Internet fast anyone?…
I don’t know about anybody else, but for the last year or so the arguments at my house tend to be related to the computer.
The more I think about the so-called Facebook Lenten fast, the more I think that it is an idea whose time has come.
Here’s what I think about it.
At my house, my teens are often arguing about computer usage.
Who’s getting on the computer?
Who forgot to turn off the monitor? … the printer?…
Having more than one computer doesn’t help either.
You see, one teen wants to get on the computer that his sibling is on for any number of reasons.
And so it goes.
Sometimes, I play referee by just shutting down all the computers.
So, I look at the idea of adults fasting from Facebook this Lenten season with a new perspective. Plus I just read a story about school students in England who are fasting from the social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace during Lent: Schoolchildren fast.
I like this idea! I LOVE this idea!
Not that my kids are all that into the social networking sites. I’m just thinking that perhaps an Internet ”fast” could be in order. Limiting the amount of time spent on the Internet isn’t a bad idea anyway, particularly if there is no homework involved.
I’m going to broach the subject with the teens, see what happens.
I’ve already got another idea: How about a fast from video games?
That should go over well with my son …
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Feb. 28 Today’s Prayer
Lord, may we not gain riches by dishonest means. Instead, may we receive Your mercy and goodness, which last forever. Amen.
Feast or fundraiser? Church offers both for Lent
Christ the King Catholic Church has come up with a fundraiser designed with the Lenten fast in mind.
Roman Catholics traditionally abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent, the 40 days before Easter Sunday.
Christ the King is selling Lenten enchilada dinners from 3 to 6 p.m. today and Friday, April 3. The dinners include 12 cheese enchiladas, rice, beans, chips and salsa. Cost is $20 per order and folks interested in the Mexican fare can pick their orders up at the church in drive-thru fashion. The church is at 8005 Dorset Drive in Nichols Hills.
All proceeds benefit the church’s Peru Mission Trip Maintenance/Expenses Fund.
For more information, call the church at 842-1481.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Dobson Steps Down as Focus on the Family Chairman
This just in from Colorado Springs, Colo.: James Dobson, the well known conservative Christian leader who founded the Focus on the Family ministry, has stepped down as the ministry’s board chairman.
His wife, National Day of Prayer Chairman Shirley Dobson, has also left the Focus on the Family Board of Directors.
According to the ministry, the Dobson’s have been elected to the positions of founder and chairman emeritus and director emerita, respectively.
In a statement provided by the ministry, the board of directors said the Dobsons’ decision represents the next step in a transition plan begun six years ago, when James Dobson stepped down as president in order to lessen his administrative burden. Executive leadership was handed to Don Hodel in 2003, and then to Jim Daly in 2005. James Dobson had been board chairman until today.
“One of Dr. Dobson’s objectives during the last decade has been to help identify the next generation of leadership for the ministry, and to see it established securely before he stepped away from administrative oversight. That purpose has now been fulfilled, and we applaud Dr. Dobson for this concern for the future of the ministry.”
James Dobson will continue the “Focus on the Family” radio broadcast, and handle other duties as in the past. He will also continue to write the ministry’s newsletter, sent to 1.6 million people per month.
“One of the common errors of founder-presidents is to hold to the reins of leadership too long, thereby preventing the next generation from being prepared for executive authority,” Dobson said. “I have wanted not to make that mistake with Focus on the Family, which is why I stepped back, first from the presidential duties six years ago, and now, from board chairmanship. Though letting go is difficult after three decades of intensive labor, it is the wise thing to do. ”
For more information, visit the ministry’s Web site: Dobson Steps Down.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Morality at the movies
So it’s Friday and you’re thinking about catching a movie this weekend.
You’re trying to find a family friendly movie. Read on:
Screenwriter Teri Haux says she grew up loving movies so much she knew she wanted to write them.
Haux has written a new book “Movie Viewer Extraordinaire: Discerning the Influences of Movies on Your Freedom, Family and Happiness.”
She offers the following tips for families looking for movies that match their morals:
1. Choose the morals and standards you want to live by. Examine the ideas and concepts that are important to you, and that you want to pass on to your children. Before you understand what you don’t want in a movie, you really need to come to terms with the things that you DO want. Make your choices your standards, and use them as the guidelines to navigate your family’s movie wish list.
2. Regulate ALL media that you and your family experience. For all the people who want to ban certain films and television shows, the truth is that it is far easier to simply choose and guide what your own family watches. Movies that feature more sex or violence than we would like will always be around. We simply don’t have to watch them. The natural extension of that is being a vigilant parent who knows not only what your kids are doing, but also what they are watching.
