Arts

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RNS looks at Mormon art: Vastly interesting, but what's the news hook right now?

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Ten years ago, I got to spend a whole day in Temple Square in downtown Salt Lake City, wandering about the gorgeous gardens and visiting all the sites that a non-Mormon could get into. I enjoyed the tranquility and the snapshots of Mormon history I’d known nothing about. I watched various bridal parties approach the main temple and pose for photos and I watched a few films chronicling the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The art in the main visitors center fascinated me, even though I knew it was highly idealized at best. For instance, why do painters constantly portray Jesus as the only person in the crowd wearing a white robe? No first-century carpenter would have dressed like that, so I knew instantly these were not meant to be realistic.

A recent Religion News Service story shows that I am not the only journalist asking these kinds of questions:

SALT LAKE CITY (RNS) -- Enter the North Visitors’ Center in Temple Square here, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and you can’t miss them: 10 life-size oil paintings that march along a curving wall.
The paintings illustrate the life of Jesus. Here is John baptizing Jesus, there is Jesus gathering disciples from simple fishermen. Another shows Jesus entering Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, and in another he is crucified between two thieves.
In all of the paintings, there is little room for interpretation about who is being depicted: Jesus glows with an otherworldly light.
But if the message is hard to miss, so is something about the medium. Everyone is spit-spot clean and all of the paintings seem set more in the lush, green valleys near the Great Salt Lake than on the dry, brown shores of Galilee.


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Native Americans: Thumbs down on J.K. Rowling's use of American witchcraft icons

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It had to happen sooner or later: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has crossed the pond and found a massive new set of sorcery traditions to garnish her output for her Potter prequel movie. The only problem: She uses symbols and names from American history and Indian sources. Things like Navajo myths and the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.

The Guardian (UK) is already onto this new movie "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" if you want news about that, but the mere idea of transmitting the world of Potter onto American soil is getting ridiculed by some. 

Whereas some folks would be more than glad for the world's richest author to toss some PR toward neglected tribal shamans this side of the Atlantic, not everyone is thrilled. Here's how the Los Angeles Times described the matter:

While some American "Harry Potter" fans were ecstatic over J.K. Rowling's new writing about "the history of magic in North America," her story has angered some Native Americans.


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God, cancer, a videogame: Did WIRED dig deep enough into the facts of this mystery?

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I have had the following debate several times with editors over the past 40 years or so, while working on news features or columns about religious issues and the believers involved in them.

In terms of reaching mainstream readers, an audience that is both secular and religious, which of the following two methods is best?

When writing the final version of the piece, should you include lots of specific facts and information about the religious beliefs and practices of the people involved, for the simple reason that these details are crucial to their lives and, thus, the story?

Or maybe you need to turn that around. Should you write about their faith in a very general way, so that more readers have a chance to get involved in the story without baggage or prejudices? After all, saying that a story focuses on a circle of "evangelical" Christians will turn off people who are angered by that whole "evangelical" thing.

For many people, this is another version of the old debate between "spiritual" storytelling and "religion" news.

Let's look at a perfect example of this debate in practice. I'm interested in how readers react to the decisions that writer Jason Tanz and the editors at WIRED made while producing the absolutely wrenching feature story called "Playing for Time." The kicker for that headline: A father, a dying son, and the quest to build the most profound videogame ever."

Yes, once again we are dealing with another "theodicy" story that revolves around ultimate questions about God, pain, evil, sickness and death -- when bad things happen to good people. The people at the center of the story are videogame pro Ryan Green, his wife Amy and Josh Larson, the co-designer of the game called "That Dragon, Cancer."


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Media struggle to grasp what friends (including females) meant to St. John Paul II

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Media struggle to grasp what friends (including females) meant to St. John Paul II

If you know much about the young Polish actor and philosopher Karol Wojtyla, then you know that his path to the Catholic priesthood was quite unusual, surrounded as we was by the horrors of the Nazi occupation and then the chains of a puppet regime marching to a Soviet drummer.

