Tom Heneghan
Tom Heneghan launched the post of religion editor for Reuters in 2003, after 25 years of reporting from 30 countries, covering events including the fall of the Berlin Wall and wars in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Kosovo. From Paris, he now directs the agency’s coverage of religion worldwide and writes mostly on the Vatican and Islam in Europe. He coordinates with Reuters editors for science, health, environment, and pharmaceuticals to ensure reports include relevant religious and ethical issues. He published Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall in 2000 and has written chapters in several Reuters books. In early 2005, he helped lead the Reuters multimedia team in Rome covering the death of Pope John Paul II and election of Pope Benedict XVI, which won the Reuters Story of the Year award.
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Reuters
Creation vs. Darwin Takes Muslim Twist in Turkey
A lavishly illustrated Atlas of Creation is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism.
Arriving unsolicited by post, the large-format tome offers 768 glossy pages of photographs and easy-to-read text to prove that God created the world with all its species. At first sight, it looks like it could be the work of United States creationists, the Christian fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days as told in the Bible. But the author’s name, Harun Yahya, reveals the surprise inside. This is Islamic creationism, a richly funded movement based in predominantly Muslim Turkey which has an influence U.S. creationists could only dream of. |
John Kelleher
John Kelleher is a freelance documentary producer and scriptwriter who also writes regularly for UK newspapers. His films cover a broad range of topics, from the environment to the origins of language to the future of faith in the UK, and have won numerous awards, including the Science Special Gold Award Questar and Best Documentary at the New York Film Festival. Currently, he is researching, producing, and writing a series of films on history and politics in the Middle East. Before becoming a documentary film maker he had a long career as a newspaper reporter and editor and as a television news producer in the UK and internationally.
Jane Little
Jane Little created the post of religious affairs correspondent at the BBC World Service in 1998 and since then has traveled widely to cover religion for the BBC. She studied theology and religious studies at King’s College, Cambridge, and at Harvard University, as a Fulbright Scholar, where she specialized in religion and politics in the US. She is also interested in the burgeoning field of integrative medicine. In the last two years, in addition to reporting on religion, she has been presenting on BBC Radio Four’s Sunday, a religious and ethical news program, as well as occasionally presenting Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour. She also reports for general news programs across radio and TV outlets in the UK.
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BBC World Service
Analysis Tuesday
The Democrats have radically shifted their approach to religion. How is the Democratic Party trying to reach out to the religious voters? |
Tracey Logan
As a senior science journalist for BBC Radio since 1990, Tracey Logan covered some of the biggest science stories of recent times, from the human genome project to the building of the internet, the search for life on Mars, the revolutionary impact of mobile phones, and the recent discovery of remains of a new human species in Indonesia. The numerous awards she received for her work as a radio presenter and producer include the BT Technology Journalists Award of Excellence and the BT Technology Journalist of the Year award. Her programs have appeared both on BBC World Service and Radio. She has also written extensively on technology and engineering for BBC News Online.
Jeffrey O’Brien
Jeffrey O’Brien joined Fortune magazine in June 2006 as a senior editor covering the intersection of science, technology, culture, and business. Before joining Fortune, he was a senior editor at Wired magazine. He edited two of the three cover stories that earned Wired a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2005. The profile he wrote of cave-explorer Bill Stone, “To Hell and Back,” was included in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2005, and two recent features he edited have been chosen for The Best American Science Writing 2006 and The Best Technology Writing 2006. He also received a Jesse H. Neal Award as editor of the best single issue of a business magazine.
Eric Ormsby
A freelance journalist and specialist in Islamic intellectual traditions, Eric Ormsby writes on science, history, natural history, and religion. His work appears regularly in The Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, Yale Review, The Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Parallel to his journalism career he has served as a director of libraries and professor of Islamic Studies at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies, McGill, and the Institute of Ismaili Studies. He has also published several books, including Theodicy in Islamic Thought (1984), and articles on Islam as well as a volume of essays.
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The Wall Street Journal
When Empires CollideBook Review: The Siege of Vienna by John Stoye In one of Aesop’s Fables a stag takes refuge on a cliff to escape his hunters. He feels safe as long as he can survey the landscape below him. But a boatload of hunters coming upriver spot his silhouette against the sky and bring him down from his blind side. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640-1705) resembled that unfortunate stag. He was so fixated on the threat from France and the aggressive designs of Louis XIV that he underestimated a far worse menace from the East. That, combined with his legendary procrastination, almost cost him Vienna and his empire. In 1683, the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed IV, still smarting from the failure of Suleiman the Magnificent to take Vienna in 1529, began preparing for a new assault on the ultimate prize. Victory, which lay almost within their grasp, would have spelled the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The heartland of Europe would have become yet another unruly Ottoman province. |
Steven Paulson
Steven Paulson is the executive producer and an interviewer for To the Best of Our Knowledge, a radio program produced at Wisconsin Public Radio and syndicated nationally by Public Radio International and Sirius Satellite Radio. The program won the George Foster Peabody Award in 2005. He has also received awards from the Northwest Broadcast News Association and the Milwaukee Press Club. He received a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He has written for The Independent, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and other newspapers. His radio reports have also been broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition Sunday.
