Faith, Politics & Press in Our Perilous Times. Stephen Burgard, ed. New York: Kendall Hunt Publishing Co., 2010. 178 pp.
For many years the religion beat was the least popular assignment of all. Editors routinely handed it to cub reporters. But times have changed. Religion is now in the news, and reporting on religion has become a challenge to the knowledge, empathy, and writing skills of journalists.
The twelve essays in this book exhibit this change. Most of the authors, many now teaching in American journalism schools, have “been there” as reporters, editors, and students of the kaleidoscopic worlds of religion.
The book is compiled and edited by Stephen Burgard, director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and a former editorial page writer and editor for the Los Angeles Times, and author of Hallowed Ground, named a Religion Top 10 book in 1997.
The great virtue of the collection is that almost every essay takes on an event or a movement and describes it as a case study in how to cover it journalistically. This is not a book of general instructions; it is a series of concrete examples of how to do a religion story. As such, any general reader will learn a lot about its subjects. But, with the discussion questions that follow each essay, the book will be useful, up-to-date reading for courses in journalism schools.
Many in the press—and perhaps many in America—had to learn about Islam in a hurry after the attacks of 9/11. As last year’s threats of a mass Qur’an burning by a Southern evangelical (and carried out in March this year), and the divisions over a proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York City illustrate, there is still much to explain and clarify between Americans and the Muslim world. This book, reflecting on the role of religion in these “perilous times,” attempts to provide guidance for journalists and others in understanding the intersection of faith, public policy, and the press.
The subject range is broad and organized in three sections: (1) Religion Reporting in the Post-September 11 World; (2) Religion in the Twenty-first Century: Technology and New Specialized Reporting; and (3) Covering America’s Dynamic Religious Landscape. Phil Bennett and Rami Khouri write on Islam; Jack Miles on religious forces in Iraq; Alan Schroeder on religion and 2008 presidential politics; Timothy Kelly on the “new” evangelicals; Burgard himself on “quiet” centrist religious Americans; Megan McGee on blogs, social media, and letters to editors; and Jen’nan Ghazal Read on Muslim Americans.
Bennett, former managing editor of the Washington Post, discusses the lessons learned after and since 9/11. Ben Hubbard, an emeritus professor of comparative religion and editor of a 1990 book on covering religion, writes on the history of the religion beat. Debra Mason of the Religion Newswriters Association looks at how new technologies are changing religion reporting.
There is hardly a dull or trivial description of religion in these essays. The authors, like all skilled journalists, specialize in concretions. The great benefit of the collection is that it repeatedly illustrates that supposedly abstractions—God, faith, hope, love—can have huge consequences for how citizens and leaders understand and act in our common life. It has often been easy to neglect the influence of religion on human events. The neglect itself has consequences. Contributor Jack Miles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, illustrates the danger when he writes that “the greatest of the long-term lessons to be learned from the historic blunder of the second Gulf War must be never again to underestimate the soft power of religious difference to trump the supposedly hard realities of guns and money.”
It turns out that, for better or worse, religion is real in human life, and plays important roles in public life, politics, policymaking, and world affairs. Not to report it is to miss much of the real news.
DONALD W. SHRIVER
Union Theological Seminary