If you are interested in God and also in blogs that are about religion and God, then you are probably familiar with The God Blog, which is operated by the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. And if you are familiar with The God Blog, that means you are familiar with the work of the young religion-beat specialist Brad A. Greenberg.

Now, I have been interested in having Greenberg do a 5Q+1 post for us for quite some time now. However, there is now another reason to introduce him to GetReligion readers. During our latest reorganization — with Ari Goldman’s decision not to wade into the blogosphere — we’ve been looking for another member of the GetReligionistas and Greenberg has answered the call.

Now, I will let young master Greenberg fill in even more details about where he is in his career when he does an introduction post later this week. But briefly, let me tell you where he has been.

Greenberg is a graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, and has done some adjunct teaching at UCLA, as well, working with journalism interns. He has worked as the religion-beat reporter at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin in Ontario, Calif., The Sun in San Bernardino, Calif., and the Los Angeles Daily News. However, he is best known for his work as the senior writer at The Jewish Journal. You may have also seen his byline as a contributing writer at Christianity Today.

When it comes to awards, he placed second in the Religion Newswriters Association’s Cornell Religion Writer of the Year contest in 2006, picked up a third-place award from the American Academy of Religion contest for mid-sized newspapers and, in 2008, the Los Angeles Press Club gave The God Blog its “best individual blog” nod. One of his recent Facebook updates noted: “Thank God for the religion beat. At the Press Club dinner; won Journalist of the Year in under 100k category. Amen.” That would be the LA Press Club, again.

Greenberg is especially interested in religion and popular culture and, thank goodness, that also includes an interest in faith and sports. We will let him offer some more insights into his unique background later on. Meanwhile, here’s the standard 5Q+1 questions:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I started in print journalism as a purist, so it’s a bit embarrassing that I get almost all of my religion news online — and not just from the online versions of The New York Times and The Washington Post. In addition to the religion feeds of mainstream media staples, my Google Reader overflows with content from 90-something blogs written by religion reporters; journalists at sectarian outlets; pastors, rabbis and imams; scientists and skeptics; lefties and rightists.

The nice thing about filtering religion news through sectarian publications and personal blogs is that you immediately know the perspective the author is bringing to the story (though I don’t want to confuse that with the term “agenda”) and the authors often communicate a better understanding of why something is occurring and what is at stake. There is more of a mixed bag with religion blogs at mainstream papers, in large part, I think, because traditional journalists remain uncomfortable with having an online identity that differs from the person they need to be in the paper. I know I did. Sadly too, some of my favorite newspaper religion blogs have fallen by the wayside or been drawn back dramatically due to decimated and discouraged staff.

My three most trusted sources — both for keeping up on religion news and for those lazy Monday mornings when I desperately need a quick blog post — are Christianity Today, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and, for a quick view of what the MSM is writing about, GetReligion. I really couldn’t survive without those three. I’m also a big fan of Friendly Atheist, FaithWorld, The Forward and Religion Clause. At the national news level, I think The New York Times and NPR do the best job. I get very little these days out of my local paper, the Los Angeles Times. But I also get a healthy dose of quirky religion news on Twitter from Holy Weblog! and through my at-home subscriptions, which include The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired, but not Newsweek and Time. Really, you’d be surprised how many religion currents run through an issue of Wired.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Definitely the Miss California mess.

Actually, though that was designed as a joke, there was plenty wrong with the way media reacted to Carrie Prejean’s belief that homosexuality is a sin. And that hints at a bigger religion story that the MSM continues to miss, or at least oversimplify: homosexuality and the church. The Episcopal schism and California’s Proposition 8 come with their own pre-packaged stories. But it’s too easy to settle for a storyline that pits gay rights activists against Christian soldiers. When is the last time you saw a reporter really try to explain why most Christians believe homosexuality is a sin? Considering the great range of opinions on this topic, from everyone’s-welcome theology to fire and brimstone for those who stray, shouldn’t journalists being trying a bit harder to understand why even members of the same denomination, the same church, the same family could understand the same few biblical passages so differently?

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

The arc of the atheist evangelists. A few years ago, there was all this hoopla over atheists and agnostics “coming out of the closet.” But aside from a few bestsellers and getting a lobbyist in Washington, I’ve seen a lot more news ink dedicated to this movement than seems warranted. Some polls have found an uptick in the percent of Americans who identify as unreligious, which is different than being atheist or even agnostic, but other polls continue to find that nontheists are viewed more negatively by others than just about any other group. No, they aren’t baby eaters, but Americans would still be more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who is female, African American, Latino, Catholic, Jew, Muslim or Mormon than for an atheist.

I think journalists have made the mistake of over-hyping this story because they feel like atheists have been underrepresented and under respected for years. Their perspective, though, is likely skewed. Based on the random samplings of the dailies I’ve worked at in Southern California, newsrooms have a disproportionately high percentage of unbelievers among their ranks.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Because that role cannot be understated. This is a point I have made for years. In fact, I emphasized it in a blog post last year titled “The dangerous world of religion reporting.” I wrote:

Once considered a backwater of journalism, the Godbeat feels to me quite chosen, home to immensely important and interesting news. Religion, after all, is the rubric through which each person uniquely sees the world. Science, education, politics, entertainment — it regularly serves as an undercurrent in these fields. (That was, in fact, part of my pitch at The Sun three years ago when they were looking for a reporter for the newly created position and I was eager to get out of Rialto.) The religion angle also is occasionally relevant when trying to understand peoples’ beliefs in God, their perspectives on the life hereafter and that which gives every day meaning.

Think of the God beat as the Jerusalem of journalism. Seriously.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

You mean besides learning that a reporter at a Jewish newspaper, who looks and acts and even spells his name like a Jew, is in fact a Christian?

Well, I wouldn’t call the general phenomenon funny — it’s the reason I’m going to law school — but as newspapers have been cut to the bone and, in some cases, gone belly up, the religion beat has suffered. The Los Angeles Times, which only a few years ago had three-plus religion reporters, has had periods with none. Picking up the slack have been reporters with other specialties, which has led to the funny part of this sad story. For instance, an article about soaring fuel prices last summer included this paragraph:

The problem is affecting even the holy business, driving down attendance at churches, synagogues and mosques. Religious leaders are struggling to help their members cope, spinning new themes about a society that has become almost sinfully reliant on motorized transport. Others are viewing the energy-price squeeze as a test of the way they serve God and their communities.

Now, any Jew, and most gentiles, could tell you that Orthodox Jews don’t drive on the Sabbath. They haven’t since the Model-T went into mass production, regardless of the price of gasoline. But the reporter, who quoted a Muslim and a few pastors in his article but no Jews, must not have known this; surprisingly, neither did his editors. It’s difficult to imagine Russell Chandler making that mistake.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

It sure ain’t what it used to be, and I worry about how much more it will slip as more and more metropolitan papers drop their religion reporter slot(s).

Not to bury the lede or anything, by when it comes to religion writing, Prof. Ari L. Goldman of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has been there and done that. During his two decades at the New York Times, he was one of the nation’s most trusted bylines on the religion beat and I have heard that judgment voiced by a stunningly broad range of clergy and Godbeat critics.

In other words, any decent survey of religion writing in the late 20th century would have to include Ari’s work. I sure hope GetReligion.org readers start paying more attention to this weblog’s attempts to deal with religion reporting in a global context, because as soon as we can get the software tweaked that will be the main focus of Goldman’s blogging as the newest member of your GetReligionistas.

But you need to know some more about Ari, first.

In his current academic incarnation, he serves as the director of the Scripps Howard Program in Religion, Journalism and the Spiritual Life, a duty which regularly takes him and a circle of students to religion news hot spots around the world. Before entering journalism, Goldman went to all of the predictable schools, as in Yeshiva University, Columbia University and, of course, Harvard.

