Sounds like a misnomer, perhaps.

Well, not if you follow the thinking of the “Atheist Christmas Coloring Book” which has been creaed for families “who want to enjoy a Christmas holiday free from religion.”

So says a news release from Mindposts.com, described as a place for rational parents, students and teachers to learn and share.

“There is no shame in celebrating Christmas as a time of love and joy,” the news release states.

“Families should share and celebrate the true roots of the season.”

Take a look at the book here: Atheist Christmas Coloring Book.

Rick Marazzani, MindPosts founder, said the coloring book provides “reason for the season” to firm up rational foundations for Christmas, and building the self-esteem of rational children.

“My wife and I are raising rational atheist kids, and in our house we celebrate Christmas,” Marazzani said, in the MindPosts news release.

“Tree and stockings, love and joy, food and cheer, family and friends. We continue our family traditions and enjoy sharing the fruits of our intelligence and productivity.”

Carla Hinton

Religion Editor

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.”

“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers,” Obama said in his speech.

In a news release, Ed Buckner, president of American Atheists Inc., said atheists and others who could be labeled as “non-believers” should routinely be acknowledged by elected leaders as “the good, patriotic, taxpaying and contributing citizens we have always been.”

However, before Obama’s speech that acknowledgement has rarely been offered, the atheists organization said.

Buckner said Obama’s forthright acknowledgement is appreciated.

“President Barack Obama finally did what many before him should have done, rightly citing the great diversity of Americans as part of the nation’s great strength — and including ‘non-believers’ in that mix,” Buckner said in his statement.

Buckner also alluded to Obama’s mother, who was an atheist.

“His mother would have been proud, and so are we. Congratulations and best wishes on your presidency, Mr. Obama. And thanks for including us all, right from the start.”

Carla Hinton

Religion Editor

The sign reads, in part “There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.”

The RNS reports that the sign is on display along with a Christian Nativity scene and a holiday tree.

Washington members of the national Freedom From Religion Foundation installed the sign, saying it was important that atheists offer their viewpoint alongside the overtly religious Nativity scene and Christmas-style holiday tree.

Meanwhile, last month, the American Humanist Association launched a holiday advertising campaign that include signage on Washington, D.C. buses that said “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.”

It appears that one doesn’t have to be of a particular faith to share a message during the holiday season.

Carla Hinton

Religion Editor