GetReligion
Tuesday, April 01, 2025

Elizabeth Dias

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Speaking of people being praised: New York Times offered solid, old-school story about Barrett

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Guess what? Judge Amy Coney Barrett is being considered, once again, for an open chair at the Supreme Court, the only branch of the United States government that seems to matter in this tense and divided land.

The odds are good that you have read about this development in the national press or even in the few remaining pages of your local newspaper.

We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage. Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a “devout” Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett. I am following all of that in social media and elsewhere.

However, let me start these discussions with a post that might surprise many readers. I would like to praise the recent New York Times story that ran with this headline: “To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court.” Also, I think it was wise to have a religion-beat professional take part in reporting and writing this story.

I am sure that combatants on both sides of this debate will find some sections in this story rather troubling. But here is the key point I want to make: Unlike many Times stories in recent years, almost all of this material comes from qualified sources (left and right) whose names are attached to their opinions and the information they provided. There are attribution clauses all over the place, just like in Times of old.

Near the top there is this short summary:

“She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, who has praised Mr. Trump’s entire shortlist.

The nomination of a judge whom Mr. Trump was quoted last year as “saving” to be Justice Ginsburg’s replacement would almost surely plunge the nation into a bitter and divisive debate over the future of abortion rights, made even more pointed because Judge Barrett would replace a justice who was an unequivocal supporter of those rights. That is a debate Mr. Trump has not shied away from as president, as his judicial appointments and efforts to court conservatives have repeatedly shown.

As you would expect, Barrett’s critics are given plenty of space to respond — which is totally appropriate. It is also good that these voices are clearly identified, along with information about their organizations.

In other words, the story contains evidence of debate on a serious topic in the news.


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Tips of the trade: How to cover religion news, even if this is not your regular beat

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The National Press Club, like others, is well aware that reporting staffs are shrinking. Thus, full-time religion-beat specialists are considered even more a luxury than usual.

Savvy newspapers will make sure someone cultivates the field at least part-time, as far as feasible. However, managers in too many news shops even neglect that necessity. Magazines are iffy. Radio and TV are even worse off. The Internet is a zoo.

What should writers do when they’re thrown into coverage about religion, which they may know little about – and perhaps care little about even though sizable chunks of their audiences do care? Some guidance for such drop-ins and greenhorns might also provide good reminders for religion-beat specialists who will share shop talk September 24-25 at the Religion News Association conference (virtually this year). The RNA also posts a wealth of tips and resources on trending topics here at its ReligionLink website.

Religion can be pitfall hell, so The Guy’s No. 1 point is rather obvious, which is to make absolutely certain everything you write is accurate.

Don’t just assume what we think everybody knows. Articles often say the Catholic Church forbids priests to marry. Truth is, Catholicism forbids “most priests” to marry and in “most situations.” But what about the Eastern Rite clergy? Or men who swim the Tiber from Anglicanism?

Or take the respected columnist who stated confidently that whatever the Bible may teach on male homosexuality it says nothing about lesbianism. With a quick phone call or email check, almost any cleric would have cited Romans 1:26 and avoided an embarrassing correction.

The press club’s Journalism Institute helps out with advice from an interview with Elizabeth Dias, a full-time religion correspondent with The New York Times. (The video at the top of this post is a speech on related issues, drawn from her days at Time magazine — where The Guy worked for many years.)

Dias stresses the importance of simply “listening and asking open questions” with sources because the topic at hand “may be the most important part of their lives.” She explains that “religion at its heart is about people, not just ideas” so she spends more time talking with folk than “reading social media commentary.” On the latter point, The Guy would underscore the value of meaty books and articles about the issue at hand. Too much reportage is thinly informed.


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Plug-in: History Repeats itself as Little Rock Central hero's great-grandson shows courage

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In 1957, the white mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, showed courage by standing up for nine black students trying to integrate Central High School.

Defying segregationist Gov. Orval Faubus and an angry white mob, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send U.S. soldiers to quell the violence.

“Situation is out of control and police cannot disperse the mob,” Mann said in a telegram to Eisenhower. “I am pleading to you as president of the United States in the interest of humanity, law and order and because of democracy worldwide to provide the necessary federal troops within several hours.”

To enforce the school’s desegregation, Eisenhower sent 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and federalized the Arkansas National Guard.

But Mann paid a steep price.

