Environment-Climate

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Norman Lear: An iconic mass-media seeker who evolved past secularism

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Norman Lear: An iconic mass-media seeker who evolved past secularism

Early in the premier of Norman Lear's sit-com "Sunday Dinner," the beautiful environmentalist T.T. Fagori raised her eyes to heaven and, with a sigh, entered a spiritual minefield.

"Chief?", she asked God. "You got a minute?"

In addition to praying out loud in prime time, this character offered a theological reverie at dinner while meeting the family of her fiancé, a 56-year-old widower nearly three decades her elder. The problem: His granddaughter heard Fagori mention God during a science lecture.

"You see, I talk about extending 'love thy neighbor' to include animals, plants, stuff like that. I say that the natural world is the largest sacred community to which we all belong," Fagori explained. "I talk about cosmic piety because the same atoms that form the galaxies are in all of us and it's the universe that carries the deep mysteries of our existence within itself.

"You see how all that sounds pretty spiritual. … So, when the kids hear me say these things, some of them think they hear the word 'God,' but they don't. I don't actually mention it. Interesting, huh?"

This 1991 comedy flopped, but it was an important statement from Lear, whose December 5 death at 101 years of age closed his career as lightning rod in popular culture and politics.

For decades, Lear described himself as a cultural Jew who didn't practice any traditional form of faith. He also founded People for the American Way, an old-school liberal advocacy group on church-state issues. But this television icon became more and more intrigued with religious faith, both as a force in American life and as a topic ignored by Hollywood.


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Elite press skips doctrine at World Youth Day in favor of (#surprise) scandal and politics

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Elite press skips doctrine at World Youth Day in favor of (#surprise) scandal and politics

This summer has been a very busy one for Pope Francis and the church. Adding to all this news was World Youth Day held in Lisbon, Portugal. Last held in 2019, the event — often nicknamed the “Catholic Woodstock” — was initiated by Saint Pope John Paul II in 1985.

The concept of World Youth Day has been influenced by the Light-Life Movement that has existed in Poland since the 1960s, where Catholic teens celebrated a “day of community” during youth camp retreats. This has morphed into the five-day event that ended yesterday.

The journalists in the mainstream press have never known what to do with this event. This is, after all, a positive gathering that brings together millions of people, mostly young Catholics. This is not an everyday thing. It shows young Catholics happy to embrace the church, while celebrating its teachings — a stark contrast to the secular world and the messages of hopelessness and sin we get each day.

As a result, the mainstream press covers World Youth Day and the pope’s appearances through a lens of scandal and (#ShockedShocked) politics.

Doctrine, as is often the case, is simply swept aside. Anything positive that can be gleaned from the gathering of so many young people is tossed aside. World Youth Day is a snapshot of the church’s future — but you wouldn’t know it from much of the coverage of the last week. For example, going to confession (with the pope helping out) is a major part of the World Youth Day experience. Valid story?

For great — and complete — World Youth Day coverage, the Catholic press did its job, once again. Places such as Crux, The Pillar on Substack and Catholic News Agency created pages where all their stories could be found. In other words, a one-stop-shop for all things World Youth Day.

How did the mainstream media do?

Take a guess.

I understand there are different audiences to satisfy, but ignoring what’s in front of their eyes — large masses of young Catholics excited about their faith — in favor of what I saw as negative coverage isn’t a snapshot of reality. It is, instead, a focus on what editors and journalists think their own loyal niche audiences want to read about the modern church.


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Five big takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention's 2023 annual meeting

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Five big takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention's 2023 annual meeting

Making headlines this past week: A tornado has devastated the Texas Panhandle town of Perryton, killing three people and injuring at least 75. As always, look for the “faith-based FEMA” to be among the helpers.

In Rome, Pope Francis has left the hospital where he had abdominal surgery nine days earlier. His surgeon says the pontiff is “better than before,” The Associated Press’ Francis D’Emilio reports.

This is our weekly roundup of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith. We start with five key takeaways from the Southern Baptist Convention’s big annual meeting in New Orleans.

What To Know: The Big Story

1. No women pastors: As nearly 19,000 people — including 12,737 registered messengers — attended the SBC meeting, the nation’s largest evangelical denomination expanded restrictions on women in leadership.

See coverage by the New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias, Religion News Service’s Adelle M. Banks, the USA Today Network’s Liam Adams and Katherine Burgess, the Wall Street Journal’s Francis X. Rocca and the Washington Times’ Mark A. Kellner.

2. Saddleback out: The SBC rejected an appeal by Rick Warren to reinstate the California megachurch that he founded.

The reason for its ouster: It has women pastors. Also denied reinstatement: a smaller church with a female pastor in Louisville, Kentucky.