In his massive authorized biography of the St. Pope John Paul II, "Witness to Hope," George Weigel argued that a key to understanding Wojtyla is to grasp the degree to which his faith and spiritual disciplines were shaped by the lives of strong laypeople and his many friends -- male and female -- who surrounded him in academia, the underground theater and similar settings.

Once he became a priest, he spent years as a campus minister working with young adults during his graduate studies and beyond.

In other words, if you want to picture the life and times of the future Pope John Paul II (and you want to understand the material covered in this week's "Crossroads" podcast) then it's wrong to picture him in some kind of pre-seminary ecclesiastical assembly line, surrounded by other young men headed to holy orders and, yes, celibacy.

Instead, picture him trying to explain his priestly vocation to his girlfriend. Picture him carrying a canoe on a camping trip, explaining Catholic teachings on marriage and sexuality to college students of both genders (creating friendships that in many cases lasted his whole life) and holding Mass as far as possible from Communist police. Check out this sprawling made-for-TV bio-pic starring John Voight and Cary Elwes.

In other words, the more you know about Karol Wojtyla, then the less likely you are to be stunned by the wink-wink BBC reports about his years of "secret letters" to a female philosopher friend.


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Yet another turning point in the search for Hollywood's Christian market?

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Yet another turning point in the search for Hollywood's Christian market?

Highly secularized showbiz moguls suddenly realized that religion could pay off when Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie “The Passion of the Christ” posted $370 million in box office. That remains history’s highest domestic take for an R-rated movie and tops for any Christian-themed film, beating out the three  C.S. Lewis “Narnia” stories.

Woodenly scripted cheapos like 2001’s “Left Behind” that did poorly ($4.2 million total box office) no doubt dampened studio interest. Even after Gibson, Hollywood seems generally uncertain how to capitalize on this market, and treatments of faith are too often either phony or snarky. Hollywood insiders have struggled to find the magic faith-based niche formula.

But something important may be developing. Note that #5 in the Christian genre’s all-time box office is “War Room,” about the ineffable power of prayer to change lives for the better. It  grossed $67.8 million last year. Then there’s the current film “Risen,” timed for the lead-up to Easter. It earned a healthy $11.8 million with its opening last weekend and ranked #3 in the market (all data in this item are from www.boxofficemojo.com).

Both films come from Sony Pictures’ Affirm Films subsidiary, which has received surprisingly scant mainstream media coverage and has obvious potential for a good story.

Sony launched Affirm in 2007 with the mandate of “producing, acquiring, and marketing" films that uplift and inspire. Senior Vice President Rich Peluso, formerly with EMI Christian Music, says Affirm works “the space between faith and entertainment.”


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Dear New York Times editors: Did Harper Lee's faith have anything to do with her art?

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If you know anything about the South, then you know that there are, literally, United Methodist churches everywhere you go in the Bible Belt.

You also know that United Methodist churches down South are usually not as "conservative" as, say, their Southern Baptist counterparts, but they tend to be more conservative -- "evangelical" in some cases -- than UMC flocks in other parts of the country.

Thus, it is certainly interesting that the celebrated, and ultra-private, author Harper Lee was an active member in her local United Methodist congregation down in Alabama. That detail made it into the New York Times story about her funeral, since it's hard to cover a funeral without saying where it was held. However, the story managed to avoid any of the details of that rite of worship or of the implications of her faith for her life's work.

It's interesting to note that the very first pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, include references both to Methodism and to its founder, the Rev. John Wesley. Hold that thought.

The Times funeral story does include this information about the setting:

MONROEVILLE, Ala. -- Friends and family from around the corner and across the country gathered here on Saturday to pay final respects to Harper Lee, the author whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racial inequality in the South during the Jim Crow era inspired generations of readers.
A dense fog that had shrouded this small town lifted as mourners filed into the First United Methodist Church, which Ms. Lee attended for many years, for a simple, private service that lasted about an hour.


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What would Rene Russo do? Los Angeles Times punts when dealing with Hollywood and faith

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What would Rene Russo do? Los Angeles Times punts when dealing with Hollywood and faith

On one level, this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in) is about a very shallow, quickie feature that The Los Angeles Times published the other day about a fledgling ministry that is trying to help -- using a very expensive set of weekend seminars -- Christians break into the movie business.

