Rachel Zoll

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Plug-In: News that had the attention of religion-beat pros last week (#RNA2023)

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Plug-In: News that had the attention of religion-beat pros last week (#RNA2023)

BETHESDA, Md. — Greetings from just outside the nation’s capital.

The Religion News Association’s annual meeting was held last week, and I enjoyed the opportunity to connect with old friends and make new ones.

I attended my first RNA conference in Nashville, Tennessee, in the fall of 2002, just a few months after joining The Associated Press in that same city. I met the late, great Rachel Zoll — then one of AP’s two national religion writers along with the legendary Richard Ostling — at that meeting. What a blessing!

We’ll stick with the RNA theme as we jump into the best reads and top headlines in the world of faith.

#RNA2023: That was the hashtag to follow the highlights at the religion writers meeting.

Thursday’s program featured reports by academics and journalists on the Spiritual Exemplars project by the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. ReligionUnplugged.com published a dozen or so of the profiles produced as part of that ambitious project on engaged spirituality.

Godbeat topics: As the conference opened, Religion News Service’s Bob Smietana led a session on “The Future of Houses of Worship.” Plug-in readers may recall that Smietana is the author of “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters.”

Another session I really enjoyed: The Associated Press’ Holly Meyer moderated a discussion on “Praying and Playing: The Role of Sports in Religion.” In recent months, Meyer covered the Super Bowl ad campaign touting Jesus and wrote about football fans who see prayer as a Hail Mary.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Sex abuse crisis: “These survivors felt betrayed by local SBC officials. What their stories say about reform.”

Once again — as I told him in person Thursday — The Tennessean’s Liam Adams has produced an important, enlightening story about the handling of sexual abuse allegations within the Southern Baptist Convention. His stories are must-reads heading into the SBC’s annual meeting in New Orleans in June.


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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

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Plug-In: Mourning two amazing people and journalists -- Rachel Zoll and Amy Raymond

In 31 years of full-time journalism, I’ve been blessed to work with some incredible people.

The world recently lost two of the best.

Rachel Zoll was one of The Associated Press’ two New York-based national religion writers — along with Richard Ostling — when I joined AP’s Nashville bureau in 2002.

She was always so kind and supportive of me and my work, as she was with countless others. I last saw her at the 2017 Religion News Association annual meeting in Nashville. I had left AP more than a decade earlier, so I was surprised when she asked how my wife, Tamie, was doing. I had no idea she knew Tamie was battling autoimmune disease. But she did.

Early in 2018, Zoll was diagnosed with brain cancer. She died Friday in Amherst, Mass., at 55.

Her AP colleague David Crary, who called Zoll his “best friend at work,” wrote a truly touching obituary.

Zoll and Ostling were AP’s national religion dream team for five years until his retirement in 2006.

Ostling enjoyed a legendary career with Time magazine before going to work at AP and now, in retirement, with GetReligion. But he told Zoll during her illness that “on a day-to-day basis our work together was the highlight” of his time in journalism.

Amy Raymond and I both got our start working on The Talon campus newspaper at Oklahoma Christian University. I was excited when she joined The Oklahoman staff in 1997, a few years after me.

Although Raymond and I hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades, we stayed in touch via Facebook. We occasionally chatted about religious and political issues.

On a Zoom discussion Monday night, current and former colleagues kept saying — through tears — how smart and kind she was. That is the absolute truth.

“Amy started as a staff writer but her true passion became apparent as she made her way up the ladder as a copy editor, page designer, and then as night news editor,” my longtime friend and former Oklahoma Christian classmate Steve Lackmeyer wrote in The Oklahoman this week.


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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

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The U.S. Census story and its hooks for religion news (plus a personal note about Rachel Zoll)

The first round of 2020 U.S. Census data (with much more to come) is big news as states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House and politicos enter the wild decennial joust to gerrymander federal and state district lines to their advantage.

But here's another journalistic thought: What does the Census mean for religion?

Tony Carnes of the "A Journey Through NYC Religions" website provides an early example, analyzing possible implications for New York City that other writers could emulate for their own cities, towns or regions.

