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Wednesday, April 02, 2025

New York City

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Yes, this is personal: Concerning the New York Times report on The King's College crisis

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Yes, this is personal: Concerning the New York Times report on The King's College crisis

I have been on the road for about 12 days now, visiting family in Kansas after speaking at a journalism conference in Washington, D.C. During that time, I have received quite a few emails asking me to comment on the New York Times story about the crisis at The King’s College in lower Manhattan.

As longtime GetReligion readers know, I taught seminars at The King’s College for five years after the semester-length Washington Journalism Center program moved there in 2014. I have friends and former colleagues at TKC and, thus, writing about this topic is quite personal.

Thus, let me stress that the following is a GetReligion commentary about the Times report — which is an important story and, frankly, quite good. It’s crucial — here’s that GetReligion theme, again — that it was assigned to a religion-desk reporter. However, the story, in my opinion, does have an important “ghost” in it, one that could be spotted by anyone who has dug into the details of recent academic and financial trends in Christian higher education.

Hold that thought. First, here is the double-decker headline on this news feature:

The Second Life of a Christian College in Manhattan Nears Its End

The King’s College, which draws students from around the country to Manhattan, has not been able to recover from enrollment and financial losses.

As is the case with MANY private colleges, before and after the coronavirus pandemic, this small college has fundraising issues, enrollment issues and then budget issues that are directly linked to enrollment issues.

To be blunt, many excellent private educational institutions are overly dependent on tuition dollars and lack the endowment funds to survive severe drops in recruiting numbers. For two decades Christian college leaders have known that they would face severe challenges after the passing of a giant wave of students from the giant Millennial generation.

Thus, Christian college administrations have been asking hard questions about recruiting and fundraising. Here is one way to look at it: The concerns of donors, church leaders and parents are not (#DUH) always the concerns of potential students. However, a Christian college cannot survive without loyal donors, church leaders and parents willing to send their children — the ultimate investment — to a specific college.

The raises a painful question: Should small Christian private schools case a “wide net,” seeking as many students as possible (period), or focus on “mission fit,” seeking students from homes and pews that strongly support a school’s core values and programs?


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Plug-In: No Separation Of Church And State? New York City Mayor Sparks A Furor

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Plug-In: No Separation Of Church And State? New York City Mayor Sparks A Furor

Good morning, Weekend Plug-in readers!

Among the religion news happening now, Catholics in Los Angeles are remembering slain Auxiliary Bishop David G. O’Connell. See photos by Los Angeles Times staff photographer Francine Orr from Thursday’s vigil Mass, before the funeral Mass the next day.

As always, we have a bunch of best reads and top headlines in the world of faith to highlight. Let’s jump right in.

What To Know: The Big Story

Big Apple, big controversy: “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said that at an interfaith breakfast this week — remarks called “unhinged and dangerous” by a rabbi quoted by the New York Times’ Dana Rubinstein.

More from the New York Times:

He went on to suggest that his path to the mayoralty was divinely ordained, saying that when he implements policies, he does so in a “godlike approach.”

At another point, Mr. Adams seemed to suggest that it was a mistake for the Supreme Court to ban mandated prayer in public schools, as it did in 1962. “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools,” he said.

The phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution, but the First Amendment’s statement that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” has been widely interpreted to dictate such a separation.

‘God bless Mayor Adams’: But not everyone criticized the comments.

In fact, Adams won “a new group of fans: Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians, whose leaders lauded the liberal Democrat,” according to the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner.


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100 years ago this week, feisty Time magazine began changing the news game

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100 years ago this week, feisty Time magazine began changing the news game

Friday, March 3, marks 100 years from the first issue date of Time magazine, self-described as “The Weekly News-Magazine.”

The feisty New York-based newcomer brought journalistic inventions that redefined what’s news and how it’s presented. When Time and other Time Inc. magazines were up for sale in 2018, an article in the rival New York Times bade farewell to “the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th Century.”

Here is a very obvious point of disclosure and personal privilege: The Guy worked there 1969-1998 as a field correspondent and Religion section writer.

Looking back, the magazine’s 75th anniversary spectacle converted Radio City Music Hall across the street into a banquet venue and invited every living person who’d ever appeared on its cover. The Rev. Billy Graham, say hello to Joe DiMaggio. President Bill Clinton, meet Lauren Bacall. You get the picture.

The current ownership, however, is low-key about the centennial. But Time’s survival is noteworthy in today’s harsh environment for print media, albeit with reduced circulation, budget, staffing and publishing frequency.

Then there is another important angle about the impact of Time in the news marketplace. News flash: Religion makes news!

Missionary Kid Henry Luce was the co-founder, and Time carried a religion news section each week, alongside other specialized “back of the book” sections like Press and Law – subject areas that many dailies only covered with depth decades later.

