Many of the most compelling news stories in the United States in recent years engage religion in important ways. The stories included in our reading lists draw from a range of sources, including national, local, and social media. Topics include Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump and white evangelicals, North Carolina’s House Bill 2, Occupy Wall Street, Park51 (the “Ground Zero Mosque”), the Pulse Nightclub attack, and public debates about refugees, immigration, and national security. These resources were initially developed for the December 2016 Symposium on Religious Literacy and Journalism held at Harvard Divinity School.
These readings are not intended to be representative of best (or worst) practices. Rather, they present a range of approaches to a topic in order to provide a common core of knowledge for practitioners in the field.
The journalism reading lists below draw from a range of sources, including national, local, and social media. They represent some of the most compelling news stories in the United States in recent years, and each one engages religion in important ways. As you read, we pose the following questions to guide your reading:
- When does religion become part of the story? What role does religion play in this story?
- Which religious actors or institutions are included, and when? How does the choice of which religious actors to include shape the story?
- Where is religion engaged in an innovative way? Where is it treated as a cliché (perhaps obscuring what’s really going on in the process)?
- How does a religious literacy approach to this story enrich our understanding of what’s happening?
- What forms of violence is religion supporting or resisting in this case?
- How do theological anthropologies (theologically based understandings of human nature/human beings) play into the positions at stake and the conflicts between them?
- We also pose the following questions about the field of journalism more broadly:
- What sociocultural or local structural factors foster or constrain critique in journalism?
- What are the strengths and drawbacks of having a “religion beat” and how is that beat defined?
- What are the received narratives about religion that are easy to write (and draw “clicks”), and how do journalists effectively challenge or complicate them?
- How can schools of journalism best address the challenges and opportunities regarding religious (il)literacy? What should journalists know?
- How do the structural changes occurring in the media world affect coverage of religion/religious aspects of stories, and how can journalists cope?
- How do professionals in journalism understand the relationship between constructing narratives and reporting on the narratives of others?