Health

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Thinking about faith during a plague: Input from Singapore on dealing with coronavirus crisis

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This is not a normal Sunday morning — anywhere.

I’m typing this after spending the morning doing something I have never done before — watching an Internet live stream of the the Divine Liturgy of my home parish, St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tenn. I am, to be blunt, an at-risk individual since I am (a) 60something, (b) someone with asthma and chronic sinus issues and (c) someone who had a sore throat and low fever six days ago (both gone).

But I was not the only person who was not present in the service. Under the extraordinary (and I believe very wise) instructions of our Archbishop Alexander of Dallas and the Diocese of the South the rite was being celebrated by our clergy and a few chanters — while everyone else stayed home as a form of “social distancing.” Priests will take the Sacraments to the sick and hospitalized as needed, of course.

Our archbishop’s instructions (.pdf document here) represented a crisp, clear statement of one of the major COVID-19 news stories taking place in our world, this morning. In part, he wrote:

Everyone in the parish or mission, other than the priest (and deacon), a reader, a server, and no more than two (2) chanters or singers (all of whom are physically strong and at low risk for COVID-19), should remain at home, even at the time of the Divine Liturgy. The holy body and precious blood of our Lord can never be a source of disease, it is after all for the healing of soul and body, but the COVID-19 virus can still be passed through the congregation. Out of love for our neighbor, we must do everything we can to protect the vulnerable by slowing the rate of infection not only in our parishes, but in the greater community, and thereby allowing the hospitals and medical community to more adequately care for those most at risk. All who are “at risk” — the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, any who are actively sick or exhibiting signs of illness — should absolutely absent themselves from the services. ...

If possible, the service should be webcast on the internet so that the faithful may participate in the prayers, which are themselves a source of grace and consolation.

The liturgy was followed by special prayers in our ancient tradition, the Molieben in Times of Pestilence. When it comes to plagues and disasters, ancient faiths offer ancient rites — because the faithful have been through all of this many times before.

This leads me to this weekend’s think piece, an essay by Edric Sng that ran on March 11 (that seems like an eternity ago) at Christianity Today.


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New podcast: Autism and Holy Communion -- Like it or not, doctrine is part of this story

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This was the rare week in which my national “On Religion” column for the Universal syndicate grew directly out of a recent GetReligion post, the one with this headline: “Autism and Communion: Textbook social-media clash between parents, press and church.” The syndicated column then provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

That’s a lot of material to take in. Why did I think that this issue was worthy of all that attention?

Basically, it was a four-step process and I have to admit that I had a personal reason for taking this on.

(1) Let’s start with the USA Today story, which ran with this headline: “Boy with autism denied First Communion at Catholic church: 'That is discrimination,' mom says.”

That story offered a classic news-coverage clash between “discrimination” language that is so popular with journalists and the efforts of church leaders to, perhaps imperfectly, minister to people with special needs while also honoring 2,000 years of Catholic doctrine about Holy Communion.

(2) Doctrine vs. discrimination? What could go wrong? This USA Today piece was a classic example of a larger issue that your GetReligionistas have encountered over and over during the past 17 years.

Simply stated, journalists (especially reporters without religion-beat experience) have a tendency to frame religion news in images and language drawn from political conflicts. Who needs to dig into the details of Catholic tradition and canon law — including statements about Holy Communion and people with autism — when you can write a headline that shouts “Discrimination!”

Once again, there’s that doctrine found in way too many newsrooms: The world of politics is real. Faith and doctrine? Not so much.


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Ryan Burge on unique coronavirus fears in pews of America's aging 'mainline' churches

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Anyone who has worked in a newsroom knows that journalists often have to study the equation 1+1+X=3 and then find the missing X factor that produces “what comes next.”

What am I talking about? Journalists look at one set of facts in the news. Then they study another set of facts that we tend to take for granted or that we have pushed onto the news back burner. When you pay attention to where the two sets of facts overlap — #BOOM — you can see potential headlines.

Right now, the coronavirus crisis is creating all kinds of overlapping sets of facts and many are life-and-death matters. This is shaping the headlines and this trend will only increase.

However, after all of the COVID-19 stories I’ve read in the past week (while 66-year-old me has faced my usual spring sinus woes), none has hit me harder than a Religion News Service essay — “Why mainline Protestants might fear COVID-19 the most” — by political scientist Ryan Burge (also a contributor here at GetReligion). It’s crucial that he is also the Rev. Ryan Burge. He teaches at Eastern Illinois University, but he also a minister in the American Baptist Churches USA. Here is the overture:

I walked through the doors of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, a congregation that I’ve pastored for the last 13 years, and shook hands with the 91-year-old greeter. Afterward, she said to me, “I didn’t know if we should shake hands today.”

I hadn’t even thought about it, but I know that she had.

