy Answers Your Questions.” I had lobbied hard for “The Religion Answer Man.” Whatever. This is great news no matter what it’s called. I’ve been bugging this man for years about getting involved in a blog, whether writing for GetReligion every now and then or pursuing some other online option.

Once this is up and running, Ostling will be in the Patheos “News and Politics” channel, which is also the home of GetReligion. Obviously, Ostling expects to get his share of questions about the role of religion in the news and public life and, thus, GetReligion plans to feature at least one of his posts each week. It’s the kind of cooperation we hope to see more of around these cyber-parts (hint, hint former GetReligionista Jeremy Lott and Deacon Greg Kandra, the former CBS News scribe).

Those seeking a quick introduction to Ostling, via audio, can check out this interview conducted at the Calvin Institute of Worship.

For a sample of Ostling’s print work — one that is highly relevant to his new blogging format — click here for a 2005 GetReligion post focusing on a short Associated Press analysis piece in which he tried to explain the unexplainable, as in the very divergent schools of sexual ethics found in the global Anglican Communion. That full AP report can be found stashed away right here.

Here’s a large chunk of that AP text, focusing on the four camps that Ostling calls “dismissal, perplexity, renovation and traditionalism.”

Dismissal is the left-fringe attitude personified by Bishop John Shelby Spong, former head of the Newark, N.J., diocese. In “The Sins of Scripture” (HarperSanFrancisco), he says calling the Bible “the Word of God” (a belief he himself affirmed at ordination) is “perhaps the strangest claim ever made” for a document. Spong finds the Old Testament’s homosexual prohibitions ignorant and “morally incompetent” expressions of “popular prejudices.” With the New Testament, he disdains Paul’s condemnations as “ill-informed” ravings from a zealot who, he hypothesizes, was a “deeply repressed, self-loathing” homosexual.

“The contending positions are mutually exclusive,” he concludes, and “there can be no compromise.” He dismisses conservative views as “frail, fragile and pitiful.”

The other three approaches were displayed at a … hearing before the international Anglican Consultative Council. …

Perplexity was the outlook of Anglican Church of Canada representatives. Their denomination affirmed the “integrity and sanctity” of homosexual relationships and tolerated a diocese’s blessing ceremonies for same-sex couples. The Canadians said they are “seeking discernment” but face “deep divisions” and lack consensus.

Renovation was the policy of the U.S. Episcopal Church in its report “To Set Our Hope on Christ,” written by seven theologians. It was the denomination’s first official rationale for recognition of the unhindered same-sex blessings in its ranks and for toleration of openly gay clergy, including a bishop.

Traditionalists answered that argument with “A True Hearing,” a paper by writers from nine nations that the Anglican Mainstream group gave to delegates to explain the stance endorsed in 1998 by 82 percent of the world’s Anglican bishops.

And so forth and so on. In other words, Ostling is going to help point readers and, I would imagine, some journalists toward information and resources on complex religion-news questions. I would be hard-pressed to name a better scribe to take on that task.

Stay tuned.

On women bishops: Who voted ‘no’ and why?

November 21, 2012 By tmatt

To the shock of legions of mainstream reporters, the Church of England fell just short of approving the long-debated step of raising women to the Anglican episcopate.

The issue that seems to have some reporters stumped, a bit, is why the laypeople who cast these votes didn’t go along with this latest evolution in Anglican orders. Take, for example, the pretty solid report from Reuters, as offered by The Huffington Post. Here are two summary passages that contain the key material:

After hours of debate, the General Synod, the Church legislature made up of separate houses for bishops, clergy and laity, fell just short of the two-thirds majority required in all three houses to pass the measure. … The vote among lay members fell short by just four votes.

“It’s crushing for morale, senior women clergy must feel despondent and most bishops and most clergy male or female feel hugely sad and worse than sad, embarrassed and angry,” said Christina Rees, a Synod member and former chairman of the advocacy group Women and the Church. “Women bishops will come, but this is an unnecessary and an unholy delay,” she told Reuters.

The second passage is the key. Yes, careful readers will, of course, note that the progressives are once again called “reformers,” which means that, by definition, they are attempting to right a wrong. Nice neutral language, there. Not.

Women already serve as Anglican bishops in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, but the Church of England, mother church for the world’s 80 million Anglicans, has struggled to reconcile the dispute between reformers and traditionalists on whether to allow them in England.

The Church had already agreed to allow women bishops in theory but Tuesday’s vote, on provisions to be made for conservatives theologically opposed to senior women clergy, needed to be approved before female Anglican priests could be promoted to episcopal rank in England. …

More than 100 members spoke during six hours of discussion in a vast circular chamber in Church House, the Church’s central London headquarters, airing their views under a domed ceiling inscribed with a prayer to “them that endured in the heat of conflict.” The dispute centred on ways to designate alternative male bishops to work with traditionalist parishes that might reject the authority of a woman bishop named to head their diocese.

