by John Adams

You know the 2010 Winter Olympics are almost complete when the average fan can hum four verses of the Olympic theme song and the local ice rinks are packed with curling wannabes. With more than half the events in the books the biggest shock is that a simple Google search of “Religion+Olympics” brings up “Tough Day for a Land Where Hockey is a Religion” as the No. 1 result, with “Are the Olympics Canada's New Religion?” receiving the silver medal.

Lucky for me, a fellow journalist informed me that the Winter Olympics are actually about sports and not religion. She quizzed, “Why does everything have to turn into a story about religion?”  

Answer: It doesn't, but isn't the Olympics about people? And don't most peoples' stories intertwine with religion at some point in their lives? And with 2,629 athletes competing in Vancouver isn't there a good chance that some have a specific religious ardor that drives their lives and that would be a compelling story to the world?

Surfing through some of the search results provided four “notable” stories on religion:  

1) Religion has Historic Ties to the Olympics (It was a story about the Summer Olympics and the article was about the original athletes competing naked – that is just not something I want to think about in regards to the Winter Olympics.)

2) Christian Ministries Seek Excellence During Olympic Outreach (I'm sure Jesus is happy that His people are seeking excellence during the Olympic Outreach – and even after the games are over.)

3) Olympic-sized Risks – Death, Injury and Risk Taking in the Winter Games: Begging for a Christian Response. The story is about the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili's fatal collision during a practice run at Whistler. However, the blog post was less about religion and more about promoting one's agenda:

Should the Christian community speak out against sports in which victory, fame, and fortune is directly tied to athletes' willingness to risk life and limb in performing dangerous stunts? I think it should.

4) Finally, a story with real religious substance: Iran's Hijab Skier in Winter Olympics. Marjan Kalhor was the first Iranian woman to compete in the Winter Games and finished 22 seconds behind the winner of the giant slalom (22 seconds is an eternity when talking in terms of the giant slalom). The big story was not that she finished last but that she competed while wearing a hijab under her helmet.

The Olympics are not just about sports but about life, country and, yes, even religion. Are we reporters taking the easy way down the hill because we are afraid to examine the religious aspects of this worldwide event as well as the possible controversies we might encounter?  

We obscure the complete story of these athletes when we fail to ask how religion figured into this Winter Olympics. This was our trial run, after all: The 2012 Summer Olympics will be jammed-packed with religious stories because the games coincide with Ramadan.

John Adams is a second-year grad student at USC Annenberg, where he is working toward a master's in online journalism. He was a pastor for 12 years before leaving his church and heading to grad school.  He is now focused on sports journalism and is the co-founder of thesportsunion.com.

by Ali H. Mir

Do we want to call Joseph Andrew Stack III a terrorist or just a really angry upper-middle-class white tax protester with an airplane?

Stack purposely crashed his Piper Cherokee PA-28 into a federal building in Austin, Texas on February 18, 2010.  It is now clear that Stack selected this building as a target because it housed approximately 190 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees.

Stack left a detailed six-page suicide letter explaining why he decided to take his own life and to take the lives of others through his suicide attack using an airplane loaded with extra fuel. What is interesting about Stack's suicide letter is that much of the language he chose to use is similar to the rhetoric found in statements made by spokesmen for Al-Qaeda that call for or justify terrorist acts against civilians.

Stack states in his letter, “We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place [the United States] and we should be ready to lay down our lives for the noble principals by its founding fathers.” Similarly, an operative affiliated with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, claiming that the bombing of the Danish Embassy in Islamabad in 2008 was retaliation for the printing of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, declared that the attack was carried out because “[i]f there is no check on your freedom of words, then let your hearts be open to the freedom of our actions.”

Another statement from Stack's letter: “Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough).”  He goes further and says, “But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I ensure nothing will change.” Al-Qaeda representatives often argue that suicide attacks and killing innocents are necessary as a form of retaliation for real and perceived injustices in order to bring about necessary change.  

Several hours after Stack's suicide attack, and after the letter Stack wrote was authenticated, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a statement to the media stating, “At this time, we have no reason to believe there is a nexus to terrorist activity. We continue to gather more information, and are aware there is additional information about the pilot's history.” Local law enforcement officials on the scene in Austin did not draw a connection between the suicide attack and terrorism. Art Acevedo, Chief of the Austin Police Department, said, “I consider this a criminal act by a lone individual.”  