Apparently, the editors who handled this story did not know that the Times had, in the past, actually done solid news features that talked about some of the complex issues linked to religious faith in Hollywood. They even quoted some of the academic and artistic leaders who have been doing this kind of work, as I kept stressing, for decades. It's like some editors in the Los Angeles Times newsroom are not that familiar with, well, Los Angeles.

Maybe there is a reason for that. Thus, on another level, this podcast focused on a problem -- a loss of institutional memory -- that is plaguing the news business right now as so many veteran journalists are being pushed out of newsrooms. Why is that? Well there is a major crisis in journalism, in case you haven't noticed, linked to falling ad revenues and the harsh reality that no one has discovered a solid Internet news business model that will support diverse newsrooms that retain experienced reporters and editors.

Then again, maybe there is a third level to this discussion. You see, there are quite a few people of faith in Hollywood and -- you may need to sit down -- they don't all agree with one another about lots of tough issues. Some of their programs even compete with one another, if you want to know the truth. They take different approaches. Really!

Can you imagine that? Not all Christians agree with one another when it comes time to wrestle with tough, complex issues linked to art, ministry, money, storytelling and many other realities in Hollywood. Should all movies be "evangelistic"? Should they all be "safe" and "clean"? Can Christians work in movies that are not "Christian"? Come to think of it, what does the adjective "Christian" mean when parked in front of the word "movie"?


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Los Angeles Times: Christians finding totally cool new ways to learn Hollywood stuff!

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Let's say you wanted to write a newspaper piece about a big, complex topic, maybe something like Christians trying to find doorways into work in Hollywood. There are two responsible ways to do this kind of news story.

You could take a comprehensive approach and attempt to update the status of the full story, backing up several decades and demonstrating that this is not a new story. You would contact the key players, old and new, and go for a real update on the big picture.

Second, you could do a modest piece that looks at a new institution that is getting into this field, a new school or a new professional program that claims to have a fresh approach. Then you briefly -- three to four paragraphs or so -- mention that there are a host of other people who have been doing this work for (that word again) decades. Perhaps you ask the veterans to critique the current state of this work and evaluate this newcomer in their home turf.

But here is what you do not do, especially if you are writing the The Los Angeles Times, for heaven's sake, which is supposed to "get" Hollywood. You do not write a shallow, barely researched piece about a newcomer on the block and then proceed to ignore all of the professionals who have been working in this field (one more time) for decades.

Alas, this third option is precisely what the Times offered the other day, under this snippy headline: "Selling Stardom: A Christian path to Hollywood."

The story focuses on a program called "Actors, Models & Talent for Christ," which grew out of a talent-search company in Atlanta. Readers are told that it jumped into this new line of work when "owner Carey Lewis became a religious Christian." Here is what passes for the thesis and summary material in this story:


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Spiritual leaders we lost in 2015: Comparing the coverage at RNS and NPR

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Want a sense of time passing?

Read some of the many lists of "famous dead" cranked out this week. The Religion News Service does its part with a brisk list of 23 spiritual leaders who departed in 2015. Let's see how well they did.

RNS opens with a nice, measured lede:

They preached and inspired. They wrote and taught. Some lobbied in the halls of government. Others toiled to protect the environment and educate the young. Several died at the hands of persecutors.
Here is a list of notable faith leaders — and a champion of secularism — who left us in 2015.

From there, the list goes by date of death, rather than alphabetical order. First is Andrae Crouch, who merged several musical genres -- gospel, rock, country, even Hawaiian -- to electrify crowds and get even secular people to listen. As RNS reports, Crouch's songs not only found a home in hymnals, but won Grammys.

RNS seems to have taken care for broad religious representation. I count four Catholics, two Muslims and two United Methodists. I also see one each of several others -- Jewish, Baptist, Buddhist, Hindu, Episcopalian, Church of Christ, African Methodist Episcopal.

The list includes a brief rundown on each person, which is a service even for readers like myself, who are more than casually interested in religion. Some of the names make you go "Oh, yeah, I remember him!" People like:


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