COVID-19 has now infected more than 100,000 people, killing 4,000 of them across the globe. But, one of the real curiosities is that the mortality rate is dramatically different based on age. The disease takes the life of nearly 15% of the people that it infects over the age of 80.

I find that to be incredibly cruel, especially for my mainline church that has been dwindling in size and increasing in age at a stunning rate. Of our 20 or so active members, four of them are over the age of 90. Another 10 are in their 80s. If COVID-19 becomes a true global pandemic, my church would likely not fare well.


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Did I shake hands with the rector? COVID-19 hits a highly symbolic altar inside DC Beltway

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I know, I know. I couldn’t believe it either.

In terms of shock value in the Twitter-verse, the Washington Post team buried the lede in a timely news piece that ran with this headline: “For Georgetown churchgoers, a coronavirus self-quarantine is embraced as necessary.”

This is an Inside. The. Beltway. Story and I am perfectly OK with that. So see if you can spot the shocking symbolic detail in this overture:

The longtime friends were looking forward to their regular game of bridge at Washington’s posh Metropolitan Club on Monday afternoon, a bit of welcome routine in a world slowly spinning out of control.

The three prominent lawyers, C. Boyden Gray, William Nitze and Edwin D. Williamson, were well aware that the novel coronavirus was spreading, and that it had just made an appearance in Maryland with the announcement of the state’s first three cases last week. They never imagined, however, that the District’s first confirmed case of covid-19 would arrive at their doorstep: the 203-year-old Christ Church Georgetown, an affluent Episcopal congregation co-founded by Francis Scott Key and attended by a bipartisan collection of well-known Washingtonians, among them Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

You can just hear the gasps from readers across America who do not understand the role that Georgetown plays in the DC political ecosphere.

Yes, Tucker Carlson and his family attend an Episcopal parish. If I remember correctly, they have been members of this parish for quite some time.

It’s a Washington thing. Lambs and lions (who is who depends on the biases of the observer) may occupy the same pews. It’s all about location, location, location. And as any editor inside the Beltway will tell you, the Episcopal Church retains its clout, serving as a kind of “NPR at prayer” (a label created by my Orthodox priest, a former Episcopal tall-steeple clergyman).


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During times of panic and plague, priests take risks to do the work they are called to do

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During times of panic and plague, priests take risks to do the work they are called to do

The second wave of influenza in the fall of 1918 was the worst yet and, by the time Father Nicola Yanney reached Wichita, Kansas, a citywide quarantine was in effect.

A 16-year-old girl had already died, creating a sense of panic. The missionary priest -- his territory reached from Missouri to Colorado and from Oklahoma to North Dakota -- couldn't even hold her funeral in the city's new Orthodox sanctuary. As he traveled back to his home church in Kearney, Neb., he kept anointing the sick, hearing confessions and taking Holy Communion to those stricken by the infamous "Spanish flu."

After days of door-to-door ministry in the snow, Yanney collapsed and called his sons to his bedside. Struggling to breathe, he whispered: "Keep your hands and your heart clean." He was one of an estimated 50 million victims worldwide.

A century later, many Orthodox Christians in America -- especially those of Syrian and Lebanese descent -- believe Yanney should be recognized as a saint. And now, as churches face fears unleashed by the coronavirus, many details of his final days of his ministry are highly symbolic.

"Father Nicola got the flu because he insisted on ministering to people who had the flu," said Father Andrew Stephen Damick, creator of "The Equal of Martyrdom," an audio documentary about the man known as "The Apostle to the Plains."

"For priests, there are risks. But you cannot turn away when people are suffering and they need the sacraments of the church. You go to your people and minister to them. This is what priests do."

Few acts in ministry are as intimate as a priest huddled with a seriously ill believer, hearing what could be his or her final confession of sins.


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Plug-In: Mickey Mouse + Harry Potter + Joe Biden = fantastic ledes in world of religion news

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Plug-In: Mickey Mouse + Harry Potter + Joe Biden = fantastic ledes in world of religion news

The best news stories start with a fantastic lede.

For those unfamiliar with journalistic lingo, the lede is “the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story.”

Every year, Poynter Institute writing guru Roy Peter Clark recognizes the Pulitzer Prize winner with the best lead (as he spells it). Yes, there’s a whole debate over which spelling is best.

Clark argues that even some of the stories that earn journalism’s most prestigious honor provide “evidence that we have lost the art of the great news lead.”

But this week, I came across two ledes in the world of religion that I really enjoyed. I can’t resist sharing them.

The first comes via the Orlando Sentinel’s Chabeli Carrazana:

For the better part of two decades, Orlando’s holiest theme park has hung on from its perch on Interstate-4, a struggling David among Orlando’s Goliaths: Mickey Mouse and Harry Potter.