For the purpose of clarity, an act of domestic terrorism is defined by the Patriot Act as something “intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.”    

The headlines in major media outlets have avoided using the word “terrorism” to describe Stack's suicide attack: the Los Angeles Times: “Man who crashed plane into Austin IRS building part of decades-long line of tax protesters;” the Christian Science Monitor: “Joe Stack IRS attack and the growth of the tax resistance movement;” and CBS News/Associated Press: “Austin Pilot Left Anti-IRS Suicide Note.”

Several bloggers and online columnists are now exploring why law enforcement agencies and the legacy media have been hesitant to connect the word “terrorism” to the atrocious act of violence committed by Stack (see Brian Selter's piece on the New York Times blog , Glenn Greenwald's piece for Salon and Evan Perez's piece on the Wall Street Journal blog ). However, the initial and continuing reaction prevaling in most major media outlets in the United States was and is to identify Stack as disgruntled, depressed, a pilot, a tax protestor, a man acting alone, a criminal, one bad apple–but certainly not a terrorist.  

Writers in the blogosphere as well as some online media venues, on the other hand, do seem to be pushing the issue of Stack as a terrorist (see, for example, Marcia Alesan Dawkin's piece for TruthDig). Bucky Turco of Animal New York puts it well: “So to recap. Joseph Stack carried out a premeditated, politically motivated suicidal attack, using an airplane, against both the U.S. government and its civilians, to scare them and protest specific policies of said government, that he outlined in a manifesto posted online and ultimately intended to destroy the entire building. Am I missing something here?”

Law enforcement and the major media outlets in the United States need to be consistent in their definition of terrorism and to use the term objectively. Selective use of the term makes it clear that objectivity is simply a conceit and that certain racial, ethnic and religious groups are incapable of committing acts of terrorism (i.e. upper-middle-class white men who own airplanes and nurture a grievance against their own government).

Ali H. Mir is currently the Director of Muslim Student Life at the University of Southern California Office of Religious Life and a 2010 NewGround Fellow. Ali is a graduate of the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development. As a private environmental consultant, Ali has over seven years of  experience within the policy framework of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

In 2009, the Gaza conflict took a terrible toll on the battlefield; now, a year later, casualties have spilled into the newsroom. The sacking of a progressive political leader from her spot as a columnist at one of Israel's prestigious dailies has charges and counter-charges of McCarthyism and Jewish anti-Zionism lobbing back and forth the blogosphere. But the bitter debate over Israel's security, its freedom of the press and the legitimacy of its loyal opposition hasn't even registered in the U.S. mainstream media.

On Feb. 7 The Jerusalem Post announced it had fired columnist Naomi Chazan after she and the New Israel Fund (NIF) threatened legal action against the paper for carrying an ad against her and the U.S.-based philanthropy of which she is president. After running the anti-Chazan ad, The Post subsequently published one that defended her and the NIF. But Chazan's lawyers said the initial ad constituted libel and incitement, and that the cancellation of her column was a form of speech infringement.

In the ad, Chazan, a former Knesset member, was depicted with a horn sprouting from her forehead. Im Tirtzu, the group that sponsored the ad, accused Chazan and the NIF of funding groups that provided “negative” comments for a U.N. probe of Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip last year. The Goldstone Report determined that the Israeli offensive, launched in response to Palestinian rocket fire, killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. It also found that both sides had committed war crimes, a charge that both Israelis and Palestinians have denied.

Chazan said there is no direct correlation between the NIF's political positions and those of the groups that have received grants from the NIF. “We really don't support every single thing these organizations say, but we support their right to say it,” she told Ha'aretz last week. “The only thing that unites them is a demand for an independent investigation, and this is totally mainstream.” But NIF, a progressive philanthropy “committed to democratic change in Israel,” has inflamed some conservative Israelis who see it as a fifth column supported by American liberals.  

