Monday Mix

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Plug-In: Pastors and plagiarism -- why a very, very old story is making new headlines

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Plug-In: Pastors and plagiarism -- why a very, very old story is making new headlines

Two decades ago, while serving as religion editor for The Oklahoman, I investigated allegations of plagiarism and faked endorsements by a prominent Baptist pastor who had written a book.

I still remember how angry the 2002 story made some church members — at me for reporting it.

“One thing great preachers enjoy about traveling is that they can hear other people preach,” Terry Mattingly wrote in a 2003 “On Religion” column on plagiarism and the pulpit. “But the American orator A.J. Gordon received a shock during an 1876 visit to England. Sitting anonymously in a church, he realized that the sermon sounded extremely familiar — because he wrote it.”

While plagiarism by pastors falls under the category of “nothing new under the sun” (see Ecclesiastes 1:9), the subject is making timely new headlines.

Prominent among them: a front-page “Sermongate” story this week by New York Times religion writer Ruth Graham.

Credit questions over past sermons by Ed Litton, the new president of the Southern Baptist Convention, for the fresh interest in the subject.

Last week’s Weekend Plug-in pointed to related coverage by Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana and the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner. Check out, too, Mattingly’s recent GetReligion podcast on the topic.

Even before the Litton controversy, Smietana produced an excellent story earlier this year headlined “‘If you have eyes, plagiarize’: When borrowing a sermon goes too far” with a related piece on “Why some preachers rely on holy ghostwriters and other pulpit helps.”


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Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

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Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

Back in 1995, I covered the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building for The Oklahoman.

To many of us in Oklahoma, images of the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, seem “gut-wrenchingly similar” to the Murrah Building rubble 26 years ago.

Even the slow, excruciating search for victims — as loved ones pray for a miracle — stirs tearful reminders.

More than a week after the Miami-area condo building’s collapse, the fear is no longer that the missing won’t be found alive. It’s that “they may not be found at all, making it harder to know when and how to grieve those lost,” report the Wall Street Journal’s Alicia A. Caldwell, Valerie Bauerlein and Daniela Hernandez.

“The grief here is really deep,” Rabbi Ariel Yeshurun of the Skylake Synagogue in North Miami tells the Journal. “As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this.”

The disaster “has rocked Surfside’s Jewish community, a cohesive and interconnected group mirrored in just a few places in the United States,” explain the Washington Post’s Laura Reiley and Brittany Shammas.

Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron interviews Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, who leads the Shul of Bal Harbour, a synagogue that takes up nearly an entire city block less than a mile from the Champlain Towers.

More to read:

• ‘Now is not the time to ask why’: Surfside’s Jewish community ushers in somber Shabbat (by Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Carli Teproff and Samantha J. Gross, Miami Herald)

• Jewish community prays for miracles after condo collapse (by Luis Andres Henao, Terry Spencer and Kelli Kennedy, Associated Press)

• Miami-area churches pray for miracles, minister to rescue teams after condo collapse (by Kate Shellnutt, Christianity Today)


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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

For 120 years, Canada took Indigenous children from their families and forced them into residential schools run by Christian denominations — a practice that didn’t end until 1996.

Now, the discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at two former residential schools have rocked America’s northern neighbor, and the aftershocks have spread to the U.S.

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that it had found the remains of 215 children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. And this week, the Cowessess First Nation reported locating more than 600 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

The discoveries have brought a national reckoning over what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterizes as “a dark and shameful chapter” of the nation’s history.

“I’m ashamed as a White Christian. I’m ashamed of what we did,” Kevin Vance, a minister in Regina, Saskatchewan, told me earlier this month. “I’m ashamed of all the racism and genocide that we concocted and that we did it in the name of Jesus. That’s just unbelievable to me.”

But the dark history isn’t limited to Canada: The news there “has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the United States,” according to The Associated Press.

As Susan Montoya Bryan of the Associated Press reports, the U.S. government “will investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.”

In the U.S. — as in Canada — Christian denominations are an important part of the story, notes veteran religion writer G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who wrote about American church-run boarding schools in 2018.

“The churches were not just complicit. They were participatory,” Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive officer of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told MacDonald then. “They received federal funding and helped carry out the policy.”


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Plug-In: Lots of news about Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholic bishops and even a modern Jonah

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Plug-In: Lots of news about Southern Baptists, U.S. Catholic bishops and even a modern Jonah

One.

Two.

This makes three straight weeks that the Southern Baptist Convention’s big meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, has topped Plug-in.

