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What happened when this 2022 Final Four hero was asked to explain his heart, mind and soul?

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What happened when this 2022 Final Four hero was asked to explain his heart, mind and soul?

OK, faithful GetReligion readers, you know the drill.

Especially those of you who are among the small circle of our readers who join millions and millions of ordinary Americans in caring about sports news and personalities. In this case, we are talking about March Madness, the NCAA hoops festival that — taken as a whole — is a much more symbolic and emotional sports event than that whole SuperBowl thing.

Sure enough, the final act of this year’s tournament features a sports hero-coach who wasn’t supposed to be there, at least not this year, at this stage of his career. Here is the top of a typical news story about him, care of the always secular USA Today team:

NEW ORLEANS — Kansas coach Bill Self had a positive opinion of Hubert Davis long before North Carolina staged a thrilling run to the national championship game.

Self ran into Tar Heels' All-American big man Armando Bacot when both teams were in Fort Worth two weeks ago for the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.

"I went up to Armando and said, 'congratulations: are you having fun?' And the first thing he said: 'I love playing for Coach Davis.' That's the first thing he said to me," said Self, who had a relationship with Bacot from coaching him on the FIBA U18 team back in 2018. "So I think right there is a testament to how good (Davis) is, how special, and the relationship he has with his guys."

On April 5 of last year, Davis was named as the replacement to legendary UNC coach Roy Williams. For parts of 2021-22, it looked as if it would take time for Davis to transform the blue-blood back into a perennial power. Then the Tar Heels found another gear – starting with a March 5 road upset of rival Duke, an outcome they replicated in this Final Four to send Blue Devils coach Mike Krzyzewski into retirement.

So what makes this man unique? What does he have to say when he is asked to explain who he is, why he does what he does and what Makes. Him. Tick. as a man and a coach?

Consider this quote, in one of those high-profile press conferences before the Final Four:

"My faith and foundation is firmly in my relationship with Jesus. It just is.


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Plug-In: Just say no to 'cult' -- That four-letter word journalists really need to avoid

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Plug-In: Just say no to 'cult' -- That four-letter word journalists really need to avoid

“Don’t Call It a Cult.” That was the title of one of the more intriguing sessions at last week’s Religion News Association annual meeting, held at a Washington, D.C.-area hotel.

Moderated by independent audio journalist Sarah Ventre, the panel featured Anuttama Dasa, global communications director for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness; Melissa Weisz, a podcaster who grew up in a Hasidic Jewish community; and Shirlee Draper, who was born and raised within a polygamous sect known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

“The goal was to explore the ways in which we report on marginalized religious communities, particularly those that are often referred to as ‘cults,’” said Ventre, who hosted the award-winning 2020 podcast ”Unfinished: Short Creek,” about the fundamentalist Mormon community where Draper grew up on the Utah-Arizona border.

"I wanted to unpack the responsibilities we have both to our audience and to our sources,” the moderator added, “and examine the ways in which our reporting affects the communities we report on long after we publish.”

“Show, don’t tell” is a journalistic adage.

This session reinforced the importance of describing a specific pattern of abusive or manipulative behavior rather than resorting to more generalized terms like “cult” or “brainwashed.” This has, of course, been a topic of frequent discussion here at GetReligion for two decades. Here’s a few recent items to check out, but there are many more:

* “Define ‘cult’ -- give three examples.”

* “Updates in the journalism style bible: Appropriate 'cult' advice and other tweaks.”

* “Entering a religion-beat minefield: What is the proper definition of the word 'cult'?”

All of this is not to say sources can’t describe their own experience as having escaped from a cult. Nor do journalists have to be completely relativist: They have a responsibility, to the extent possible, to evaluate and assess people’s — and leaders’ — accounts. Often, groups do have systemic ways of enabling abusers and abusive behavior, and journalists can identify that where they can verify it.

But news organizations need to be careful.


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Will Smith's Oscars slap turned heads; Denzel Washington quietly warned about temptation

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Will Smith's Oscars slap turned heads; Denzel Washington quietly warned about temptation

Moments after the Academy Awards slap heard 'round the world, Will Smith huddled during a commercial break with Denzel Washington, another of the Best Actor nominees.

No one could hear what Smith discussed with the man who is both an A-list player and the rare Hollywood superstar who has – after years in hot press spotlights – emerged as a mentor on issues of faith and family.

But Smith appeared to have Washington on his mind during his emotional remarks after winning the Oscar for his work in "King Richard." Smith apologized to his peers for slap-punching Chris Rock after his jest about his wife Jada Pinkett-Smith's shaved head. The comic apparently didn't know she was suffering hair loss with Alopecia.

“In this moment, I am overwhelmed by what God is calling on me to do and be in this world. … I'm being called on in my life to love people and to protect people," said Smith, tears on his face. "I know that to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse, you gotta be able to have people talk crazy about you. In this business, you gotta be able to have people disrespecting you. And you gotta smile and pretend that that's OK."

When Washington offered quiet words of encouragement from offstage, Smith thanked him and added: "Denzel said a few minutes ago: At your highest moment, be careful – that's when the devil comes for you."

This was not ordinary Oscars God-talk.

This drama triggered waves of social-media angst, with critics and millions of viewers debating who to blame for this crisis during an otherwise meandering Academy Awards show shaped by politics, pandemics, gender, race and low ratings.


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Thinking about the Catholic vocations 'crisis': The Pillar asks if this is truly a global problem

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Thinking about the Catholic vocations 'crisis': The Pillar asks if this is truly a global problem

When journalists are covering a truly global religion — take the Catholic Church, for example — it really helps to pay attention to the fine details in statistics.

What is true in America may not be true in Africa. What’s true in the shrinking churches of Western Europe may not be true, literally, anywhere else.

I brought this up in a recent think piece — “Thinking about world Christianity, as Crux digs deep into many overlooked Catholic details” — pointing readers to an interesting Crux essay by John L. Allen, Jr. (of course). Here’s a key bite of commentary from Allen:

… Catholicism added 16 million new members in 2020, the latest year for which statistics are available. Granted, that meant the church did no more than keep pace with overall global population growth, but it’s still significant at a time when most western perceptions are that the church is shrinking due to the fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, various scandals at senior levels, bitter political infighting, increasing irrelevance to younger generations, and any number of other alleged failures.

For sure, if you live in western Europe or in some parts of the United States, where parishes are closing or consolidating and Mass attendance seems in free fall, those perceptions are understandable. Yet the reality is that on a global level, Catholicism enjoyed the greatest expansion in its history over the past century, more than tripling from 267 million in 1900 to 1.045 billion in 2000 and 1.36 billion today.

Basically, Catholicism is growing wherever it’s churches, to be blunt, have plenty of children, converts and clergy.


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Podcast: Concerning the many religion-beat stories linked to that 'Don't Say Gay' bill

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Podcast: Concerning the many religion-beat stories linked to that 'Don't Say Gay' bill

Let’s talk news-business realities for a moment.

If you do an online search for the following terms — “Parental Rights in Education,” Florida — you will get about 43,000 hits on Google News (as of Thursday afternoon).

Then again, if you run a search for these terms — “Don’t Say Gay,” Florida — you will get 6,820,000 hits on Google News and 24,100,000 hits on Google (period).

That’s a pretty big difference. What’s going on?

On this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) I argued that the real name of this bill sounded way, way too much like a whatever it was that parents in Virginia wanted during that recent election that left the Democratic Party establishment in shock.

As it turns out, a new Public Opinion Strategies poll (.pdf here) found that registered voters — a majority of Democrats, even — liked the contents of this controversial Florida bill when shown its key, defining language:

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in Kindergarten through third grade or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Clearly, “Don’t Say Gay” worked much better for political activists who wanted to keep the focus on LGBTQ-era sexual education for prepubescent children. The whole idea was that way too many parents are burdened with religious, moral and cultural beliefs that were on the wrong side of history. Thus, “parental rights” and classroom transparency are not helpful concepts.

What does this have to do with the many religion-angle stories that journalists could be chasing linked to this legislation and variations on this bill that are sure to show up in other states?


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Along the religion beat: Should 'mainstream media' pundits take sides on church disputes?

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Along the religion beat: Should 'mainstream media' pundits take sides on church disputes?

The acerbic anti-Donald Trump conservative Jonah Goldberg says that — at National Review and currently TheDispatch.com — he has spent the past 25 years complaining about "liberal media bias."

But, he wrote last week, much has changed during that time with the breakup of America's onetime "hegemony" of three broadcast networks, the newsmagazines and a few influential newspapers. Now we have devoutly conservative news-talk radio and cable TV while infinite opinions of commentary and information overwhelm the Internet.

Then there's rising distrust in the news media, which The Religion Guy believes is a serious threat to healthy democracy. A Pew Research Center survey, reported last August, found that since 2016 the percentage of Americans with at least "some" trust in the national news media has slumped from 76% down to 58%, and among Trump-era Republicans and Republican leaners from 70% down to 35%.

Another simultaneous change, Goldberg said, is "the blurring of reporting with partisan punditry, particularly on cable news and social media." The Guy would contend that this distrust expands when partisan opinion seeps into or overshadows supposed hard news. (This is the spirit of our media age, since, as tmatt often observes here at GetReligion, opinion is cheap and actual reporting is expensive).

That brings us to religion coverage in the print media and the Internet (broadcasters and cable generally slight the beat) and a rather idiosyncratic must-read complaint about The New York Times from Hillsdale College historian D.G. Hart, posted at Real Clear Religion the same day as Goldberg's article. In case you missed it, the text is here.

Hart thinks the Times "rightly" figures that explicitly religious periodicals can handle faith news, which means he does not read the paper that closely (though it can be criticized for sins of omission). The article appears to suggest the Times and other outlets should downplay or eliminate attempts to do religion-beat reporting -- which would remove the very reason GetReligion exists.