Many of these American liberals prefer not to publicly criticize Israel (not just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also on issues of human and civil rights, economic justice, immigration and the environment). Instead they support NIF, which promotes on-the-ground change. But the attack by Im Tirtzu signals an end to business as usual.

Im Tirtzu calls itself a centrist organization that wants to strengthen political Zionism. But according to an investigative report by Ha'aretz, the movement is funded by right-wing groups and individuals, including John Hagee, the controversial Texas pastor who heads Christians United for Israel. (An ardent Zionist, Hagee has nevertheless alienated many Jews by blaming them for anti-Semitism.) Also on board with Im Tirtzu is the Central Fund for Israel, a New York-based non-profit that funds settler militias and security for West Bank settlements. Im Tirtzu's website calls for “a second Zionist revolution.” That begs the question: Who and what will be overthrown?

At the very least, the flap over Chazan has trained a spotlight on a pair of American non-profits that are channeling millions of dollars to support two very different visions of Israel. Sounds like a story in the making.

But it's also interesting that Israel—long heralded as the only American-style democracy in the Middle East—may be entering a period that some of its citizens find reminiscent of the McCarthy era, a time when right-wing activists used government and the press to question the patriotism of Americans who may or may not have been Communist sympathizers. (McCarthy's Congressional hearings blurred differences among the truly subversive, loyal leftists and the unfairly accused.) 

The 1950s Red Scare was the beginning of the end for the American left. Ever since then, the center of American political life has moved farther to the right as mainstream politicians steer clear of causes, issues or ideas that would place them in the progressive (code name for “lefty-socialist”) camp. In the meantime, the legacy media has muzzled itself, likewise fearful of the right's blanket criticism of the liberal press. (For more on this see David Domke's study of the post 9/11 press: God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.)

Since its inception, Israel has had a wide diversity of opinions forcefully presented in the public sphere. Newspapers have reflected a spectrum of political views, cultivating free speech and lively debate. The Chazan affair chills anyone who believes that openness is necessary for peace and justice in the Middle East—and anywhere else in the world. Enforced conformity, conjured by right-wing political correctness, doesn't make for an informed citizenry or a vibrant press. Up to now, Israel has been lucky enough to have both. Maybe it's no accident that American journalists have missed the story thus far.

[USC Annenberg graduate student Len Ly contributed research for this piece.]

by Courtney Bender

In the weeks before Christmas the culture-blogs were all atwitter over a Toys'R'Us advertisement for a pink microscope that had less magnification power than the blue or black models featured on the same page. “Girls need less power?” the headlines asked. This week, another pink instrument caught the public's attention, by way of Fox News. This time it was Hasbro's pink Ouija board, a modernized version of the game it has been selling since the 1960's.

While the pink Ouija is relatively new, major toy makers have been selling talking boards as “games” for generations. So why the fuss over this one? Is there more to this story than conservative Christians up in arms about demon possession a la “The Exorcist“?

Talking boards were born in the late 19th century, when Spiritualists hoped to both speed up the process of dictating messages from spirit mediums as well as democratize the practice. Spiritualism centered around mediums, many of them young women and girls, who had started to receive messages from ghosts in the 1840's. (The Fox sisters, ages 6 and 8, are generally considered to have been the founding “mediums” of the movement.) Ouija boards have been produced and sold since the 1890's, quickly crossing over into the realm of “novelty” as the Spiritualist denomination dwindled in size. As a game and an object in popular film and television, the talking board remains a popular device through which Americans continue to pose serious and semi-serious questions.

Take for example a recent episode of CBS' drama The Ghost Whisperer (now in its fifth season), where a skeptical anthropologist (Margaret Cho) is haunted by a surprisingly animated Ouija board. The plot is formulaic and saccharine, so the episode's real draw centers around the Ouija board itself. What kind of communication does it allow? What is the quality of the connection? Who are we talking to? Cho, settling down with the board, candles lit, asks: “Is this a séance or a seduction?” Her desire to connect is kept in check by the series' “real” medium, played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. She cautions Cho that Ouija boards are a faulty technology. There are a lot of “cranky ghosts” out there, and you never know to whom you're talking. So yes you can talk to a ghost, but the Ouija board affords little control.

Which brings us to the fact that Hasbro's pink Ouija board encapsulates and expands the tensions that continue to center on gendered and spiritual power in American culture. All gussied up for its slumber party, the new Ouija board packs a powerful mnemonic punch, reminding us of the Fox sisters, of the possessed girl in “The Exorcist” and the various other images that invest both girls and inanimate objects with serious power. These images reproduce old questions: How can they (spirits or girls) be controlled? Who can control them?

In our culture, young girls remain both objects and cauldrons of desire. They are hungry for secret knowledge and relations as well as connectivity of all kinds–spiritual, physical and intellectual. The pink Ouija board should thus likewise remind those of us who study and/or report on American religion that the tendrils of spiritual power can be found written into and wrapped up in various unexpected places– including narratives about children, gender and cultural power. We might end up agreeing with Hasbro that the Ouija board is “just a game,” but that doesn't mean that we can ignore the powers that it conjures.  

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).
 

by Evan Pondel

The mayor of Lancaster, CA says his city is “growing a Christian community,” but after reading myriad wire stories and the handful of local features regarding this topic, I still have no sense of what life (religious or otherwise) is like in Lancaster.

Why should I care? Lancaster is the eighth largest city in my home county of Los Angeles, and its population is growing at a rate that is more than double that of the state of California–which arguably makes it a microcosm of exurban culture in the U.S. The fact that Lancaster's largest employer is Edwards Air Force Base adds another potentially intriguing ingredient to the mix.

Yet I cannot find a single story about Mayor R. Rex Parris' recent remarks that relays more than a few scant details about the economic, political and religious context of this sprawling community.

But let's be fair here. Local news organizations aren't exactly chomping at the bit to send their skeleton staffs to the outer reaches of the county when sensational stories closer to home tend to attract more eyeballs. So what kind of information can reporters use to convey what's interesting about a bellwether community and a mayor with some apparently provocative religious convictions?

The Los Angeles Times published a blog item or two on the mayor's coming under fire from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Undeniably interesting, but the blogs would better serve readers by providing some context about the Muslim population in Lancaster. And how about the mayor's use of the word “Christian,” which started this whole hullabaloo in the first place? Is there a significant Christian influence in Lancaster? Perhaps a talk with local clergy members would help sharpen this point.

And I'd like to know who was in the room when the mayor delivered his State of the City address. What do community members think about the mayor's vision for their city (or his apology)? Where does the mayor go to church? Do his fellow congregants agree with his vision?  Where do people pray in Lancaster?

Instead of parsing what the mayor said, we should focus on what he didn't say. The only story I read that attempted to portray the religious context of Lancaster was a piece published on examiner.com. About seven paragraphs deep, the reporter quoted a statistic suggesting that the Muslim community makes up 2.7 percent of the Antelope Valley population.  The writer didn't attribute the statistic, but at least that suggests why the Council on American-Islamic Relations took up the issue.   

Another ready-to-boil issue: the comments Lancaster City Councilwoman Sherry Marquez posted on her Facebook page about Islam. Disconcerting? Yes, indeed (see paragraph six). Who are these local government officials, and perhaps the more pressing question is, what do we know about the folks who elected them?    

I hope some reporter somewhere is going to dig in and ask the right questions. Until then, the reporting on this potentially rich story is missing the kind of context that could really make it come alive.

Evan Pondel is a master's candidate in specialized journalism at the University of Southern California.  He has more than a decade of experience as a print journalist, serving as a writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal online, the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Daily News.  He has also written for Los Angeles magazine and the Jewish Journal.

Reporting in the Science section of the New York Times on Tuesday, John Tierney probes the paper's most popular pieces. They're not breezy bits about sex, pets, diets or relationships. Rather, they're long, “intellectually challenging” articles that elicit an emotional sense of awe.

Jonah Berger, a University of Pennsylvania researcher who studied the Times' “most emailed” list, explained: “Emotion in general leads to transmission, and awe is quite a strong emotion. If I've just read this story that changes the way I understand myself and the world, I want to talk to others about what it means. I want to proselytize and share the feeling of awe. If you read the article and feel the same emotion, it will bring us closer together.”