See coverage by The Associated Press’ Peter Smith, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt, the Oklahoman’s Carla Hinton, RNS’ Banks and Bob Smietana and the Washington Post’s Michelle Boorstein.

3. Sex abuse reform: The debates about women’s roles threatened to push the issue that dominated last year’s meeting to the background.

But the slow work to address the abuse issue plodded on, as Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt explains.

4. The Rev. Bart Barber reelected: The small-town pastor from Farmersville, Texas, will serve a second one-year term as the SBC’s president.


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Concerning Elon Musk, the Babylon Bee and the wise teachings of Jesus

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Concerning Elon Musk, the Babylon Bee and the wise teachings of Jesus

At the end of each podcast, Babylon Bee leaders ask guests the same 10 questions, including this stumper: "Calvinist or Arminian?"

That caught Elon Musk by surprise, and he needed clarification on the difference between Arminian believers and persons from Armenia. After some background on Protestant history, he said: "My mind would say 'determinism' and my heart says, 'free will.' "

Why was the mastermind behind Tesla and SpaceX -- a man worth $278 billion at the end of 2021-- talking to a Christian satire website? The answer: Musk has 69.7 million Twitter followers, and he frequently responds, even if it's a U.S. senator questioning his taxes.

"You know, he engages with our content from time to time," Bee CEO Seth Dillon told Fox News. After email exchanges about a meeting, Musk said: "Fly to me and we'll do it."

The result was 100-plus minutes of conversation in Austin, Texas, ranging from satire to science, from politics to pop culture. Topics included why entrepreneurs are fleeing California, sustainable energy, superheroes (Musk would choose to be "Irony Man"), the physics of reusable rockets, cyborgs, how "wokeness" threatens humor, CNN morality and the future of a planet near an expanding sun.

Musk discussed his journey from South Africa to America, including his days as a manual laborer while struggling to pay student loans. Then he dove into computer coding and online commerce, making millions of dollars that led to Tesla. The rest is history.

On celebrity websites, Musk is often described as an atheist or agnostic. Asked if he prays, Musk once replied: "I didn't even pray when I almost died of malaria." But after the success of the first manned Falcon rocket mission, Musk said, in his public remarks: "You know, I'm not very religious but I prayed for this one."


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Religion's impact on global migrant crisis: RNS concludes that it's Gordian Knot complicated

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Religion's impact on global migrant crisis: RNS concludes that it's Gordian Knot complicated

Globalization has been a decidedly mixed bag.

On the plus side, it’s managed to knit diverse people together economically and, to a lesser degree, culturally. But it’s also further divided others along religious, political, race, and class lines.

It’s introduced us to a myriad of once exotic consumer products at relatively cheaper prices (cheaper for many Westerners, that is). Globalization has also brought us fresh ideas and life choices that — while I certainly don’t agree with every new view put forth — has enormously enriched my own life experience.

On the negative side — and this is huge — it’s allowed multi-national corporate boards (and shareholders) to escape the full weight of responsibility for the enormous environmental degradation their decisions have produced in exploited regions thousands of miles distant from their posh corporate headquarters.

Also, let’s not forget the foreign workers, including child laborers, exploited by unscrupulous employers trying to satisfy their Western customers insatiable demands for rock bottom prices.

For the United States and other Western nations, globalization’s complex outcomes has produced still another key Gordian Knot dilemma. I’m referring to the vast numbers of desperate human refugees heading, most often without proper documentation, to the United States, Europe, Australia — and even to neighboring countries that may be only relatively better off.

The latter group includes situations American news media rarely cover. They include Nicaraguans fleeing to Costa Rica and South Africa’s burgeoning refugee population comprised of hopeful immigrants from a variety of sub-Saharan African nations.

Is it any surprise to anyone with a working knowledge of Homo sapiens that we demand globalization’s creature comforts without us wanting to deal with those actual Homo sapiens that globalization has negatively impacted.


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New podcast: When popes and presidents meet, headlines may not tell the private stories

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New podcast: When popes and presidents meet, headlines may not tell the private stories

Sometimes, the calendar isn’t friendly to columnists and podcasters.

This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was recorded before the lengthy, closed-door chat (with photo ops before and after) between Pope Francis and the “devout” Catholic President Joe Biden. Thus, host Todd Wilken and I took a kind of “tomorrow’s headlines” approach, surveying the advance coverage of the meeting and some fascinating features that looked at images and the realities of some previous pope-president meetings.

In this podcast I predicted that the headlines and public pronouncements would focus on their agreements about the environment, immigration, poverty and COVID-19 strategies.

Why? Well, the mainstream press believes that these meetings are, first and foremost, political events and these are political topics, even though they clearly have doctrinal content for those with the eyes to see that.

