Academics Meets Storytelling: A Critical Conversation with Chloë-Arizona Fodor and Deborah Jian Lee
Chloë-Arizona Fodor, MTS '25, sat down with Deborah Jian Lee, RPL Journalism Fellow 2024-25 to discuss religion and journalism. Deborah is an award-winning journalist, radio producer, and senior editor at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She is also the author of ‘Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism.’ Chloë-Arizona completed a CRPL internship with Religion News Service in the Journalism track, and just completed her role as RPL’s Affiliate in Religion and Conflict with the Religion News Service.
In this segment of their conversation, they discuss the ways that journalism can translate academic work.
Chloë-Arizona Fodor: In the past, you and I have talked about how journalism has the power to take questions out of a theoretical space and ground them in context. Being at an academic institution, people are often confused when I tell them that I’m working in journalism. They aren’t clear on how journalism translates in this academic context of Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. How do you see the relationship between journalism and accessibility beyond our academic setting?
Deborah Jian Lee: The thing I love about journalism is you're refining your skill of distillation. You’re asking: how do I take something that's theoretical and complex and distill it in a way that is accessible and engaging, and makes a reader care? Learning how to write for a non-academic audience is such a powerful skill. And it’s a skill that is transferable across professions and relationships. Storytelling is the foundation for human connection. For most of human history, it’s been the way that we're able to communicate who we are and pass our values on.
CAF: This reminds me of a couple years ago, I was on a phone call with my grandmother trying to explain my thesis research. But I only knew how to articulate it in language that was jargon-y and insular to the academic environment that I was in. I was stumbling through an explanation, and she just asked, ‘can you just tell it to me like a story?’ A switch flipped in my brain after that: if I can’t explain my research to my grandmother, what am I even doing this for? I think academics could benefit from learning how to write in a journalistic style. It has given me the opportunity to take questions that I have been mulling over throughout the past couple years and to research them in a deeply humanistic and public-facing way. It makes the questions that we’re interrogating here at HDS accessible to those outside academia’s ivory tower. When done well, I think journalism has the power to be a really effective medium to tease out the implicit and explicit ways that religion’s power manifests in the world.
DJL: You said that so beautifully. If we're only able to talk to people within our silo of academic interest, our ideas are neither going out into the world nor being challenged like the way your grandmother challenged you. She said, ‘actually, that doesn’t make sense to me,’ and forced you to distill your years of research into something that she could connect with and relate to. Storytelling is such a powerful way of doing that.