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Wisconsin Public Radio
To The Best Of Our Knowledge
Electrons to Enlightenment: A Five Part Series on Science & Religion
The Big Questions:
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Michael Powell
Michael Powell is a native New Yorker and New York bureau chief of the Washington Post. He graduated from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism with a master’s degree. He has worked at the Burlington Free Press, New York Newsday, The New York Observer and, since 1996, the Washington Post, where he covered former Mayor Marion Barry and wrote on national politics and science and culture for the Style Section. He moved back to New York for the Post just before September 11, 2001, and has since written of terror, politics, the intelligent design battles, and all matter of mayhem large and small.
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The Washington Post
The End of Eden: James Lovelock Says This Time We’ve Pushed the Earth Too FarThrough a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit’s sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard’s edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush.
A lean, white-haired gentleman in a blue wool sweater and khakis beckons you inside his whitewashed cottage. We sit beside a stone hearth as his wife, Sandy, an elegant blonde, sets out scones and tea. James Lovelock fixes his mind’s eye on what’s to come.
Why is that?
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William Saletan
William Saletan is the national correspondent for the online magazine Slate, which he joined in 1996 and where he now writes the Human Nature column covering science, technology, and society. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he is a former editor of the Hotline, a former reporter for the New Republic and The Washingtonian, and a contributor to numerous publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, and National Review. He is also a panelist on the weekly television program Eye on Washington. His books include Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (2003) and Slate’s Field Guide to the Candidates 2004 (2003).
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Slate
The Deity in the DataBrother, have you heard the bad news? It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn’t go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren’t prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all. |
Rob Stein
Rob Stein is a national science reporter for the Washington Post, focusing on health and medicine. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, he began his science journalism career in 1987, when he became health reporter for United Press International in Boston. After covering health and medicine for UPI for five years, he became UPI’s science editor, overseeing the news agency’s science coverage. He moved to National Public Radio in 1992 to become a science editor at the radio network. In 1996 he took over as the science editor at the Post, a position he held until taking over the health and medicine beat in 2002.
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The Washington Post
Institute Practices Reproductive Medicine—and CatholicismCraig Turczynski traveled from Texas to find ways to help infertile women that do not conflict with his religious beliefs. Cherie LeFevre came from St. Louis to learn how to treat her OB-GYN patients in obedience to her Catholicism. Amie Holmes flew from Ohio so she could practice medicine in conformity with church teachings when she graduates from medical school. On a journey that would blend the aura of a pilgrimage with the ambience of a medical seminar, the three arrived at an unassuming three-story red-brick building on a quiet side street in this Missouri River city. Their destination was the Pope Paul VI Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction, which has become perhaps the most prominent women’s health center serving Catholics and other doctors, medical students and patients who object for religious reasons to in vitro fertilization, contraceptives and other aspects of modern reproductive medicine. |
Jay Tolson
Jay Tolson is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report, covering culture, ideas, and religion. Previously the editor of the Wilson Quarterly, he has written for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement, Civilization, Slate, The Sciences, DoubleTake, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University, he is the author of Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (1992), which won the Southern Book Award, selected by critics of the Southern Book Association, and the Hugh Holman Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Southern Literary Studies, and he edited The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy (1996).
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US News and World Report
The New UnbelieversBooks on atheism are hot. But do they have anything fresh to say?
Little seems to have changed since Benjamin Franklin penned those words of advice to would-be immigrants in 1782. Most polling data suggest that some 90 percent of Americans believe in God or a supreme spirit. And a recent University of Minnesota study finds that atheists—or at least that lonely 1 percent of the national mix that dares to identify itself as such—are the least trusted group in America. |
Kristal Brent Zook
Kristal Brent Zook has been a freelance author, journalist, and broadcast commentator for more than 12 years. She is a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s News & Notes with Ed Gordon and a contributing writer to Essence magazine, where she covers educational and health disparities, environmental concerns, and other social justice issues. In 2004 and 2006 her work at Essence won the New York Association of Black Journalists award for social issues reporting. Formerly a contributing writer for the Washington Post, her articles on race and culture have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, USA Weekend, The Village Voice, and many other publications. Her books include Color by Fox (1999) and Black Women’s Lives: Stories of Power and Pain (2006).
Honorary 2006 Fellow Madeleine Bunting
Madeleine Bunting, who was chosen as a 2006 fellow, has left journalism to become the director of Demos, a prominent UK think tank. As a columnist and associate editor at The Guardian for over a decade, she had written extensively on religious affairs, most recently on Islam and Britain's Muslim community, and was awarded a national Race in the Media award in 2005 for her work in this area. Her books include Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives (2004) and The Model Occupation: Channel Islands under German Rule 1940-45 (1995). She received her master’s degree from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She has a keen interest in the social and political implications of scientific and technological developments and how they affect people’s sense of identity and relationship. Among her other particular journalistic interests are issues of global development, environment, and poverty.
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Guardian Unlimited
The Venomous Media Voices Who Think No Muslim is Worth Talking ToAs government efforts to
One could almost feel sorry for them. A minister like Ruth Kelly is wrenched from her bucket-and spade holiday on a rainy British beach with the kids to launch yet another push to It’s all designed to sound energetic and purposeful. We pay fat cabinet salaries and we want our politicians to sound like they are earning them. But in truth, beneath the rhetoric—an odd verbal combination of rugby tackles and romantic engagement—is a profound confusion in government policy as to what to do about British-grown Islamist terrorism, apart from large amounts of surveillance and frequent use of detention. Beyond that, the hearts-and-minds strategy is running on empty. |