Miami

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Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

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Plug-In: 'As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this': condo horror rocks Jewish community

Back in 1995, I covered the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building for The Oklahoman.

To many of us in Oklahoma, images of the partially collapsed Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, seem “gut-wrenchingly similar” to the Murrah Building rubble 26 years ago.

Even the slow, excruciating search for victims — as loved ones pray for a miracle — stirs tearful reminders.

More than a week after the Miami-area condo building’s collapse, the fear is no longer that the missing won’t be found alive. It’s that “they may not be found at all, making it harder to know when and how to grieve those lost,” report the Wall Street Journal’s Alicia A. Caldwell, Valerie Bauerlein and Daniela Hernandez.

“The grief here is really deep,” Rabbi Ariel Yeshurun of the Skylake Synagogue in North Miami tells the Journal. “As a rabbi, you deal with grief. But not like this.”

The disaster “has rocked Surfside’s Jewish community, a cohesive and interconnected group mirrored in just a few places in the United States,” explain the Washington Post’s Laura Reiley and Brittany Shammas.

Religion News Service’s Yonat Shimron interviews Rabbi Sholom Lipskar, who leads the Shul of Bal Harbour, a synagogue that takes up nearly an entire city block less than a mile from the Champlain Towers.

More to read:

• ‘Now is not the time to ask why’: Surfside’s Jewish community ushers in somber Shabbat (by Marie-Rose Sheinerman, Carli Teproff and Samantha J. Gross, Miami Herald)

• Jewish community prays for miracles after condo collapse (by Luis Andres Henao, Terry Spencer and Kelli Kennedy, Associated Press)

• Miami-area churches pray for miracles, minister to rescue teams after condo collapse (by Kate Shellnutt, Christianity Today)


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Good grief! Why won't Hispanics vote like they're supposed to? (With Axios think piece)

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All together now: Good grief!

The other day I shared my frustration with readers, after enduring another elite newsroom story about the “shocking” trends among Hispanic voters in the 2020 elections. It turned out that quite a few Hispanics didn’t vote for Democrats the way that they were supposed to and it wasn’t just Cubans in Miami.

Of course there were economic issues involved. Of course there were efforts to paint Democrats as “socialists” or worse, using labels that really scare lots of voters in conservative Hispanic households (including Cubans, of course).

Of course, there are “religion ghosts” lurking in many of those memories of life in the old country.

Anyway, I wrote a post with this headline: “One more time — Why can't Democrats count on Hispanics, etc., to vote the way they should?” I noted that GetReligion has been running posts on this topic ever since the 2016 campaign in Florida, when there was evidence that evangelical Latinos helped make Donald Trump a winner there. As I said earlier this week:

There’s more to this story than Cubans in Miami. Reporters need to visit megachurches in and around Orlando. Also, if you have ever lived in Texas, you know that the political lives of third- and fourth-generation Hispanics is rather different than those of more recent arrivals. And, again, look for church ties. …

Now the editors need to ponder this truth: Political labels are not enough.

That post was about a New York Times political-desk story that was completely tone deaf to the religion angles in this important topic.

Now, low and behold, that Times team has gone and done it again — this time looking at Miami and its powerful Cuban community, in particular. The double-decker headline states:

How Hispanic Voters Swung Miami Right

Many expected that liberal young Hispanic voters would propel a Democratic wave. But Miami, a city where Hispanics hold the levers of power, confounded expectations.

It was more of the same, of course.


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Podcast: Whoa! An old religion-beat story heated up the politics of Florida in 2020

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If you have followed the religion beat for several decades, you know that one of the most important trends has been the rising numbers of Hispanics — in Latin America and in the United States — who have converted to various forms of Protestantism. Check out this huge study by the Pew Research Center on the Pentecostal side of that trend.

But that’s just, you know, religion stuff. That kind of information isn’t really real until it affects something important — like politics. Right?

That brings us, once again, to the closer-than-expected 2020 showdown between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And, no doubt about it, the Washington Post political desk was impressed with the many hooks that GOP leaders used to reel in lots of Hispanic voters in Florida, which is supposed to be the ultimate multicultural swing state in American politics.

The story considered many different angles, from the usual stress on Cuban conservatism to talk of how immigrants from troubled lands in South America may have been swayed by warnings about “socialism” and images of mobs in major-city streets crashing into businesses and public buildings. The headline focused on one location: “Miami-Dade Hispanics helped sink Biden in Florida.”

There was, however, an important topic missing in this story. Want to guess what that was? This was — no surprise — one topic discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to tune that in.

This political trend in Florida was so important that the Post produced another story about it: “Democrats lose ground with Latino voters in Florida and Texas, underscoring outreach missteps.” Readers who dug deep into this piece finally hit the following:

The Democratic Party’s failure in Florida to build a permanent campaign infrastructure to target Latinos left the Biden campaign at an early disadvantage, said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster and strategist in the state. Amandi said he has warned Democratic leaders about this election cycle after election cycle, but has seen little change.

