N.T. Wright

Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

Thinking about Bari Weiss, Twitter, evangelicals and New York Times op-ed doctrines

Here’s a question for you: When it comes to defining the doctrines of blue-zip-America, which is more important — the news pages of The New York Times or the newspaper of record’s op-ed pages?

In the old days, I would have said the op-ed pages.

But that was back when most of the Times news desks were, to one degree or another, still part of (to one degree or another) the American Model of the Press (background in this .pdf file). That was certainly the case in the era of the late, great A.M. Rosenthal.

At this moment in time, there are signs of actual diversity — even tension — in the op-ed pages and maybe, just maybe, signs of a few glowing embers of editorial independence in the news papers.

But let’s still assume — as I argued in my Religion & Liberty essay, The Evolving Religion of Journalism — that the Times news operation is still operating as a niche-news, advocacy journalism publication anxious to please the new liberal, maybe illiberal, readers who pay cash for its content.

Let’s assume that the July, 2020, resignation letter posted by Bari “The Free Press” Weiss remains a must-read “think piece” for all news consumers. For those who need a refresh, as part of this “think piece” doubleheader, here are two key passages from that shot over the bow of the Gray Lady’s principalities and powers:

… [A] new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

Here is another essential passage from this “read it all” classic. This comes after Weiss — a gay, Jewish, old-school First Amendment liberal — describes the in-house digital bullying that made her hit the exit door:


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Memory eternal: The quiet, yet very public faith, of Queen Elizabeth the Great

Memory eternal: The quiet, yet very public faith, of Queen Elizabeth the Great

Before wearing the Imperial State Crown, Queen Elizabeth II knelt at the Westminster Abbey altar for a moment of silent, private prayer.

The three-hour coronation in 1953 contained myriad oaths and symbols, but the most ancient rite -- Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher anointing Elizabeth with holy oil -- sought the highest possible blessing on her life's work and eventually her death.

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God," he prayed, "who by his Father was anointed with the oil of gladness … that by the assistance of His heavenly grace you may govern and preserve the people committed to your charge in wealth, peace and godliness; and after a long and glorious course of ruling a temporal kingdom wisely, justly and religiously, you may at last be made partaker of an eternal kingdom."

Televised for the first time, 27 million BBC viewers watched what Oxford don C.S. Lewis called the "tragic splendour" of this drama.

“Over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it," he noted, writing to an American friend.

It was "a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it) -- awe -- pity -- pathos -- mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate."

Few could have imagined that the woman many now call "Elizabeth the Great" would reign for 70 years, striving to lead by example after the suffering of World War II and into an age in which humanity would be united by the Internet, terrorism, pandemics and other challenges.


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Thinking with N.T. Wright and Ryan Burge: Let's talk specifics of that 'evangelical' crisis

If you follow top-tier American media, you know that retired Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright is in the news right now. This is the kind of thing that happens when British intellectuals come to the United States to promote their new books.

Wright is a theologian known around the world as an apologist for a traditional, ecumenical brand of Christianity, to the point that some have said that his pew-level apologetics can be compared with C.S. Lewis.So what’s are the hot topics for Wright, as he tours in support of his new book, “The New Testament in Its World”?

Wait for it.

Well, have you heard that 81% of white evangelicals in American just love Donald Trump? And that American evangelicalism is in a state of crisis?With all of that in mind, let’s make this an N.T. Wright weekend, with some “think piece” input from two religion-beat professionals who will be ultra-familiar to GetReligion readers — Sarah Pulliam Bailey of The Washington Post and Emma Green of The Atlantic.

So Bailey’s breakfast Q&A ran with this headline: “ ‘A wakeup call:’ British theologian N.T. Wright on the prosperity gospel, climate change and Advent.” Here’s a sample:

Q: How do you compare Brexit and Trump, and how British Christians understand American evangelical support for Trump?

