Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
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\u2019t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don\u2019t get to see them. But that doesn\u2019t mean they aren\u2019t there.<\/p>\n\n
I want to show you an an example \u2014 a case study, if you will \u2014 of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog \u2014 www.GetReligion.org.<\/p>\n\n
But first let me introduce myself. My name is Terry Mattingly and I am journalist who covers religion news. For the past 15 years I have written the national \u201cOn Religion\u201d column each week for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. I also teach at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Palm Beach County, Fla., where my title is Associate Professor of Mass Media & Religion.<\/p>\n\n
I will be writing for this blog pretty much every day. The actual 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.<\/p>\n\n
Between the two of us, we have been covering religion news in secular and sacred media \u2014 or trying to convince editors to pay us to do so \u2014 for almost 50 years.<\/p>\n\n
We write religion stories and we read religion stories. Lots of them. That\u2019s how we start our days and often that\u2019s how we finish them. We see all kinds of things and so do our many friends out there in the blogosphere.<\/p>\n\n
Here\u2019s that example I was going to tell you about from a few months ago.<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
November 12, 2003<\/p>\n\n
Survivors of Riyadh Bombing Pick Up Pieces<\/p>\n\n
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR<\/p>\n\n
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\u2019s office.<\/p>\n\n
That is how Dany Ibrahim and Houry Haytayan found out that the blushing couple who lived next door were also expecting their first child.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
The details were, of course, sketchy. But the newspaper of record had to find the pattern that would help readers make sense of this.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cOf 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.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cMr. Ibrahim, the young Lebanese husband, lived in Beirut through the 1970\u2019s and 1980\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n
It was safer to live in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Arab and Muslim. But it was not safe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Note: Arab and Muslim.<\/p>\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n
After all, the terrorists themselves keep saying that these bombings target \u201cinfidels.\u201d There are, in fact, \u201cinfidels\u201d who are Arab. There are even \u201cinfidels\u201d who are Muslims. What exactly were we dealing with in this case? Who are the \u201cinfidels\u201d and where are they in this story?<\/p>\n\n
So I kept reading and, latter, I found this.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
Christian Arabs possible attack targets<\/p>\n\n
By ESTANISLAO OZIEWICZ<\/p>\n
From Wednesday\u2019s Globe and Mail<\/p>\n
POSTED AT 5:40 AM EST Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2003<\/p>\n\n
Nina Jibran had everything to live for. The Lebanese school teacher was recently married, pregnant and living in a comfortable compound in Riyadh.<\/p>\n\n
There was even talk of her moving to Canada with her husband, an engineer who worked for a multinational advertising agency.<\/p>\n\n
But then, shortly after the couple returned home from an obstetrician\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
Scanning down, I found this newspaper\u2019s version of the crucial, defining paragraphs:<\/p>\n\n
\u201cAs details emerge about the victims of last weekend\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cElias Bijjani, a Toronto-based member of the Lebanese Canadian Coordinating Council, said many of the couple\u2019s neighbours were also Lebanese Christians. He speculated al-Qaeda was targeting Christian Arabs, rather than Muslims.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
In fact, the evidence seemed to be that the victims were Arabs, but they were Arab Christians.<\/p>\n\n
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 \u201cinfidels\u201d \u2014 Arab Christians.<\/p>\n\n
Why was that information missing? What was the origin of this ghost?<\/p>\n\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n
Before long, an interesting thing happened. One of these cyber-colleagues \u2014 Dr. Paul Marshall of Freedom House, which studies religious liberty issues \u2014 took an interest in these two stories. Then he took this case study to another level.<\/p>\n\n
The result was this essay for The Weekly Standard.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
Misunderstanding al Qaeda<\/p>\n\n
What you weren\u2019t told about their targets in Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n\n
by Paul Marshall<\/p>\n
12\/01\/2003, Volume 009, Issue 12<\/p>\n\n
AMERICAN REACTIONS to the recent bombing of a foreign workers\u2019 compound in Riyadh reveal multiple misreadings of the Arab world and \u2014 more dangerously \u2014 of both al Qaeda and the Saudis.<\/p>\n\n
The media seem to equate Arab with Muslim and, along with some in the administration, think that al Qaeda\u2019s war is against Americans and Westerners per se, rather than against all \u201cinfidels,\u201d 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\u2019 distorted account of the attack.<\/p>\n\n
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\u2019s newspapers are replete with photographs of Maronite Catholic and Greek Orthodox victims. Daleel al Mojahid, an al Qaeda-linked webpage, praised the killing of \u201cnon-Muslims.\u201d 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 \u201cmerely media deceit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
If so, the media fell for it.<\/p>\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n
Marshall and I had seen the same ghost. He chased it down and captured it in print.<\/p>\n\n
And that is what we hope to do with this blog. It is an experiment by Doug LeBlanc and myself and, we hope, our friends and new readers. We want to slow down and try to pinpoint and name some of these ghosts.<\/p>\n\n
But I don\u2019t want to sound like we see this as a strictly negative operation. There are many fine writers out there \u2014 some believe the number is rising \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n
Most of all, we want to try to create a clearning house of information and opinion on this topic. This is what blogs do best.<\/p>\n\n
So this is why Doug and I are starting 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.<\/p>\n\n
Let\u2019s begin.<\/p>\n\n
NOTE FROM TERRY MATTINGLY: This item ran at www.GetReligion.org on Feb. 1, 2004. I am adding it to the www.Tmatt.net site for a simple reason. Due to a technical error, the copy desk at the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., did not receive my column this week. Thus, it will run a week late. Rather than leave a gap here at the Gospel Communications Network site, I am sharing this opening essay from another web project. I hope you enjoy it.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[204,1537,720,729],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-islam","tag-religion-news","tag-religious-liberty"],"yoast_head":"\n