Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
We thought we were being clever when we named our church feature Filet of Soul. See, it’s a triple pun. Fillet of sole is a way to cook fish. Then, soul is a homonym for sole. Third, filet is the way McDonald’s spells Filet-O-Fish, presumably because it’s not a real fillet. Funny, right? Well, I don’t know that anyone ever got the references. Brad Bynum and myself are the only ones who can remember how we came up with that great name, and it just looks like we misspelled fillet.
Phew, expression is good for the sole.
Anyway, I’ve been doing church reviews for four years now. I realized recently that I’m just burned out on doing them. The fact is, I’ve stopped looking forward to Sunday, or going to a new church, synagogue, mosque, temple, whatever. More and more, I’ve found myself writing about the cultural aspects of spirituality: memorials, plays, essays on random topics.
And that’s not really what I wanted for Filet. My original idea was that religion is undercovered in the mainstream media, so this would be an “alternative” way to cover it. Thirty people show up at a Reno City Council meeting and all the media outlets write about it. Five hundred people show up at some services, talk about important stuff in the community, but nobody covers it. We tried to take people places they wouldn’t naturally go, shine a light to remove ignorance and fear about places of worship and religion.
And for the first three years or so, I was able to do that. It’s not like I’d ever run out of varieties of spiritual experience. The column probably generated more discussion than any feature in the paper. It’s brought us goodwill in places alt-weeklies rarely get a reading.
But I’d like to plan for the occasional Sunday morning activity. So, I’m putting Filet on hiatus—at least six months. We’re bringing back a feature we called “In Rotation” that included four rotating features: Ask a Mexican, Gadget, Western Lit, and In the Mix.
Thanks, Filet fans. It’s been an enlightening experience.