{"id":7371,"date":"2004-05-02T00:10:56","date_gmt":"2004-05-02T00:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html"},"modified":"2004-05-02T00:10:56","modified_gmt":"2004-05-02T00:10:56","slug":"the_question_is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html","title":{"rendered":"The question is…"},"content":{"rendered":"

…can someone tell me how to write nothing pieces like this one and get them published in the NYTimes Magazine?<\/a><\/p>\n

\nFor personal reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, crisscrossing the West and the Midwest and noticing along the way just how far the new Bible Belt extends from its traditional Southern origins. Religious-themed T-shirts, posters for Christian rock concerts, signs promoting traveling evangelists and billboards preaching sexual abstinence don’t just dot the landscape; they are the landscape, especially in the smaller towns and cities. Christian pop culture seems, at times, to be all the pop culture such underdog places have, at least in any local, grass-roots sense. Big TV, big music and big film, by clustering in the nation’s glitziest ZIP codes and focusing — almost exclusively, at times — on the lives and loves of affluent young singles, have left vast swaths of the country to the preacher-folk, who’ve seized the day by slicking up their acts. It’s no wonder that some are now ready for prime time. <\/p>\n

America’s first two Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th centuries, were not just religious movements, but democratic ones. They offered salvation at the retail level to the underrepresented, the overlooked and the previously uninterested, and they broke down the old institutional authority of a sheltered, privileged priest class. Suddenly, anyone could go to heaven, and almost anyone could lead them there. That’s what’s happening now, I sense, if you think of entertainers as our new priests and movies, books and songs as our new catechisms. This isn’t a fresh Awakening so much as a populist, media-savvy continuation of the fervor that first swept the seaboard colonies, then the frontier and, much later, my family home in a middle-class neighborhood of Phoenix. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…can someone tell me how to write nothing pieces like this one and get them published in the NYTimes Magazine? For personal reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, crisscrossing the West and the Midwest and noticing along the way just how far the new Bible Belt extends from its traditional Southern origins.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe question is... - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The question is... - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"…can someone tell me how to write nothing pieces like this one and get them published in the NYTimes Magazine? For personal reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, crisscrossing the West and the Midwest and noticing along the way just how far the new Bible Belt extends from its traditional Southern origins.…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-05-02T00:10:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The question is... - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The question is... - Via Media","og_description":"…can someone tell me how to write nothing pieces like this one and get them published in the NYTimes Magazine? For personal reasons, I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately, crisscrossing the West and the Midwest and noticing along the way just how far the new Bible Belt extends from its traditional Southern origins.…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2004-05-02T00:10:56+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html","name":"The question is... - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2004-05-02T00:10:56+00:00","dateModified":"2004-05-02T00:10:56+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/the_question_is.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The question is…"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}