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Elite American super-cities are bleeding people: Any religion ghosts in this big story?

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Elite American super-cities are bleeding people: Any religion ghosts in this big story?

It’s hard to imagine any corner of American life that has not been touched by the coronavirus pandemic.

Obviously, there have been plenty of religion stories — along with the obvious angles linked to politics, business and technology.

Then you have stories that combine all of these elements. That is, they combine all of these themes if reporters are willing to look at the numbers and trends through multiple lens. However, as any GetReligion reader knows, not all lens are created equal.

One of the most important stories has been the impact of COVID-19 realities on some of the most important zip codes — “important” from an elite-news perspective — on the blue coasts. That brings us to that massive headline the other day in The New York Times, a paper that has, for the most part, treated evidence of New York City woes as part of a vast a right-wing conspiracy theory. Here’s that double-decker headline:

Cities Lost Population in 2021, Leading to the Slowest Year of Growth in U.S. History

Although some of the fastest growing regions in the country continued to grow, the gains were nearly erased by stark losses in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

This is, of course, an almost totally religion-free story. I was pleased to notice that the Times team took demographic issues — including birth-rate slumps — rather seriously, even if the editors didn’t (as usual) connect the dots and see the religious, cultural and moral elements of that important angle (please see this earlier GetReligion piece — “New York Times asks this faith-free question: Why are young Americans having fewer babies?” — for background).

Am I arguing that the flight from several important American super-cities is essentially a religion story? Of course not. Am I saying that issues linked to faith, family and culture are playing a role in this very, very important story? Yes, I am.


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Are lawyers 'ministers?' Unanswered questions plague Union Gospel Mission coverage

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Are lawyers 'ministers?' Unanswered questions plague Union Gospel Mission coverage

Last week, the Supreme Court turned down a very interesting case that has gotten comparatively little media coverage outside the Pacific Northwest, which is where it originated. It was Woods v. Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission (UGM) and it’s an important milestone in allowing gay employees to be employed at evangelical Christian organizations.

I wish the high court had taken the case, as it would have gone a long way toward explaining if all employees at religious organizations are counted as “ministers,” or only the ones with spiritual-sounding titles.

It’s a battle that’s going to keep on being fought and I’m guessing that leaders at evangelical and Catholic groups are not taking the Court’s silence on this case as good news.

The Seattle Times’ account of the Court’s rejection is below, although I would’ve liked to have seen a more balanced headline than: “U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission’s anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policies case.” The kind of gives you an idea of where the article is going, doesn’t it?

Assuming the Times reporters did read some of the arguments from UGM, they would have known the subject was not just some anti-gay organization, but that UGM also had problems with this employee’s lack of clear Christian commitment.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced … that it will not review a case involving Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, which was sued in 2017 over its anti-LGBTQ+ hiring policy after it declined to hire a bisexual lawyer who applied for a job.

Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the decision not to hear the case at this stage. But according to The Associated Press, they said that “the day may soon come” when the court needs to confront the issue the case presents.

The Seattle-based Christian organization filed a petition in August 2021, asking the Supreme Court to decide a case in which the Washington Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, attorney Matt Woods, in March 2021.

I covered this in December for Newsweek (of course it helps that I live driving distance from UGM’s headquarters), and believe me, UGM helps the folks who no one else wants to help.


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Updates in the journalism style bible: Appropriate 'cult' advice and other tweaks

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Updates in the journalism style bible: Appropriate 'cult' advice and other tweaks

If you know anything about the nuts and bolts of reporting and editing, then you know that the Associated Press Stylebook is the bible — that’s with a lower-case “b” — of journalism.

It’s also a great place to chart tensions inside the news business. Consider, for example, the decades of debate about “pro-life” and “pro-choice,” as opposed to “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion rights.” Will the next major revision of the AP manual need to include an updated definition for the suddenly controversial word “woman”?

Our GetReligion patriarch, Richard Ostling, recently sent me an interestingly list of some of the religion-beat terms in the latest revisions to this AP bible. He served as a consultant on that revision project and, thus, doesn’t want to make any comments about the results. Here is one of the updates that is sure to lead to newsroom discussions:

cult (new)

A loaded term to be used with caution.

Yes, indeed — proceed with caution. I totally agree that this is a “loaded term” that journalists should avoid whenever possible.

The problem, however, is that this is a term that religious leaders, activists and even scholars are going to use every now and then and it will be hard to avoid the term when it is used in important direct quotations. Thus, editors need to know the various ways that informed people use the word — the key is sociology vs. theology — so that these loaded quotes can be placed in context for readers. Then there are activists of various kinds who throw this term around like a verbal hand grenade.

Readers can tell, with a quick glance at the venerable Merriam-Webster dictionary, that this is a complicated subject. Here are several of the definitions:

cult

noun, often attributive …

Definition of cult

1: a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious (see SPURIOUS sense 2) also : its body of adherents


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