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Bishop Robert Duncan, head of the TEC breakaway Anglican Church in North America, had a great line capping his Q&A in today's New York Times Magazine:

Q: I see a lawsuit was filed by the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh to take away both money and property in your control as the longtime bishop there.

A: There is an ongoing lawsuit. They may get the stuff, but we'll get the souls. They may get the past, but we've got the future.

God grant the good bishop many years! The only time I've heard Robert Duncan was in an interview he gave in 2004 to Terry Gross of the public radio show Fresh Air. I tuned in after he'd been introduced, and didn't know who he was. It was clear that he was against same-sex marriage, and that he was an Episcopalian cleric, but that's all I knew. I was really struck by how gentle and humble he was, especially given how tense and hostile the host's questioning was. I haven't been able this morning to find a transcript of the interview, but I did find this quote from Bp. Duncan's 2004 interview in a transcript of a more recent one Gross did with TEC Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori:

Bishop ROBERT DUNCAN (Former Episcopalian Bishop, Pittsburgh): What I'm saying and what we are trying to say in the gentlest, most graceful, most Christ-like way is that we didn't make the rules here, that God did, and that we believe God knows what he's doing, even if at times we question it. Again, scripture describes the human race as fallen and all of us as sinners. And if, even if it were allowed, which, again, is much disputed that orientation has some genetic part of it, as well as what all would agree is an environmental part. Even if it has some genetic part, there are many genetic conditions that people have to live with, have to work with, have to work through and work around.

The Church loves us in whatever disorder, disease we may be afflicted with by the fall in this - in the creation. And that's all I can say about the affectional same sex that's sort of wiring, that it's an affectional disorder. That's - those are hard words, but I think they're true words. They're at least consistent with the scriptural description of who we are and how God's made the world.

I remember thinking as I listened to that interview how remarkably patient Duncan was with his interviewer, who was bristling with hostility (not in a talk radio way, but in that muted way that characterizes everything on NPR -- which, I must confess, is why I really like NPR).
That, by the way, is par for the course with Terry Gross. I generally like her program, and listen to it on podcast, but the two topics she returns to over and over again are homosexuality and television (especially anything related to Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert). I'm a fairly regular listener, and have been for years. The host struggles audibly to conceal her lack of comfort with the occasional social or religious conservative she has on the program, as Doug LeBlanc has observed. No, she's not a lesbian; she's married to a jazz critic for the Village Voice. Anyway, I like her show, but I wish she were more fair to thoughtful social and religious conservatives, and had them on her program more often. I'm a big supporter of NPR, but I do wish its commitment to diversity included having more conservatives on the air. There are quite a few of us who don't listen to talk radio, and who like NPR precisely because it offers such reasonable, elevated discussion as a general rule. I support NPR for the same reason I subscribe to The New York Times: because the quality is there, and a pleasure to partake of, even as I believe they are often unfair or dismissive of people like me. They can do better.

Sorry, I didn't mean to go off on that NPR tangent. I just want to say that I thought Bp Duncan had a great line, and that based on what I know about him, Anglicans under his authority are indeed fortunate to have him as their spiritual father.

We now know that the Fort Hood shooter, Hasan, was a Muslim, and fancied himself a devout one. We know that he shouted "Allahu akbar!" as he executed American soldiers. We are informed by a retired Army colonel and co-worker of Hasan's that he had been talking about how America has no business in the Muslim world, and that Muslims should rise up against the military. And we know that on the day of the killings, Hasan went out in traditional Arab garb; you don't see that often in Killeen, Texas, suggesting that the Army major, who was raised in America, had developed a strong identification with his ethnic and religious background. One of his neighbors in Maryland, the last place he lived, remembered him fondly as calm, nice and, quote, "religious."

No matter how badly the media try to spin it another way, or to ignore the religion ghost in this story, Hasan's religion was to all appearances a key factor in the mass murder he committed. You don't have a Muslim shouting "Allahu akbar!" as he executes people one by one, and conclude that religion is incidental to his crime. You have to be a moral idiot to draw that conclusion, a politically correct nitwit.

So: how should we regard the role of Hasan's religion in this infamy? Read on below the jump for a discussion.

According to National Public Radio's ombudsman, the National Association of Black Journalists wonders aloud about black senior staffers at NPR who have left recently:

"It is NABJ's belief that actions speak much louder than your words," said the NABJ letter on Tuesday. "It is not enough to provide internships for young people or hire them into entry-level positions. Diversity must also be reflected among the managers who decide what news gets covered and who gets to cover it."

To which NPR chief Vivianne Schiller said:

"Well, that's too bad, but let me explain something to our friends at NABJ. I'm trying to run a national news organization that's suffering through serious budget cuts, like every other news organization in this country. We will not discriminate in hiring or firing on the basis of race, but we do not have the luxury now, in this time of intense difficulty for journalism, to set aside jobs for journalists on the basis of race. We're all struggling to keep our heads above water these days, and professional competence, not demographic desirability, must be by far the most important factor in hiring and retaining personnel."