A: The same sort of movement propelled both events. With Brexit, we did not see the white evangelical support Trump had. The churches are probably divided. They’re probably mostly Remainers [who wanted Britain to remain in the European Union].

In Britain, the word “evangelical” doesn’t mean what it means in America.


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Podcast: Why reporters (and clergy) should heed religious signals in pop culture

Readers who have followed GetReligion for quite a few years may remember that, in 1991, I left full-time work at The Rocky Mountain News (RIP) to teach as “Communicator on Culture” at Denver Seminary. Basically, I was teaching classes about religious content and trends in mainstream news coverage and popular culture, providing material for apologetics.

In the summer of 1993, when I moved to Milligan College in East Tennessee, I spoke at a national conference for Episcopal church leaders and laypeople, delivering a lecture entitled: “And Now, a Word from Your Culture — Mass Media, Ministry and Tuning in New Signals.” The respondent to my paper, by the way, was Father N.T. Wright, a big-league British intellectual who was beginning to gain some fame in North America. Here is the opening of that lecture:

True or false: It is impossible to talk — in terms of practical details and statistics — about how modern Americans live their lives without addressing the role played by television and other forms of news and entertainment media.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the role that television and other forms of news and entertainment media play in the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: Most churches have little or nothing practical to say about the daily lives of most modern Americans.

True or false: This applies to my church.

Now, this era of my life surfaced in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), because of two recent posts here at GetReligion. They were, “Old Pete Townshend asks some big questions about rock and what happens after he dies” and “Washington Post offers look at five country music myths and misses a familiar ghost.”

The big idea in the podcast: Every now and then popular culture sends out “signals” addressing subjects on topics that religious leaders simply cannot ignore.


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Friday Five: Clergy abuse scandal, Buttigieg at church, politics of communion, N.T. Wright

It’s a big number. A really big number. As in, $4 billion.

As part of its “The Reckoning” series, The Associated Press reported this week that a surge of new abuse claims threatens the Catholic Church like never before — “with potentially more than 5,000 new cases and payouts topping $4 billion.”

Meanwhile, AP reporters and other experts examined the state of the clergy abuse crisis in a Facebook Live panel discussion. Watch it here.

Now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Pete Buttigieg keeps making major headlines in the Democratic presidential race.

We highlighted his visit to a black church in the South on Sunday, asking a question that news stories mostly ignored: “Is Buttigieg being gay a reason for his low support among black voters in the South?” The New York Times later followed up with another story on Buttigieg and black voters. Still, the key question we raised remained unexplored.


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Veritas Forum invites college students to think through 'life's hardest questions'

Veritas Forum invites college students to think through 'life's hardest questions'

It’s back to school time, and how’s this for a bracing lineup of campus lectures in just the past four weeks?

At Yale University, distinguished philosophy professor Shelly Kagan, who is an atheist, hosted a top theologian, Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright, from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews to jointly ponder “Living Well in Light of Death.”

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat visited Ann Arbor to advise University of Michigan students that “Faith Is Not a Sideshow.”

At arch-rival Ohio State, a panel on “Living and Dying Well” consisted of a physician, a biological ethicist, and a specialist who helps patients with end-of-life planning.

Bob Cutillo, a physician working with Colorado’s homeless, spoke at the Mayo Clinic and its medical college on “The Doctor’s Gaze: Some Ancient Opinions on How We See Our Patients.”

Then it was celebrated attorney Rachael Denhollander, leader of the sexual abuse victims in the Michigan State and USA Gymnastics scandals and among Time magazine’s “100 most influential people.” Her double-header this week at New York University, then Columbia University Law School, addressed how justice can be reconciled with religious faith and forgiveness.

So began the season for the Veritas Forum of Cambridge, Mass., which organizes campus lectures to address “life’s hardest questions” from traditional Christian viewpoints that it believes academe neglects. To date there’ve been Veritas events at 185 colleges and universities, including at all but one of America’s top 25 schools in the new Wall Street Journal rankings.