Want an impossible challenge? Try highlighting the best coverage out of the plethora of headlines produced in Music City this week.

Some of the big news:

• The surprise election of “moderate” (if you’re OK with that term from the SBC past) pastor Ed Litton from Alabama as the SBC’s president.

Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana, the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt, the New York Times’ Ruth Graham, The Associated Press’ Travis Loller and Peter Smith and ReligionUnplugged’s own Hamil R. Harris all offer insightful coverage on that. (Even the Los Angeles Times weighs in, via Atlanta bureau chief Jenny Jarvie.)

• The skirmish over critical race theory, which Chris Moody describes in an in-depth narrative piece for New York Magazine.

Also, don’t miss The Tennessean’s Wednesday front-page report by Katherine Burgess, Duane W. Gang and Holly Meyer.

For more on the CRT angle, see Adelle M. Banks’ RNS story and Greg Garrison’s Birmingham News coverage.

• The major action to confront sexual abuse in the denomination, as the Houston Chronicle’s Robert Downen, CT’s Shellnutt, the Memphis Commercial Appeal’s Burgess and RNS’ Smietana detail.


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Plug-In: Southern Baptists brace for biggest annual meeting in a quarter-century

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Plug-In: Southern Baptists brace for biggest annual meeting in a quarter-century

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting is a hot ticket once again.

Flash back to 1985: At the height of the battles between the denomination’s conservatives and moderates, 45,000 Southern Baptists flocked to Dallas.

But by 2001 — when I covered my first SBC annual meeting for The Oklahoman — the typical number of “messengers” sent by local congregations had dipped below 10,000. I actually wrote a front-page story from New Orleans that year headlined “Baptists share united voice.”

For years, the meetings were a big draw for national and regional journalists who cover religion. But as Southern Baptists gathered in Orlando, Florida, in 2010, Cathy Lynn Grossman, then the religion writer for USA Today, asked, “Who's watching Southern Baptists debate their future?”:

The wire services are walking the beaches of Pensacola with President Obama and religion reporters — what's left of us — are hobbled by lack of travel budgets and the rigidly local focus of many media.

The Tennessean’s Bob Smietana, now with Religion News Service, was one of perhaps only two mainstream reporters (along with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Frank Lockwood) who flew to Florida for that meeting.

At the time, I opined that not just a lack of travel budgets — but a shortage of news woven through the lens of sex and politics — was to blame.

Not to fear: No such shortage of news exists anymore. (Thank Donald Trump. Or Russell Moore. Or if you prefer, Beth Moore.)


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Plug-In: Tulsa Massacre centennial -- focusing on repentance, reconciliation, reparations

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Plug-In: Tulsa Massacre centennial -- focusing on repentance, reconciliation, reparations

TULSA, Okla. — Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a truly dark moment in America’s history.

At the centennial, a prayer room at a downtown Tulsa church focuses on the sins of 1921 while asking God to bring healing, as I report here at ReligionUnplugged.com.

In separate dispatches for The Christian Chronicle, I explain how faith drives two leading advocates fighting for massacre justice and detail the racial unity effort by two Tulsa-area ministers — one Black, one White.

New Associated Press religion writer Peter Smith reports from Tulsa on how houses of worship commemorated the massacre Sunday.

At The Oklahoman, longtime faith editor Carla Hinton and her colleagues offer in-depth coverage, including a compelling story on how a modern-day Moses helped rebuild Tulsa’s Mount Zion Baptist Church.

A strong narrative piece by AP’s Aaron Morrison opens with a scene from Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, a congregation involved in a massacre reparations lawsuit that Religion News Service’s Adelle M. Banks highlights.

Check out the Tulsa World, too, for the latest developments, including a last-minute cancellation of a planned centennial event featuring John Legend and Stacey Abrams.


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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

In 31 years of full-time journalism, I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people.

The world recently lost two of the best.

Rachel Zoll was one of The Associated Press’ two New York-based national religion writers — along with Richard Ostling — when I joined AP’s Nashville bureau in 2002.

She was always so kind and supportive of me and my work, as she was with countless others. I last saw her at the 2017 Religion News Association annual meeting in Nashville. I had left AP more than a decade earlier, so I was surprised when she asked how my wife, Tamie, was doing. I had no idea she knew Tamie was battling autoimmune disease. But she did.

Early in 2018, Zoll was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died Friday in Amherst, Mass., at 55.

Her AP colleague David Crary, who called Zoll his “best friend at work,” wrote a truly touching obituary.

