One of my favorite web sites is Get Religion, where a recurrent theme in their critique of journalism is writers missing a clear religious angle to a story; in GRese, such a spiritual elephant in the living room is a "ghost."
I thought I saw a ghost in this Herald Leader story on Morehead State football coach Matt Ballard, who will be coaching barefoot this afternoon.
Ballard, 51, is going without shoes during his team's meeting with Marist so that underprivileged children around the world will no longer have to go barefoot every day.
His shoeless game is being done for Samaritan's Feet, the Charlotte, N.C.-based charity that seeks to provide footwear to children around the globe who have never had a pair of shoes.
During Saturday's MSU football game, fans will be asked to text the word "shoes" to 85944. When they do so, a $5 charge will be applied to their next phone bill that will go toward providing shoes for children without them in South Africa.
Samaritan's Feet. Franklin Graham's poverty-fighting ministry is Samaritan's Purse and Charlotte is where the Billy Graham organization has its HQ. Dollars to donuts that's a Christian outfit, but nary a mention of a spiritual angle is to be found in Mark Story's story. Is there a ghost to bust here?
Well, yes and no. SF is a Christian organization (no connection to the Purse), but they seem to do a lot of efforts that work on getting shoes on kids' feet without a lot of evangelism. For instance, IUPUI's basketball coach did a similar Shoeless Joe shtick as a SF fund-raiser (at least he was inside; it's in the 50s and rainy today) and the whole Detroit Piston team worked at a SF event; Ben Gordon and Will Bynum were washing kids' feet and Rip Hamilton "was the self-appointed shoe tester."
That lets them get access to places like Morehead State. Morehead is in eastern Kentucky where people might be a but more churchy than most, but it's still Morehead State; the ACLU and other critters of the secular left would be on things like white on rice if the football coach were doing something evangelistic with the school's blessing.
SF might either be below their radar or be so non-evangelistic like Habitat for Humanity that they become an honorary Bright and get help across the board without worrying about the Christian roots of the organization.
No ghost here. The spook is SF's downplaying the gospel to get secular help, so Story didn't miss the story.
Recent Comments