Of course, he is also known as the author of the bestseller, “The Search for God at Harvard,” as well as “Being Jewish: The Spiritual and Cultural Practice of Judaism Today” and a recent memoir, “Living a Year of Kaddish.”

You can find out more (he plays cello in the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra) by reading his online bio and Ari will write his own note of introduction in a few days. However, since he is a pro with years of experience on the beat, I thought I would also ask for his take on our usual 5Q+1 questions, since it has been way too long since we offered one of those. So here goes:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I mostly get my news from old media and first-hand reporting. By old media, I mean The New York Times and the New York Daily News, which I read on paper every day. I also have subscriptions — yes, on paper — to a host of denominational papers from Jewish, Catholic, Hindu and Muslim sources. Perhaps most important, I get my religion news from synagogues, churches, temples and mosques, which I visit frequently, both in New York where I live and on my travels. I listen to sermons and I talk to people.

So I am decidedly old-fashioned, but not totally dependent on paper and first-hand observation. I read the religion writing of my former students on the Internet. I have been teaching a course at Columbia in religion writing since 1993. My students have gone on to write religion for mainstream papers in such cities as Baltimore, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Raleigh, N.C. and La Crosse, Wisc. Many of them, like Manya Brachear of the Chicago Tribune, even blog. I read her blog, The Seeker, and several academic blogs, including The Revealer out of NYU, Religion Dispatches out of Emory and Diane Winston’s out of USC. And, of course, I read getreligion.org. While I have a special place in my heart for print, I realize that these internet sources are the future of religion journalism.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

I want to begin by saying that there is much that the mainstream media gets right. It is easy to bash the work of religion journalists and pick apart their work. But as a former religion writer, I know what a battle it is to report religion intelligently for editors who simply do not “get” religion. And I was at one of the best papers in the country, The New York Times; I can only imagine how hard it is at smaller papers. I am also aware that even if the reporter gets it right, the editors can cut the story and change its focus and meaning.

But that wasn’t your question. What does the mainstream press miss? The role of faith in global conflicts. I just returned from a trip to Northern Ireland and was struck by the efforts of Catholic and Protestant leaders to damp down any return to violence in the aftermath of the recent killing of two British soldiers by a radical IRA group. In what is often portrayed as a religious conflict, religion has actually emerged as the solution and not the problem. Another global hot spot where religion plays a role is the Arab-Israel conflict. Facile comparisons to Northern Ireland are being made in part because of the appointment of former Senator George Mitchell as the United States’ special envoy to the Middle East. In Ireland, he is often hailed as a magician because of his work on the Good Friday Accords. But whether he can work his magic in the Holy Land, where the stew of religion and politics is quite different, requires some smart mainstream media analysis.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

Number one is the economy. It is the big story that has already begun to shape our society, from banks to housing to law enforcement to schools. Religion will not be immune. The Catholic Church is already closing schools and parishes. Other religious organizations are laying off workers, cutting back services and shuttering their doors. But most important is how the economy will affect the people in the pews. With unemployment rising and less disposable income at hand, will people turn toward faith or away from it? A lot of that has to do with how the churches, temples and mosques respond to this crisis.

Another story I will be watching is the integration of Muslims in Europe. In addition to Ireland, I recently traveled to Germany. One of the raging controversies there is the building of mosques in certain neighborhoods. The fears of the mosque are rooted in a mix of bigotry, xenophobia and real estate values. The integration of Muslims in Germany, France, England and other European countries is an important bellwether for the West.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Most things go in and out of fashion — politics, economic theories, sports teams, clothes, celebrities — but religion, like it or hate it, remains. And that it because religion is about ultimate questions. How individuals and nations answer those questions motivates them in powerful and practical ways. I mentioned global conflicts earlier, but religion also motivates people’s spending, their values, their associations and the ways they educate their children. If you miss the religion story, you miss a good part of our world.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

It’s far from funny, but I guess it is ironic. I’ve seen reference after reference in the mainstream press, including the Wall Street Journal, of Bernie Madoff as an “Orthodox Jew.” That hurt. There is nothing Orthodox about Madoff. He did not keep kosher or observe the Sabbath or do other things that Orthodox Jews do. What he did was ingratiate himself with the Orthodox who trusted him and gave him money by the millions. Those who trusted him included my alma mater, Yeshiva University, and the high school my wife and oldest children attended, the Ramaz Upper School.

In other words, Madoff stole from the Orthodox but he was not one of them. And even when he wasn’t identified as “Orthodox,” the fact that he was Jewish was often cited. As Rabbi Allen Schwartz of Manhattan recently told his congregation, the Madoff scandal broke just as the scandal Blagojevich scandal was breaking in Illinois.”Did you ever see a reference to Blagojevich’s religion?” the rabbi asked. “Yet we kept seeing Madoff described as Jewish.”

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

The mainstream media is already beaten down. It is in a very different place than where it was when getreligion.org started five years ago. There is far less religion coverage and the religion writers who remain are heroic, but not perfect. As a blogger, I hope to point out the good and the bad.

One of the advantages of living and working on Capitol Hill is that there are all kinds of interesting people who live in your neighborhood. I mean, there is this house a block or so away from my computer keyboard that, these days, has all kinds of people in black suits in black cars around it these days. I think it has something to do with it being the home of the junior senator from Illinois.

But I digress. Another very interesting thinker, when it comes to religion and public life, also lives in this neighborhood. His name is Ross Douthat of The Atlantic and he is someone who shows up in all kinds of interesting places around this very small town talking about all kinds of interesting things. Check out this interesting Pew Forum session on God and the Democratic Party, with the omnipresent Amy Sullivan and E.J. Dionne.

If you want to know more about Douthat, here is what they say about him at his day job:

Ross Douthat is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005), and Grand New Party, with Reihan Salam, which is forthcoming in 2008 from Doubleday. He is the film critic for National Review, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, GQ, Slate and other publications. A native of New Haven, Connecticut, he now lives in Washington. …

Of course, these days, you also need to know that he is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of the new and much-discussed book “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.”

You also need to read this man’s weblog over at The Atlantic, where there is currently a very lively discussion on this provocative question: Why are modern Evangelical Protestants more pro-life than modern Catholics? Yikes.

And, of course, the name is pronounced “Dow-thut.”

So here we go, with the standard 5Q+1 questions:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I get my news primarily from a combination of the big newspapers that I read every day — the New York Times and Washington Post chief among them, with the Wall Street Journal close behind — and a slew of bloggers who are either interested in religion or writing about it full time, ranging from the crew at GetReligion and Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con blog to the First Things blog, Dan Gilgoff’s God-o-Meter, and my colleague Andrew Sullivan. (I consider myself vastly more underinformed than I was in the days when Amy Welborn used her blog as a Catholic-inflected clearinghouse for religion news of all kinds; I don’t blame her for giving that up, but I miss it.)

