counseling

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Plug-In: Faith in Uvalde, even as national media attention focuses on police and guns

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Plug-In: Faith in Uvalde, even as national media attention focuses on police and guns

In the 10 days since a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, questions about the incompetent police response have dominated the headlines.

So, too, has the political debate over gun violence, specifically the assault-style weapons used in Uvalde as well as recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and — just this week — Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Rightly so.

But faith, too, has emerged as a vital part of the story, as we first highlighted last Friday. Once again this week, that is where we start.

Check out this must-read coverage:

• A church, a gathering place for generations, becomes a hub for Uvalde’s grief (by Rick Rojas, New York Times).

• Funeral after funeral, Uvalde’s only Catholic priest leans on faith (by Teo Armus, Washington Post).

• Meet the first minister of gun violence prevention (by Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service).

• In Uvalde, a ministry of listening and silence (by Addie Michaelian, World).

• ‘This is wailing, weeping, heartfelt grief. This is what this town is feeling’ (by Audrey Jackson, Christian Chronicle).

• The arrow in America’s heart (by Elizabeth Dias, New York Times).

• A former pastor grieves the loss of his great-granddaughter in Uvalde (by John Burnett and Marisa Peñaloza, NPR).

• On Texas shooting, Vatican Academy for Life says just laws ‘protect all citizens’ (by Elise Ann Allen, Crux).


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A World Series MVP's marriage crashes and his pastor is more than a role player in the drama

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A World Series MVP's marriage crashes and his pastor is more than a role player in the drama

Celebrity divorces are rarely tidy and uncomplicated. This is especially true when one of the people in the marriage is alleged to have been sleeping with the couple’s marriage counselor.

Two more details: The marriage counselor was (1) both the couple’s pastor and (2) the leader of a charitable foundation funded by the jilted husband. Now, throw in the fact that the husband was, at the time, a Major League Baseball star — the 2016 World Series MVP — with the Chicago Cubs.

This is not, alas, your usual upbeat Bobby Ross, Jr., story about God and baseball. Several news operations have reported on this sad affair, but the key report ran, logically enough, at The Chicago Tribune. The headline: “Ben Zobrist lawsuit alleges his pastor had an affair with his wife Julianna and defrauded the former Chicago Cubs player’s charity.”

The story was written by a reporter who covers “sports pop culture with a Chicago focus as well as a range of other topics from the White Sox to fantasy football.” As you would expect, this story misses one or two religion details that many readers would have liked to have known. Here’s some crucial material right up top:

The lawsuit against Byron Yawn, CEO of the Nashville-area counseling firm Forrest Crain and Co., seeks $6 million in punitive and compensatory damages through a jury trial.

According to the complaint filed May 6 in Nashville Circuit Court, Yawn, while acting as the Zobrists’ marital counselor and executive director of Ben Zobrist’s charity, “usurped the ministerial-counselor role, violated and betrayed the confidence entrusted to him by the plaintiff, breached his fiduciary duty owed to the plaintiff and deceitfully used his access as counselor to engage in an inappropriate sexual relationship with the plaintiff’s wife.”

Yawn’s attorney, Christopher Bellamy of Nashville-based Neal and Harwell, told the Tribune …: “At the end of the day, a woman has the right to choose who she wants to be with. We’re in the middle of litigation, so I can’t really comment further at this point, but that’s what it boils down to.”

Yes, that certainly raises moral questions, in terms of the actions of high-profile conservative Christians. But that is not the stuff of journalism discussions.

I did, however, want to know more about this pastor and the church at the heart of this drama.


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Is this a news story? A new challenge for pastors: Smartphones that just won't leave them alone

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Is this a news story? A new challenge for pastors: Smartphones that just won't leave them alone

If you know anything about the lives of pastors and priests, you know that — when it comes time to help hurting people — they really want to be able to pull aside, slow things down, look into someone’s face and talk things over.

Life does not always allow this, I know.

But my father was a pastor and, at the end of his ministry life, a hospital chaplain who spent most of his time with the parents of children who were fighting cancer.

On the few times I was with him during those hospital shifts, I saw him — over and over — sit in silence with someone, just being there, waiting until they were ready to talk. He was there to help, but mainly he was there to talk, to pray and to wait — for good news or bad news.

It would be hard to imagine a form of human communication that is more different than today’s world of social media apps on smartphones.

That’s why an article that I ran into the other day — via the progressive Baptist News Global website — stopped me dead in my tracks. The headline: “Pastors and other church leaders: Give up social media. Not for Lent, but forever.” I posted the article as a think piece here at GetReligion and then decided that I really need to talk to the author, the Rev. John Jay Alvaro, the lead pastor at the First Baptist Church of Pasadena, Calif.

That led to an “On Religion” column this week for the Universal syndicate and, now, to a “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Why did this topic intrigue me so much?

Well, first of all, it would be hard to name a more powerful trend in human communication today than social media and our omnipresent smartphones. That’s news. And Alvaro is convinced that these social-media programs are seriously warping the work of pastors. That’s a claim that would affect thousands of pastors and millions of people. So, yes, I think this topic is a news subject in and of itself.

Here is a large chunk of my column:

His thesis is that the "dumpster fire" of social-media life is making it harder for pastors to love real people.


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The Daily Beast digs into case of a generic 'youth pastor' who preyed on young boys

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It's a truth your GetReligionistas have discussed many times. When you are covering a story about people linked to a faith with a clearly defined hierarchy it's pretty clear who you are supposed to call.

I'm not just talking about Roman Catholics. If a United Methodist pastor gets in trouble, there is a clear regional and national structure linked to the work of the clergy. Southern Baptist congregations are part of regional associations, state conventions and then they have ties of various kinds to the national Southern Baptist Convention. You have some place to start digging.

But when a minister goes REALLY off the tracks, it's hard -- especially in the world of nondenominational, independent evangelicalism or Pentecostalism -- to find a paper trail anywhere, along with people who were responsible for supervising the work of this or that clergyperson. And what about people who were only "sort of" clergy?

I thought of all of that while reading this recent piece at The Daily Beast that had this genuinely hellish tabloid headline: "UNHOLY: Pastor Arrested for Chopping Up Teen Kept Counseling Kids for 23 Years."

Now, in terms of facts linked to church life, the key word in that headline is "pastor."

When you hear "pastor," you kind of assume that we are talking about an individual who has gone to seminary, been ordained and has a pulpit somewhere in a church. Pastors fill a specific leadership role in a specific faith community, one with a tradition of some kind (even if its an independent local congregation). You hear "associate pastor" and you think someone who carries out a specific ministry, working in a larger church that has a senior pastor in the pulpit.

Now in this case, things are much murkier and the Daily Beast team never offers readers a clear look at the facts, in terms of the man at the heart of this nightmare. Once we make it past the mysteries linked to the sniffing dog and the headless torso, what we get is this:

Fred Laster, 16, was last seen with local youth pastor Ron Hyde several days earlier. Laster hitched a ride with Hyde after a family argument, according to his sister. Laster and his five siblings were living with their elderly grandparents at the time, after their mom died from cancer four years earlier.


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Elvis statues, segregation: Atlanta paper lays Deep South template over Nashville news

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The Atlanta Journal Constitution raises Deep South, Civil War-era caricatures in its weekend story on cultural stresses in Tennessee.  And it does so in almost a robotic, paint-by-the-numbers style.

The article strains mightily to contrast urbane, liberal city dwellers with backward, "ignorant" -- yes, one source uses that word -- country folk. It takes a patronizing attitude toward these yahoos and pits people on the street against scholars and think-tankers. It even compares so-called "bathroom bills" in some states with "White" and "Colored" signs from segregation days.

How else to read paragraphs like:

Across the country -- the South in particular -- a wave of bills, proposals and court fights in recent months are again ramping up the culture wars. The measures come in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court legalizing same-sex marriage, a decision many religious conservatives see as an assault on their beliefs.

And:

The South finds itself in the middle of that conflict. It’s a place where city folks may have a decidedly different take on social issues than their peers in the country, a region where progressive notions rub up against more traditional, conservative values.

For context, the article brings Georgia's"religious liberty" bill -- complete with sarcasm quotes -- vetoed by Gov. Nathan Deal. There's also Gov. Bill Haslam vetoing a bill to make the Bible the state book in Tennessee, then signing a bill to let counselors refer out people who conflict with their "sincerely held principles" -- yes, more sarcasm quotes -- to reject gay, lesbian, transgender and other clients. Would it be better for these religious counselors to handle these cases, even though they have a clear conflict of interest?


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Kellerism on right? Dialogue with atheist reader about coverage of military chaplains

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Your GetReligionistas get quite a few emails from readers that you never hear about "out front" here on the blog. Many are from professionals on the Godbeat and others come from journalists on copy desks and on other beats. All are read carefully and appreciated.

We also have critics, of course, and we pay close attention to them, too, especially the constructive folks who are actually talking about journalism issues, rather than their own pet political or cultural issues. One long-time reader I have always appreciated is atheist Ray Ingles, who makes regular appearances in our comments pages.

The other day he sent me a Washington Times URL for a story on another military-chaplain dispute, with the simple question in the email subject line: "Do you think this was balanced?" The story opened like this:

Soon there may only be atheists in the foxholes.
Christians are leaving the U.S. military or are discouraged from joining in the first place because of a “hostile work environment” that doesn’t let them express their beliefs openly, religious freedom advocates say.


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News about 'conversion' therapies for gays? As usual, one side gets to offer its views

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Several readers have written to ask me what I thought of the recent news stories linked to President Barack Obama's endorsement of government bans on so-called "conversion" therapies for various sexual orientation and behavior issues.

I guess I didn't write about these reports because I assumed, accurately, that the mainstream coverage would be rooted in the new journalism doctrines of "Kellerism," with few if any attempts to explore the views of advocates for secular and religious counselors who support the rights of people to seek out this kind of help.

You may have noticed that, even in these first few lines, I have described these counselors and their work in ways that many readers will consider sympathetic, because I included distinctions that represent the views of some of the people on that side of the issue. In other words, these are subtleties that rarely show up in the news, because mainstream stories rarely explore the views of people on both sides of this fight.

Consider, for example, the lede on the main Washington Post report:

The Obama administration late Wednesday called for a ban on so-called “conversion” therapies that promise to cure gay and transgender people.

What? They forgot to use the phrase "pray away the gay." The key words in that lede are "promise" and "cure." Hang on to that thought.

When it came time to represent the views of these counselors, the Post team used the increasingly familiar tactic of representing the "other side" with a quote from a print source. While story -- as it should -- featured interviews with many experts and activists that backed Obama's action, the "other side" was granted this:


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