William James, the early 20th-century philosopher/psychologist, would not be surprised. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, a groundbreaking book that sought to reconcile science and religion, James advocates the primacy of religious experience—that is, the emotional evocation of awe and transcendence—over religious institutions. Nor would many of today's true believers be taken aback. They, too, assume that their vision of the “good news” leads to a deeper and richer awareness that also builds community.

Looks like writing about religion would be among the paper's most emailed stories, right? But nowhere in Tierney's piece is that word even mentioned. Rather, the paper's most widely circulated pieces come from the Science section, covering topics ranging from the science of the stars to the prehistory of humankind. Secular elites, as many Times readers are, don't look to God or the Bible for answers about the history of the universe, human evolution or the nature of good and evil. They turn to cosmology, paleontology and social psychology for illumination. When they look to religion, they want color, conflict, scandal and sensationalism. (Or so goes conventional journalistic wisdom.)

But conventional wisdom is not always wise or widely accepted beyond those who hold it. Yes, the public needs to know about priestly pedophilia and politically over-reaching pastors. We need stories on the rise of religiously inspired terrorism and the debates over ordaining gays and lesbians. But there's much more to religion than a laundry list of the good, the bad and the ugly. Art, nature, mystery and (super)naturalism shouldn't all be ceded to science.

Two years ago, The Wire—HBO's brilliant series on life in Baltimore—took a critical look at how and why the news media fails citizens. This spring, Caprica—a SyFy series about a civilization beset by religious terrorism, widespread corruption and technology gone amok (sound familiar?)—depicts how tainted tips, gang-bang reporting and sensationalist coverage likewise undermine an otherwise thoughtful citizenry.

The Penn study offers an alternative. Its findings indicate that readers want something more than trivia, trifles and bad news. The ramifications could change not only the coverage of religion but how and what we cover across the board.

Diane Winston

by Judith Weisenfeld

On February 3, 2010, the Yavapai County, Arizona Sheriff's Department arrested self-help counselor James Arthur Ray, charging him with three counts of manslaughter for the deaths that took place in the course of his October 2009 “Spiritual Warrior” retreat. Prior to the deaths, Ray had advertised the retreat as part of his program to “create harmonic wealth in all areas of your life” and offered secrets he said he had “searched out in the mountains of Peru, the jungles of the Amazon (and a few other places I don't care to recall).” On the final evening of the five-day $9,000 retreat, participants gathered inside a tarp-covered wooden sweat lodge for a ritual of purification they hoped would attract material bounty.  About an hour into the “sweat lodge” event, some participants began to vomit and pass out from the high heat, dehydration and lack of ventilation. Before it was over, nearly two-dozen people were hospitalized, two people were dead and one more would die a week later.  

Not surprisingly, early media coverage of the deaths noted Ray's appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007 when she featured participants in the film version of Rhonda Byrne's self-help bestseller, The Secret.  Ray himself has been active in engaging the media to insist that the deaths were accidental, as in this January interview in New York magazine. Understandably, media coverage of his arrest has focused on the experiences of families of the victims. Less prominent in the mainstream press has been discussion of the response within Indian communities to this specific event – an official statement by Oglala Lakota Chief Arvol Looking Horse and a lawsuit filed against Ray by the Lakota Nation, for example – and to the commodification of Native ceremonies more generally.  

The tragedy at Sedona offers an opportunity for reporters to consider the history of complicated engagements by non-Indians in aspects of Indian traditions and to explore the implications of commodifications of cultural and religious practices. James Arthur Ray is not alone in packaging and selling Native American spirituality, and the deaths in Sedona were not the first to happen in commercialized sweat lodges. This event should be engaged in the broader historical context that Philip J. Deloria outlines in Playing Indian, his 1999 study of the appropriation of Indian identity and practices from the American Revolution through the 20th century.   

Not surprisingly, questions about whether Indian spiritual practices can be considered part of the public domain and available to anyone or understood as inextricably linked to the tribal communities in which they originated are discussed with vigor on the Internet.  Websites, blogs and online forums such as New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans, Don't Pay to Pray and Nuage Tricksters provide valuable resources for covering this story in a way that takes seriously the repeated claims of spiritual exploitation by some Indian peoples, as well as the complicated debates about race and religious authenticity that the deaths in Sedona and Ray's arrest raise. The significance of this story lies not in Ray's connection to Oprah or to The Secret but in what it reveals about the religious politics of contemporary self-help culture and non-Indians' relationship to indigenous people and their traditions.