He endured hate mail and death threats. White supremacists burned crosses on his family’s lawn. He lost his insurance business and any hope of a political future in Arkansas.

Sean Richardson, youth minister for the Bammel Church of Christ in Houston, recalled Mann’s experience as he preached on the Sunday after George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

“See, typically in history when people have chosen to side with those who are oppressed, they themselves get treated as those who have been oppressed,” Richardson said in the video sermon, which came amid national outrage over Floyd’s death and coast-to-coast protests against racial injustice.

The black youth minister’s mention of Mann, who moved to Houston in 1961 and lived there until his death in 2002 at age 85, was no mere historical footnote.

Richardson traced the late mayor’s lineage to the present day — to an 18-year-old Bammel youth group member named Trevor Mann.

No doubt, Trevor’s place in American history — at least at this point in his life — pales in comparison to that of his great-grandfather, whom he met as a baby.

But Trevor, too, showed courage in the face of racial prejudice.

Read the rest of the story.


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Friday Five: CT's editorial, LDS church's $100 billion, Catholic priests, SBC sex abuse, holiday grief

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Did you hear about the editor-in-chief of a leading evangelical magazine calling Donald Trump unfit to lead the nation?

But enough about the editorial that Marvin Olasky and World magazine wrote before the 2016 presidential election.

Christianity Today broke the internet — or at least crashed its own website — with retiring editor-in-chief Mark Galli’s editorial Thursday making the case for Trump’s removal from office.

Washington Post religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey, a former online editor at CT, tweeted that her mouth “dropped open” when Galli’s piece hit the World Wide Web.

Me? I was about as surprised as I could be without actually being surprised.

As The Atlantic’s Emma Green noted:

Within hours of the article’s publication, the magazine’s website had crashed and Galli had been invited to speak on CNN and NPR, among other outlets. To be clear, Galli’s editorial in no way signals that evangelicals are about to defect, en masse, from Trump or the Republican Party. Christianity Today, also known as CT, mostly appeals to well-educated readers who are moderate in every way, including politically and theologically. Much of its readership is international, and many older print subscribers might not even register the small, seismic event that just happened on CT’s website. And polling over the past few months has consistently shown that white evangelicals remain among Trump’s staunchest supporters.

And at the New York Times, Elizabeth Dias pointed out:

The editorial was a surprising move for a publication that has generally avoided jumping into bitter partisan battles. But it was unlikely to signal a significant change in Mr. Trump’s core support; the magazine has long represented more centrist thought, and popular evangelical leaders with large followings continue to rally behind the president.

More later.

But for now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:


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A Pew Research Center study on the varying lengths of sermons in Christian churches? That'll preach

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When’s the last time you read a news story on sermon lengths?

Before this week, I mean?

If you follow religion news, you know that the Pew Research Center released a study Monday dubbed “The Digital Pulpit” and analyzing sermons in various Christian contexts.

It’s a fascinating topic, actually.

It’s also one that I don’t recall ever making headlines before. Of course, journalists get in trouble by making statements like that. So please feel free to educate me on past coverage if I missed it. That’s what the comment box is for.

From the Pew report, here is a rundown of the approach:

This process produced a database containing the transcribed texts of 49,719 sermons shared online by 6,431 churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period that included Easter.2 These churches are not representative of all houses of worship or even of all Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide. Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas and tend to have larger-than-average congregations (see the Methodology for full details).

The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37 minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant.3

Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14 minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the Easter study period.

Both the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey and The Associated Press’ David Crary produced interesting news stories on the study. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias did a quick item on the study, asking for reader input for a possible future story.


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Outspoken but quiet, conservative but progressive: Media profile U.S. Catholic bishops' Latino leader

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Here’s a surefire way to make headlines: Do something significant — and this part is crucial — do it for the first time.

Such was the case with this week’s election of Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles as U.S. Catholic bishops’ first Latino leader.

Prominent religion writers — including the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias, the Washington Post’s Julie Zauzmer and Religion News Service’s Jack Jenkins — were on the scene for the milestone vote. It helps, of course, that the bishops met in Baltimore, an easy drive or train ride from those journalists’ base in Washington, D.C., and New York City.

Other familiar names — The Associated Press’ David Crary, the Wall Street Journal’s Ian Lovett and the Los Angeles Times’ Sarah Parvini — covered the news remotely (Crary from New York and Lovett and Parvini from Los Angeles). The WSJ piece was more of a brief (four short paragraphs), but the financial newspaper at least acknowledged Gomez’s election.