Biden and the pope agree on these subjects and, at this point, the progressive Pope Francis has little or no motivation to hurt a Catholic progressive in the White House. They have many of the same goals and they, to be blunt, have all the same enemies — especially among American Catholics who wear the red hats that mark them as cardinals (and those who have not received red hats).

Would anything significant happen in the private discussions?

That’s the kind of question that Catholic publications will probe and, here at GetReligion, I’ll leave commentary on that topic to Clemente Lisi (it helps that he is fluent in Italian).

If you are looking for a perfect summary of the elite press template for coverage of this meeting, and the ties that bind these two modern Catholics, this block of Washington Post material — from a political-desk story, of course — is pitch perfect:

… The resonance is also personal, given the similarities between the 84-year-old pope and the 78-year-old president, who have in a sense become allies. Both attained ultimate leadership late in their lives and quickly moved in a liberal direction. They have faced internal resistance. Both are treated warily by conservative American bishops.


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Push comes to shove on climate change. What more can clergy and religion reporters do?

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Push comes to shove on climate change. What more can clergy and religion reporters do?

Imagine, if you dare, being forcibly parachuted into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the world’s current hell-hole du jour.

Suddenly you’re forced to shelter and feed your family and you’re at a loss as to how to do this.

Now consider how the increasingly dramatic consequences of human-accelerated climate change might make your already dire situation worse.

A recent New York Times piece attempted to paint this picture.

It was not pretty. Here’s its opening graphs.

Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, the second in three years.

Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.

And while it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to climate change, the effects of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.

Just like that, a regional hell hole turns into a global tragedy that should be generating global headlines. Powerful nations half-a-world away scramble to deal with the situation — or should I say scramble to look like they’re dealing with it.

Nor is Afghanistan the only failed state suffering from ongoing political violence complicated by climate change’s frightening uncertainties. “Of the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a dozen are affected by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index developed by the University of Notre Dame,” The Times article reported.


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Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

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Demographics make news: How will religion shape the oncoming Birth Dearth and vice versa?

A Newsweek magazine feature back in 1975 was headlined "The Cooling World." (Journalists beware: The supposed 1977 Time magazine cover story "How to Survive the Coming Ice Age" is among the countless frauds that infest the Internet.)

Eventually, cultural concern shifted instead to "global warming" (which was then rebranded as "climate change").

Seven years before Newsweek's freeze alarm, Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich published his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb," which sold in the millions and updated Thomas Malthus's dire demographic predictions from 1798. Ehrlich warned, for example, that due to global overpopulation, in the 1970s "hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." He then helped found the Zero Population Growth organization (since rechristened Population Connection).

Now comes The New York Times with a major page-one May 23 feature headlined "Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications." We're told fertility rates are falling most everywhere except Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and that experts project the first population decline in world history will take hold by the end of this century. Click here for tmatt’s podcast and first take on some of the religion hooks in that story.

Stagnant and shrinking populations will thrill a segment of environmentalists, but these trends also destabilize society — which creates news. Whether with the shared responsibilities families have always assumed, or modern-day governments' social security systems, humanity must have enough younger workers carrying older people to sustain itself.

To keep the population stable, a society needs 2.1 children in the average nuclear family. A survey in The Lancet last year predicted that 183 of the world's 195 nations and territories are on a path to fall below that mark.

The particulars are staggering. The United States is well below that replacement number, and India and Mexico are nearly there, but South Korea has plummeted to a remarkable 0.92.


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Behind the headlines: As winter storm cripples Texas power grid, people of faith rally to help

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Behind the headlines: As winter storm cripples Texas power grid, people of faith rally to help

Texans like to brag that they live in “a whole other country.”

I don’t suppose, though, that whoever came up with that slogan had Siberia in mind.

As a severe winter storm crippled the state’s energy grid this week, my parents were among 4 million residents who lost electricity. Mom and Dad endured a really chilly night before going to stay at my sister’s house for a few days.

Heroes (think “Mattress Mack”) and villains (#FlyingTed) have emerged, while people of faith — as they tend to do during disasters — rally to help.

Here at Religion Unplugged, Jillian Cheney tells the inspiring story of a church that partnered with a Jeep club to rescue snowed-in families.

Houses of worship losing power themselves hampered some efforts to provide reliable sanctuary, but “leaders are doing all they can to connect and comfort their communities,” Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt reports.

Churches and other faith groups teamed up to help open an emergency warming center for the homeless at a Dallas convention center, Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana notes.

Catholic churches in San Antonio and Fort Worth opened their doors, according to the Catholic News Agency’s Jonah McKeown.

Among others mobilizing to help: Southern Baptists, Churches of Christ and Episcopalians.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. A congregation of avatars: A few pastors minister “to the wild universe of virtual reality, or VR for short,” this fascinating feature by World magazine’s Juliana Chan Erikson explains.


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