Park Slope

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Thinking, with The Free Press, about what Brooklyn folks don't 'get' about Iowa

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Thinking, with The Free Press, about what Brooklyn folks don't 'get' about Iowa

Let’s do something different with a “think piece” this week.

What we’re going to do is watch a short video and then, hopefully, GetReligion readers can leave a few comments about what they saw or, more importantly, what they didn’t see.

The video itself comes from those savvy urbanites at the must-follow website/Substack feed called The Free Press. What’s going on in this light-hearted, chatty, laugh-to-keep-from-crying offering? The goal was summed up in this epic double-decker headline:

Pork Chops! Politics! The Free Press Goes to the Iowa State Fair. …

Brooklynite Ben Kawaller dives headfirst into livestock, fried food, and the great political divide at America’s annual country circus.

Kawaller states, right up front, that he knows a lot more about musical theater than he does agrarian life (and, needless to say, hip eateries in and around Park Slope don’t serve deep-friend Oreos). So why would he want to spend a week hobnobbing with Iowa farmers?

Read the headline again.

We’re talking politics and the Iowa primaries, of course. Thus, Kawaller offered this online confessional:

Along with showcasing some of the state’s most impressive agriculture, the fair has, since the 1970s, become a de rigueur campaign stop for political candidates. Over the course of this year’s fair, which runs until Sunday, August 20, no fewer than sixteen presidential hopefuls have appeared or are expected to. My visit coincided with some big ones: Florida governor Ron DeSantis was there on Saturday, only to be upstaged by Donald Trump, who also may have arranged for the flight of an aerial banner urging “Be likable, Ron!” (You have to hand it to him: the man knows how to taunt.) 


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Yes, the Gray Lady made a somewhat understandable error in its stolen-tabernacle story

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Yes, the Gray Lady made a somewhat understandable error in its stolen-tabernacle story

Let’s face it, liturgical traditions in ancient Christian flocks are complicated.

With that in mind, let me respond to an error in an otherwise solid story in The New York Times — the latest in what seems like an endless river of news reports about attacks on sanctuaries around the world. Our own Clemente Lisi has written many posts on this topic and, alas, it seems that journalists will be writing more crime stories of this kind in the future.

Here is the dramatic double-decker headline on this latest tragic story:

Theft of a Church’s Tabernacle Leaves More Than a Physical Void

A Brooklyn congregation condemned the desecration of their sacred sanctuary in a burglary that the pastor called “one more blow” to a struggling church.

As I said, this Times story does contain an error that I think is worth a correction.

However, I will have to admit that I read right past this error when I first saw this story and I can understand why it might have slipped past copy-desk professionals (unless a traditional Catholic was in the mix). Why would I have missed it? I’ll deal with that in a moment. First, here is the overture, which contains the error:

Deflated, Father Frank Tumino stepped into the pulpit at St. Francis Xavier Church in Brooklyn on Tuesday morning. Six blocks away, St. Augustine’s, the other church where he serves as pastor, was closed and cordoned off with police tape. At its center was a literal and figurative hole.

“This is just one more blow,” Father Tumino said after presiding over Mass. He was referring to the theft of St. Augustine’s tabernacle, a $2 million gold treasure that was separated from its 19th-century foundation last week with a power saw before presumably vanishing into the murky underground of stolen artifacts.

The ornate tabernacle box that held the eucharist — the wine and consecrated wafers that the faithful believe embody Jesus Christ — disappeared from the Park Slope church’s sanctuary sometime between last Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon, the police said.

The error?


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'Soothing sounds meet church liturgy' -- AP needed more facts about 'sound bath' prayers

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There are few liturgical rites used in the global Anglican Communion that are more beautiful then the service known as “Compline,” “Vespers,” “Evensong” or simply “Evening Prayer.” Similar services are common in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism.

The blending of music, prayers and biblical texts in the Compline rites at Magdalen College, Oxford, are world famous. The historic Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street offers a variety of Evening Prayer rites, including its well-known Sunday evening “Compline by Candlelight” service.

Worshipers who attend these rites are used to hearing texts such as this one from Psalm 74: “Yours is the day, O God, yours also the night; you established the moon and the sun. You fixed all the boundaries of the
earth; you made both summer and winter.” Psalm 141 includes this poetic image: “Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as incense, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice."

As believers move from the trials of daily life into the evening hours, these rites almost always include some kind of confession of sins, such as this “Book of Common Prayer” text:

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.”

According to a long, fascinating Associated Press report — which combines text and video — something rather different is taking place in an Episcopal sanctuary in Park Slope, one of New York City’s trendy neighborhoods.