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

It isn’t the sort of story that makes for newspaper headlines, so it’s no surprise they don’t get it, but I think the media’s focus on the culture wars — whether between secularists and believers, or the religious right and the religious left — has led them to underplay the larger theological context in which its occurring: Namely, the collapse of orthodox Christian belief in the United States, and its replacement by a cluster of competing religious narratives that tend to offer variants — some socially-liberal, some socially-conservative — on what Christian Smith has termed “moral therapeutic deism.” I think there’s still a core of orthodox Christian belief (broadly defined to include Catholic, Orthodox and Reformed traditions), but there isn’t enough coverage of the extent to which the “conservative evangelical” who gets her religious teaching from Joel Osteen the Prayer of Jabez and the liberal Protestant who cheers for the consecration of V. Gene Robinson actually share a lot of theological premises, most of which are functionally post-Christian.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

Since this is an election year, Barack Obama’s attempt to broaden the Democratic Party’s support among religious voters, both Catholic and evangelical, strikes me as the biggest national religion story of the next six months. The second-biggest is the cracking-up of the Anglican Communion — the media tends to overhype it, but it’s implications for the future of Christianity, in America and abroad, are large enough deserves at least some of the hype.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

I can think of a hundred reasons, but here’s one big one: Because religious belief and practice relate not only to our timebound lives but to eternity — which means that the stakes in religious controversies tend to be higher than in any other aspect of human affairs — which means in turn that the capacity for dramatic, world-changing actions (for good or for ill) is higher in the religious sphere than anywhere else. And if you’re a journalist looking for the story of a lifetime — well, anyone can cover Presidential politics; it’s the writer who discovers the next Mother Teresa, or Osama bin Laden, who’s really going to make a name for himself.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

This was well-covered, especially in the liberal press, but when Larry Craig and David Vitter showed up as two of the 10 co-sponsors of the Federal Marriage Amendment was reintroduced in the Senate last month, I don’t care where you stand on the amendment, or on the attention we should pay to hypocrisy … You HAD to chuckle, at the very least.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

This relates more to my own sphere of opinion journalism than to newspaper and magazine reporting, but I would love to live in a world where the media provided more space for arguing about the actual truth claims of religion — where op-ed columnists and bloggers and essayists spent less time on meta debates about the politics and sociology of religion, and more time arguing about whether Christianity or Islam or Judaism is true. These kind of arguments still take place, obviously, but they take place in books rather than in the popular press — and I’d like to live in a world in which the pope’s book about Jesus of Nazareth sparked a lively intellectual debate about Christianity’s truth claims in, say, the Times Book Review and the Post op-ed page, instead of being largely ignored.

But I’m as guilty as everyone else in this regard … In a short-form medium like journalism, it’s easier to write around the central questions raised by religion than to attack them directly.

Colleen Carroll Campbell knows all about the new Christian faithful.

A serious Roman Catholic, she is one of them. In her first book, her last acknowledgment was not to her dog or an inside joke to a friend, but rather to “the God who answered the call of my restless heart. Without him, nothing would be possible or meaningful.”

She has also written extensively about them. Among various accomplishments, Colleen is the author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola, 2002); the host of EWTN’s Faith and Culture; a weekly columnist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch; and a fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center. She was a presidential speechwriter for President George W. Bush; studied philosophy as a doctoral student at Saint Louis University; is an alumna of Marquette University; and had an essay about Alzheimer’s disease, “Hope in the Ruins,” featured in Take Heart: Catholic Writers In Our Time. Her full bio is here.

I cannot write about Colleen objectively, as I am good acquaintances with her. But I know that in her book, articles, and columns, she manages to find some morsel of information about the intersection of faith and politics — some statistic, quote, or theme — that less talented writers miss.

Here are the six standard questions:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I get most of my religion-related news online, from sources as varied as the Drudge Report, The New York Times, CNN, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, and Catholic World News, as well as commentary sites like this one (Get Religion), blogs, e-mailed articles from colleagues and friends, and a very helpful daily roundup of religion-related stories compiled by a St. Louis-based blogger and friend of mine, Sherry Tyree. I read my local newspaper, of course, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I subscribe to various religion publications, from First Things to Catholic World Report. I cruise the religion aisles of bookstores regularly to keep abreast of the latest religion trends. But most of my religion-related columns deal with the way religion influences and intersects with politics and pop culture, so my news tends to come from secular sources.

2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media do not get?

Although I have seen mainstream media coverage of young adults and religion improve in recent years, I still see signs of the same blind spots and untested assumptions that led me to write my book, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy (Loyola, 2002). Most journalists still struggle to understand or even acknowledge the hordes of young Catholics who flock to papal youth rallies, the throngs of young pro-lifers who fill the National Mall to overflowing every January for the March for Life and the trend among many young adults toward a more liturgical and traditional Christian faith and a firmer defense of the dignity of every human life, from conception to natural death.

No matter how many events, rallies, publications, campus clubs and the like turn up year after year attesting to these countercultural trends, they remain largely invisible to many journalists — or they are regarded as evidence only of a “fringe element” with no bearing on the larger culture. Journalists, especially those who came of age during the 1960s, tend to be adept at writing about young adults who reject religious authority and tradition and embrace progressive political causes. But the growing cohort of young adults who are attracted to authority and tradition and see no conflict between traditional moral values and care for the poor and vulnerable tend to be overlooked or dismissed. If they are taken seriously enough to merit the occasional story, the reasons these young adults offer for their life choices often are glossed over and more weight is given to the reasons that their critics offer — rigidity, naivete and nostalgia. The media’s coverage of young adults and religion has seen some improvement in recent years, but there is room for much more.

3) What is the story you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

As an op-ed columnist, I’ll be following the presidential election, of course, and the various religious story lines that emerge in the campaign and its aftermath. More broadly, I am increasingly interested in the topic of women, Christianity and American culture — how the challenges and problems posed by contemporary feminism intersect with traditional Judeo-Christian ideas about faith, family and freedom. The divide in our post-feminist culture between women who view religious tradition as an oppressive force and those who regard it as liberating interests me a great deal. I hope to examine the conflicting ideas at the heart of that divide more deeply in the coming years.

4) Why is it important for journalists to grasp the role of religion in the world?

Our most contentious cultural debates and momentous political decisions rest on essentially religious assumptions, whether we acknowledge them or not. What else, after all, is at the core of our disputes on such topics as embryonic stem-cell research, physician-assisted suicide and same-sex marriage? Our disagreements arise from competing ideas about the value of human life, the meaning of human sexuality and whether and how we can know moral truth. Journalists need to understand the competing worldviews driving these debates or they cannot cover them with fairness and accuracy. Astute religion coverage can cut to the heart of an issue and help us understand more clearly the assumptions and motivations of those with whom we disagree as well as our own.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Perhaps only a political junkie would find this funny, but I have been amused at how pundits and journalists who spent the past eight years warning us against George W. Bush’s imposition of a theocracy now are tripping over themselves to tell us how wonderful it is that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has gotten religion. Whether Obama is promising to expand Bush’s once-reviled faith-based initiative, assuring voters that his Christian faith will influence him as he strives to “do the Lord’s work” or telling religious crowds that he wants to create a Kingdom of God “right here on Earth,” he wins plaudits from the very same voices that once castigated Bush for weaving in far less pointed references to his own Christian faith. I guess they think faith and politics should mix after all — if you have the right kind of politics.

(6) Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

For all of its flaws, the American media establishment still has a much more nuanced and favorable view of religion than most of its European counterparts. And I think religion coverage has improved a great deal even in the past decade.

There are still many American journalists who fail to do their homework when writing religion-related stories and fail to understand the significant role that religion plays in nearly every major news story they cover. I’m glad GetReligion.org exists to keep them on their toes.

You know what?

I have been putting off posting the second part of my dialogue (click here for earlier post) with freelance journalist Andrea Useem for two simple reasons: (1) I was out of town for a week, attempting to survive four days of traffic-challenged driving in greater Los Angeles and (2) we normally fill our 5Q+1 interviews with hyperlinks to all of the publications, schools, think tanks, etc., linked to the journalist’s career and, in this case, Useem has just been too busy for me to look up all of those links.

Honest. I’m only going to do about half of them. Or less. So there. Try it yourself.

To flash back, Useem is the veteran religion-beat freelancer and researcher who is behind the ReligionWriter.com blog. There are all kinds of nice details in her personal biography — read it all — but here is the section that many will find the most interesting.

After reporting first-hand on the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi, Andrea became intrigued by Islam, a religion she knew little about. She studied informally with Muslim leaders in Kenya, Egypt and Sudan, and what started as a journalistic interest gradually became a personal conviction. Just before leaving Africa for good in the fall of 1999, she formally embraced Islam while in Zimbabwe.

Back in the United States, Andrea earned her Master’s of Theological Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. She studied Arabic at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Middlebury’s renowned summer language institute. She met and married an American convert to Islam in early 2001, before graduating from Harvard that spring. After long consideration, she decided against pursuing a Ph.D. in religious studies, largely because she preferred the fast pace and wide reach of journalism.