3. Reinforce positive influences and minimize the negative. Short of editing the movies yourselves, you likely won’t 
eliminate all vestiges of the negative elements of modern movies. Talk to your kids about some of the things that they see, and ensure they understand the context of the actions. Silence in the presence of harmful examples is an implied endorsement.
4. Trust your feelings. Movies do more than entertain. They touch our emotions, so if we are previewing a movie, and it feels wrong (or right), chances are it is. These are individual choices, and we need to trust our guts sometimes.
5. Use movies to complement dreams, interests and talents. Since we already know that children emulate what they see on film and television, why not expose them to a diet of movies that actually inspires them and speaks to interests and talents they may already exhibit. One of the most valuable things movies do for us is that they take us to new places and show us things we might never see on our own, allowing us to live our dreams vicariously through the cinematic experience. When we choose movies that connect to our aspirations, the potential for inspiration is limitless.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Have a green Lent
The Natural Resource Defense Council has compiled a list of “green” resolutions for the environmentally conscious individual observing Lent.
Lent, the 40 days preceding Easter Sunday, is a time when many Christians from some faith traditions abstain from certain things. Some people abstain from certain foods or perhaps they abstain from certain behaviors during a season marked by prayer, reflection and pentinence.
The suggestion on the council’s list is to give up plastic and paper bags.
“Do you opt for paper or plastic when at the grocery store? Neither is a good choice,” the council says on The Daily Green’s Web site. “Twelve million barrels of oil were used to make the 88.5 billion plastic bags consumed in the United States last year. And it takes four times more energy to make paper bags.
The best choice is reusable shopping bags made of cotton, nylon or durable, meshlike plastic. Put a few reusable shopping bags in your car so you have them handy on your next shopping trip. And if you happen to forget your reusable bag (as we all do!), choose paper if you will recycle it or plastic if you will reuse or recycle it.”
This is a simple tip, definitely something to think about.
Get more tips on the council’s complete list by clicking here: Green Lent.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Feb. 27 Today’s Prayer
Lord, forgive us when we are led astray by our deceitful hearts. Search us and rid us of any impure or unjust thoughts. Amen.
Meat-less recipes for Lent, courtesy of Humane Society
Many Roman Catholics traditionally abstain from eating meat on Ash Wednesday and Friday’s during Lent.
The Humane Society of the United States offers meat- and dairy-free recipes on its Web site.
A message on the site reminds those who fast thatchoosing meat-less meals during Lent “is not only a symbol of self-sacrifice but is a means to proactively help millions of animals who suffer on factory farms in the United States each day.”
For meat-less recipes from the Humane Society’s kitchen, click here: Veggie recipes for Lent. Scroll down to the bottom of the page.
Look for more Lent-related blog postings here on the Religion and Values blog in the days ahead.
Carla Hinton
Religion Editor
Religion reporter loses faith
Reader, before you wonder if the blog title is referring to me, read on:
A story came over the wire yesterday that immediately captured my interest because it involved another religion writer (or former religion writer).
The story really hit home.
The Religion News Service had an interesting story about a new book by former religion reporter William Lobnell.
Lobnell writes about his crisis of faith in “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace.”
According to the RNS, Lobnell wrote that he lost his faith while covering the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal as a journalist for the Lost Angeles Times. Lobnell had been an evangelical Christian and was going through the process of converting to Catholicism when he began reporting on an Orange County priest accused of molesting boys.
The book’s premise, released just a day before Ash Wednesday, might seem like a downer during Lent. However, I found that it pushed me to think about those times that I’ve had my own crises of faith and how they were resolved.
None (and I can count them on one hand) had anything to do with a story I was reporting on. Rather they were spurred by personal disappointments within my own family and circle of friends. Some I brought on myself, a sort of internal combustion.
Each time, the resolution was basically the same: You will lose your faith if you place your hope in mankind, even yourself. Faith is placing hope in God, no matter what the circumstances look like.
Hey and often a story I worked on actually increased my faith. One in particular was last year’s story about the relatives of Stephen Beachboard, who found out what happened to him after reading my story on the Internet. I’ve blogged about it so I won’t go into details here, but suffice it to say that there are many times when faith is strengthened through the work of sharing these stories.
Sure there are some stories that are not so positive and downright ugly, so I can’t judge Lobnell. Everyone’s faith journey is different.
