by Nick Street

Who counts as a Christian conservative? What issues will drive rank-and-file “values voters” to the polls during the next presidential election? And do all voters who compose this chunk of the electorate—mainly evangelical or “born-again” Christians—value the same things equally?

Reading Newsweek's recent story on early handicapping of prospective GOP contenders by eminences of the religious right, you might be forgiven for finding yourself unable to answer these basic questions about Christians who also identify themselves as political conservatives. The magazine's follow-up feature—a slide-show profiling “Faces of the Religious Right”—only compounds the confusion. What gives?

The most obvious issue is lazy sourcing. Leaning on oft-quoted figures like Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, reinforces the mistaken assumption that evangelical Christianity isn't changing as a younger generation of born-again believers comes of age at a time of dire economic crisis. During and since the 2008 presidential campaign ABC News, the New York Times and Time magazine, among many other news outlets, coupled on-the-ground reporting with survey data from Pew and other polling organizations to show that younger evangelicals often avow a different set of political priorities than the older generation.  As Newsweek's own Tony Dokoupil reported last year, while their personal sexual mores haven't changed dramatically, Christian Millennials tend to see poverty and economic inequality as more urgent political priorities than same-sex marriage or opposition to abortion.

Which points to another problem that hovered in the background of the feature story and moved to center stage in the slide-show: the differences in theological orientation and worldview that distinguish the sometimes overlapping factions of American Protestantism—conservative, evangelical, fundamentalist, Pentecostal, mainline and progressive—are essential to understanding trends among religious voters. But these delineations were nowhere to be found in Newsweek's muddled coverage. A modest bit of background reporting would have helpfully illuminated important distinctions and prevented the wrongheaded inclusion of not-so-conservative activists like Jim Wallis and Melissa Rogers in a roster of leaders on the religious right.

The inroads that Barack Obama managed to create among younger evangelical voters in 2008 were largely a consequence of his command of the kind of prophetic language that has devolved into shrillness in the political speech of old-guard conservative Christian activists like Land and Perkins (whose organization, Newsweek's reporter failed to note, was recently named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center).  Now that even members of Obama's own party have begun to murmur that he is not so much a visionary leader as a “negotiator-in-chief,” will those young religious conservatives gravitate toward a GOP candidate? Perhaps John Thune, whose potential candidacy Richard Flory examined recently? And will the continuing economic crisis heighten the importance of bread-and-butter issues among older evangelicals who have traditionally ranked sexual and social values as their foremost concerns at the voting booth? These are the kinds of questions that would be most helpful in a profile of the religious constituency that's likely to shape the upcoming election.

Reporters who choose to follow these leads should try to avoid those dog-eared entries in their Rolodexes. There's a reason it's called news.

Nick Street is the managing editor of TransMissions.

by Richard Flory

With the recent midterm election now behind us, reporters are beginning to speculate about potential Republican challengers to President Obama, and even challengers from within his own party, in the 2012 presidential election. To date, much of the media attention has centered on Sarah Palin and her reality show. Other reports have focused on potential candidates like Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and even Newt Gingrich, who has indicated that he may run in 2012. But one name that has been mentioned among these potential challengers is a surprise—the little known senator from the great state of South Dakota, John Thune. What John Thune lacks in broad exposure, he may gain though his connections to core Republican values voters.

Thune attended the conservative evangelical school Biola University in Southern California, and since his election to the Senate, has been celebrated by the university. Not only is Biola a stronghold of conservative evangelicalism and values Republicanism, it holds to, and promotes, a pre-millennial dispensationalist theology and worldview. In its most basic form, dispensationalism teaches that Jesus will return to Earth to retrieve true believers before humans manage to destroy the planet and that those who faithfully support the nation of Israel will be blessed by God. These deceptively simple beliefs have significant implications for both domestic and foreign policy positions; dispensationalists deny the possibility of nuclear holocaust or environmental catastrophe on the one hand and, on the other, unstintingly support the idea that America must always be Israel's special friend.

This politically inflected “Christian Zionism” also threads through the policy narratives of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, who have all courted (or at least flirted with) the constituency represented by pastor John Hagee and his organization, Christians United for Israel. 