So what’s the problem here?

It is good that the story notes that the opponents of female bishops are “conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics,” because there are plenty of evangelicals who are willing to back the ordination of women to all orders.

It is not helpful that, at the end of the piece, the divisions inside the global Anglican Communion are described, in effect, as being between Anglicans in modern lands and many “Anglicans in developing countries.” That radically oversimplifies matters, especially in Africa. One could just as easily have described this as a conflict between the Communion’s rapidly shrinking liberal churches and its rapidly growing conservative ones.

The story also fails to note that taking this step would have created even more tensions between Anglicans and the ancient Christian churches of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, which do not ordain women to the priesthood and the episcopate.

Careful readers will note that the story does not, in fact, quote any person — ordained or laity — who opposed this crucial “reform,” which would lead to female bishops who would then ordain priests, male or female, that traditional Anglicans would argue have not been truly ordained. If the conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics won, where are their happy voices? Why leave them out of the story?

But here is the key question: Did the vote fail, in fact, because there were liberal Anglicans who voted against this measure because they believed it offered too much protection for conservatives? Did they oppose this measure because it did not go far enough to please the “reformers”? Meanwhile, did others who support the ordination of women vote against the measure because they did not believe it did enough to protect the traditionalists? Watch the video at the top of this post.

In other words, did the left split? Again, note that this Reuters report did say that the key “dispute centred on ways to designate alternative male bishops to work with traditionalist parishes that might reject the authority of a woman bishop named to head their diocese.”

If that was the dispute that led to the defeat of the measure, then the single most important thing this story needed to do was to explain that conflict, while quoting representative, authoritative voices on both sides of that dispute.

The bottom line: Why voted “no” and why? Was this measure defeated by a coalition of people who opposed it for very different reasons? If so, where are these crucial voices in this report?

Pod People: Romney, abstinent New Yorkers and (almost) Randy Travis

August 25, 2012 By Bobby Ross Jr.

On the latest Issues, Etc. podcast, host Todd Wilken and I discuss my recent post on media coverage of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney going to church.

In the comments section of that post, Mark Hemingway, GetReligion’s resident expert on Mormonism, raised an interesting question:

There’s one interesting detail I would like to know, though I don’t know whether it’s here nor there in relation to what Bobby wrote. Did the Romney campaign allow multiple reporters to attend services — or just one? Because the pool report that all of the details in this story appear to have been cribbed from was written by McKay Coppins, who is covering Romney for Buzzfeed and happens to be an active Mormon.

Wilken and I also talk about my recent post on a New York Times feature on sexually abstinent New Yorkers.

A topic that Wilken and I didn’t address: my recent post on the religion ghosts in media coverage of country star Randy Travis — full of drink and devoid of clothing — being arrested at a Texas convenience store.

I bring up that post here because (1) this post is running short and (2) there has been a new development related to Travis. A hat tip to my GetReligion colleague George Conger for pointing out this headline from Canada’s Vancouver Sun:

Randy Travis, fully clothed, hospitalized after ‘church fight’

You can click this link for all the juicy details.

But to all who questioned if a religion angle really existed related to Travis, I say: I Told You So.

GetReligion has moved to the Patheos universe

August 15, 2012 By tmatt

It didn’t take long, after the Rt. Rev. Douglas Leblanc and I started GetReligion.org back in 2004, for people to start suggesting that this weblog needed to hook up with a larger website or online institution that was about religion or journalism or, hopefully, both.

Early on, it seemed that a massive religion portal — think fishing for beliefs — was going to be able to produce a serious, broad blend of multi-faith news and commentary. We talked. There wasn’t enough news in the mix, for me.

We have talked to people who wanted to mix religion, news and popular culture. We have talked to a few academic institutions about links to The Media Project and, of course, GetReligion.

The key to all of these talks is this: GetReligion really, really, really is not a “religion” site and it also isn’t a “religion news” site.

Honest. We are a journalism site dedicated to looking at the good and the bad in mainstream news media attempts to produce balanced, accurate, informed news about the world of religion. We think (click here for the Day 1 essay) that it’s impossible for journalists to make sense of real news in the real world without taking religion seriously.

In other words, we think religion deserves a chair at the table of serious news coverage. We’ve been making that case for nearly 7,500 posts and millions of words. We are not going to stop chasing those religion-news “ghosts.”

However, GetReligion has moved. Finally.