Although Cuban Americans, who tend to live in Miami-Dade County, have historically been Republican-leaning voters, their commitment to the GOP is not monolithic. Meanwhile, Puerto Ricans, whose numbers have grown in the state in recent years, are often assumed to be Democrats. That is not always the case among many evangelical Protestants and those who have recently moved from Puerto Rico.

If you missed that three-word phrase — “many evangelical Protestants” — there was this sentence later:


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All megachurches are not alike: NYTimes noted Howard-Browne arrest, but didn't leave it at that

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Rare is the day when I do not receive some kind of email linked to the following issue.

I will use “evangelicals” in this equation, since that is the most common religious flock mentioned in these missives. You also see this equation play out with “Catholic voters,” “Jews and Israel,” “New Yorkers,” “Democrats” (and “Republicans”) and lots of other niches in public life.

It is one thing to say that “evangelicals” are doing such and such or are responsible for a specific trend/event that is in the news. Think about that recent New York Times headline — now tweaked — that read: “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Evangelicals.”

Making blanket statements of that kind — about evangelicals, Jews, journalists or any other group — requires either (a) massive amounts of solid reporting or some combination of (b) ego and/or (c) hatred.

Frequently, journalists need to carefully look at the evidence and add words such as “most,” “some” or even “a few.” They may need to limit their judgmental statements to certain zip codes or subgroups of a larger whole (there are many kinds of Baptists, for example).

With that in mind, consider the following New York Times story that — #WAITFORIT — deserves some praise for not putting all evangelicals and even megachurch pastors in the same boat during the coronavirus crisis. And, yes, I am returning to an important topic that was just addressed by our own Julia Duin. Here’s the double-decker Times headline: “

Florida Pastor Arrested After Defying Virus Orders

The sheriff of Hillsborough County said the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, a Pentecostal pastor, endangered the lives of his parishioners by holding services on Sunday.

Yes, that preacher — again. Here is the overture:

MIAMI — Before the Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, the pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch in Florida, held two church services on Sunday — each filled with hundreds of parishioners — lawyers from the sheriff’s office and local government pleaded with him to reconsider putting his congregation in danger of contracting the coronavirus.


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Not the right kind of paper to report both sides? About that story on fired Catholic teacher

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Just last month, I highlighted a quasi-piece of reporting by the Washington Post on a pastor "lighting into" President Donald Trump with Vice President Mike Pence sitting in a front pew.

I noted that it's often difficult these days — even in the Post — to tell what's supposed to be real news and what's simply clickbait and/or aggregation.

Well, here we go again ...

A reader emailed us about a new Post story that raises some of the same "What is this?" questions as the earlier piece.

The latest story — with the headline "‘Not the right kind of Catholic’: Private schoolteacher fired days after same-sex wedding" — prompted a GetReligion-style analysis by the reader who emailed us.

I thought I might share highlights of the reader's thoughts and respond to each.

From the reader:

The article is about a teacher fired from a Catholic school after she married her same sex partner. The opening few paragraphs make it clear whose side the writer is on by carefully describing the upcoming wedding, then dropping the bombshell of her being fired.

Certainly, the lede is sensitive to the teacher's situation and seems designed to evoke a response from readers. But honestly, I don't have a major problem with the lede. It's the rest of the story and the much-delayed and incomplete reporting on the other side that concerns me, from a journalistic perspective.

More from the reader:


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This is why the media just can't resist a chainsaw-wielding nun helping after Hurricane Irma

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It's clickbait.

Take that back — it's chainsaw bait.

As NPR put it, "(N)o one, it seems, can resist a story about a chainsaw-wielding nun."

And you know what? I don't blame them. What's not to like about this story?

The basics from Emily Miller at Religion News Service:

(RNS) — Now here’s something you don’t see every day: A Carmelite nun, in full habit, cutting trees with a chainsaw.
Sister Margaret Ann, principal of Miami’s Archbishop Coleman F. Carroll High School, caught the attention of an off-duty police officer, who posted photos and video of her at work on the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Facebook page on Tuesday (Sept. 12).
The post said acts of kindness like hers “remind us all that we are #OneCommunity in #MiamiDadeCounty” and included the praying hands emoji for good measure.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, snagged an interview with the nun:


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So when is it OK for a bishop to call President Barack Obama a 'sodomite'?

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This was certainly the strangest URL anyone sent me this week.

When I saw that an Episcopal bishop had called the president a sodomite I assumed that the problem in this story was that we were dealing with an "Episcopal" bishop -- a leader in some kind of fringe, buy-yourself-a-mitre church -- rather than a real, live leader in the liberal Episcopal Church establishment. As it turned out, the WLRN website was actually writing about a mainstream, and thus culturally liberal, Episcopalian.

So what the heck?

Eventually, this story or essay gets to the point, underneath the headline: "What Bishop Frade May Have Meant When He Called President Obama A Sodomite." But first, the story had to explain that this bishop was actually a good guy.


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That all-but-missing detail about Jeb Bush's life

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Catholics here in America have a very intense and interesting relationship with the mainstream press.


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