Did you follow all of that? As stated before, she has professional ties to all kinds of people, including Religion News Service, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle of Higher Education, the Dallas Morning News, etc., etc. I met her when she called me up to talk, as part of research she is doing for some Religion Newswriters Association “webinars” on coverage of Islam. It looks like the dates for those are March 11 and April 22. Check it out.

So here come the standard question:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I get the majority of my news, including religion news, via RSS feed on my Google desktop sidebar. Big breaking stories — like the death of Gordon Hinckley, for example — usually come to me first from major news outlets on my RSS, like Forbes, CNN, or the Guardian.

Blog-wise, I am trying to create an all-star religion RSS line-up. Currently some of my favorite national-audience religion RSS feeds are: GetReligion, Gary Stern’s Blogging Religiously, Dan Gilgoff’s God-o-Meter, the First Things blog, Reuter’s FaithWorld, the Religion News Service blog, washingtonpost.com’s On Faith, BlogRunner’s religion category, and CBN’s The Brody File, in addition to religion-specific RSS feeds from Slate, NPR and washingtonpost.com. I read ChristianityToday.com, CAIR, Altmuslim.com and the Pew Forum via email and browsing.

I also pay attention to the news feed on my Facebook page, and friends who mass-email on religious topics — that gives me a sense of what stories have caught the attention of other people. Locally, I read blogs by religious folks in Northern Virginia, including that of Reston Community Church pastor Ben Arment, and consume local publications like The Muslim Link.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Here’s an important story that simply hasn’t been covered: The death of the Salafi movement in America. Maybe it hasn’t been covered because a reporter would have to spend so long setting the context for why this neo-traditionalist Muslim movement is important (Answer: It significantly shaped the character of Islam in America for a decade or more, and this very conservative thinking often results in isolationist us-versus-the-West thinking; whether it is associated with violence is a separate question).

This story came to my attention via Northern Virginia Muslim blogger Tariq Nelson, a person I think religion reporters should include in their Rolodex/Blackberry/RSS (particularly if the question at hand is, “Where are the conservative Muslims who condemn violence?” or “What are the debates going on right now among American Muslims?”) Tariq pointed me toward a seven-part series — The rise and fall of the ‘salafi dawa’ in the US — published last January by Umar Lee, an American Muslim who, like Tariq, spent time as a Salafi. Anyways, Umar’s tale of Salafism is fascinating: It’s a story that simply hasn’t been told, at least as far as I’m aware, in the mainstream press.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

Is the Christian legal movement paving a multicultural superhighway, on which the next generation of minority religions will ride? School prayer isn’t a burning issue right now, but it’s a perfect example of an issue conservative evangelicals have trumpeted without apparent thought to how non-Christian groups would use such legal precedents to champion their own rights. If there were any sort of state- or federally-mandated prayer in public school, it would open wide the door for, say, Muslim students to ask for time off during class, special foot-baths or other accommodations. The point is not that I’m against Muslims praying in school but that the very people pushing for these rights may be a bit shocked at the eventual results. Yet because the Christian legal movement frames its arguments in terms of religious liberty, which applies to all Americans, I do believe they are setting the stage for further battles over religion-in-the-public-square, as minority religions follow in the litigious footsteps of evangelicals.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Substitute the word “politics” or “economics” for the word “religion” in that question, and the answer is obvious: Religion is a large part of what makes the world go round. Remain ignorant at your own risk.

What we’re seeing now in journalism, I believe, might be called a market correction, except that it’s really an intellectual correction. Not to get too bookish, but members of the media, like a lot of secular elites, subscribed to the modernist assumption that as the world became more and more technologically advanced, religion would play a smaller and smaller role before finally being extinguished by the march of human progress. Of course, that’s not at all how the story has played out, and the media, along with academia, government and business, has finally gotten the memo. For an excellent sociological peek into the special role evangelicals are playing in bringing religion to elite American institutions, I recommend D. Michael Lindsay’s Faith in the Halls of Power.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

While reading Jacqui Salmon’s Washington Post article on how the NFL forbid churches from broadcasting the Super Bowl on large screens, I almost laughed out loud when I read the Christian legal movement may yet weigh in on the issue:

John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville civil liberties group that focuses on religious freedom issues, is threatening to sue the NFL on behalf of an Alabama church that wants to host a big-screen Super Bowl party. He is also seeking sponsors for federal legislation to exempt churches from the ban.

On the face of it, this is funny just because I think only evangelicals could conceive of Super Bowl parties as a religious freedom issue. It demonstrates how hard it is find the line sometimes between American culture and evangelical culture, both for outside observers and inside believers. This religion-culture overlap comes up in a number of debates, including: Is entertainment-style megachurch worship still worship? Has Joel Osteen blurred forever the line between faith and self-help? One person who I think is asking some thought-provoking questions on these issues is Skye Jethani, now managing editor of Christianity Today’s Leadership Journal and author of the well-read 2006 piece, “All We Like Sheep,” which speaks out against the consumerization of evangelical Christianity.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Yes, very much so. While I am as interested as the next religion reporter in questions about the-next-great-religion-story and how to improve religion coverage, I do worry that these discussions are like so many concertos on the Titanic foredeck. The mainstream media faces some very serious business problems, to which it has not yet discovered any simple answers — so while we’re honing our skills on the reporting side, the business side is deciding whether or not to throw us overboard.

What I would like to see much more of are discussions about, for example, how “denominational” bloggers are not only serving as important sources for the mainstream media, but are in some senses replacing the mainstream media. I think religion reporters could also benefit immensely from digital news-gathering strategies, like Jay Rosen’s ideas about using social networks to assist in beat reporting. I find traditional print reporters are, for the most part, incredibly resistant to the changes going on. So I’d like to see the religion-in-the-media conversation be more new-media focused.

That would be GetReligion reader Bob Smietana, of course, along with the rest of his family.

You see, Smietana has just made a very interesting and rare leap from the world of the denominational press back into a mainstream newsroom. He has joined the Tennessean as the new religion reporter in the very symbolic city of Nashville — which is known as guitar town, the Baptist Vatican and lots of other names. (I interviewed for that same job a long, long, long time ago and the statistics on religion in that zip code are amazing.)

Smietana has been a contributing editor for Christianity Today, a correspondent for Religion News Service, and for eight years he served as features editor for the Covenant Companion, a Chicago-based publication of the Evangelical Covenant Church. He received more than a dozen national awards from the Associated Church Press for his work there.

A native of Attleboro, Mass., Smietana has a degree in religion from North Park University in Chicago, and he earned a master’s degree in communication from National-Louis University in Chicago. In 2001, he completed a summer program in reporting on religion news at Northwestern University’s the Medill School of Journalism. His freelance credits are extensive and he will soon begin blogging at GoodIntentionsBook.com, in support of what he calls a “Freakonomics-style” book on poverty, immigration, global warming and other related issues.

So here are his answers to the usual 5Q+1 questions from your GetReligionistas:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

These days I’ve been missing Ted Olsen’s mighty, mighty weblog at Christianitytoday.com, which seems to have been phased out these days. It was a great spot to get a ton of coverage, all in one place, and it’s sorely missed.

RNS remains a great source — Kevin Eckstrom and Adelle Banks do great work. And the denominational press — Baptist Press, Presbyterian News Service, United Methodist News Service, etc. — give an insider’s view of what’s happening in those groups I just did a story on the effect of the weak dollar on missionaries and international relief groups, and got the inspiration from something the Baptist Press ran.

The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, all do great coverage when they take religion. And usually there’s something in those publications that will spark a God-beat story. Religion is one of the world’s largest industries, and the trends, like the weak dollar, that effect big for-profit companies also effect churches.