Lecture topics run the gamut, for example “What Does It Mean to be Human?? “Is There Truth Beyond Science?” “Does Science Point to Atheism?” “Is Tolerance Intolerant?” “Contradictions in the Bible?” and “What Makes Us Racist?”

The concept is particularly intriguing due to heavy involvement of conservative or “evangelical” Protestants, often depicted in the media as anti-intellectual or at best mediocre thinkers.

The journalism hook?


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More Bible battles: The 'old, old story' is ever new and, thus, ever in the news

More Bible battles: The 'old, old story' is ever new and, thus, ever in the news

Pondering Washington’s new Museum of the Bible for the quasi-Jewish Commentary magazine, Williams College art historian Michael Lewis finds it ideologically inoffensive and is therefore perplexed at how fiercely some despise the place.

How come? He says the very claim “that the Bible is a foundational document of our civilization is, to many, an unwelcome one. And as biblical ignorance grows, the claim grows progressively more unwelcome. The Bible seems to be one of those books that the less people know about it, the less they like it.”

Journalists: The professor is onto something that might merit a think piece.

But in this Memo, The Religion Guy instead insists that the Book of the “old, old story” (per that Gospel hymn) is perpetually new, and therefore news. Book-buyers, Internet blabbers and media consumers (also church and synagogue attendees) can’t get enough of it. So here’s the latest twist on the Bible beat.

Religion writers should check the next issue of Christianity Today as it  surveys “lesser-known translations” of scripture, provoking this theme: In the Bible sweepstakes, why pick this one and not that one? Plus there’s a story peg in a current biblical battle between two titans who translated their own one-man New Testaments from the original Greek into English, as opposed to the usual committee editions. The competitors:  

(1) David Bentley Hart, outspoken Eastern Orthodox thinker currently at Notre Dame’s Institute for Advanced Study, with his sharply provocative “The New Testament: A Translation” (Yale).

(2) Bishop N.T. Wright of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, favorite New Testament scholar for legions of U.S. Protestants and his fellow Anglicans worldwide. Wright's “The Kingdom New Testament: A Contemporary Translation” (HarperOne, 2011) caused England’s Church Times to proclaim him “the J.K. Rowling of Christian Publishing.”


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A prophet acting out a parable: Why did Jesus choose to curse a fig tree?

A prophet acting out a parable: Why did Jesus choose to curse a fig tree?

RACHAEL’S QUESTION:

What is the significance of Jesus cursing the fig tree?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Our discussion will focus on the Gospel of Mark (11:12-14 and 20-26) rather than the briefer parallel version in Matthew (21:18-22), which most experts think was written down later. Mark records the following:

Jesus was traveling with his disciples to Jerusalem, where he was to “cleanse” the temple by driving out devious money-changers and sellers of birds for sacrifice. He was hungry and spotted a fig tree. Seen from the distance, it showed leaves, but close up there was no fruit. Jesus declared that no-one would ever again eat fruit from this tree. Returning from the temple the next day the disciples saw that the tree had withered down to its roots. (Matthew puts the “cursing” after the “cleansing” and says the tree withered immediately.)

Scholarly British Bishop N.T. Wright says this narrative “looks most peculiar,” and it’s “one of the most difficult in the Gospels” in the view of D.E. Nineham at the University of London. That’s because, as Hugh Anderson of the University of Edinburgh observed, the cursing of the fig tree was Jesus’ only reported miracle of “destruction” rather than restoration, so at first glance it seems “out of character” if not “irrational.”

Interpreters see significance in Mark’s literary “sandwich” with the temple assault enclosed within two halves of the fig tree account. It’s important to realize that the fig tree is a symbol for the Israelite nation in many Old Testament passages, an apt poetic device due to this fruit’s importance for the regional diet.

Jesus was not angry over his hunger, and certainly not angry at a tree.

Rather, scholars tell us, he was filling the role of a Jewish prophet like many before him.


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