In the future, GetReligion.org will still get you to the weblog, but if you want to bookmark the most direct cyber-route, here’s the URL that you need:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/getreligion/

Of course, we’ll also be up and running via RSS, and Facebook, and Twitter, and just about any other platform that comes along.

The Patheos crew is into it all.

Now, if you know anything about Patheos (“Hosting the conversation on faith”), you know that this sprawling parallel universe is organized around a wide variety of channels dedicated to various world religions and approaches to belief and, well, to unbelief. Inside these digital doors there are legions of bloggers and commentators on the left, on the right, in the center and in lots of other places that cannot be labeled. Patheos is as well known as the home of The Friendly Atheist as The Optimistic Christian. You can find The Wild Hunt there, a few navigation turns away from The Anchoress.

Where in the world, GetReligion readers might ask, would a journalism blog about religion fit into that structure?

Well, the reason we have signed up with Patheos is that its leaders have committed to creating what will be a sprawling new channel dedicated to news, politics and culture. Some of the folks who have already set up shop there are Greg Kandra (former CBS News producer) at The Deacon’s Bench, former GetReligion scribe Jeremy Lott of Real Clear Religion, the Muslimah Media Watch, the Public Religion Research Institute’s Faith in the Numbers blog, Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online and others.

There will be plenty more. There are many different angles, when it comes to discussing the intersection of religion and the news. Bring ‘em on. Patheos is big enough for activists, journalists, scholars, commentators, clergy, politicians and lots of other folks who are interested in the world of religion.

This move will leave all of our existing features intact and our massive, massive archives will come with us (as will the Tmatt.net archives, pretty soon). The look will change, as we move into a narrower column width in a space surrounded by a few advertisements. (Yes, I am not a fan of pop-up ads. However, I have been told that, when that first pop-up ad appears, you can click it and then the pop-ups will vanish for the rest of your session or your return visits to the site that day. One ad per day, per person, in other words. Friends, we live in a fallen world and ads keep websites open and growing.)

We’ll have to change the ways we handle art. We will try harder to avoid long, long posts (wink, wink) in such a narrow space. But we will keep doing the same work.

So mark the new URL. The change will take place in stages over the next few days and, as always, I expect a few bumps, dead links, wayward YouTube videos and other signs that we are getting used to our new home. Please be patient. This post should be the last one at GetReligion.org proper. In a day or two, that URL will point toward the new address at Patheos.

We’re not going away. We’re simply moving into a complex, exciting and growing neighborhood. Look around. Explore. Keep coming back.

Why We’re Here

February 9, 2012 By Patheos Daily Reflections

What we do, why we do it

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

I want to show you an an example — a case study, if you will — of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).

But first let me introduce myself. My name is Terry Mattingly and I am a journalist who covers religion news. For the past 17 years I have written the national “On Religion” column each week for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. I also direct the Washington Journalism Center at the national headquarters of Council for Christian Colleges and Universities on Capitol Hill.

I will be writing for this blog pretty much every day. The founding editor of the site is my colleague Douglas LeBlanc, another veteran journalist who has covered religion in the mainstream and religious press. In recent years, he has been best known as an associate editor of the respected evangelical news magazine Christianity Today.

Between the two of us, we have been covering religion news in secular and sacred media — or trying to convince editors to pay us to do so — for almost 50 years. We write religion stories and we read religion stories. Lots of them. That’s how we start our days and often that’s how we finish them.

We see all kinds of things and so do our many friends in academia, think tanks and the blogosphere. In this project, we are working with the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life and a philanthropist who — with the bylineRoberta Green — is herself a journalist with solid, national-level experience on the religion beat in mainstream newspapers. Click here to read a speech in which she discusses her own motivations for continuing to work on issues of education, mass media, journalism and culture.

But back to the “ghost” issue. Here’s that example I was going to tell you about.

Like many people who live far from New York City, my morning email includes the digital newletter version of The New York Times. So I was scrolling along and ran into this:

November 12, 2003

Survivors of Riyadh Bombing Pick Up Pieces

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Nov. 11 They were neighbors and newlyweds, and late on Saturday night they bumped into each other by chance outside the obstetrician’s office.

That is how Dany Ibrahim and Houry Haytayan found out that the blushing couple who lived next door were also expecting their first child.

It was your basic, solid symbolic person story, a snapshot from the age of terror. I was especially interested in finding out who the authorities thought planned and executed this bombing and why.

The details were, of course, sketchy. But the newspaper of record had to find the pattern that would help readers make sense of this.

Of the 17 dead, 13 have been identified. A Saudi police investigator at the scene on Tuesday said one of the four unidentified bodies might have been that of a suicide bomber inside the sport utility vehicle.

Mr. Ibrahim, the young Lebanese husband, lived in Beirut through the 1970’s and 1980’s when it was racked by civil war. Somehow this is different. He specifically picked this compound to move into six months ago, after the suicide bombings in May against Western compounds, because he thought it would be safer to live in a place that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim.

It was safer to live in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim. But it was not safe.

Arab and Muslim.

This is one of those strange combinations of words. Not all Arabs are Muslims and many Muslims are not Arabs. This strange combination of ethnic and religious identifications puzzled me.

After all, the terrorists themselves keep saying that these bombings target “infidels.” There are, in fact, “infidels” who are Arab. There are even “infidels” who are Muslims. What exactly were we dealing with in this case? Who are the “infidels” and where are they in this story?

So I kept reading and, later, I found this.

Christian Arabs possible attack targets

By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
POSTED AT 5:40 AM EST Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003

Nina Jibran had everything to live for. The Lebanese school teacher was recently married, pregnant and living in a comfortable compound in Riyadh.

There was even talk of her moving to Canada with her husband, an engineer who worked for a multinational advertising agency.

But then, shortly after the couple returned home from an obstetrician’s appointment last Saturday, a suicide bomber ripped through the gates of their residential area, shredding their lives and sparking outrage in Saudi Arabia. Ms. Jibran was among the 17 dead, and her husband, Eliyas, among the more than 120 injured.

Scanning down, I found this newspaper’s version of the crucial, defining paragraphs:

As details emerge about the victims of last weekend’s bombing, many observers believe their profile made them targets for the suspected al-Qaeda attack. Ms. Jibran, like her husband whom she married in July of 2002, was Christian. According to Arabic-language news reports, they had also received documentation to move to Canada.

Elias Bijjani, a Toronto-based member of the Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council, said many of the couple’s neighbours were also Lebanese Christians. He speculated al-Qaeda was targeting Christian Arabs, rather than Muslims.

In fact, the evidence seemed to be that the victims were Arabs, but they were Arab Christians.

The wording in the New York Times story did not eliminate that possibility, but it also did not provide that specific information. In fact, it would turn out that it was hard to explain the location of the attack in any terms other than an attempt to kill a specific form of “infidels” — Arab Christians.

Why was that information missing? What was the origin of this ghost?

I immediately did what I do several times a day. I sent pieces of these stories and the URLs around to a circle of friends — journalists, human rights activists, politicos, etc. You know, the usual cyberspace circles. We all have these private circles, right? Mine just happen to care a great deal about religion and the news.

Before long, an interesting thing happened. One of these cyber-colleagues — Dr. Paul Marshall of Freedom House, which studies religious liberty issues — took an interest in these two stories. Then he took this case study to another level.

The result was this essay for The Weekly Standard:

Misunderstanding al Qaeda

What you weren’t told about their targets in Saudi Arabia.

by Paul Marshall
12/01/2003, Volume 009, Issue 12

AMERICAN REACTIONS to the recent bombing of a foreign workers’ compound in Riyadh reveal multiple misreadings of the Arab world and — more dangerously — of both al Qaeda and the Saudis.

The media seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with some in the administration, think that al Qaeda’s war is against Americans and Westerners per se, rather than against all “infidels,” a group al Qaeda defines idiosyncratically and expansively as anyone who is not a strictly observant Muslim. Both mistakes are compounded by reliance on the Saudis’ distorted account of the attack.

The November 8 bombing took place in a Lebanese Christian neighborhood of Riyadh, and of the seven publicly identified Lebanese victims, six were Christian. Lebanon’s newspapers are replete with photographs of Maronite Catholic and Greek Orthodox victims. Daleel al Mojahid, an al Qaeda-linked webpage, praised the killing of “non-Muslims.” The Middle East Media Research Institute quotes Abu Salma al Hijazi, reputed to be an al Qaeda commander, as saying that Saudi characterizations of the victims as Muslims were “merely media deceit.”

If so, the media fell for it.

Marshall and I had seen the same ghost. He chased it down and captured it in print.

And that is what we hope to do with this blog. It is an experiment by LeBlanc and myself and, we hope, our journalist friends and new readers. We want to slow down and try to pinpoint and name some of these ghosts.

But I don’t want to sound like we see this as a strictly negative operation. There are many fine writers out there — some believe the number is rising — who are doing an amazing job of taking religion news into the mainstream pages of news, entertainment, business and even sports. We want to highlight the good as well as raise some questions about coverage that we believe has some holes in it.

Most of all, we want to try to create a clearing house of information and opinion on this topic. This is what blogs do best.

So this is why Doug and I started this experimental blog. We hope it grows. We hope it forms links with other sites that are digging into the same issues, each with their unique viewpoints and resources. We will point some of those out as well and include them in our links page.

Let’s begin.