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).

by Meghan McCarty

There may be no atheists in foxholes, but apparently there are a few Wiccans.

Stories broke this week concerning a Wiccan stone-circle established at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs–that bastion of evangelical Christianity. But what exactly was the story? That depended on which media outlet you turned to for the news.

If you read Dan Elliot's Associated Press article–which was widely published as the sole notice in newspapers and on Web sites like the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News–you would have read a story about a step forward in the Air Force Academy's effort to foster religious tolerance.

According to Elliot, after a 2005 study revealed widespread harassment and discrimination against various religious groups as well as non-evangelical Christians, the Academy has taken steps like establishing the stone-circle to remedy the situation.

“To me this is a freedom thing,” said academy chaplain Lt. Col. William Ziegler, who was quoted in Elliot's article.

Maybe it's a freedom thing, or maybe it's a case of the military establishment bending over backwards to accommodate a minority of wacky witches and dodo druids as FoxNews seemed to suggest.

“Stonehenge on the Rockies?” the Fox report asks with an incredulous question mark.

USA Today religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman highlighted the striking contrast in U.S. military policy with her headline: “Wiccans in uniform? Yes. Gays? Not yet.” Grossman describes the “whiplash” of the week's military news, with resistance to gays in the service on one end of the spectrum and the Wiccan circle on the other, presumably more forward-looking, tolerant end.

But if you had happened to come across the item in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, you would have read about the large wooden cross, made of railroad ties, that was discovered at the heralded Wiccan circle two weeks ago.

To be fair to the outlets that omitted that detail, the academy had not yet made the erection of the cross public–most likely because it didn't fit into the narrative of improved religious tolerance that the news media seemed all too eager to report.

While the L.A. Times reported the incident as an offense against Wiccans, it still seemed to miss the broader narrative: While the military is busy setting up Wiccan circles and Buddhist meditation groups to prove its tolerance, it has done little to address the underlying culture of aggressive Christian proselytizing that has made these “alternative” faiths the object of harassment or discrimination.

In fact, the original 2005 report that exposed religious “intolerance” at the academy mostly cited instances of inappropriate proselytizing and overt religious expression by evangelical Christians, not specific attacks against other religions.

Recent reports about the military using “Jesus Rifles” inscribed with New Testament verses and video that appears to show military chaplains at Bagram Air force Base telling troops how to distribute Bibles to Afghans have served to highlight the pervasiveness of this culture of aggressive Christian evangelism.

The question that news media should be asking is not whether the military is doing enough to combat intolerance of religions other than Christianity, but whether it is doing enough to discourage evangelizing in one of our most important public institutions.

Meghan McCarty is an M.A. candidate in journalism at USC Annenberg and a Graduate Associate at Annenberg TV News.

by Tom Pfingsten

Only Pat Robertson could offhandedly twist a natural disaster to make it sound like a divine slap in the face to some of the world's poorest people. Whether he intended to or not, Robertson instantly became a huge part of the Haiti story, thanks to the American news media, which benefit from outrageous sound bites practically every time Robertson opens his mouth.

The thousands of words and hours of air time devoted to Robertson's comments about Haiti were a disservice to that ravaged country and provided the reverend with more attention than he deserves. And, in the end, all that coverage was wasted.

Fast forward three weeks to the next big scandal to result from the disaster in Haiti: the group of Americans caught trying to smuggle 33 Haitian kids out of the country.

Each of the ten defendants faces up to 15 years in jail. It is a serious crisis for one small church in Idaho, and an opportunity to explore the connections between Christianity, humanitarianism gone awry (if the defendants are to be believed) and crime in the midst of disaster (if their accusers are to be believed).

Now we arrive at the journalistic failure that unites the two scandals: Using sensational quotes from the wrong people—and not asking the right people—to help readers understand a significant story.