What makes Thune an interesting person to watch is not just his connection to evangelical institutions like Biola, but how the theology and cultural worldview these institutions promote continue to influence his political and policy positions. Not only would this have implications for foreign-policy vis-à-vis Israel and the Middle East, but dispensationalists are among the most adamant in their beliefs that such things as global warming, interfaith dialogue and social justice ethics are not supported by biblical teaching and that an emphasis on these issues undermines the true Christian message. Thune is also connected to the influential–and controversial–C Street organization, which could prove to be both an asset and a liability to his potential candidacy.

As we move toward the 2012 election the relationship between Thune's and other potential candidates' religious beliefs and their various policy positions bears close scrutiny. Of course Thune may never enter the race, and if he does, he may lose early on. But the connection between  any candidate's religious beliefs and how he or she believes the world “really works” is an urgent and often under-reported topic in political journalism. Regardless of whether we see a true dispensationalist as a candidate for president, all candidates have a worldview that inevitably influences their daily decisions and political positions. Thus it is important for reporters to ask how they understand the relationship between their beliefs and the power they would wield as the most powerful chief executive in the world.

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and senior research associate in the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Stanford, 2010) and Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (Rutgers, 2008).

by Lee Gilmore

The latest showdown about California's infamous Proposition 8 saw the two sides presenting arguments to determine the proper legal standing of those who seek to defend that amendment, as well as testimony concerning the law's the constitutional validity. And as has become commonplace, behind the scenes of CSPAN's live broadcast there were numerous conversations buzzing on social media, some of which said as much about changing attitudes towards religion and culture as they did about attitudes toward gay marriage.  

For example, immediately after the hearings, the #prop8 hashtag on twitter was dominated not by statements either for or against a given side, but rather by a popularly retweeted comment from someone calling himself @lord_voldemort7 who opined: “#prop8 is ridiculous. Every person should have identical rights & be treated the same. For example, I hate everyone equally.” This told an interesting story not so much about the legitimacy or scope of the various legal arguments presented, but about the values and attitudes of the millennial generation concerning religion and sexuality.  

@lord_voldemort7, whose account boasts over 445,000 followers, turns out to be a cheeky 19-year-old who has lifted the Voldemort persona to cheerfully and acerbically skewer the pop cultural icons of the tween and millennial set (in addition to characters from the Potter canon, Justin Bieber appears to be a frequent target). The studied indifference of @lord_voldemort7's tweet, particularly coupled with its apparent popularity as a retweet, seems to point to the extent to which the millennial set is kind of over this whole debate.  

My own perspective on the millennial worldview comes from my classrooms at California State University, Northridge (in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley). Ours is a highly diverse campus where, judging from observations and informal polls in my classes, students tend to be largely working class, first-generation college attendees, and many are also second-generation immigrants, reflecting the numerous ethnic communities of greater Los Angeles. One of the courses I teach is American Political Institutions and Religion, and in the inexorable quest to make musty history and abstract political and religious theories accessible and relevant, the subject of marriage equality has often come up in our classroom discussions.  

Although there are exceptions, it's become clear that most of these young people are “pro-gay-marriage.” But this is not so much because they are passionate about protecting equal rights for minorities or particularly interested in the intricacies of queer theory or biblical hermeneutics. Rather the answer to the same-sex marriage question (“like, whatever”) is so obvious to most of them as to be a non-issue. These same students are also, by and large, not especially religious.  When asked, many will claim a Christian identity, but when pressed only a few profess to be especially devout. Theirs tends to be a gentle but relatively disinterested moralistic therapeutic deism.

All of this points to important changes on the religious, political, cultural and moral horizon.  While their elders seek to determine the boundaries of religious tradition and ponder the subtleties of constitutional law, millennials express a relative ease with shifting cultural tides.  And while sociologists ponder the significance of the growing category of religious “nones,” especially among this generation, religious concerns and spiritual expression are seeping into new territories that should prompt scholars–and journalists–to rethink long-held assumptions about the nature of “religion.”

Lee Gilmore really didn't set out to write two posts in a row referencing Harry Potter, but sometimes pop culture just wends that way. She also teaches in the Religious Studies and Anthropology departments at California State University, Northridge. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

As my husband and I drove east on the 10 toward mid-City, I had an epiphany. We'd come from a Christmas party at a friend's home in Venice Beach where pomegranate martinis and platters of red velvet mini-cupcakes limned the largesse of a production company that had staged a murder scene in the living room. Thinking to please me, my husband keyed up a podcast at Slate about HBO's recent documentary on “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Bruce Springsteen's long-awaited follow-up to “Born to Run.” For those of us who remember the interminable three-year wait between the albums, “Darkness” was more than a promise—it was a pay-off. The dude really did understand: By the late 70s, many of us felt as if we were “dying little by little piece by piece.” No longer dancing, we were indeed racing in the streets, desperate to “wash these sins off our hands.”

We could not have known that 32 years later, the sentiment would slither between cliché and inconceivability, a judgment shared by Slate's young commentators—even the self-professed Springsteen maniacs. You had to have been deep in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter malaise to understand that Springsteen's thick descriptions were both a relief and a release. Even their implausibility was inspiring. We did not need to race cars, toil in a factory or date Jersey girls to understand the grim hopelessness of failed dreams. Bruce's idioms for broken hearts and spiritual wastelands seemed more genuine than our own.

What mattered then, and seems fusty now, is Springsteen's religiosity. As the consciousness revolution of the 60s devolved to pet rocks and designer jeans, Springsteen offered an alternative vision. Modest and shockingly workaday, he found redemption in the back seat of an old parked car. The music spun out a lived religion of commitment: punching the clock, honoring a parent, standing by a friend. Through songs that embraced daily life, he made it possible to believe that we could find meaning, feel love and snatch pleasure from pain.

The gospels of contemporary cultural icons have similar messages but delivered with whimsy, finesse and media savvy. I'd been unaware of groups like the Harry Potter Alliance and Invisible Children until I visited my colleague Henry Jenkins' seminar on civic engagement and online participatory culture for a discussion on the spiritual underbelly of this new activism.

According to Jenkins' graduate students, the groups they study do not define themselves as religious or label their activities as religiously motivated. But the conviction to dedicate oneself to social change—both Invisible Children and the HPA were founded by 20-somethings who created engaged global networks from the ground up—reflects a faith in people, ideals and possibilities that transcends the small-bore pursuits that impel the majority of us.

Is this religion? Not in any way you could definitively call Christian or Muslim or Buddhist. But it is an expression of the same quest for identity, community, meaning and purpose that animates all organized religions. Though deemed inauthentic by traditionalists, spiritual networks like HPA and Invisible Children embody recent survey results that show young people moving away from institutional religions but deeply committed to volunteerism, social justice and other hallmarks of religious meaning-making.

Bruce Springsteen's self-conscious mash-ups of Garden State landmarks, Catholic imagery and Steinbeckian prose do sound old-fashioned in today's universe of Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. But the message sometimes transcends the medium—and the desire for each generation to find and define its spiritual path and lived religion is as good a story now as it was 2,000 ago.

Diane Winston

by Brie Loskota

Many theologians, reporters and devout Catholics uttered a collective “whaaat?!?” when the Holy See announced that condoms could be used in a morally responsible way to help stop the spread of HIV. There is probably no more appropriate day than December 1, World AIDS Day, for journalists and commentators to spend some time understanding what's behind the Pope's statement.

Within certain limits, most religious traditions allow for dynamic processes that create, refresh and renew core elements of belief over time. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception.

David Gibson of the New York Times adeptly situates the Pope's decision on condom use within a Catholic intellectual lineage that is centuries old. “By allowing for exceptions for condom use,” Gibson writes, “the Pope was not, as many of his unsettled allies on the Catholic right feared, capitulating to the very moral relativism that he himself has long decried. Instead, he was only espousing a tradition of Catholic moral reasoning based on ethical categories like the lesser evil and the principle of the double-effect.”