For those curious about Lobnell’s story, I’ve included the RNS article below.
For reporter, abuse scandal prompted a crisis of faith
By Andrea Useem
Religion News Service
What if you felt God called you to a task — and then you lost your faith while carrying out that very task?
That’s what happened to William Lobdell, a former evangelical Christian and aspiring Catholic, while he covered religion as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times. His new memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace,” tells the tale.
Lobdell, now 48, became an evangelical in his late twenties, after reaching a personal crisis point. “I had married a volatile woman whom I was divorcing, my career was going terribly, and I had gotten my girlfriend pregnant,” he said in an interview. “At age 27, I thought, `I could not have screwed up my life more.“’ Lobdell said a friend told him he needed God in his life — a bit of advice that led him to an Irvine, Calif., megachurch and a conversion experience during an evangelical men’s retreat.
Working in journalism at the time, Lobdell wrote that he began to see all around him amazing stories of faith at work in people’s lives — and he prayed that God would allow him to become a religion reporter to tell those stories. By the time that dream came true in 2000, Lobdell was a married father of four, but spiritually restless, and he began the process of joining the Catholic Church in search of a deeper, more authentic faith life.
Soon those two forces were on a collision course. On the religion beat, Lobdell was covering the story of an Orange County priest and Catholic school principal, the Rev. Michael Harris, accused of molesting young boys. After Harris’ diocese settled with an alleged victim for $5.2 million in August, 2001, Lobdell attended a meeting of survivors of clergy sexual abuse.
Up until that time, Lobdell wrote, he didn’t feel the bad actions of one priest affected his own faith: “I saw exposing what Harris did as cleaning up, not hurting, Catholicism.” But sitting in the room with seven abuse survivors, he wrote, was a “spiritual body blow.”
“I had written so much about the redemptive power of faith, but I had never seen, in a real and personal way, the opposite: the damage religion could do in the hands of bad people,” he wrote.
Only a few months later, in early 2002, the abuse scandal broke in earnest, driven by reporting in the Boston Globe, and Lobdell eventually told his “sponsor” in his Catholic conversion process that he couldn’t go through with it. “My long honeymoon with Christianity had ended,” he wrote.
Lobdell is not the only journalist to admit publicly that covering the abuse scandal critically damaged his faith. Dallas Morning News religion columnist Rod Dreher announced in October, 2006, in a widely read blog post at Beliefnet.com, that he had left his Catholic faith, in part because he had allowed the abuse scandal to “destroy” his belief. (He is now a member of the Orthodox Church in America.)
“I think many reporters experienced something like PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) because of hearing first-hand from people whose lives had been changed in a tragic way by people wearing a clerical collar,” said Debra Mason, executive director of the Religion Newswriters Association, a professional group for religion reporters. “Anecdotally, some reporters left the 1 / 8religion 3 / 8 beat after covering the scandal because they were just burned out.”
Michael Paulson, the Boston Globe religion reporter who received, along with a team of co-workers, the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2003 for reporting on the scandal, noted that while newsrooms sometimes provide debriefing for reporters who cover wars and natural disasters, he and his team members did not have any “formal preparation” for dealing with “heart wrenching and angry-making” stories they heard. “The emotion was much more raw than what we encountered on other stories,” Paulson said.
But Terry Mattingly, a syndicated religion columnist and director of a Washington D.C.-based journalism center for Christian universities and colleges, rebutted the idea that religion reporting necessarily leads to a traumatic loss of faith.
“I have only known one or two professionals who felt their faith was threatened by covering religion news,” he wrote at the website GetReligion.org after Lobdell’s first account of his loss of faith was published on Page One of the L.A. Times in July, 2007.
Lobdell not only decided to forgo his Catholic conversion, but he also resigned from his post as religion reporter in 2006 and now embraces a non-dogmatic atheism, he said in an interview. “If I were a postal worker who did his job everyday and went to church on Sunday, I like to think I would still have gotten where I am today, but it would have taken decades,” he said. Being a religion reporter, “I went through it in warp speed.
“The truth can be very uncomfortable sometimes, and for me that’s what my journey has been about,” said Lobdell, noting that while some readers have applauded his decisions, others have chastised him or invited him to a new faith. “Have I come to the truth? I guess we’ll find out.”
Feb. 26 Today’s Prayer
With You we have nothing to fear. Our worries evaporate like the wind. Our lives will always bear the fruit You’ve intended. Amen.