No, actually, this is what she said:

"I couldn't agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff -- particularly in management and editorial," wrote Schiller in response to NABJ's letter. "I am on the record with the media and our employees, stations and board in acknowledging that NPR must take a leadership position in diversity, just as we do in high-quality journalism and digital innovation."

The NABJ's kind of complaint, and NPR's kind of response, is completely unexceptional in mainstream journalism. If top media executives spent a fraction of as much time worrying about viewpoint diversity as they do about ethnic diversity, we might have a truly more diverse media in terms of content. In any case, I wish folks like Vivian Schiller, instead of kowtowing to people like the NABJ, would instead challenge them to recruit more minorities for college journalism programs. I haven't looked at any numbers lately -- so if you have access to them, please correct me -- but in general, minority candidates for journalism jobs are relatively scarce. A friend of mine at a big newspaper told me a couple of years ago about trying to recruit a Hispanic for a plum position, and having a very difficult time finding qualified applicants. He said that there's so much demand for minorities now that the media outlets with the greatest resources tend to scoop up the better candidates as quickly as they come on the market.

It is unjust to come up with a racial quota for achieving "diversity" in a newsroom, without taking stock of what a newsroom's needs are, and what the pool of minority candidates consists of. Most newsrooms are suffering from dramatically shrinking budgets, and are letting people go, not hiring them. To expect newsrooms in which fewer people are having to do more work with less to commit itself to hiring people on the basis of their ethnic background -- which unavoidably means putting white journalists at a competitive disadvantage through no fault of their own -- is morally wrong. With so many journalists of all colors terrified of losing their jobs now, the idea of having minority set-asides for fewer and fewer newsroom positions is hard to justify, or so it seems to me.

In fact, with all the layoffs in newsrooms, a higher percentage of minorities are working in journalism today. But according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors (of which NPR is not a part, I'm pretty sure), there's no way newsrooms can keep parity in diversity hiring with the growth of non-whites in the population. But you know, so what? Personally, I don't care whether the people who write and edit my newspaper (or produce my favorite news radio shows) are white, brown, black, or spumoni-colored. I don't care if they're gay or straight. I just want them to give me news and information that's well-written, accurate and relevant. If every story is written and edited by an African-American (or an Asian, or a Hispanic, etc.), that's perfectly fine with me. Journalism is not a product that can be created like widgets, with people like interchangeable parts.

To be clear, I'm certainly not against trying to diversify one's newsroom staff; in, for example, a newsroom like the one I work in, if you don't have people who can speak Spanish (even if they're not Hispanic), you're going to be at a disadvantage in covering much of Dallas. On the other hand, given our readership demographics, and given how fast and how far our circulation has fallen, it's a serious question as to whether or not it's a wiser use of resources to hire a reporter based on his or her ethnicity (this, on the theory that you can reach out to ethnic communities), or to hire another reporter, whatever his or her ethnic background, who is better prepared to cover the news, period, or who is more capable of covering news likely to be more interesting to the largely white suburban communities who make up the bulk of our newspaper's readership. These are the kinds of decisions journalism executives are having to make all the time now. I'm not saying one decision is right, and the other is wrong. You have to know the circumstances. I am saying, though, that for the NABJ or any other activist group to tell a news organization struggling to stay alive that it "must" meet a certain quota in minority hiring is unrealistic in this economic environment. It's like telling telling the British commanders being pushed toward Dunkirk that they had better make sure that a sufficient number of Welshmen are placed in senior officer positions, or else.

This continued agonizing among journalism executives with "diversity" (which I put inside ironic quotes because they have a very specific take on diversity that excludes diversity by other measures, i.e. religion, politics, and so forth) takes place on a planet different from the one we're actually living on. Here we are watching an entire industry sink like the Titanic, and these well-meaning folks want to make sure that enough chairs on the deck are reserved for people of color.

Today's Dallas Morning News has a front-page feature about Hank Stuever and his Christmas book "Tinsel," which I've been writing about some on this blog. The book is a non-fiction account of how the booming Dallas suburb of Frisco experiences Christmas. Excerpt from the piece:

Stuever is unwaveringly protective of his characters and even the city itself.

"If I really wanted to make fun, I wouldn't have spent so much time here," he said.

He rented a Frisco room for seven months in 2006 and then came back 12 times in the next two years, as the economy started to wither and Frisco saw its first foreclosures.

"I thought this would be more a survey book about how Christmas was manufactured," he said. "The people changed me."

Instead, it became a glimpse into American life, a quirky historical document for the day when books like these are footnotes of a past era.

Texans frame their annual bluebonnet pictures so the Applebee's and freeways don't make it into the shot, he said. "I came to put Applebee's back into the frame."

Hank chose Frisco because he sees it as emblematic of contemporary America; as he has said, he wanted to do a book about what Christmas is like in a society that has for some time been so wealthy most people never had to delay gratification. I think it's an important book, the melancholy of which goes down awfully easy because of Stuever's shimmering prose, and sense of fun. But, as I write in my DMN column today, it is a melancholy book, at least to someone with my religious and cultural convictions. Excerpt from my column:

The Christmas pageant Stuever observes at a Frisco megachurch promising "a state-of-the-art multimedia worship experience" epitomizes his point. In the onstage finale, the church gathered Victorian townspeople, kids dressed like presents, the Holy Family and a bloodied adult Jesus carrying his cross, all singing their hearts out in a holiday extravaganza that screams, "More! More! More!" ...