Probably the most important sources are religious folks themselves, especially the clergy and lay leader who know what’s going on below the surface.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Here’s one story that I, as newly minted member of the mainstream media didn’t get — the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. This year, Southern Baptist hope to raise $165 million, or more than half their annual budget, in that one offering, taken in December. In effect, every year they wager the future of their world-wide missionary enterprise, which is 5,300 missionaries strong, on this one offering. This past decade, they’ve raised more a billion dollars through the Lottie Moon offering. If the money doesn’t come in every year, they are sunk. It’s a fascinating story, one that reveals the priority that Southern Baptist place on missions. They have about 15 million members and 5,300 missionaries. The Methodists, with 8 million members, have about 400 missionaries. And Lottie Moon, who was a China missionary in the 1800, is an icon for Southern Baptists, who are the largest Protestant group in America. I’ve covered religion professionally since 1999 and had never heard of her before coming to Nashville.

I’m not sure the major mainstream media — the New York Times, CNN, ABC, etc. — get evangelicals or the faith of believers in general. They don’t get the personal and grassroots nature of religion, and spent too much time looking at religious celebrities and not enough time looking at the day to day the lives of believers.

My younger brother died last year, suddenly and unexpectedly, while in the Philippines to finalize the adoption of his daughter. During that time, our church family, kept the faith for us. They carried us through that time of almost unbearable grief, with acts of kindness great and small. That close knit, grassroots community was our lifeline. (I wrote about it afterwards), and I can’t imagine trying to go through that experience without faith and without the company of ordinary believers.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

At least three stories come to mind.

One of these days, and it will probably be soon the Southern Baptist are going to stop growing and begin shrinking. That’ll be a huge story for them.

The growth of multi-site megachurches. They are becoming the Wal-Marts of the church world, and it’s putting a tremendous amount of pressure on small congregations, some of whom are giving up and reinventing themselves as franchises of the brand-name megachurches.

Gay bishops get all the press when it comes to Mainline churches, and but I’m more curious about demographics and finances of those institutions. The denominational feuds are fueled as much or more by money and fannies in the pews as they are by sex.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Journalists are supposed to ask who, what, where, when and why. You can’t get to why without asking about religion.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

It’s got to be the Rocky boxing glove, which was sent out to pastors in order to promote Rocky Balboa as a faith-based film and attract some of the Passion of the Christ crowd. There was even a website, rockyresources.com/, with preaching tips, banners and even a video message from Sylvester Stallone for church leaders. Stallone was pitched as a true believer, with quotes like, “If you don’t have a great relationship with God, you can go off the deep end.” He must have been thinking about the new Rambo film.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

In coming to the Tennessean, I moved from the magazine world, and mostly religious publications, to a daily newsroom. I’ve been amazed by the skill of my colleagues, who day after day produce quality news under unrelenting deadlines. As a magazine editor and writer, I had the luxury of time to dig deep into stories. I don’t have that luxury anymore, and it’s given me a greater respect for longtime daily journalists.

GetReligion’s friend David Crumm sent email this week with the news that he will take a months-long leave of absence from the Detroit Free Press to develop a project called Read the Spirit. To call Read the Spirit a blog focused on religion news would be an understatement.

Here’s how David described it:

In August, we hosted a national conference in Ann Arbor for a network of writers, editors, artists, web gurus, scholars, clergy who’ll be working with us over the next year or two on a whole new approach to religion in media.

The tip of our iceberg is up online already — the “daily voice” of our new project. Over the coming year, we’ve got online projects lined up, some innovative publishing projects, etc. Even a new documentary film unit that’s formed.

… This week, we’re running a 5-part multimedia series on A Pilgrimage to Iona, based on reporting I’ve just done with a photographer and videographer.

To gain a further sense of what David and his many friends have in store, read their Ten 21st-Century Principles of Religious Publishing.

I’ll miss David’s sharp insights in the Free Press, but with that loss comes the gift of an important new voice on the Web.

Terry took the opportunity to invite David’s participation in our 5Q+1 feature, and David jumped right in.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I listen to National Public Radio, BBC especially, because they’ve got the biggest global reporting network these days. I read Atlantic, New Yorker, New York Times every day, Vanity Fair, Weavings, National Catholic Reporter, PC Gamer. Most importantly, I walk through the magazine, book, music and DVD aisles of Target stores once a week. I walk through Borders’ religion-spirituality sections at least once a week plus their DVD and magazine sections. I cruise comic book racks, graphic novel shelves — and I try to walk through mystery novels sections at least a couple of times a month. If you check New York Times Book Review sections weekly, you’ll find that Americans read more murder mysteries than any other single category of books — so discerning themes that show up in mystery novels says a lot about Americans’ spiritual imagination.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

There are many. But the Goliath story that we don’t get — and that will affect all of us — is understanding the aging process. Just admitting that we are aging — and that this is not a disease — is a huge transformation that’s starting. We’re just on the leading edge of this story — and those voices who explore aging in terms of its spiritual gifts — not merely its diseases to be cured — will be the beloved prophets in media who we’ll look back to as pioneers in the years to come.

I’m working on that right now myself — and welcome others.

Think of how Dr. Spock saw the Goliath of child care after World War II.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

I’ve already said that I’ll be watching the aging story. Also, I’ll be watching closely the way that American media covers what we seem to call Third World peoples. Not just big-picture stories in which a reporter parachutes into some corner of the world or analysis pieces by scholars — but I want to see how the voices of real people emerge from these communities in our media. Can we even see or hear them over here in the States? This, to me, is an enormous challenge in an era when much of American media is going through a historic transformation — and we’re pulling back many of our outpost reporting bureaus.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Religions — and, more broadly, spiritual aspirations — are key components in the fuel that drives individuals, communities, nations.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

I’m amazed by all of the stories of “change” — folks like Anthony Flew and Frank Schaeffer who’ve made changes in their spiritual lives — and this seems to be an occasion for milestone media coverage — when the irony is that most of us do change over time, don’t we? I think it’s ironic that news of someone changing their spiritual stance is considered something momentous.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

The Good News for those who cover religion is that, while media forms and firms are transforming themselves and some types of media may be imploding in this new age — accurate, balanced and insightful coverage of religion and spirituality remains profoundly important — and the World Values Survey data examining countries around the world with objective, scientific measuring tools says that Americans remain overwhelmingly interested in these themes.

There’s a very bright future for us out there in media that focuses on religion and spirituality.

It’s Time.

Anyone who knows the history of religion writing in the American press knows that Time played a major role in proving that religion is, in fact, news and, come to think of it, that cover stories about religion can move large numbers of copies off the store shelves. Cover stories about religion have often fueled debate about American religion (like the old yet still famous “Is God Dead?” story) as well as reflected the news.

These days, the magazine’s senior writer for religion news is David Van Biema, who has written numerous cover stories in his 14 years there — reaching the religion beat about 10 years ago. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the Columbia School of Journalism and won awards from the Religious Communicators Foundation, the the Religion Newswriters Association, the American Academy of Religion and the Amy Foundation. His previous journalistic stops included People, Life and The Washington Post Magazine.

I had a chance to talk shop with Van Biema last spring, when I was speaking at a journalism conference in New York City (where Van Biema lives with his wife and son). He promised to take part in our 5Q+1 feature when he had a chance, so here goes. His answers are on the concise side, which makes me now wish I had recorded our conversation that day! It was a delight to spend some coffee and tea time with him.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

AP, RNS, CNS, other wires, assorted blogs, book publishers, my morning paper plus Nexis alerts, magazines and let us not forget colleagues who care.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

It’s not a story, really, but the difference between outsiders’ definition of “evangelical” and insiders’. I’m inclining toward your point that it’s becoming meaningless, but what does one substitute?

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

The two-way globalization of American religion.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

I would emend that to the “roles” of religion; but have you looked at the world lately?

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Not funny, but the Juanita Bynum situation is certainly replete with ironies.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

I think that just as there are religious ghosts in “secular” stories, there may also be secular ghosts in many religion stories.

