Podcast: Are many Bible Belt military families losing faith in the U.S. armed services?

On Feb. 1, 2004, GetReligion co-founder Doug Leblanc opened the digital doors here at GetReligion and our first post went live. The headline: “What we do, why we do it.”

I tweaked that post a bit in 2019, but left the main point intact. The key was that GetReligion was going to try to spot what I called religion “ghosts” in hard-news stories in the mainstream press. What, precisely, was a religion “ghost”? I raise this issue once again because this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) focused on a “ghost” question in a very important topic in the news. Hold that thought.

That first post opened with Americans sitting down to read their newspapers or watch television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. …
One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.
A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t.

This brings us to a recent Associated Press report with this headline: “Army cuts force size amid unprecedented battle for recruits.” There are zero references to religion in this report, which is kind of the point.

Is there a religion “ghost” somewhere in this story? Here are some crucial paragraphs:

With just two and a half months to go in the fiscal year, the Army has achieved just 50% of its recruiting goal of 60,000 soldiers, according to Lt. Col. Randee Farrell, spokeswoman for Army Secretary Christine Wormuth. Based on those numbers and trends, it is likely the Army will miss the goal by nearly 25% as of Oct. 1. …

New podcast: Did a religious search help shape Norm Macdonald's haunting humor?

While it may sound strange, I would argue that there are theological “ghosts” hiding inside the great comic Norm Macdonald’s most famous joke. This was the “moth” story, of course.

Right. This joke wasn’t a Saturday Night Live shot at O.J. Simpson or Bill Clinton. It was a long, twisting, bizarre story about a nihilistic moth who was afraid of eternity. It was the kind of joke that fit with the summary of Macdonald’s life and work that opened this Ricochet tribute by Jon Gabriel: “Norm Macdonald — Dostoyevsky in Front of a Red Brick Wall.”

The smartest comedians portray themselves as the dumbest; Norm Macdonald was the best at this sleight of hand. He graduated high school at 14, read Russian literature in his downtime, and had long philosophical discussions with clergy. … Macdonald was a student of human nature first, comedy second.

Macdonald was also a self-identified Christian, yet he made it clear that he didn’t consider himself a very good one.

The question raised during this week’s “Crossroads” episode (click here to tune that in) was whether news consumers had any right to expect journalists to mention that reality in their obits of this brilliant, courageous, edgy, mysterious comedian.

The more I read about him — following some really simple online searches — the more I hoped that someone would spot the religion “ghost” in his death-and-virtue haunted work. It also, at least to me, became obvious that many of his spiritual and religious questions were linked to his secret 10-year battle with the cancer that took his life. Cue up these two YouTube clips (here and here).

So this brings us to a crucial text: The actual “moth story” as it unfolded on on Conan.

Read carefully and keep thinking — Russian literature and maybe even a glimpse of a sacred icon.

Yes, I know that this is long. That’s the point: