earthquake

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Plug-In: Around 100 Million Super Bowl viewers saw new commercials -- about Jesus?

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Plug-In: Around 100 Million Super Bowl viewers saw new commercials -- about Jesus?

Good morning!

After a week on the road that took me from Oklahoma to Texas to Arkansas to Tennessee, I’m back in the driver’s seat at Weekend Plug-in.

The Big Game was this weekend and it included some prominent religion-news stories. With that in mind, let’s kick off our scrimmage of the top headlines and best reads in the world of faith.

What To Know: The Big Story

‘He Gets Us’: Jesus is coming to the Super Bowl — to the commercials, that is.

Two ads. Ninety seconds. A $20 million price tag.

The Associated Press’ Holly Meyer, Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana and the Washington Times’ Mark Kellner delve into the pricey campaign and its backers.

The bottom line, as AP explains:

They hope to counter the notion that religion is used to divide people, spending about $20 million to reach more than 100 million viewers at a time when the nation’s Christian population — and religious affiliation of any kind — are in decline.

Because religion is a touchy subject and prime-time advertising is so expensive, it is rare for faith to be promoted alongside the Super Bowl ’s perennially buzzed about beer and fast-food commercials. But the backers of the “He Gets Us” campaign see it as a great opportunity to reach so many people at once.

Faith and football: For the first time, two Black quarterbacks — Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs — will face each other during a Super Bowl.

Hurts and Mahomes have something else in common: They’re both “practicing Christians not afraid to publicly talk about their faith and how it helps them succeed at the highest levels,” as Clemente Lisi explains at ReligionUnplugged.

‘God of Sod’: George Toma is preparing the field for the Super Bowl for the 57th straight year. “When I’m in heaven, I’ll be looking at your beautiful field,” the 94-year-old Toma tells the New York Times, “or I’ll be in hell looking up what kind of root system you have.”

A final football note: Lifeway Research’s Aaron Earls provides four guidelines to keep your church Super Bowl party legal.


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It's the end of the world as they report it: New York Times listens to echo-chamber voices

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Good morning, journalism class. Today's topic is the question of the voice in writing, specifically news writing.

No, we're not talking about active voice versus passive voice, Rather, let's look at the voices -- the "subject matter experts" as the phrasing goes -- selected by a reporter and a media outlet to speak to a given item.

For this question, we can thank The New York Times and their recent feature titled, "Apocalyptic Thoughts Amid Nature’s Chaos? You Could Be Forgiven." While the subject itself is interesting, it was the voices heard in the story -- as well as those not heard -- that caught my attention.

Here we go:

Vicious hurricanes all in a row, one having swamped Houston and another about to buzz through Florida after ripping up the Caribbean.
Wildfires bursting out all over the West after a season of scorching hot temperatures and years of dryness.
And late Thursday night, off the coast of Mexico, a monster of an earthquake.
You could be forgiven for thinking apocalyptic thoughts, like the science fiction writer John Scalzi who, surveying the charred and flooded and shaken landscape, declared that this “sure as hell feels like the End Times are getting in a few dress rehearsals right about now.”

We go on to a survey -- written and published before now-Tropical Storm Irma made its first U.S. landfall as Hurricane Irma -- the thoughts of several experts about the relationship, if any, between environmental disasters and the End of All Things.


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After the earthquake(s): National Cathedral seeks lots of money and some kind of new life

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Building and operating cathedrals has never been an easy or noncontroversial task. In recent years, several Episcopal Church dioceses have simply given up and closed the doors of their cathedral sanctuaries, often because of the decline of the congregations inside those buildings.

At the same time, far too many Episcopalians on the doctrinal left and the right have been lawyered up for decades, involved in lawsuits that are rooted in disputes about doctrine, but almost always end up focusing on property, buildings, trust funds and sacred assets.

It doesn't help if your cathedral is shaken by a literal earthquake, as well as the tremors of lawsuits and demographics. As most journalists know who follow trends in American religion, membership in the Episcopal Church has declined from about 3.6 million in the glory days of the '60s to about 1.8 million today.

This brings us to a recent New York Times story talking about the struggles to rebuild the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. -- both the earthquake-damaged sanctuary and the human congregation in its pews. Here are the crucial summary paragraphs that set the stage:

Almost four years after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake shook the site -- cracking finials and half a dozen flying buttresses and sending pieces of pinnacles tumbling hundreds of feet -- the National Cathedral is struggling to piece itself back together, physically and financially, even as contractors put the finishing touches on the $10 million first phase of repairs to the interior.
Before the earthquake damage, years of shortsightedness by church leaders, little known to outsiders, left the cathedral in need of millions of dollars in repairs and exposed to the worst of the 2008-09 financial crisis, when it had to cut its budget in half and lay off almost 100 out of its 170 full-time employees.


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