Now that last item really interested me, because I totally agree. There are all kinds of secular or realities that, at first glance, appear to be faith-free that affect religion news. Consider the role of pensions and property costs in shaping much of the Anglican Communion warfare.

So I wrote Van Biema back to ask for him to elaborate a bit. He replied:

I’m actually not sure how many stories it applies to, but in a recent piece I did about Mother Teresa’s long dark night of the soul, the book on which it was based and considerable commentary after the story discussed her condition on strictly faith terms. (Given that the book was edited by her postulator, of course, one would expect nothing else.) I tried to do justice to the faith understanding, but it seemed to me that her case would be seen very differently by a secular psychologist and yet again differently by an atheist. Those views are represented in the story at a graf or two apiece, not as quick brushoffs nor as negating the religious view, but as having a different logic.

I am not trying to get out of my gig by imposing the word “alleged” before every use of the word Resurrection, the way Calvin Trillin’s protaganist did in his classic book, Floater. But part of me wants to suggest that there is a bifurcation: we either talk about religion stories in overly secular terms or unquestioningly remain within the religious frame. At a time where the intertwining of the two is one of the biggest stories we cover, perhaps there is some obligation to open our pieces out in whichever direction seems in danger of being scanted, without effacing either.

Many years ago I wrote an angry letter to the editor of Rolling Stone, doubting whether that magazine ever would give serious attention to religion and believers. I am glad that, as a contributing editor for both Rolling Stone and Harper’s, Jeff Sharlet has proven me wrong.

Some Americans discourage talk of politics, religion and sex — the unholy trinity for people who are convinced that nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth an argument. One thing I admire about Jeff is how much he defies that skittishness:

My religion writing career began in 1998 when I quit my first serious job as editor in chief of Pakn Treger, a magazine of Jewish history and culture, when my boss told me to lay off stories about politics, religion, and sex. Of course, that’s all I wrote about as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 1999 I co-founded a little webmagazine, Killing The Buddha (which has just recently ended its run), and spent much of 2002 traveling the country with my co-author, Peter Manseau, working on a “spiritual state of the nation” called Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, published by Free Press in 2004.

My second book, also started in 2002, will come out next spring from HarperCollins; it’s tentatively titled In the Shadow of the Cross: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of America’s Civil Religion. Since 2003, I’ve been editing and writing for a website I created called The Revealer, published with support from NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, Religious Studies Program and the Department of Journalism. The Revealer is on summer break now, and its future is up in the air — I’m leaving NYU in the coming year to finish my next book, The Hammer Song, and work on more stories about politics, religion, and sex for Rolling Stone and Harper’s.

Jeff occasionally offers comments on our work here at GetReligion, and we’ve sometimes been in touch with him via email. Our respective blogs approach the terrain rather differently, but it’s a difference that keeps me on my toes.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

All the usual suspects, of course - like GetReligion, I’m as interested in how the media covers religion as in the actual details of the story. That means I think a clumsy New York Times piece — like, say, the Michael Luo profile of Hillary’s faith that seemed to divide the U.S. up into clear camps of piety and absolutist secularism — is as useful to understanding what’s going on in religion as would be a better-reported story, such as the late Michael Kelley’s classic 1993 New York Times Magazine Hillary profile, “Saint Hillary” in which the particular, and rather unique, shape of her beliefs was more fully revealed.

I read Christianity Today for the same reason — there’s plenty of good reporting in that magazine, but there’s also plenty of reporting that can clue readers into presumptions as well as the actual details of a given story. Finally, I look for religion news in some more unconventional places, as well — I subscribe to the Christian Newswire emails, a rather undiscriminating source of press releases from groups, many of which can’t be described as anything but fringe (which makes them a useful reflection of the mainstream).

For Jewish news, I like cultural pages — Forward’s arts section, Jewcy, and Guilt & Pleasure. The real news in American Jewish life, I think, isn’t about the endless battles between organizations, but about the — well, guilt & pleasure of ordinary Jews.

I don’t know a really good source for news about Islam, generally, but I tend to find more useful stuff in the radical left press, for the simple reason that it more often publishes work by real live Muslims, crazy as that sounds, sometimes even talking to other real live Muslims. Check out this report from inside Pakistan’s Red Mosque, for instance, by Fawzia Afzal-Khan. Sloppy? Sure. Beats the pants off the more “responsible” media? Absolutely. Political websites, little magazines, small city alt weeklies, denominational newsletters — that’s where it’s at for raw data.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

The slow but sure formation of a new evangelical Protestantism that will shape American life and politics — and thus the life and politics of the world — for decades to come. I think it’s a cultural story, though, not one to be measured by voting blocs or witnessed at election time. Which means the press just won’t get it.

There’s no one story here, either — the schisms of mainline denominations are part of it, the decline of the old Christian Right is part of it, lifestyle evangelicalism is part of it, the return of poverty to the forefront of evangelical consciousness is part of it, etc., etc. Piece by piece, none of these stories compares to, say, the question of what’s up with the bellicose branches of Islam, but taken as a whole, American Protestantism will still do more to shape the world, for better and worse, than any other faith.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

Not the above, actually. This is a strictly personal answer: Having spent the last five years thinking about the transformation of American Protestantism, I’m eager to get back to the much smaller, more peculiar stories of lived religion. I’m spending the summer thinking about the next book, which I hope will be geographically-bound — that is, an exploration of various beliefs, traditions, rituals, etc., within a locality, rather than any kind of trend story. So I’ll be looking for the quiet signals that hide in the back pages of newspapers rather than following, say, the evangelical soul-struggle over global warming.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Here’s a cynical answer: It’s not. Understanding religion is not a way to get ahead in mainstream media. I say that as a guy for whom religion has proved, among other things, a path to a decent career in journalism. But I got lucky — for most people, religion is a dead end. Not because of an anti-religion bias in newsrooms — lots of journalists and editors are privately religious — but because of a narrative loop in which media “consumers” hunger for “breaking news.” Religion doesn’t usually break, it unfolds; understanding is achieved not through investigation, but immersion; the story is best told not in news prose, but in narrative. Mainstream media is a machine that simply doesn’t perform those functions well; it was never meant to.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

It’s from the Red Mosque story I mentioned above: when Fawzia Afzal-Khan, an English professor from Montclair State in New Jersey, finally manages to win access to the home of the so-called “Burqa Brigades” — the squads of ultra-conservative Pakistani Muslim women who police morality with staves — she finds a flirty male leader and young girls eager to debate Adam Smith with her. One needn’t have any sympathy for the violent, bullying tactics of these Muslim fundamentalists to find it ironic that what American media long assumed (incorrectly) about American fundamentalists — that they were driven by economic rage as much as by religious belief — seems to be true in spades within the ranks of Muslim fundamentalists, who here want to discuss not the proper covering for women, but the wages of cab drivers and the price of butter.

Bonus: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Tune in — more good religion reporting is broadcast on radio than is printed in most major papers.

Kim Lawton is managing editor and correspondent for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on PBS, where she has worked since 1997. She began her career as a religion writer by covering the fall of PTL’s Jim Bakker in the late 1980s. She has written for United Press International, Religion News Service, News Network International, Christianity Today and International Media Service.

She answered GetReligion’s 5Q+1 with characteristic self-effacing humor.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

I monitor AP and Religion News Service every day, along with skimming the highlights from the major papers. (I unabashedly steal news ideas from my fellow members of the Religion Newswriters Association-in the most ethical way, of course.) And I get deluged with news releases and “pitch calls” from religious folks all the time. Many of our viewers offer story suggestions on our website.

I also try to read the news services and publications tied to religious denominations and movements: Catholic News Service, National Catholic Reporter, Christianity Today, Charisma, Christian Century, the Forward, Jewish Weekly, Tricycle, Episcopal News Service, Ecumenical News International, just to name a few. I make an effort to glance at the what-seems-like billions of religion-oriented blogs, but that quickly gets exhausting. The very best way I get news is by keeping plugged into a wide network of people who are plugged into what’s going on in the world of religion. (And sorry, I’m not going to divulge who all is part of that!)

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Sadly, there are many. I don’t think a lot of the reporters covering the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East fully understand all the religious factors at play there. I also think much of the reporting about faith and politics here in the U.S. is too simplistic. So many political stories just don’t convey the complexity and nuances of the religious dimensions.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

I’m watching the seemingly-growing acceptance of religion and religious expression in public life. One of the most interesting manifestations of that right now is the 2008 presidential election season (see answer #2). Then, there’s also the seemingly-growing atheist-secular backlash!

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Faith has an impact on virtually every area of life. As a religion reporter, I have covered institutional religion, spirituality and worship, but I’ve also covered wars and politics, natural disasters, human rights, philanthropy, music, pop culture, travel, business, and yes, even fashion and sports! If you don’t “get religion,” you don’t fully get virtually all of the best, most compelling stories of our times.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Funny? It’s not exactly lately, but one of my all time favorites: In reporting on the Vatican beatification ceremony for Mother Teresa, a local news anchor said that she was being “beautified.” It made me want to check the tape for telltale Botox marks.

Ironic? A couple of weeks ago, a coalition of moderate and progressive religious groups held a Washington news conference to release a new poll saying that the mainstream media don’t cover their leaders as much as they cover religious conservatives. (Of course, my program had covered every event and person they cited as examples of how they are ignored. But that’s not my major point of irony.) Two days later, one of the groups wouldn’t let me bring a TV camera into a major event they were sponsoring because they had promised an exclusive to CNN!

And it’s not just the liberals. The following week, I had to push to be allowed to bring a TV camera into the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting … even though the meeting was theoretically “open” to the media. And I wasn’t allowed to have a camera in a lunch meeting with Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, even though print reporters were allowed to be there. It’s a two-way street, people. If you want the media to do a good job covering you, you have to let us in to do our jobs!

Bonus: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Although the basic journalistic principles remain the same, expanding technologies are changing the way we cover religion. Visuals and audio are becoming more important, even in traditional text media. This is actually a strength for coverage of religion.

Bonus Bonus

This is the most fascinating, and at the same time, the most challenging beat in the world (see answer #4)!

Image: Kim on location in Turkey.

Fred Barnes is a Christian conservative who runs an openly conservative magazine and attends a conservative Anglican parish. He also spends a lot of his time in the world of talk television, which means he is used to stating his views in short bursts of information and he doesn’t mind if people disagree.

With all of that in mind, what we have here is a very short and opinionated take on GetReligion’s 5Q+1 questions.

Once again, I think that the crucial point about Barnes — made in an earlier post on this blog — is that he is a religious or moral conservative more than he is a political conservative. He sees religious issues through the lens of his church (even more than through his famous eyeglasses).

Also, let me sound a note of serious, serious doubt about the answer that Barnes gave to question No. 1. Whether you agree with his opinions or not, it’s clear from his writing and editing that he reads much more widely than Christianity Today and World, when it comes to gaining information about the world of religion. I also think it’s interesting — and a glimpse into his own story as an adult convert to real Christian faith — that he lists his own grown children as major influences on how he sees the world. Every time I have ever heard Barnes speak, he has referred to the impact that his own children — daughters, if I remember correctly — have had on his faith and beliefs. Interesting.

So here come the Barnes soundbites. Prepare to fire back at him.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

Mostly at church, The Falls Church in Falls Church, Va. Or from my grown children, all Christians, or from Mike Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who knows everything about religion. Also, I belong to two Bible studies. Oh, yes, I read Christianity Today and World.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

That’s simple. It’s the threat from Islamic radicalism. The media sees it as a problem in Iraq and Afghanistan, but not a real threat to Western civilization and Christianity. The media reports on it without understanding it at all.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

The decline and fall of the Episcopal Church. I belong to a parish that voted to withdraw from the Episcopal Church. It’s a vote I don’t regret in the least.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Because religion in one form or another drives events in many if not most parts of the world.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

The leaders of the Episcopal Church, who are liberal and politically correct and in favor of multiculturalism, now feel compelled to criticize, and criticize quite stridently and intolerantly, the Anglican leaders in Africa and Asia, who are orthodox believers.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

The coverage is biased against traditional forms of Christian faith.

If you do a search in Google Images for Frank “Bible Belt Blogger” Lockwood you will find nothing that is useful. Zippo.

But if you use Google to search the whole Web, you will find all kinds of interesting things to read. Or Google “Lockwood” and “Jimmy Carter” in Google News for another interesting set of URLs. Go to the White House and mention the name “Frank Lockwood” and they’ll know who you are talking about, too.

To get the basics on the celebrated Lockwood interview with former President Carter, click here to flash back to a recent GetReligion post.

Let me cut to the chase. To celebrate this mini-firestorm, I went ahead and did what I was planning on doing soon anyway — I got in touch with Lockwood to ask him to do one of our 5Q+1 mini-interviews.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

AP and Religion News Service, Baptist Press, other newspapers, Christianity Today and Charisma, GetReligion.org and TitusOneNine, the Religion Newswriters Association’s blog aggregator, visitors to my blog, church bulletins and newsletters, Christian radio and religious bookstores. Christianity Today’s Ted Olsen, the folks at the Dallas Morning News, Gary Stern of the Journal News and Brad Greenberg of the Jewish Journal are among the religion bloggers I monitor.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

Religion coverage is a whole lot better now than it was a few decades ago. Peter Smith of the Louisville Courier-Journal sent me a story his paper ran on Jerry Falwell in Dec. 23, 1975. The writer begins: “Dr. Jerry Falwell, a husky, 42-year-old television preacher from Lynchburg, Va., took the pulpit at Louisville’s Beth Haven Baptist Church yesterday and delivered an old-fashioned, Bible-thumpin’, smoke-spewin’ sermon. Dressed in a conservatively cut brown suit, his face taut with grim emotion, Falwell unloaded a half-hour harangue on the excesses and decadence of modern society.”

Could you imagine that crummy story running today in one of the nation’s 50 largest papers? Probably not. Certainly not if a reporter like Peter Smith is covering the event.

So we’ve made progress. But there’s a lot of progress still to be made. There are far too few evangelicals (or Mormons for that matter) writing in America’s major newsrooms — and far too few writers who understand America’s largest religious bloc. As a result, you see silly mistakes in major publications.

Back to the Mormons: a major newsweekly last week had a picture of the Mormon Tabernacle and referred to it as the Salt Lake Temple. It wasn’t. They’re two very different buildings. A major West Coast daily a couple of years back botched the name of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in one of its stories — especially embarrassing in Oregon, where the LDS church is the second-largest religious body. Silly mistakes like these wouldn’t happen if there were a few more Mormons in big city newsrooms.

On a related note, I think the major media is figuring out that the Mitt Romney story is more complex than just, “Are Romney’s opponents bigots?” They’re looking at his faith — and his opponents — in more nuanced ways.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

I really look forward to following the presidential election. I’m curious if evangelicals will stick together as a voting bloc, or whether they’ll fragment in 2008. My guess is that they’ll never be more homogeneous than they were during the last election.

By the way, I’m always somewhat amused when major publications “discover” born again Christian voters, as they did when Carter was elected in 1976 and in 2004 when President Bush won a second term. These evangelicals — tens of millions of them — didn’t immigrate to America during our bicentennial year nor did they go into hibernation after President Carter’s victory. They’ve been here all along and they’re not going anywhere — at least in the near term. They’re only “discovered” at election time because that’s the only time some journalists pay attention to the territory between LA and Manhattan. We’ve seen a series of books and a documentary or two recently warning that “religious extremists” are taking over America.