Readers are given quite a bit of information about some of the contents of an evening prayer rite at this parish. At the same, readers learn next to nothing — other than a few strategic hints — about what has been edited out of this liturgy or added to it. Both halves of that equation could be news. Let’s start with the overture:

NEW YORK (AP) — Meditation and immersion in soothing sounds meet church liturgy at All Saints Episcopal Church in Brooklyn. The combination takes on stress — and self-examination. Welcome to sound bath Evensong.

The first time Alexis Dixon attended a sound bath Evensong at the church, she cried.


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New York Times scribe has big problem with 'New South' -- it's full of backward church people

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To be honest, I had shoved the Ginia Bellafante feature at The New York Times — “Abortion and the Future of the New South” — so far back into the “think piece” folder of guilt that I almost forgot that this “Big City” masterpiece still existed.

In this case, the term “masterpiece” is defined as a piece of first-person journalism that has to be in the running as one of the greatest summary statements of Gray Lady-speak ever put on paper.

I mean, Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher — a former Brooklyn resident — had already produced this truly fab summary statement of what’s going on here. Before we get to the latest response to the Bellafante opus — at Scalawag, hold that thought — let’s let Dreher kick off this thinker-fest:

I’m so sorry. Really, just very sorry. Here entitled Yankees like the NYT’s Ginia Bellafante thought the American South existed to give Millennial Brooklynites a place to reproduce Park Slope, but more affordably, and now we’ve gone and ruined it for them with our deplorable social and religious views.

Ah, right. All that icky religious stuff. That really messes things up for “Tess” and other relocated New Yorkers. Here is the essential Times-talk overture:

Tess wanted her own kingdom, and New York — forbidding, impossible — wasn’t going to let her build it. The start-up costs for the baking and catering business she envisioned were going to be too high; the rent on her apartment in Bed-Stuy was increasing. When she moved in it was $1,800 a month; just a few years later, it was approaching $3,400.

This young woman was a citizen of the New South now. Her business, Tess Kitchen, was thriving. Her New Orleans apartment, at $1,900 a month, had three bathrooms.

I called Tess on the day that the Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee backed legislation to prohibit abortions once a fetal heartbeat was detected. This came 24 hours after Alabama passed the most restrictive abortion law in the country, one that does not allow exceptions for rape or incest. That followed the passage of another restrictive abortion law in Georgia.

Living in a very liberal city in a very conservative state is a trick mirror. “You really forget that you are in the Deep South here,’’ she said.

Need more? It’s all about the word “backward,” you see. You see the people who are, to New York-raised reformers, still yearning for the “Old South” are still fighting the Civil War.


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The New Yorker stirs up a storm with analysis of Chick-fil-A evangelism in the Big Apple

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First things first: I am not a New Yorker. I just live here -- lower Manhattan, to be specific -- two-plus months a year. Thus, I do not pretend to offer any special insights into the heart and soul of New York City.

However, part of my ongoing relationship with this great city is that I spend lots of time talking to New Yorkers about life in their city (as opposed to the New York seen in movies and television). I do this, in part, to help students in the New York Journalism Semester at The King's College, since they come here from all over America and even overseas.

Now, a wise New Yorker gave me this advice when I first started working here. This scribe advised me to never, ever, think of New York City as one place. If you do that, he said, your head will explode. New York City is just too big, too complex, to do that.

Instead, he advised me to figure out how people live in their own unique New York City neighborhoods and then move out into the wider city. And avoid the tourist places. Visit the neighborhood delis, pizza joints, coffee shops, pubs, hole-in-the-wall grocery stores. Talk to people there and, before you know it, those people will know your name and call it out.

The paradox: While New York is the world's greatest Alpha city, its neighborhoods are more like small towns. New York is not a super-crowded shopping mall.

You will not be surprised that this brings me to that viral headline in The New Yorker, the one that proclaimed: "Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City." The photo tagline on the picture of the new Chick-Fil-A on Fulton Street, in my way downtown neighborhood, perfectly captures the tone: 

Chick-fil-A’s corporate purpose begins with the words “to glorify God,” and that proselytism thrums below the surface of its new Fulton Street restaurant.

Yes, this piece was commentary, as opposed to news. But that raises an interesting point, one heard often here at GetReligion: Why settle for commentary? If New Yorkers are angry or upset about a Bible Belt company selling chicken sandwiches, shouldn't there be a way to write a hard-news story about this fact?

Another question: Did the author of this piece simply assume that HIS New York is one big monolithic place, that it is one unified city where everyone thinks and feels the same way? Did he make the same mistake as millions of New York-haters.


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