Can the Press Cover Religion Fairly? with Mark Oppenheimer

But the bigger challenge has nothing to do with who the reporters are, but rather with the subject of religion. Usually, reporters report what they, or what their sources, have seen: a car crash, a Senate vote, a Word Series game. But religion is organized around the unseen: Bible stories, other sacred scriptures, legends, and the spiritual experiences that people claim, but cannot verify, that they have undergone. From the Middle East to Waco, from Jonestown to Joel Osteen, how is it possible for a reporter to make sense of this world in which the normal rules of evidence don’t apply?

Mark Oppenheimer writes the Beliefs column, about religion, for The New York Times. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale in American religious history, and he is the coordinator of the Yale Journalism Initiative and a Lecturer in English. He has won the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the Koret Young Scholar on Jewish Themes award. He has had a varied career, having been a newspaper beat reporter for the Hartford Courant, a writer for The Christian Century, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, and an essayist for Slate, The American Scholar, Southwest Review, and Yale Review. He is the author of several books, most recently a Kindle ebook about sex abuse in Buddhism called “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side.” See also markoppenheimer.com.