I would also say, spend time in churches. Church is the most popular non-biological thing Americans do; more people do it every week than go to the movies, go to pro sporting events, etc. An old editor once asked us to contrast the resources we spent covering primary elections (considerable) with the resources we spent covering church (negligible), and then to consider how many people vote in primary elections (a handful) with how many people attend church (a great deal).
For lots of poor and working class people in the U.S., church is welfare state, social network, community center, daycare provider, school, and arts venue all rolled into one. Church will fix your car, give you money for groceries if you're out of work, and set you up on a date. There are thousands of places in this country where every other institution - factory, farm, union, fraternal order, family - has collapsed because of 30 years of Reaganism. Church is all that many people have rooting them to a particular spot.
You go to a decent-sized church on a Wednesday night and see people who should be tired from long days at the call center or the garage or driving a school bus sitting around and discussing the finer points of complicated ancient literature and then standing up and singing, and stuff like the referendum in North Carolina makes a lot more sense.
i completely agree with you. w had a whole faith-based charity dealio in place, which i think ron suskind wrote about, and which suggests the canker at the heart of the republicanism of it all.
i'm trying to think of how i'd cover this for my 30 year old reader, with money, since my newspaper needs advertisers.
the cambodians all converted in the ref camps so they could get church sponsors to enter the country as refs. oncce here the mormons,, who were the only xtians to learn khmer, drove them to dr's appointments and told them they'd be reunited with their dead families in morm heaven. it's a huge story and hard to cover as a "real" thing, yannow? help me out.
The first thing is there can't be a "Religion" reporter who covers everybody from Pentecostals to Zoroastrians. Every news outlet makes that mistake, and it leads to inch-deep, mile-wide coverage that at its best parachutes into big stories and at its worst just produces a lot of gee-whiz features that can be boiled down to "Local people observe traditions."
Ideally, one reporter each would be assigned to cover the big denomination, grouping, megachurch. That way you can get to those daily-life stories. If this isn't possible for resource reasons, pick the most important church/denomination/whatever in your area and ignore the rest. Effectively this means you'll be covering evangelicals, Spanish-speaking Catholics, or Mormons, depending on where you live.
The next thing that lots of people constantly get wrong is that in religion, ideas matter. People don't go to church for daycare or grocery money; that stuff is a byproduct of the ideas, and would chafe people if it didn't spring from a sense of solidarity. What do religious people actually believe? That's a question most coverage never even asks.
I think the question that would intrigue your 30-year-old reader with money is the one that rarely enters religion coverage: How does this work? It's Wednesday night, so that means people in my hometown are speaking in tongues at a converted 1930s movie palace. Half a mile north on Main Street, other people are arriving for their overnight volunteer shifts at the ecumenical homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Something is going on in the lives of these people; what is it and how does it work?
one of my buds out here used to organize migrant workers in georgia. she said all those nice catholic boys joined the evangelical prot latino churches in the scraggy little mall storefronts because they invited them to thanksgiving dinner. authentic altruism, how does it work? yes yes yes.
The battle between Catholics and evangelicals for Latino souls is one of the great untold stories of the last 40 years. It takes in everything from the CIA and the attempted genocide of Mayans in Guatemala to all those Iglesias de Dios you see cropping up in suburban neighborhoods next to check-cashing places and nail salons.
For lots of poor and working class people in the U.S., church is welfare state, social network, community center, daycare provider, school, and arts venue all rolled into one. Church will fix your car, give you money for groceries if you're out of work, and set you up on a date. There are thousands of places in this country where every other institution - factory, farm, union, fraternal order, family - has collapsed because of 30 years of Reaganism. Church is all that many people have rooting them to a particular spot.
You go to a decent-sized church on a Wednesday night and see people who should be tired from long days at the call center or the garage or driving a school bus sitting around and discussing the finer points of complicated ancient literature and then standing up and singing, and stuff like the referendum in North Carolina makes a lot more sense.
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i'm trying to think of how i'd cover this for my 30 year old reader, with money, since my newspaper needs advertisers.
the cambodians all converted in the ref camps so they could get church sponsors to enter the country as refs. oncce here the mormons,, who were the only xtians to learn khmer, drove them to dr's appointments and told them they'd be reunited with their dead families in morm heaven. it's a huge story and hard to cover as a "real" thing, yannow? help me out.
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Ideally, one reporter each would be assigned to cover the big denomination, grouping, megachurch. That way you can get to those daily-life stories. If this isn't possible for resource reasons, pick the most important church/denomination/whatever in your area and ignore the rest. Effectively this means you'll be covering evangelicals, Spanish-speaking Catholics, or Mormons, depending on where you live.
The next thing that lots of people constantly get wrong is that in religion, ideas matter. People don't go to church for daycare or grocery money; that stuff is a byproduct of the ideas, and would chafe people if it didn't spring from a sense of solidarity. What do religious people actually believe? That's a question most coverage never even asks.
I think the question that would intrigue your 30-year-old reader with money is the one that rarely enters religion coverage: How does this work? It's Wednesday night, so that means people in my hometown are speaking in tongues at a converted 1930s movie palace. Half a mile north on Main Street, other people are arriving for their overnight volunteer shifts at the ecumenical homeless shelter and soup kitchen. Something is going on in the lives of these people; what is it and how does it work?
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authentic altruism, how does it work? yes yes yes.
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the battle for their souls as they become the plurality voters here makes this a story with motherfuckin legs.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html
how do i cover grocer norquist and all he represents?
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