Jason Berry

Articles

New Orleans

Trump Copies New Orleans’ Tragic 1853 Yellow Fever Playbook

By Jason Berry | The Daily Beast TOO LITTLE TOO LATE More than 4,000 New Orleanians died in one month, largely because selfish, ignorant city leaders ignored basic sanitation measures that might have saved hundreds of lives. After two weeks…
New Orleans

New Orleans Faces Another Disaster

By Jason Berry | Slate Politics As massive coronavirus shutdowns took hold in California and New York, down in Louisiana this past Sunday Gov. John Bel Edwards announced that the state had the world’s fastest growth rate of confirmed cases…
New Orleans

Survival ethos marks New Orleans, now an epicenter of COVID-19

By Jason Berry | Published on National Catholic Reporter (https://www.ncronline.org) In March, the azaleas blossom like tiny valentines on the grassy St. Charles Avenue median where streetcars trundle past the Garden District, heading toward Uptown. It is barely three weeks since…
New Orleans

A love song for Ernest Gaines

By Jason Berry The novelist Ernest Gaines, who died in his sleep on Nov. 5, 2019, at the age of 86 in his home in Oscar, La., published nine books in a distinguished career. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying, which received the National…
The Church

The last bull: Cardinal Sodano goes out

By Jason Berry A scene in The Two Popes, the charming new Netflix movie, has Anthony Hopkins as a brooding, gentle Benedict XVI hearing the unprompted confession of Cardinal Jorge Borgoglio, played by Jonathan Pryce in an adroit balance of modesty and…
New Orleans

Jazz Great Buddy Bolden Was a Mystery Hollywood Can’t Solve

Filmmaker Dan Pritzker’s biopic “Bolden,” about the horn player credited with inventing jazz, reaches for myth and misses the artist. by Jason Berry Early into Bolden, Dan Pritzker’s artful biopic on pioneering New Orleans jazzman Buddy Bolden, a lush scene unfolds as a hot air…
The Church

Francis must fix cover-up culture that John Paul II enabled

Commentary concludes with call to action for pope By Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985 report about the Louisiana…
The Church

Institutional lying at heart of the crisis

Insiders, reporters reveal structural deception that hid clergy predators by Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985 report about the…
The Church

Francis inherits decades of abuse cover-up

Three-part commentary begins with look at how the crisis reached this point by Jason Berry | National Catholic Reporter Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985…
New Orleans

Fr. Jerome LeDoux, revered New Orleans pastor, dies at 88

Published in the National Catholic Reporter. Fr. Jerome LeDoux, 88, one of New Orleans’ most popular priests, died Jan. 7 in Lafayette, Louisiana, after surgery for a double heart bypass. He had for several years been living in active retirement…
New Orleans

A city that winks at sin

New Orleans at 300 When you are raised in a town where the grown-ups wear masks and dance at Mardi Gras parades, it plants a certain optimism for the human experiment. One autumn morning in 1992, over breakfast in Manhattan,…
New Orleans

Louis’ Muse: A Shout-Out for Lil Hardin Armstrong

Published in New Orleans Magazine. August marked 117 years since Louis Armstrong’s birth. With the city’s greatest native son on a rise of planetary value, we should remember the woman who played an early pivotal role. When Armstrong left for…
The Church

Church reform advisers in crosshairs of history

In 2002, The Boston Globe investigation of clergy child abuse ignited widespread media coverage of negligent church officials. As their credibility took a pounding, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops hired R.F. Binder, a Madison Avenue consulting firm specializing in damage control.…
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