The scandals surrounding the life and work of the former (and now disgraced) cardinal Theodore McCarrick rumbled in the background of Roman Catholic life for decades — starting in the early 1980s. Insiders whispered, but nothing was done.
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This is a big time of year at Religion Unplugged. Nov. 1 marks the official launch of the annual NewsMatch campaign — one of our biggest fundraisers of the year.
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One by one, Catholic dioceses in key presidential swing states are putting out unusual statements: Newspapers whose titles include the word Catholic that are showing up in people’s mailboxes aren’t what they seem and aren’t connected to the church. With a classic typeface and traditional newspaper design, the mass-mailed Catholic Tribune newspapers carry signposts of legitimacy.
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The pontiff reflected on his own memories of playing soccer as a child in Argentina. Francis also described sports as an experience of the “sense of fraternity,” because friends would play “knowing only opponents on the field, never enemies.” Sports offer lessons in life, he added, as players learn from the highs of winning, the effort it takes to win, and the loss of defeat.
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Weekend Plug-in columnist Bobby Ross Jr. recounts his adventures as a roving religion reporter. Ross has covered news and features in all 50 states and 18 countries.
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(ANALYSIS) One of the realities of being a journalist of a “certain age” is constantly hearing people ask, in digital and analog contacts, questions that sound like this: “What do you think of (insert a trend in the modern world or a specific event in news or entertainment)?”
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(ANALYSIS) A thumbsucker on the news business could review all those disheartening statistics about dying dailies and weeklies, declining ad and circulation income and shrinking newsroom staffs — all of which have escalated since the 21st century dawned.
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Several decades ago, talented news-feature writers began using an interesting writing technique to offer readers doors into complex, often overwhelming stories. The theory went something like this: Don’t tell me a story about 100,000 people — tell me a story about one person who represents those 100,000 people.
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Among the parade of priests and nuns who stroll in and around Vatican City, there is a special breed of journalist who is tasked with explaining the pope and the Roman curia to the world. These people are known as Vatican watchers — a “Vaticanista” in Italian — and they've been around since the 1960s. Even in the digital age, these journalists have become essential to understanding the church.
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If you fly up to high altitude to study the past 50 years of American religious life, here is what you will see.
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Here’s the big idea in the podcast: Elite newsrooms allowing reporters to live in the heartland offer opportunities for reporters to interact with voices and points of view that they would not have encountered otherwise. In the end, however, a newsroom is only as diverse as the worldviews and source lists found in the work of its editors and superstars.
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(ANALYSIS) In my “On Religion” column — “Jonathan Haidt: It's time for clergy to start worrying about smartphone culture” — I focused on what the author of “The Anxious Generation” had to say about the decisions faced by religious believers in the age of digital-screens culture.
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(ANALYSIS) In the heated environs of Catholic cyberspace, that kind of reporting being done by The Pillar has drawn fierce criticism from partisans on the other side of all doctrinal debates with political, moral and cultural implications. At the moment, The Pillar is taking heat from conservatives for coverage raising questions about remarks by Sen. J.D. Vance.
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Let’s say that you know a teacher at a Catholic school that, when accepting this job, this person signed a contract in which he agreed to defend the doctrines detailed in the Catholic Catechism or, at the very least, not to oppose them in public. After several years of work, this teacher decided that gender is a social construct and that she was a woman trapped in a man’s body and began to transition into life as a woman. The school then declined to renew the teacher’s contract. Was that teacher canceled?
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(ANALYSIS) The shot shared ‘round the world following the Olympics Opening Ceremonies was actually a brief matter of seconds in a four-hour live presentation. Whether it was — in fact — a shot at Christ and his followers using Leonardo da Vinci's iconography or just a misunderstood tableau for the feast of Dionysus, as the show producers claim, the moment is better understood in motion, as video shows better than stills.
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(ANALYSIS) Why rake muck? For one thing, it’s biblical. Recall Scripture’s narratives about the venerated King David’s adultery and homicide or St. Peter’s multiple denials of Jesus Christ. It encourages healthy reflection on the forgiveness of sins, the ways power is misused, the dangers of celebrity worship, the ongoing impact of racial evil and the value in continually taking fresh looks at our own attitudes rather than remaining captive to the cultural assumptions in which we were born and raised.
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I am old enough to remember when “60 Minutes” was must-watch television for journalists. In those days, this CBS News “magazine for television” had a crack research team that dug deep and found the documents and evidence needed to support tough questions for political, cultural and business leaders who granted interviews.
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Allen, who spent 10 years of his career reporting for ProPublica, was a fierce advocate for transparency and fairness in health care, guided by his strong faith and belief in honesty and integrity. He died died this past Sunday at a hospital in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was 52.
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The feature is framed with bad news — that progressive Catholics in the United States are experiencing pain because of the rising numbers of young priests and young adults (especially parents with, wink-wink, lots of children) seeking a more pro-Catholic Catechism approach to faith.
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Fears of AI are not the only things driving public concern about the end of the world. Climate change and pandemic diseases are also well-known threats. Reporting on these challenges and dubbing them a potential “apocalypse” has become common in the media — so common, in fact, that it might go unnoticed, or may simply be written off as hyperbole.
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