This points to an important characteristic of most religious movements and institutions: cultural shifts and ruptures often precipitate changes in creeds, worldviews and even the structures of religious leadership and authority. Sometimes these events produce schisms (think Shia and Sunni Islam, Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism or the Great Schism that split Christianity in the 11th century). Sometimes they produce periods of spiritual renewal like the successive Great Awakenings in American religious history. And, as is the case with the Pope's pronouncements on condom use, sometimes they entail a controversy-spawning balancing act between the “refinement” and the “revision” of established belief and practice.

All of these processes of religious evolution show that religious movements, no matter how insular or authoritarian, are usually shaped to some degree by larger social contexts. In The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor, James Corkery and Thomas Worcester examine the changing nature of the Pope's role on the global stage. In a recent article piece for the Huffington Post, Corkery and Worcester argue that “the papacy has changed greatly, and repeatedly, during the past 500 years through forces largely beyond its control.”

This ebb and flow between institutional authority and the forces of social change doesn't necessarily entail the erosion of the foundations of belief in any given religious movement–though, not surprisingly, what constitutes erosive change for the movement's conservative members may not trigger the same alarm among progressives. Some coverage suggests that the Pope's comments on condom use were narrowly circumscribed to apply only to male prostitutes (see commentary in the Nation and GetReligion for parsings of the grammatical nuances), which means that broader Catholic teachings about procreative sex and the sanctity of fetal life remain unchanged. Other reports hint that the shift may be farther reaching.

“We're in for a long period of confusion,” a former spokesman for the U.S. bishops' conference told the Huffington Post. 

All of this suggests that reporters perform a public service for their audiences by getting ahead of trends that influence religious movements that, in turn, shape current events. How might this adjustment in Roman Catholic teaching on condom use affect efforts to curb the spread of HIV in Africa? Another pair of gender-and-sexuality stories worth investigating: how women's movements within Judaism and Islam are shaping the political scene in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The tittering about the Pope's condom comments will surely diminish in the next few weeks, but their full significance will only be apparent in the years to come.

Brie Loskota is Managing Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also serves as the program officer for the CRCC Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative, a program that seeks to spur new research on one of the world's fastest growing religious movements.

by Kevin Healey

The New York Times technology section is a portal for all things geeky: smart phones, web browsers, video games. The last place you'd go to check the pulse of American religion, right? Not so fast, says tech guru Jaron Lanier, whose latest book, You Are Not a Gadget, takes aim at the same Silicon Valley culture he helped to birth.

“The news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence,” Lanier noted recently. Too often, though, coverage of “smart” machines crosses a line by suggesting that “we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools.” In fact, says Lanier, many journalists unwittingly perpetuate a troubling “new orthodoxy” among tech elites: an ideology that redefines what it means to be human.

“What we are seeing is a new religion,” argues Lanier, who is this year's Innovator-in-Residence at USC Annenberg. One hotbed is Singularity University, a research institute named after the idea—popular among techies—that human beings will eventually achieve immortality by uploading themselves into a super-intelligent computer. Such ideas are anti-human, Lanier argues, since they value the “intelligence” of computer “clouds” over that of individual persons. As these ideas become embedded in technology and popularized by cheerleading journalists, they “lock in” a degraded view of human beings which denies that there is “something ineffable about personhood.”

A case in point is a recent New York Times article extolling the virtues of “cybertherapy”—the use of virtual reality in the treatment of social anxieties. Lanier appears briefly, as a nay-sayer in an otherwise upbeat piece. By contrast, the article defers to Jeremy Bailenson—one of the Silicon Valley researchers whom Lanier critiques. “The most exciting thing about using virtual environments,” Bailenson tells the Times, is that “you can cross boundaries… take risks… do things you could not or would not do in real life.”

Bailenson's comments exemplify how technologists re-assign to computers human capabilities that are often nurtured in the context of spiritual practice. The experience of “crossing boundaries” that Bailenson describes would come as no revelation to practitioners of Tibetan dream yoga, for example. As Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche explains, “With experience, greater freedom is developed in the dream and the boundaries of the mind are overcome, until one can do literally anything that one can think of to do.”

When we transfer such capabilities to technology, Lanier suggests, we entrust technicians with the power of social engineering. But innovations in media are usually driven by pornographers, not well-meaning therapists. Better to develop technologies that enhance, rather than replace, basic human capabilities.