Attention-grabbing Time covers, coveted real estate for all fields, added renown to numerous religious writers and thinkers (e.g. C.S. Lewis, 1947), bureaucrats (Eugene Carson Blake, 1961) and activists (Mother Teresa, 1975).

Some readers may recall one cover in particular — the much-misunderstood black-hued “Is God Dead?” Holy Week cover in 1966, written anonymously (no bylines in those days) by John Elson. This talented scribe, a churchgoing Catholic, was not undermining faith but asking whether there were any limits to the era’s “theological strip-tease” among liberal Protestants and post-Protestants. That cover was, in other words, ahead of its time.


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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

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Flashback: The late, great Walter Cronkite did some thinking about religion news

Did you know that the late, great CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, one of the most important news icons of all kind, once worked as a “church editor” for a mainstream newspaper in Houston (apparently the old Houston Press)?

That was a detail from his life that I missed. I had read, long ago, that he was a “cub reporter” after his college years, yet before he broke into broadcasting. But time as a “church editor”? That’s a journalism title from the old, old days, one that is even more condescending than the more common and inaccurate label “religious editor (as opposed to “religion” editor.

Anyway, a religion-beat friend recently send me a photocopy of a 1994 interview with Cronkite that ran in The Christian Century, the influential mainline Protestant journal. I can’t find it online, although it was quoted by Religion News Service in an a short obit — “And that’s the way he was” — in 2009.

Encountering that “church editor” label reminded me of the old “Lou Grant” show episode that I used as the opening for my graduate project at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, which ran — in a much condensed form — on the cover of The Quill in 1983. The headline on that journal essay was: “The religion beat: Out of the ghetto, into the mainsheets.”

The “ghetto”? That was the “church page.” The overture of that Quill piece is long, but it will provide some context for the Cronkite remarks that I will share here:

As was often the case, Lou Grant was working on two problems at once. At first the problems seemed unrelated.

The Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor. City editor Grant had searched far and wide and, of course, no one was interested in the position. After all, what self-respecting journalist would want to be stuck with the religion beat?

Problem number two was how to get rid of lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter Mal Cavanaugh. All through this episode of Lou Grant the management of the Trib had been trying to find a way to get Cavanaugh to resign.

Then, a spark of inspiration. The script is simple:

LOU: Congratulations, Mal. You're the Trib's new religion editor.


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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

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Big story? American (at this point) archbishop baptises famous gay couple's children in Greece

I think that I will write this post before I start getting emails (one or two from inside the wider circle of current and former GetReligionistas) asking whether or not I will write this post.

But first, before I get to the journalism question for this post, allow me to pause and discuss the meaning of a key term — “Byzantine.” Here is the word in context: To understand the following news story, journalists will need to enter the Byzantine world of Eastern Orthodox polity in North America.

The word “Byzantine,” when used as an adjective, has two definitions. First there is this:

… relating to Byzantium (now Istanbul), the Byzantine Empire, or the Eastern Orthodox Church

Now, that meaning is — sort of — relevant in this case. But this second definition is the one that we need:

… (of a system or situation) excessively complicated, and typically involving a great deal of administrative detail.

When people ask questions about Eastern Orthodox “news,” I frequently have to remind them that Eastern Orthodoxy is not the Church of Rome. We do not have a pope, even if, from time to time, the ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul has tried to promote (with the help of many elite newsrooms) a papal vision of his “first among equals” role among Orthodox patriarchs, stressing “first” instead of “equals.” See: Ukraine.

With that in mind, let’s look at the GreekReporter.com story that ran with this headline: “First Greek Orthodox Baptism for Child of Gay Couple in Greece.” The question: Is this an important “news” story worthy of complex, balanced, accurate coverage in, let’s say, a mainstream publication such as The New York Times? Jumping ahead, my answer is “yes,” but with a heavy emphasis on “complex, balanced, accurate coverage.” Here is the whole story from Greece:

Evanggelos Bousis and Peter Dundas, both of Greek descent, became the first gay couple to hold a Greek Orthodox Baptism for their children in Greece. …

The couple’s children, Alexios and Eleni, were baptized by his Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America at the Panagia Faneromeni Church in the southern Athenian suburb of Vouliagmeni.


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Journalists might ask: Did fundamentalists actually win their debate with modernists?

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Journalists might ask: Did fundamentalists actually win their debate with modernists?

Countless sermons each weekend may prove inspiring for American churchgoers, but historians “will little note nor long remember” most of them.

One great exception, titled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?,” was delivered 100 years ago this spring by the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick at New York City’s First Presbyterian Church.

