A new year invariably arrives with predictions regarding developments in the lives of individuals, Americans, the world. But when it comes to religion, the end of December comments on the Washington Post’s feature, “On Faith,” revealed a cynicism that anything at all will change in 2009, despite the promise that word holds in light of the presidential transition.

NPR tells us that religion was a “big story” in 2008, citing as evidence such stories as the furor over Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright; the debate over gay marriage; the Pope’s visit to the United States; and the controversy over the invitation to Saddleback’s pastor Rick Warren to offer the invocation at the Obama inauguration. We could add others: the division in the Episcopal Church over homosexuality; the raid on the polygamist sect in Texas; the hate-crime shootings at a Tennessee Unitarian church; the religious roots of the terrorist attack on Mumbai.

On any given day the headlines in most newspapers report developments related to religion. Major papers often have a weekly section dedicated to religious features. Despite this coverage, the media have a curious relationship with religion. Commentators offer various explanations: Cal Thomas believes the media “are embarrassed by religion and treat it as a quaint phenomenon of backwoods America when people with no teeth handled snakes, fell on the floor and never went to school” while Peter Steinfels simply suggests that writing about religion is “a minefield.”

Reporters are intelligent people. Why is it then that the media seem so incapable of representing religion well? A new book tackles that question by looking at news stories of the recent past. Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion (Oxford, 2008) is a collection of essays that would have been eagerly devoured by my friend Art Kaul, another Missouri Synod preacher’s kid and longtime professor of journalism at the University of Southern Mississippi. Sadly, Art died last spring before the book came out. He was a true scholar of both journalism and religion. Sitting at Art and Nancy’s kitchen table always assured an opportunity to hear his take on the latest in national or synodical politics. I know Art would have a strong opinion about what explains the blind spot, whether media bias or media ignorance. I expect he would argue it’s a little of both.

And I have a feeling Art would agree with Michael Gerson, who in his foreword to Blind Spot makes a case for greater religious literacy: “The more sophisticated our knowledge of religion, the more sophisticated our knowledge of the world.”

And so I wonder why — in what has been called a hinge time, when writers such as Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age) and Andrew Delbanco (The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope) tell us that more and more what marks this age is the search for meaning — the media does not play a more vital role in helping people think more deeply about the role of religion in society.

Karl Barth called for preachers to preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. One young seminarian blogger revised that advice to replace the newspaper with an iPod, and he may be prescient as the retired editor of an urban newspaper recently predicted the demise of the daily paper in print within five years. Those who find no room for current events in the pulpit will no doubt disagree with both Barth and the blogger. Perhaps, but my own bias as an educator leads me to prefer preaching in which teaching is embedded, and teaching resonates when the learner hears it as relevant.

I watched an entire family of Middle Eastern origin be directed to special security screening at an airport during the holidays, the day after headlines had reported that nine Muslims had been removed from a flight because their conversation about the safety of airline seating concerned fellow passengers. Such ‘profiling’ continues despite the rising diversity of American society. Were the TSA agents even aware of the news story in this small airport that, unlike many, had no TV monitors featuring nonstop CNN coverage? Had they been aware would they have made the connection between their actions and the widely covered account of the airline that had not only apologized to the Muslim family but also refunded its ticket costs?

The larger question of religious literacy was the subject of a previous column, but it underlies this musing as well. I asked then: what is the church’s responsibility for its people’s religious literacy? My reading of late, including a fascinating study entitled Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America, causes me to ask about the media’s responsibility for its own religious literacy.