Before analyzing all the coverage, I’ll note that I first became familiar with Gomez when he became archbishop of San Antonio in 2005. Based in Dallas, I covered religion for AP at the time. So I traveled to San Antonio to meet Gomez and do a story on him stepping into a new role as the leading Hispanic cleric in the U.S.

I remember him being friendly but not overly talkative. These were my favorite two paragraphs of the piece that I wrote for AP’s national wire:

Gomez showed that sense of humor as he recalled how he started attending daily Mass as a high school student in Monterrey. A sign of a future archbishop’s deep commitment to the church? Perhaps. But it was also a good way to get the car keys.

“The only way that my dad let me drive was to go to Mass,” Gomez said with a chuckle.

I noticed a few common themes in this week’s stories.


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Friday Five: Mexico massacre, German Catholics, Christian contraception, John Crist, wild shot

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Welcome to another edition of the Friday Five.

Usually, I offer a bit of extra information or at least a little wit before getting to the point.

But this week I’ll confess that I’ve got nothing, so let’s dive right in:

1. Religion story of the week: The Los Angeles Times’ Jaweed Kaleem was among those who reported on the massacre of a large Mormon clan in Mexico.

Also on the story: New York Times religion writer Elizabeth Dias, who contributed to coverage here and here.

Elsewhere, The Associated Press noted that the slayings highlighted confusion over Mormon groups. The Washington Post explained “How Mexico’s cartel wars shattered American Mormons’ wary peace,” and the Wall Street Journal reported on Mormon families gathering to mourn those killed.

Here’s one more: A stunning New York Times feature on the details of the attack itself and on-the-scene reporting about the families wrestling with grief and the details of how to respond. The reporting is deep and detailed — except that there’s no real sense of why these believers are in Mexico and what separates them from mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints life.

That seems like a rather important subject, in this case.

2. Most popular GetReligion post: Editor Terry Mattingly has our No. 1 commentary of the week, headlined “Washington Post: Catholics should follow Germany's gospel when seeking future growth.”

No, tmatt was not a fan of the Post’s very one-sided story:


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Friday Five: Elijah Cummings, Kurdish evangelicals, Tree of Life, viral forgiveness, open marriages/NYT

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It’s not religion news per se, but for those interested in the future of American journalism: Poynter.org reported this week on signs pointing to USA Today phasing out its print edition.

Amazing.

But come to think of it, I don’t open those free copies that I receive at hotels as often as I once did.

Anything that affects the health of major American newspapers will, ultimately, affect their ability to cover tricky, complicated subjects like religion. So would changes at USA Today affect Gannett newspapers everywhere, including funding for religion news coverage? This is worth watching.

Anyway, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: In case you missed my post Thursday, faith was a major part of the life of powerful Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who died this week from complications from longstanding health challenges. He was 68.

Some major news organizations — including Cummings’ hometown Baltimore Sun — nailed the religion angle.

However, at least one major national news organization failed to do so.

Check out my post.


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Friday Five: Remembering RHE, exiting Catholics, Pakistani Christian trafficking, fact-checking satire

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This is one of those weeks when I’m putting together Friday Five after not paying a whole lot of attention to the news.

So if I miss something really crucial, blame it on my “bucket list” baseball trip to see my beloved Texas Rangers play the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Pittsburgh’s PNC Park is the 23rd major-league stadium where I’ve seen a game. Of course, four of those ballparks (old Atlanta, New York Mets, St. Louis and Texas) no longer exist, so I have 11 left on my bucket list. The new Rangers stadium next year will make that 12.

OK, that’s enough for now, but feel free to tweet me at @bobbyross for more baseball talk.

In the meantime, let’s dive into the (distracted) Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Rachel Held Evans’ untimely death at age 37 was the major headline of the week.

The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey, the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias, The Atlantic’s Emma Green, Religion News Service’s Emily McFarlan Miller and Slate’s Ruth Graham all covered the sad, sad news of Evans’ passing.

Here at GetReligion, Terry Mattingly wrote a post on the importance of focusing on doctrines, not political choices, in coverage of Evans’ legacy. And Julia Duin voiced her opinion that Evans’ death offered “a rare look at journalistic grief.”


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