Living in More Than One World

Coverage of religion and spirituality has been downsized or eliminated by many newspapers in recent years. But there still is a lot of writing and reporting about these topics online, on radio and television and in magazines. Some newspapers have shifted more of their coverage away from print into blogs. Cathy Lynn Grossman, who covers this beat for USA TODAY both in the newspaper itself and in her Faith & Reason blog, presents four concise profiles of journalists who currently or have reported on religion, each of whom have personal books on the subject, in A window into the faith of religion reporters. The four, and their books are: Barbara Bradley Hagerty (National Public Radio; Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality); Peter Manseau (editor of Search: The Magazine of Science, Religion and Culture; Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead); Cathleen Falsani, (Chicago Sun-Times religion columnist and blogger; Sin Boldly: A Field Guide for Grace) and William Lobdell (former Los Angeles Times religion reporter; Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace).  Cathy, who is a former colleague of mine at USA TODAY, does a nice job of weaving together material about the books with personal information on the authors and quotes from each. The different takes by each author on their state of belief (and now unbelief, in Lobdell’s case) hints at the immensity of the world of religion, and why it’s a subject that deserves to be explored and covered seriously by the media.

Lisa Miller of Newsweek has a revealing interview/feature on Huston Smith. The 90 year old religion author-professor has an important new book:  Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography. The foreword was written by Pico Iyer, whom I referenced in the May 2 blog on Geoff Dyer. (Iyer’s book The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, recently came out in paperback.) Smith is known for his million-selling book The World’s Religions, originally published in 1958 as The Religions of Man.  It was also completely revised and updated when it was renamed in 1991. He was also the subject of a fascinating, five part PBS series in 1996, The Wisdom of Faith, a series of interviews conducted by Bill Moyers. I’ve long considered Smith to be a Peter Drucker-like figure. Both remained relevant and productive deep into old age, were renowned authors, professors and wisdom figures, and were considered to be at the top of their field.  Drucker was also interviewed by Moyers, for a PBS program in 1988, but not as extensively. Smith includes an anecdote about Drucker in the 2001 book Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. In addition, there are commonalities in the writing styles of Smith and Drucker: both are clear and compelling, and adept at conveying ideas to wide, diverse readerships. I don’t know if the two knew each other. It’s reasonable to think their paths must have crossed at some point. If anyone has the answer, I’d love to hear about it!

My former USA TODAY colleague Cathy Grossman, who writes and blogs on the religion beat, says on her Faith & Reason blog that she travels to the UK in April, where she’ll be in Cambridge covering and blogging about a “four day seminar with theologians and scientists talking about evolution, consciousness and the brain.”

It will be her second stint in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. One of my favorite prizes of the year is the Templeton Prize, which is announced on March 16.