Not all tech journalism is so sanguine. Many articles cite Lanier's book in discussing the down-sides of new media. The Montreal Gazette laments the use of iPhones by concert fans wishing to “capture the moment.” A New York Times review of “The Social Network” suggests that Facebook “reduces life to a database.” Another article places Lanier in dialogue with skeptics like Nicholas Carr.

But even these articles overlook the depth of Lanier's critique, which teems with religious imagery. “The future of religion will be determined by the quirks of the software that gets locked in during the coming decades,” Lanier warns. At stake is our understanding of what it means to be authentically human. It's time to tell the tech journalists: you are not a gadget.

Kevin Healey is a recent Ph.D. recipient from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His dissertation is titled “The Spirit of Networks: New Media and the Changing Role of Religion in American Public Life.” Kevin's research on media and religion appears in Journal of Mass Media Ethics, Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, and Symbolic Interaction.

by Lee Gilmore

In this weekend's headlines about the stupefyingly successful penultimate installment of the Harry Potter saga, reviewers are mainly echoing fans' continuing enthusiasm for the films. But they also seem to have exhausted their well of fresh insights. It's clearly hard to find a new angle on the Potter phenomenon. Trotting out the Christian tropes—both conservative Christian anxiety around witchcraft as well as the narrative's Christian allegorical elements—has become a pretty familiar exercise by now.

But most journalists have yet to ask how alternative religious practitioners respond to Harry Potter. Pagans in particular both critique and resonate with the series' portrayal of witchcraft, and there are religious dimensions to the vibrant Harry Potter fan-culture that have yet to be plumbed. More broadly, Harry Potter has begun to mainstream fantasy and role playing subcultures, some elements of which are beginning to engage in civic activism.

The story of alternative religious perspectives on media culture and social engagement is under-reported, yet these communities are among the fastest-growing segments of the American religious landscape, alongside their cousins the “Nones.” Paganism is among the largest and most prominent alternative religious movements, and has long been on the leading edge of religious communities that utilize new media environments to build networks and visibility.

Some Pagans are critical of the Potter series, feeling that the fanciful version of witchcraft and wizardry it presents has little to do with Paganism's actual ritual practices, and thus trivializes and distorts their religion. Given the Pagan movement's general eclecticism, however, it's not surprising that others fervently embrace the series and count themselves as active participants in Harry Potter fan culture.

Many Pagans deliberately play with questions of identity, symbolism and transformation by adopting the “witchy” costumes and ritual tools found in the this fantasy world. For example, the online Grey School of Wizardry, founded by longtime Pagan innovator Oberon Zell, is modeled on aspects of Hogwarts. The school offers distance-learning for both youth and adults on classic Pagan topics like Magical Practices, Nature Studies and Alchemy.  Potter purists can enroll in Hogwarts Online to pursue fanciful courses such as Transfiguration and Quidditch Through the Ages as well as real-world subjects ranging from Pagan and Western esoteric traditions to Tarot and Astrology.

Some scholars also have fresh ideas about the Harry Potter phenomenon. USC's own Henry Jenkins studies how fans' creative appropriations of media products foster participatory cultures that sometimes nurture civic activism. For example, the Harry Potter Alliance currently seeks to involve fans in a creative campaign against “real-world horcruxes” (so-called after the vessels of evil which much be destroyed by Harry and his friends) such as “starvation wages.”

Other scholarly perspectives can be found through the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group, a well-established scholarly community that examines the cultural significance of the Pagan religious movement. And at least one prominent academic voice is encouraging fellow scholars to approach the subject of the paranormal with increased seriousness and sensitivity.

Harry Potter fans (both Pagan and non) shape the thrill of the paranormal into ritual and play, thus raising questions about how creative works serve to mainstream alternative religions and otherwise taboo cultural issues. From this perspective, the Harry Potter epic continues to embody significant pop-cultural and religious themes in ways that should challenge journalists to see the franchise and the culture around it in a new light.

Lee Gilmore teaches in the Religious Studies and Anthropology departments at California State University, Northridge. Her recent book, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press), explores the cultural and religious significance of the Burning Man festival and why many participants describe it as a spiritual and transformational event.

by Rhonda Roumani

This week, Muslims around the world celebrated the end of one of the most important events of their religious year—the hajj—with Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice. An estimated 2 million Muslims from around the world make the yearly pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia to spend five days on a grueling journey that commemorates the prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son, Ismael, to God.

The coverage on Arabic language channels included live interviews of pilgrims at different points along the hajj as well as young anchors dressed in Western garb responding to comments and questions posted on Facebook. But if you were scanning English-language news outlets in the U.S., you might not even know the hajj was taking place.

If American journalists are aiming to do more than merely react to events that become news—specifically, if we want to get ahead of developments in Islam and the Muslim world–we could start by regularly covering Islam's most important annual event. There are plenty of potential stories in the mix. How about profiling American Muslims making the pilgrimage?

Another thinly covered development here in the States is the movement to outlaw the use of shariah law in local courts. The New York Times has followed the story of a constitutional amendment in Oklahoma that established such a ban, and prior to the recent elections there were a few briefs on similar proposals elsewhere. But the players behind this movement–and whether their concerns are warranted–merit much closer scrutiny than they have received so far.

And on November 28, Egyptians will hold parliamentary elections, which should be big news both because the last balloting in 2005 was marred by violence and because the political aspirations of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood are at the heart of the story there. Egypt's elections–an autocratic state's tentative and often volatile experiment with democracy–will be watched across the Arab world. But there has been little effort in the American press to cover or contextualize this important story.

A good resource for journalists who want to get a handle on the situation in Egypt and its broader significance is Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism by historian John Calvert. The book chronicles the life of Qutb, the intellectual leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 60s who has been credited with inspiring Islamists world-wide. But Calvert helps readers see Qutb not just as an Islamic radical but also a nationalist, a poet and a spiritual seeker who was trying to make sense of the tumultuous changes that were taking place around him.

Calvert provides a nuanced profile of a figure whose writings have been read by devout Muslims across the religious and political spectrum. It's the type of background material journalists urgently need as they work to help people make sense of Islam, Muslim movements and even Islamic radicalism.

Egypt's elections, the anti-shariah movement and the once-again-woefully-under-reported hajj are stories that desperately need telling. Unless reporters dig into them, they and their audiences are destined simply to react to events that have been unfolding in front of them and around them all along. So get ahead of these stories! You can't say nobody told you they were there.

Rhonda Roumani is a freelance journalist who has covered Islam and Muslim-related issues both in the U.S. and abroad. She has worked as a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and her articles have appeared in a number of other publications, including the Washington Post, USA Today, the Washington Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily Star, Bitterlemons.org and Beliefnet.com. She has also appeared on radio and television shows such as CNN International, NPR's “All Things Considered” and the Washington Post Radio. Before turning to freelancing, Roumani worked as a reporter for the Beirut-based Daily Star, where she covered Syria and other regional issues.

by Judith Weisenfeld

On October 30, 2010, a fire destroyed Saint Mary Magdalene Roman Catholic Church in Springfield Gardens, Queens. The local CBS affiliate framed the story with a familiar, formulaic lede: “Fire Destroys Local Church, but not Parishioners' Spirits.”

The briefs on CBS and other news outlets noted, perhaps with some curiosity, that the parish's membership is primarily Afro-Caribbean, African American and African. Because this is my family's home parish–my mother has been an active member for 45 years–I'm acutely aware of the discrepancy between the event's magnitude for parishioners and its interest for news consumers outside Queens. At the same time, I also see the space devoted to coverage of this blip on the media radar as a chance for news organizations to jettison the formula and get religion right.

The story behind the story–in this case, the parish's founding in 1913; its life as the spiritual home to Irish, Italian, Polish and black Catholics; the education the parish school provided before its closing in 1974–rarely makes it into local media coverage of religion. While local television news, with its predictable melange of crime, violence, accident and fires, has experienced ratings declines over the past few years, it still remains an important news source for many people. Local reporters rarely have the time to provide context, opting instead to cultivate emotional responses in their audiences through formulaic vignettes: horrified neighbors had no idea that a killer lived among them (cue shot of front door of criminal's home); relatives are asked to comment on the tragic, untimely death of a young person (cue shot of weeping aunt); residents mourn the loss of a beloved community institution (cue shot of firefighters fighting a blaze).

When the institution framed by the camera is religious, this formula makes it difficult to connect the events to larger social or historical issues. The broader context for understanding the experiences of American Catholics includes church resources diminished by declining membership (partly in response to the church's shocking failure to protect its children), priest shortages and bankruptcies brought about to a great extent by lawsuits from victims of clerical sexual abuse.

These issues have received considerable national press coverage, most recently, through the lens of this week's meeting of the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (UCCB) and the unexpected election of New York's conservative Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan as its President. But showing how elements of the big picture are reflected in smaller events–the mark of a good journalistic story, and something local news teams are perfectly positioned to do–is often hindered by the standard approach to religion in local news.

What does getting it right look like? Paul Vitello's recent piece in the New York Times about the announcement of the first phase of reorganization in the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens is keenly sensitive to the interplay between local parish life and broader political shifts in the church hierarchy in New York. St. Mary Magdalene, which has been without a pastor for some years, is administered by the pastor of a nearby parish and staffed by a sister who serves as Parish Life Coordinator. Lay leadership is strong but, in the context of church closings and mergers in the diocese, it is unlikely that the parish will remain in existence for long, especially with the loss of its church.

The story of how the lives of ordinary Catholics–or Muslims or Jains or Pentecostals–capture or contradict larger narratives is an evergreen resource for local news teams. They need only step outside the tight little box of the formulaic lede to discover a wealth of stories right on their doorstep.

Judith Weisenfeld is Professor of Religion and Associate Faculty in the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author most recently of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (University of California Press, 2007).

Despite smaller staffs, tighter deadlines and shrinking news holes, much of the legacy media produces reliable news around the clock. Some of its work is excellent, revealing vistas that would otherwise be overlooked. This Los Angeles Times piece describes a Jordanian bookstore that specializes in banned volumes. It's the place to go if you want to read about sex, politics or religion. Its most requested tome? The Satanic Verses.

In addition to its news coverage, the Times recently expanded its “Babylon & Beyond” section, its Middle East dispatches, with contributors from the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. Updates this weekend were filed from Egypt, Iran, Gaza and Qatar. Alexandra Sandels had a feature on a new book about graffiti art in Gaza.  Graffiti was one of the only ways to communicate when Israel took control of the region's media during the First Intifada. Activists used the area's concrete walls to provide updates and promote resistance.

Today, graffiti serves as a gauge for local politics, tracking shifting allegiances between Hamas and Fatah. Although both movements use wall artists, Fatah generally focuses on its message while Hamas is usually keener on appearance and artistic quality.

Other Babylon & Beyond stories examine the Muslim Brotherhood's decision to participate in upcoming Egyptian elections, a Doha debate over the merits of democracy over wealth, and Iran's pique at the Chinese decision to refer to the Persian Gulf, the stretch of water separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula, as the “Arabian Gulf.”

On the other side of the world from Babylon & Beyond—literally and figuratively, is the Tablet,  “a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas and culture.” Featured this weekend was an in-depth interview with Noam Chomsky, a voice seldom heard in the mainstream media. I can only guess that the legacy media avoids Chomsky lest he taint them with his leftist cooties, but the Tablet asked all the right questions about his upbringing, relationship to religion and opinions on Israel (I like the comment that said, “I completely disagree with Chomsky's politics, but this was an insightful portrait of a complicated, if misguided, Jew”).

Tablet also has a story about Bonanza, the 1960s TV Western that could easily fit into my “Religion, Media and Hollywood” class. According to Ruth Ellen Gruber, the show was “rooted in Yiddishkeit.” Its creator, David Dortort told Gruber that plotlines “centered on relationships rather than good guy-bad guy gunplay and stressed the values of love, respect and family ties.”  He used “Ben,” his father's name, for the head of the Cartwright family clan, and instilled his own family's values into the Wild West all-male household (Gruber declines to speculate on the show's gender politics or those of the Dortort family).

Diane Winston