Fosdick threw a bright spotlight on the “Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy,” both predicting and demanding that his fellow modernists would win the era’s theological war. The Presbyterian Church had been debating whether to expel biblical liberals since 1892 and in 1910 mandated what later became known as the “five points of Fundamentalism.”

Yes, some of the pioneers of the “fundamentals of the faith” were part of the old Protestant mainline.

Fosdick’s oration attacked three of these beliefs, including the necessity of belief in Jesus Christ’s literal Virgin Birth and Second Coming. But his third target was pivotal, the contention that as the inspired Word of God, the Bible is free of error on history as well as spiritual and moral teachings. Fosdick conveyed the canard that this meant God “dictated” the words to earthly stenographers and then championed “progressive” revelation as promoted by scholarly biblical criticism. (Along the way he remarked that rigid interpretation of the Quran was a similar “millstone about the neck” for Islam.)

A dictionary note is required here. Fosdick defended what he called “evangelical” religion, using the word to broadly signify Protestants of whatever theology. In the 1940s, conservative Protestant foes of the modernists began embracing that same word to distinguish themselves from the unpopular hard-line “fundamentalists.”

Got that? The label has stuck ever since, though some contend it now signifies a Republican political bloc more than a theological movement.


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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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Podcast: Why would journalists want to edit St. Patrick's voice out of stories about his feast?

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Podcast: Why would journalists want to edit St. Patrick's voice out of stories about his feast?

When you think of St. Patrick’s Day, what leaps to mind?

Maybe I should ask the question like this: When you think about mainstream-press news coverage of St. Patrick’s Day, what leaps to mind?

Green beer? Corned beef and cabbage (during Lent)?

Great masses of people — primarily in big cities in the Acela Zone and the Rustbelt — going more than a little crazy? Politicians trying to march next to the Catholic archbishop of New York, when they disagree with him on most hot-button issues? Lawsuits about LGBTQ groups demanding to march in a parade that, once upon a time, had something to do with Christian hero?

Questions like these were at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which got rather personal — since my family embraced the Celtic saints when we converted to Orthodox Christianity. My patron saint is St. Brendan and my daughter’s is St. Brigid (more on this later).

The Big Idea of this podcast was quite simple: It is totally valid for journalists to focus on civic celebrations of St. Patrick’s Day and other modern variations on the veneration (not worship) of the great Celtic saints. The problem is when they leave readers in the dark about the details in the lives of these saints (along with debates about those details), along with the prayers and rites linked to them.

For example, when you think about St. Patrick do these words come to mind?

My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers. I am looked down upon by many. My father was Calpornius. He was a deacon; his father was Potitus, a priest, who lived at Bannavem Taburniae. ... His home was near there, and that is where I was taken prisoner. I was about sixteen at the time. At that time, I did not know the true God. I was taken into captivity in Ireland, along with thousands of others.

That’s the first few lines of the Confession of St. Patrick, a document that historians take quite seriously — in part because it focuses on the faith and history of this great missionary bishop, while ignoring all kinds mythological details that came later.


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When is the Midnight Mass? All humor aside, there's history (and news) linked to this rite

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When is the Midnight Mass? All humor aside, there's history (and news) linked to this rite

Once upon a time, before the creation of the Internet, there were these very, very powerful and all-knowing professionals known as “church secretaries.” Yes, I know that they have evolved into office managers and web czarinas.

But, long ago, if anyone needed to know something about church life, or really needed to reach the pastor (this is before smartphones, too), they called the “church secretary,” who basically served as an air-traffic-controller for everything happing in the church family.

Back in the 1980s, I wrote a news piece for The Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) about the question that church secretaries in Catholic parishes used to dread hearing over and over during the three or four days ahead of Christmas Eve. That question, of course, was: “When is the Midnight Mass?”

Honest. People would ask that and, truth be told, the Midnight Mass, in some parishes, doesn’t start at midnight. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

But this post, in the week before Christmas (for most Christians in America), is about the importance of the Midnight Mass and other Christmas Eve and Christmas services. You see, there are potential news stories here. Let’s discuss several of them, briefly.

First, there is an interesting fact that I learned long ago from the late Lyle Schaller, a Mainline Protestant maven who was an often-quoted expert on church growth and, as the Mainline world imploded, church survival. The easiest way to sum up the Christmas news angle that I learned from him is to share the top of a 2015 tribute column that I wrote about his work (“Lyle Schaller, the church fix-it man in rapidly changing times”):

All pastors know that there are legions of "Easter Christians" who make it their tradition to dress up once a year and touch base with God.

What can pastors do? Not much, said the late, great church-management guru Lyle Schaller, while discussing these red-letter days on the calendar. Rather than worrying about that Easter crowd, he urged church leaders to look for new faces at Christmas.


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