Well, polling doesn’t back that up. Gallup’s polls don’t indicate that the America is turning into a more conservative or more religious society or that Americans are shifting to either the far right or the far left.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

Religion isn’t going away and it’s not getting less important. You can’t understand the world if you’re spiritually illiterate. Does that mean journalists need to be able to quote [theologian] Paul Tillich? No. But they should know basic demographics. They should be able to tell the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. They should know the differences between, say, Catholicism, mainline Protestantism and Evangelical Christianity. They should be able to name most of the Ten Commandments and recognize most of the major U.S. religious denominations.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Easy. The Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Larry Flynt paying homage to Rev. Jerry Falwell. The two men were buddies, traded dieting tips, called each other to chat. Who’d have guessed? It’s a strange world.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Yeah, if you’re a new religion journalist or an aspiring journalist, you need to find out about an organization called the Religion Newswriters Association. These folks helped me tremendously when I first was assigned to the religion beat. They hold great workshops for newcomers and their annual convention is one of the highlights of my year — right behind Christmas. They offer scholarships so people from financially-strapped papers can attend and they bring together the very best religion writers in the country. This year it’s in San Antonio and it’ll be a blast.

Time for another 5Q+1 session.

If Russell Chandler, retired from the Los Angeles Times, is one of the gold-standard names in traditional religion-beat work, then our second subject represents a much edgier style of reporting from the post-1960s alternative press. The work being done by Julie Lyons in her Bible Girl columns at the Dallas Observer represents a kind of neo-European, advocacy version of the Godbeat in modern niche media.

Lyons is in her mid-40s and a native of Milwaukee. She received a B.A. in English from Seattle Pacific University and an M.S. in journalism from Northwestern University. Bible Girl and her husband are on the pastoral staff of The Body of Christ Assembly in South Dallas, where, she says she “speaks in tongues, early and often.”

Lyons has been editor of the Observer for 11 years. The newspaper is owned by Village Voice Media and, surely, she is the only Pentecostal editor in that chain. Lyons said that she started writing Bible Girl in August 2006 after an argument with her blog editor, who didn’t think she was writing enough for the staff blog. Bible Girl, she says, draws more posted comments than anything else the newspaper publishes, online or in print.

Well, this newspaper is in Dallas, after all. People there want to read about religion.

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

Charisma (especially J. Lee Grady) and Christianity Today magazines; www.getreligion.org (really) and Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con blog for Beliefnet; Bible Girl readers who e-mail me or post comments; The Dallas Morning News (especially religion writer Jeffrey Weiss) and its religion blog (www.religion.beloblog.com); The New York Times; the religion-related blogs of some writer friends of mine (such as Sandi Glahn: www.aspire2.blogspot.com); but mostly, from being deeply involved in an evangelical church and talking to a lot of people.

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just do not get?

The mainstream media barely have a clue about Pentecostals and how they’re transforming and impacting evangelical Christianity all over the world. They don’t understand: (a) the tremendous variety of traditions and beliefs within the Pentecostal-holiness movement; (b) Pentecostalism’s departure from the Western, rationalistic expressions of Christianity we’re most familiar with; (c) the concern for racial and ethnic reconciliation that still lies at the movement’s core; (d) the emphasis within Pentecostalism on active, practical faith over biblical minutiae; (e) why Pentecostalism is catching on in places in the developing world where non-Pentecostal clergy once decried the shallowness and/or scarcity of Christian conversions; (f) the fact that we’re not superstitious ignoramuses or tongue-babbling loonies.

(3) What is the story that you will be watching carefully in the next year or two?

How African Pentecostals are calling the Pentecostal movement back to its holiness roots, and a somewhat related story — how Pentecostals are dealing (or not dealing) with the many lurid sexual and financial scandals in their midst.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

There’s a reason why people go to all those churches, and it’s not because they’re stupid or pathetic. Their faith is the driving force in their lives; it’s as real to them as whether they’re black or white, male or female. Even more real.

(5) What is the funniest, most ironic twist that you have seen in a religion news story lately?

Sad to say, I haven’t come across much that’s funny or ironic lately in my reporting and reading. Just some of the most sordid and bizarre scandals involving clergy — stuff I couldn’t make up if I tried. That’s ironic when it involves leading lights in the so-called holiness churches, but it sure ain’t funny.

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Religion coverage may not be selling a lot of ads, but it’s essential to understanding the communities you report on. Get out there and spend some time in churches, from the biggest to the smallest. Understand what makes believers tick — their concerns, their hopes, why they do what they do. Stop relying on quotes from the same list of church leaders.

And while you’re out there, answer me this: Why does every dish at the church potluck feature noodles?

Lyons asked us not to use her photograph, because she is doing some undercover work at the moment. To understand the symbolism of her logo, check out this highly personal, take-no-prisoners “Bible Girl” column.

Everyone needs heroes. Back in 1980 or so, when I was trying to break into religion reporting, I decided that one of my journalistic heroes was going to be Russell Chandler of the Los Angeles Times.

If you know anything about the history of religion news in American, you know that this was a very predictable choice. Chandler’s work on the beat was winning every award known to humanity — often two or three times. There has never been a stronger advocate of basic, old-school, hard news journalism on this beat than Russ and, to push toward the future, he has helped create a national award for religion writing at the college-newspaper level.

Chandler earned a B.S. in Business Administration from UCLA, a master’s degree from the University of Southern California’s Graduate School of Religion and an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is an ordained minister in the mainline Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), but has always been known for his fairness and rigor on both sides of various religious divides. With retirement on the horizon, he launched into writing books that focused on trends in American religion. To read a copy of a speech by Chandler, click here.

All of this is to say that Chandler is the first person to take part in our ongoing and still evolving 5Q+1 feature. As you can tell, he answered the questions via email. I’ve added some links. I am sorry about his kind first reference, but I have not censored him:

(1) Where do you get your news about religion?

Tmatt weekly columns; ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Association; Christianity Today magazine; daily papers (local and The Wall Street Journal); Leadership Network postings; The Gathering newsletter (online); Commonweal magazine (some); TV specials (some), and AOL news items (some).

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just don’t get?

Evangelical Christians (of whatever denominational affiliation, if any) are not necessarily right-wing fundamentalists; militant extremists; or pre-trib, anti-environmentalists. The usual conservative, right-wing “Christian” spokespersons often quoted by elite and/or un-savvy reporters don’t necessarily speak for the majority of any group, only for themselves. Same for the “super-libs.”

(3) What is the story that you’ll be watching carefully in the next year or two?

How the ongoing religion/culture/power wars between Islamic groups in the Middle East play out.

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

What people believe has profound influence on how they behave.

(5) What’s the funniest, most ironic twist that you’ve seen in a religion news story lately?

School Renames Easter Bunny ‘Peter Rabbit’

ABC News

(April 7) — A Rhode Island public school has decided the Easter bunny is too Christian and renamed him Peter Rabbit, and a state legislator is so hopping mad he has introduced an “Easter Bunny Act” to save the bunny’s good name.

Chandler comment: PC gone to seed!

BONUS: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?

Why limit it to mainstream news media? We should be alert to how religion, ethics and values are covered by all media — the good, bad, right, left, ignorant and ugly.

Religion watchers’ eyes should rove to and fro throughout the entire spiritual landscape.

Coming soon

One of the goals of GetReligion is to have a two-way conversation with journalists. We do that in the posts and comments pages, of course, but we also want to try something new.

In the near future we will begin an series of occasional posts that we will call “5Q+1.” The goal is talk to journalists whose work involves religious issues and events, whether they are assigned to the Godbeat or not. We hope to ask a few basic questions and store the answers in this pull-down archive on the masthead.

What kind of questions? Here’s what we’re thinking:

(1) Where do you like to get your news about religion?

(2) What is the most important religion story right now that you think the mainstream media just don’t get?

(3) What is the story that you’ll be watching carefully in the next year or two?

(4) Why is it important for journalists to understand the role of religion in our world today?

(5) What’s the funniest, most ironic twist that you’ve seen in a religion news story lately?

And the +1 or “fill in the blanks” question is: Do you have anything else you want to tell us about religion coverage in the mainstream news media?