Letting Pat Robertson explain why an earthquake happened in Haiti—instead of, say, a geologist—would make just about as much sense as asking a geologist why Baptists would want to smuggle children. Meanwhile, journalists have neglected to call on Christian leaders to explain, condemn, justify or otherwise comment on the actions of the 10 alleged kidnappers.

Much light could be shed on how Christians define their altruistic duties if the right person—a public figure known in Christian circles—was approached with an informed question about his or her faith. Instead, when there are important issues of belief at stake, it appears no one thinks to consult a prominent believer. Other helpful sources might include pastors who have spent years actually helping people in Haiti or any of the various church leaders who must have been enraged by the news that this crime was perpetrated by fellow Christians.

In both the Roberson and child-smuggling stories, journalists have failed in significant ways.

One can only imagine how insulting and disheartening it would be to the folks barely hanging on in Port-au-Prince if they could watch American broadcasts of their tragedy and observe that an obscene portion of each segment was dedicated to a grinning Pat Robertson or to the sensationalism of the abduction.

The lessons are connected, and they are simple: Stories like the Baptists and their busload of children cry out for religious context and insightful quotations from fellow Christians. Conversely, do not let the loudest person with the most outrageous angle usurp a story, especially when it's one as complex and heart-rending as the earthquake in Haiti.

Tom Pfingsten is a journalist living in Southern California and studying foreign policy in the Specialized Journalism program at USC. Before grad school, he spent five years as a daily city reporter for the North County Times in San Diego, and he is currently working on a book about World War II veterans, Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March.

by Rebecca Wanzo

As movies like “Legion” and TV shows such as Supernatural make clear, angels are once again pop culture commodities, though the kinder, gentler sort (think Roma Downey or Michael Landon) are definitely passe.

Our era's closest facsimile to the gentle, selfless helpmate of the last century is Earl, the unkempt, tobacco-chewing angel on Saving Grace. He is a representative of God, but one who could just as easily pass as your local sinner. In contrast, a wide variety of angels in contemporary popular culture are misanthropic bad-asses. For example, in the recent film “Legion,” God is through with humanity and sends angels to deliver an apocalyptic punishment. Angels in these new narratives are either angry at God for privileging humans or at war with each other, siding with Lucifer or heaven. In most cases, flawed humans are simply pawns in the larger battle. This storyline has dominated the CW show Supernatural for the last season and a half.

Angels are also popular in the paranormal romance genre. While vampires and shape-shifters are still the alpha heroes of choice, a few series are featuring angels as warrior protagonists. Being touched by an angel does not necessarily lead to salvation in these books, but it can lead to lots and lots of orgasms. In The Guardians series by Meljean Brook, angels and demons are in a war over earth, and the angels have all the earthly, sensual desires of humans because they were once human.

God is not present nor is he even mentioned in Nalini Singh's Guild Hunter books. In her series, angels create vampires and are violent, vengeful world leaders. In the most recent entry, released this week, the protagonist struggles to contain another archangel who has started raising zombies, but manages to find time to have mind-blowing sex with the woman he loves.

Over the last decade, the paranormal romance sub-genre has grown exponentially in romance sales, becoming the biggest seller in genre fiction. While there is no clear correlation between what people consume for pleasure and what they believe, this new model of dangerous and often sexy angels does speak to new trends in moral imagination. While we in academia as well as our colleagues in the journalistic profession have been looking to megachurches and popular nonfiction as pointers to new trends in how people envision God and spirituality, the emergence of angels that are far from angelic gestures toward other ways that people are imagining their universe. 

In a Twilight-saturated world where a vampire is constructed as angelic—Edward sparkles in the sunlight!—it would behoove us to explore how various communities imagine danger, distance and the earthy in the divine. Why are dark-angel narratives becoming popular? Are these consumers different from the half of the population that allegedly believes in guardian angels? Do these narratives, so mired in the battle between good and evil, speak to a feeling that God is distant or even absent in current events?

Reporters might look into online forums as well as local book groups and congregations to see what's turning on readers—and why.

Rebecca Wanzo is an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at the Ohio State University. Her first book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, looks at how citizens frame stories about suffering to make their claims intelligible to the state. Her current book project, The Melancholic Patriot, examines representations of African American citizenship in comic art.