Thursday, April 24, 2025

prayer

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Washington Post: Is Karen Pence the strong, hidden angel behind the vice president?

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I’ve long been curious about Karen Pence, who is Vice President Mike Pence’s better half and probably one of the most likeable and approachable members of the Donald Trump administration. Fortunately, the Washington Post just came out with a profile, titled “Karen Pence is the vice president’s ‘prayer warrior,’ gut check and shield.”

Well, I thought, this should be good. And it’s a lot better than what the New York Times did on her.

Karen Pence refused to be interviewed for the Post story, which meant the reporter had to work twice as hard to get info. This also tells you something about the current relationship between this White House and the biggest newsroom inside the Beltway.

This being GetReligion, obviously we’re interested in the “prayer warrior” portion of the piece which starts thus:

As second lady, Karen Pence, 60, remains an important influence on one of President Trump’s most important political allies. She sat in on at least one interview as the vice president assembled his staff, accompanied her husband on his first foreign trip and joins him for off-the-record briefings with reporters, acting as his gut check and shield.
On the vice president’s visit last month to Germany and Belgium, the Pences quietly toured Dachau concentration camp, often holding hands, and huddled together on the Air Force Two ride home to debrief on the trip. When Mike Pence, 57, ventured to the back of the plane to chat off the record with reporters, his wife accompanied him, bearing a silver tray of cookies and standing by his side for the 20-minute conversation.

Next, the Post delved into what few details were available about her first marriage, which quickly ended in divorce. At least they tracked down her first husband, who now lives here in Seattle.

Then, she met Mike Pence at church.


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Oh no, look what Trump's done: He's appointed someone to Cabinet who ONCE PRAYED

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Hey Washington Post, I have a question.

Please forgive me if I come across the wrong way. However, here's what I want to know: Are you serious!?

Yes, I understand it's impossible to fit all the important context and details in a 140-character-or-less tweet.

But really, this was the best you could do?:

Trump picks former Georgia governor Sonny Perdue, who once led a prayer for rain, for agriculture secretary

Am I reading that right? Is the newspaper that exposed Watergate really suggesting that the most important detail about a Cabinet appointee is that he "once led a prayer?"

Stop the presses!

I mean, is the political staff of the Post really so out of touch that they think somebody praying is first-sentence material for a breaking news alert?

ccording to the Pew Research Center, 55 percent of Americans say they pray every day. I'm assuming that during a drought, a few of them might pray for rain. No word on the percentage of reporters and editors in the Post newsroom who believe in prayer.


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The Los Angeles Times hears the voices: A nun, a dying woman and prayers that last forever

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On one level, it was a simple assignment. The metro desk at The Rocky Mountain News had received a call about a wedding that was sure to be poignant. The bride had cancelled her church rites several months in the future so that a simple ceremony could take place beside the deathbed of her father, whose cancer had taken a sudden turn for the worse.

My editor's instructions: Make me cry by the third paragraph or you're fired. His advice: Look for crucial details and let their voices tell the story. One symbolic detail was the copy of "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" on the father's nightstand.

I thought about that story, which generated more letters from readers than anything else I wrote in Denver, when I read the Los Angeles Times feature that ran the other day with this headline: "People don’t want to die alone. With Sister Maria standing vigil, they've got company."

There isn't much I can say other than this: Listen to the voices and pay attention to the crucial details in this very human, yet deeply spiritual, story. Here is the overture:

Esperanza Calderon stared at Sister Maria Socorro with half-closed eyes. The nun hunched over her as she reclined in a living room chair, wrapped in a blanket and slowly but inexorably dying.

As the 70-year-old woman’s sister clasped her hand, Socorro held a book open across her palms. Together the three women prayed.

“Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof,” the woman followed along in Spanish, her voice fragile. “But one word from you would be enough to heal me.”

At the heart of the story is the humble work of the Servants of Mary.


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There he goes again: The media's ongoing struggle to cover Tim Tebow's faith

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That Tim Tebow guy, he sure does present some challenges to mainstream sports reporters who may or may not be all that comfortable with religious faith.

In the latest episode of this long-running drama, Tebow – who has been taking a shot at professional baseball – played his first game in an Arizona Fall League, along with other major- and minor-league prospects. He made contact in his at bats, but went without a hit. Tebow was his normal humble, practical self in this ESPN story about the game:

"Obviously, I wish I could have done a little bit more at the plate and got a couple of hits," Tebow said after his AFL debut. "But it was fun. You've got to knock a little rust off. ... Each day is not just about the result. It's about: What are you learning? How are you improving? How are you going to be able to take that over into spring training?"

However, the real story on this day had nothing to do with baseball. Afterwards, Tebow lingered along the third-base line to sign autographs and talk with fans, from a much larger than normal fall-game crowd. That's when there was a medical emergency.

Let's walk through this scene a bit, as described down in the body of this ESPN report:

When one fan had a seizure, Tebow opted to stay with him until paramedics arrived.
"I just remember just being very disoriented,'' Brandon Berry told The Associated Press by phone. "Then I saw Tim."

Now here is the question asked by some readers: Did Tebow – the son of medical missionaries – stay with the man or did he pray with the man?


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I pray thee, might this story on Lulu the therapy dog have needed 'scare quotes'?

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Well, what do you know?

Apparently there is a time and a place for just about everything and, in the field of news, that even includes the use of "scare quotes." Surf here for some discussions of the meaning of this hot-button term in modern semi-opinion journalism.

Now, anyone who has visited this blog more than two or three times probably knows that your GetReligionistas are not fond of "scare quotes" around religious terms that have perfectly fine, established meanings, thank you very much. Most of the battles right now, of course, are about religious liberty vs. "religious liberty." Oh, and "traditional marriage" is another one.

However, in this case I am going to argue (wait for it) that the Washington Post team probably needed to use scare quotes in the Health & Science feature that ran with this headline: "There’s a dog at this funeral home, ready to pray with you."

Come to think of it, I would have put some quote marks around a specific term in that headline. See if you can figure out which one, after looking at the overture:

“Lulu, say a prayer,’’ Matthew Fiorillo tells his 2½ -year-old goldendoodle. Hearing the command, Lulu, a therapy dog who comforts mourners at Ballard-Durand Funeral & Cremation Services in Westchester County, N.Y., puts her paws up onto the kneeler and tilts her head down.


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Most of America's religious 'nones' aren’t atheists, and aggressive 'new atheism' isn’t new

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Most of America's religious 'nones' aren’t atheists, and aggressive 'new atheism' isn’t new

With a growing chunk of Americans identifying as “nones” unmoored from religious identity, The Atlantic’s Emma Green says we often hear the following: “As science became a more widely accepted method for investigating and understanding the physical world, religion became a less viable way of thinking – not just about medicine and mechanics but also culture and politics and economics and every other sphere of public life. As the United States became more secular, people slowly began drifting away from faith.”

That’s too simple, Green continues, “arguably inaccurate,” and “seems to capture neither the reasons nor the reality.” Many “nones” believe in God and pray regularly, so it’s much more a drift from “organized religion” than from faith.

Though polls show outright atheists who reject belief in God remain a tiny minority, organized atheism is becoming more prominent and aggressive. A July federal lawsuit by American Atheists goaded Kansas City into withholding on short notice its promised $65,000 to provide shuttle transportation for 20,000 attendees at the National Baptist Convention session Sept. 5-9, causing headaches for that huge African-American group. Such city aid is a standard means to help visitors and foster convention business.

Another federal lawsuit was filed August 25 by American Atheists and three groups of Pennsylvania non-believers, alongside Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It challenges the ban on non-believers delivering opening prayers for Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives. (Old gag: How does a non-believer begin a prayer? “To whom it may concern.”)


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New adventures in 'scare quotes,' in which New York Post has doubts about prayer

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Every now and then, GetReligion readers see something online – several weeks after the item actually appeared in a mainstream newsroom – and send it to us. That time delay matters, if there is a strong time element in the piece.