Tinsel made me wonder about the social role Christianity plays in North Texas. As a believer, one of the aspects of life here I cherish the most is how much piety is a part of life. But the Tinsel Christmas occurs in a consumer culture that has effectively hollowed out the Christian religion, yet still craves ritual transcendence.

Tinsel is too much fun to be a scolding, book-length "Keep Christ in Christmas" lecture, which doesn't interest its irreligious author anyway. But the book is haunted by the ghosts of Christmases past, when wants were simpler, and folks found it easier to cherish each other, and the Christ child, because nobody expected life to be a state-of-the-art multimedia worship experience.

It's good to feast joyfully at Christmas. But if you never fast, if you don't know the meaning of enough, feasting can't help being disordered and gross. When our wealth makes every day a holiday, how do you find the humility, stillness and gratitude required to live Christmas in the proper spirit? Odd, but one of the most modest but meaningful Christmases I ever spent was in secular Holland, far from the U.S. Christmas-industrial complex.

I think "Tinsel" tells us something true and useful about the way we live today. As I was reading it, though, I often realized that I couldn't have written it in a million years. First, I'm too judgmental, and my inability to refrain from criticizing would have gotten in the way of my ability to tell the story of "Tinsel." A number of people will simply not believe that Stuever likes the people he profiles in "Tinsel," but I think they're wrong. The error people make is assuming that if you like somebody, you are obliged not to see their flaws, and not to tell unflattering truths. I never got the feeling while reading "Tinsel" that Stuever held himself up as superior to the people he profiled. In fact, there are moments in which it seems he envies them, in a way, their ability to give in to the experience.

On the other hand, I'm seeing it as a professional journalist interested in telling the story straight, warts and all. The real people who invited Stuever into their lives surely must have thought that he would see them as they see themselves; nobody who thought a journalist would write a book in which they come off poorly would let the journalist cross the threshold of their house. (Interestingly, Tammie Parnell, the character with whom Stuever spent the most time, comes off by far the worst in the book, and no longer speaks to him not true says Hank, in the comments below.) Full disclosure: when "Crunchy Cons" came out, I let Stuever into my house to profile me and my family for the Washington Post; though he did not write the story I would have hoped -- how could he have done? his job was to tell the truth as he saw it, which means he had to reflect what he saw through his own sensibilities -- he was a fun dinner gues, and as a writer was fair and truthful (though there was a throwaway line he put into the story that had significant personal repercussions for me). Point is, I knew as a journalist that there was always the possibility that the journalist was going to betray our trust -- not because he's a bad guy, but because he's a journalist, and a good one.

I refer, of course, to the journalist Janet Malcolm's famous dictum holding that "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." What she means is that journalists seduce people into telling them their stories, and then, if the story requires it, the journalists betray their subjects by telling the Story in a way that sells out the interests of their subject. Mind you, the particular instance she was writing about when she said that is massively different from the "Tinsel" case. But the point, I think, is the same, and it's an unavoidable part of being a writer who would be a journalist and not a publicist in disguise.

People often say to me that I should write a book about my hometown. Can't do it, won't do it. It's not that I have any big secrets to protect, at least not that I'm aware of, but that I know from the get-go that I would not have the courage to write truthful things that would hurt people I know and love, or even just know and like. I'm not willing to write a book that's flattering but untrue, but I'm not willing to tell truths (if I found them, and I know that I would) that would hurt people I don't want to hurt, and who would probably trust me enough to tell me things that they wouldn't tell a stranger. In fact, I can think of ne time in my professional life in which I did not report something shocking that one of my interview subjects said, something that would have put her in a terrible light, but something that she didn't realize was appalling. She was a woman I knew, and I was writing a story about a battle between Good and Evil in my hometown. The woman's remark revealed that there were a lot of moral complications going on in this story. But I made the judgment that if I reported her innocent but damning remark, it would likely destroy the chances that the Good Guys would prevail, because people would focus on her tossaway line, and forget the real battle. She was trying to do good, and didn't mean to offend; the thing is, she wouldn't have made that remark to someone who didn't know her. I felt it would betray her confidence in me to report the full truth, and it would aid and abet people who deserved to lose. So I deliberately left her remark out of my published account. If I had been a reporter from the outside, I would have reported it without hesitation because it was an important part of telling the whole truth. But I didn't want to hurt her. I am ashamed that I didn't tell the whole truth, but I don't regret having made that choice at the time. I resolved, though, never to get myself into a professional situation in which I felt compromised as a journalist by my personal sympathies.

We need journalists who are willing and able to be traitors. Nobody wants to accept that -- and I can't say that I blame them -- but it's true.

Anyway, "Tinsel" is a wonderful book, and I hope you buy it.

Students at the Columbia University School of Journalism Busker Training Academy are shown here developing their street-performance skills in preparation for hitting the workforce after graduation. "Will rap for food," etc.: