It’s a sad comment on our age that, in the first tense hours after the Navy Yard shootings (just over a mile down 8th Street from my office), discussions about cause and motive kept circling back to questions about religion. Everyone was waiting for the shoe to drop, especially during the hours when mainstream media outlets were reporting that there might have been three gunmen. One gunman? All kinds of causes leap to mind. Three gunmen? That’s a different story.... Read more
I sympathize with any journalist called upon to report on victims’ loved ones in the wake of a tragedy such as Monday’s Navy Yard shooting rampage. From too many years of personal experience — starting with weeks spent on the victims’ beat after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing — I know that it’s a delicate, gut-wrenching assignment. I offer that caveat before critiquing a front-page sidebar from Tuesday’s Washington Post — the first edition published after the mass shooting. I recognize... Read more
OK! OK! I yield to all of you who sent me the link to that strange ABC News “Good Morning America” report about the dangers of sipping holy water! Let’s talk about that story a bit and, trust me, there isn’t much to talk about. First things first: Is there really some kind of epidemic out there linked to people drinking large amounts of holy water? Here’s the top of the story: Despite its purported cleansing properties, holy water could... Read more
The 2010 bankruptcy of Crystal Cathedral Ministries, founded in 1955 by the Rev. Robert H. Schuller atop a drive-in movie theater’s concession stand, stunned much of the church world. One year later, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange bid $57.5 million for the Crystal Cathedral campus itself, a sprawling facility in the city of Garden Grove, which sits at the heart of Orange County, California. Architects Richard Neutra and Philip Johnson designed the two main buildings on the site — Neutra’s... Read more
The Independent is reporting that Pope Francis is a heretic. More precisely The Independent has insinuated that Francis has adopted a Pelagian view of salvation. But it could also be saying the pope is a crypto-Lutheran. Or, has it simply botched the translation from the Italian original, omitted key portions of the quote, ignored the context of the statement, and made a hash of the theology being discussed in Pope Francis’ letter to an Italian newspaper? “Bear in the woods”... Read more
Some 12 people were killed by a gunman at Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yards on Monday morning. This being near the U.S. Capitol, reporters hit the scene early. Details came out slowly and sometimes incorrectly, even when sourced to D.C. police spokesmen. It was a difficult slog for reporters trying to figure out just what happened. The Washington Post had a team of reporters on the scene, including Godbeat veteran Michelle Boorstein who lives nearby. She and the others did excellent... Read more
Greetings, I am Mark Kellner, and right now you can call me the “new kid” on the GetReligion block. First things first: Alongside my faith, there’s something else in which I deeply believe: journalism. That may seem heretical — or even just dumb — but hear me out. More on that in a minute. Here are the basic journalism facts about my work. By day, I’m privileged to serve as news editor for two magazines: Adventist Review and Adventist World, general papers... Read more
From the beginning of this weblog, your GetReligionistas have urged mainstream newsrooms to do a better job of covering liberal religious believers — as RELIGIOUS believers. Far too often, believers in liberal institutions are covered as if there is nothing to their lives and beliefs but politics. The same thing tends to happen to African-American churches, even if — doctrinally speaking — these churches are quite conservative. Far too often, it seems that journalists simply assume that these believers are... Read more
An obituary of Father Robert F. Capon in the New York Times? Sounds great. It begins: Robert F. Capon, an Episcopal priest, author, theologian and food writer best known for “The Supper of the Lamb,” a sui generis book about cooking and metaphysics that has remained in print almost continuously since it was first published in 1969, died on Sept. 5 in Greenport, N.Y. He was 87… Mr. Capon, who lived for many years on nearby Shelter Island, wrote 27... Read more
I posted earlier this week on three veteran superstars of the Godbeat — Ann Rodgers, Bob Smietana and Tim Townsend — deciding to leave major daily newspapers. I noted a tweet in which The New York Times’ religion writer Laurie Goodstein joked, “Will the last one on the religion beat please turn out the lights?” Playing off Goodstein’s quip, I suggested that someone — I nominated former GetReligionista and current Religion News Service national correspondent Sarah Pulliam Bailey — should “step... Read more
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