That isn't a problem with this recent piece at The New York Post. This is another one of those strange updates on one of your GetReligionistas favorite topics -- "scare quotes." No this isn't another "religious liberty" case.

This is totally new territory, so hang on. First you have to know the context for this strange issue in journalism style. Here is how the story begins:

A nearly six-hour standoff in Columbus Circle ended Thursday morning when a suicidal man wearing a red helmet suspected of tossing a hoax bomb into a police vehicle was taken into custody without incident.
The man, identified by police as Hector Meneses of Queens, was taken into custody on a stretcher at around 8 a.m. after cops were forced to pepper spray him, police said. Dozens of officers, their guns drawn, had surrounded the car and SWAT team members had cleared the circle, as they brought in equipment to deal with Meneses.
“I have a bomb strapped to me, and I want to die,” he’d told cops, according to police officials.

Now the two cops inside the patrol car where Officer Peter Cybulski and Sgt. Hameed Armani.

Now, if you were in that patrol van, in the current atmosphere surrounding police in America, and some unknown person tossed a strange package into the vehicle, package making a strange noise, what would you think?

Next question: What would you do? The odds are that you would do several things at once, including a rather predictable religious behavior. Read carefully.


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The Los Angeles Times misses wrestler's prayer refrain: 'Christ is in me, I am enough'

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Does anyone have time for yet another Rio 2016 religion-news post?

One of the responses that your GetReligionistas hear when we criticize the faith-shaped holes in mainstream news coverage goes something like this: You guys just aren't realistic. In today's age of short, quickie digital journalism – with journalists dashing off three or four stories and 10 tweets a day – reporters just don't have the time and space to add secondary, deep-background details about religion and stuff.

Or words to that effect. Trust me, we understand the pressures, in an age when the advertising crisis in mass media has left fewer reporters in mainstream newsrooms, while the World Wide Web demands more and more 24/7 content. We know that reality issue is there.

The veteran scribes here at GetReligion – with nearly 200 years worth of experience in religion news, when you add us all up – can see the challenges. Trust me, we know that people on beats that bump into religious content, from arts to politics, from sports to business, don't have the time to write religion feature stories.

But they do have time to listen to what people say and then include a few details and quotes about faith, when it is clear that these details are at the heart of a person's life and work.

Take team USA wrestler Helen Maroulis, whose win over three-time Olympic champion Saori Yoshida of Japan was – in one NBC soundbite – something like an unknown sprinter beating Usain Bolt (that Catholic mega-star from Jamaica) in the 100 meters.

Now, it helps to know that Maroulis has been training for several years in Southern California. Thus, you would expect The Los Angeles Times to be anxious to tune her in and capture the essence of this huge Olympics upset. So here is some key material at the top of a feature about the gold-metal winner:


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Where's the beef? Report on Texas attorney's controversial prayers missing crucial details

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Where's the beef?

In a front-page story today, the Dallas Morning News nails the basic facts of a prayer dispute pitting a Texas criminal defense attorney against prosecutors and judges. However, crucial specific details are missing about, well, religion. More on that in a moment.

But first, the lede from the Morning News:

Defense attorney Mark Griffith prays for God’s guidance each time he walks into a courtroom.
He prays on Facebook, too, asking God to help the jury “see the heart of my client.” Or for “God to be with them all tonight as they await closing arguments tomorrow and the decision by the jury as to what will echo in my client’s life forever.”
And he prays, as he writes on Facebook, about how he has “one of God’s children in my hands. He has no voice, I am his voice in the courtroom. I actually pray before trial starts and at every break during trial. I ask God to lead me to the truth with his grace, by my questions.”
Now, Griffith says, two judges have ordered him to stop praying on social media at the request of Ellis County’s County and District Attorney Patrick Wilson.

Whoa!

But that's just one side of the story. The Dallas newspaper reports the other side, too:


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