Now it seems it’s time to concede defeat. The news came earlier this year: The Crucifixion is canceled. So is the resurrection and all the other stage shows portraying stories of the Bible, which play out five days a week at Orlando’s Holy Land Experience, a part biblical museum, part ministry that has withstood 19 years of financial trouble.

The second was penned by Politico’s Ryan Lizza:


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Helpless in Seattle: How journalists are/are not covering coronavirus, churches and conferences

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Here’s a dispatch from the center of the evolving pandemic — which where I live.

When the national epicenter for the coronavirus is 13 miles away from one’s home, life becomes a place somewhere between Albert Camus’ “The Plague” and Gabriel Garcia Márguez’s “Love in a Time of Cholera.”

If you live in major urban areas — think New York City and greater Washington, D.C. — you can expect to see these patterns sooner, rather than later. What’s in your newspapers this morning?

Back to Kirkland — the expensive suburb (described here by the Los Angeles Times for those of you who have never been). Kirkland is merely one of several cities on Seattle’s Eastside where this thing has hit. Kirkland used to be the place we’d go for some beach time on Lake Washington when I was in high school. It was unglamorous and kind of shabby until the tech boom hit, Microsoft moved into neighboring Redmond and Google began gobbling up reams of office space in Kirkland, sending rents soaring.

Living two suburbs away as I do, I can say that the pall over Kirkland is now upon us all. Visiting local stores is like entering the Twilight Zone. I’ve never seen the shelves at Trader Joe’s so empty. Target has zero, I repeat zero, cough drops. Lines are forming at the local Costco first thing in the morning so folks can get toilet paper. The King County bus system greets you with hygiene announcements when you board.

We will get to religious groups and coverage in a moment. Hang in there with me.

Traffic for the past few days has been delightfully free of gridlock but it feels, writes one Seattle Times columnist, like Seattle is being symbolically quarantined from the rest of America. Conventions, conferences and meetings are being cancelled left and right. The Seattle-based Alaska Airlines put lots of flights on sale, begging folks to fly or buy before the end of March. But interestingly, while one school district has totally shut down, the others are not.


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Do it yourself tradition: Many Millennials are creating individualistic versions of Lent

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Headline writers love short words.

If you were a copy-desk pro, which of the following two terms would you prefer to use in a bold one-column headline when describing one of the biggest and most complex trends in American religion today (hello omnipresent Pew Research Center folks)?

Would you prefer to call people linked to this trend “religiously unaffiliated Americans” or “nones”?

You see my point, right?

Now, one of the problems associated with the term “nones” is that many people seem to think that this word means that these Americans have no religious beliefs.

That’s inaccurate and misses the main point, which is that the “religiously unaffiliated” are just that — people who have cut their ties of affiliation to organized religious groups. Instead of religious traditions, they have their own personal approaches to religion and ultimate issues. Does the term “Sheilaism” mean anything to you? It should. It’s a term linked to the work of the late sociologist Robert Bellah, author of the landmark book, “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.”

This brings us back to the season of Lent and to this weekend’s think piece, care of The Lily website operated by The Washington Post. The key is that large numbers of Millennials, many of them “nones,” have not given up on Lent. Instead, they have — this is America — created their own versions of the season, using the “give up one thing” motif as an opportunity to express themselves. Here is a key section of this breezy feature:

Millennials are leaving religion in greater numbers than ever before, but they are more likely to observe Lent than baby boomers, according to 2014 research from Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling group. Twenty percent of millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) responded that they were planning to fast, compared with 10 percent of boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964).


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Podcast: Stop and think. How will coronavirus affect nurseries, worship and last rites?

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At this point, it’s clear that the coronavirus story has moved past concerns about whether members of ancient Christian churches can catch the disease from wine in golden Communion chalices.

People will debate that issue for one simple reason — people have researched that issue for centuries and argued about the results. That story is the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to reporting on how religious congregations — past and present — have reacted during times of plague.

So read up on the “common cup” issue and then move on. Oh, and resist the temptation to spotlight the inevitable proclamation from the Rev. Pat Robertson. And there will be more to this story than Episcopal bishops turning a scheduled meeting into a “virtual” gathering.

That’s the message at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in). And while many journalists tend to focus on Catholic churches — lots of people in sanctuaries that photograph well — I think that editors and producers need to consider how this crisis could impact highly independent Protestant megachurches and institutions linked to them. Mosques and synagogues will be affected.

Everyone will be effected. Reporters will need to focus on specific facts and broad trends.

While we were recording the podcast, I told host Todd Wilken that journalists may want to note that spring break is not that far away. In addition to sending legions of young people to jammed beaches and crazy watering holes, this is also a time when churches and colleges organize short-term mission trips to locations around the world. Sure enough, I saw this notice on Twitter a few hours later, from a campus in Arkansas:


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