Zoll and Ostling were AP’s national religion dream team for five years until his retirement in 2006.

Ostling enjoyed a legendary career with Time magazine before going to work at AP and now, in retirement, with GetReligion. But he told Zoll during her illness that “on a day-to-day basis our work together was the highlight” of his time in journalism.

Amy Raymond and I both got our start working on The Talon campus newspaper at Oklahoma Christian University. I was excited when she joined The Oklahoman staff in 1997, a few years after me.

Although Raymond and I hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades, we stayed in touch via Facebook. We occasionally chatted about religious and political issues.

On a Zoom discussion Monday night, current and former colleagues kept saying — through tears — how smart and kind she was. That is the absolute truth.

“Amy started as a staff writer but her true passion became apparent as she made her way up the ladder as a copy editor, page designer, and then as night news editor,” my longtime friend and former Oklahoma Christian classmate Steve Lackmeyer wrote in The Oklahoman this week.


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With all due respect, reports about Biden, the 'McCarrick doctrine' and Mass are not stupid

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With all due respect, reports about Biden, the 'McCarrick doctrine' and Mass are not stupid

“The Biden Communion stories are stupid,” proclaims the headline atop a Religion News Service column by Father Thomas J. Reese.

The opinion by Reese, a Jesuit priest and RNS senior analyst, follows a flurry of news reports — which we first mentioned last week — about whether the nation’s second Catholic president might be denied Communion because of his support for abortion rights.

“This is a stupid story for canonical, theological and political reasons,” Reese writes. “First, and foremost, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops does not have the canonical authority to tell (President Joe) Biden that he cannot go to Communion.”

For insight on the canonical, theological and political issues, I’d highly recommend Reese’s column. As for his claim that the news stories are stupid, I’d respectfully disagree. From a journalistic perspective, they are, in fact, highly newsworthy.

Even if much of the coverage could be better, as Clemente Lisi explained here at GetReligion, with the essay then appearing at Religion Unplugged. A key topic being avoided? The role of fallen cardinal Theodore “Uncle Ted” McCarrick in developing the awkward compromise currently in effect here in America.

Another helpful read at Religion Unplugged: Stephen P. Millies, an associate professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, dissects the power struggle behind the U.S. bishops’ move.

Among this week’s related headlines:

• Pelosi’s archbishop says prominent Catholics who support abortion rights should be denied Communion (by Reis Thebault, Washington Post)

• How faith groups feel after Biden’s first 100 days (by Kelsey Dallas, Deseret News)

• New bishop of Biden’s hometown mum on Communion question (by Nicole Winfield and Luis Andres Henao, Associated Press)

• Catholic bishops who want to deny Biden Communion may have to reckon with the pope (by Jack Jenkins and Claire Giangravé, RNS)


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Plug-In: COVID-19 vaccines are still creating buzz on religion beat -- pro and con

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Plug-In: COVID-19 vaccines are still creating buzz on religion beat -- pro and con

After sticking close to home for over a year, I’ve returned to in-person worship at my church in Oklahoma.

I’ve joined my sons and 2-year-old grandson in watching a game at my beloved Texas Rangers’ splashy new ballpark.

I’ve boarded an airplane and — for the first time since the pandemic hit — made a reporting trip (to Minneapolis this past weekend after Derek Chauvin’s conviction in George Floyd’s murder).

For millions, the COVID-19 vaccines have brought joy and hope, and I count myself among them after receiving my two Moderna shots.

Weekend Plug-in has covered various angles related to the vaccines and religion — from whether the shots are “morally compromised” to efforts to overcome skepticism among wary African Americans.

Still, the topic remains timely and important, as evidenced by interesting stories published just this past week:

• COVID-19 has hit the Amish community hard. Still, vaccines are a tough sell (by Anna Huntsman, NPR)

• Francis Collins urges evangelicals: ‘Love your neighbor,’ get COVID-19 vaccine (by Adelle M. Banks, Religion News Service)

• At Orange County mosques, they come for the halal tacos and stay for the vaccination (by Alejandra Molina, RNS)

• Churches, Christian universities hosting COVID-19 vaccine clinics (by Chellie Ison, Christian Chronicle)

• For evangelical leader Jamie Aten, advocating for vaccines led to a death threat (by Bob Smietana, RNS)

Also, in case you missed it last week, Ryan Burge offers fascinating analysis here at ReligionUnplugged on data showing White evangelicals and Catholics are more likely to get the vaccine than religious “nones” and the general public. Yes, you read that right.


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