Editor Carnes (disclosure: a personal friend) is a professional sociologist leading a team that has spent years tracking religion developments in Gotham, notably at the neighborhood level. Despite the town's secular image, Carnes and company have documented that, starting in the late 1970s, thousands of new churches, synagogues, mosques and temples have been built. Such activity was continuing until the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Carnes counts the populations moving in and moving out from the American Community Survey between 2010 and 2014 as updated by Census numbers for 2018. This shows a city gradually becoming less African-American (population down 96,000) and Hispanic (down 50,000). The gainers are non-Hispanic Whites (up 200,000) and Asians (up 97,000). We'll soon know if these trends continued in 2020.

Carnes calls that "a startling change in the racial/ethnic profile of the city, and it is also found in other cities in the United States."


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Passing of the guard at the Associated Press; the rise of Ministry Watch and the Roys Report

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Passing of the guard at the Associated Press; the rise of Ministry Watch and the Roys Report

The death of a well-known religion reporter; a new job announcement from a beat veteran and a spotlight on two feisty independent religion news organizations is what concerns me this week.

Tmatt had previously offered an update on the health of Rachel Zoll, a former Associated Press religion specialist who came down with glioblastoma, a brain cancer that has no cure, in early 2018. That was only a few months after another religion-beat pro, Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News, died of the exact same malady.

Last week, Zoll died at the age of 55 at her home in Massachusetts. She reported on religion for AP for 17 years.

There have been lots of tributes, so I’ll spotlight this Associated Press obit atop the list.

Zoll covered religion in all its aspects, from the spiritual to the political, and her stories reached a global audience. But her influence was far greater than that. Other publications often followed her lead, and AP staffers around the world depended on her generosity and guidance.

Zoll was at the forefront of coverage of two papal transitions, the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and tensions within many denominations over race, same-sex marriage and the role of women.

She often broke news, as in 2014, when she was the first to report Pope Francis’ appointment of Blase Cupich to become the new archbishop of Chicago.

Fellow GetReligionista Dick Ostling, who was at AP from 1998-2006, wrote this:

My partner Rachel was simply a delight to work with and a personality enjoyed by everyone who knew her -- and who competed with her. But in broader and more historical terms she exemplified all that's needed in reporting and especially with a complex and emotion-laden field like religion. She was of course quick and accurate but those are the basics for any Associated Press writer. And then, remarkably intelligent. She knew her stuff and knew she needed to learn ever more stuff to handle this beat.


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Plug-In with good news: MRI shows no new brain tumor growth for AP's Rachel Zoll

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Like so many of her devoted readers, I miss the stellar journalism of Rachel Zoll, longtime national religion writer for The Associated Press.

But I have positive news to report about Zoll, who was diagnosed with brain cancer more than two years ago.

An MRI last week “showed no evidence of new tumor growth once again,” said Cheryl Zoll, Rachel’s sister.

Rachel has glioblastoma, or GBM, the aggressive and deadly cancer that claimed the life of Sen. John McCain in 2018.

The Religion News Association honored Rachel with a Special Recognition Award at its 2018 annual meeting in Columbus, Ohio. That same year, AP recognized her as one of the winners of the Oliver S. Gramling Awards, the global news service’s highest internal honor.

The reporter’s doctor indicated that in 90 percent of cases, “patients would be showing progressive disease by now,” her sister said.

“While we could, of course, see new growth at any time, Rachel has officially graduated into the class of people who are outliers with respect to survival,” said Cheryl, with whom Rachel is staying in Amherst, Massachusetts. “We'll take all the time we can get!”

Like many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, Rachel has been confined to walking around the neighborhood the last few months. But she has enjoyed receiving calls and notes from friends such as Richard Ostling, with whom Rachel worked on AP’s national religion team for years.


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Life on religion-news beat: Update on the health of Rachel Zoll of Associated Press

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We are almost a month into life here at the somewhat downsized GetReligion.org, with me working roughly half of the time — like in the blog’s first decade.

We are publishing less material and, frankly, there are times when it is agonizing to have to let some subjects and news articles pass without commentary (either positive or negative). We really do appreciate all of the story tips from readers. Keep them coming, even if we are not able to post about them.

We are still trying to figure out how to handle some items of business, especially without the regular work of Bobby Ross, Jr., and his Friday Five collective. His new “Weekend Plug-In” feature for Religion UnPlugged helps. But there are still times when we all think, “Oh, I’ll send that to Bobby for the Friday Five,” and then we have to say, “Oh, right.”

Not all of this material is light-hearted. Take, for example, this serious life-on-the-beat update from patriarch Richard Ostling — focusing on the health of his colleague Rachel Zoll, with whom he shared religion-beat duties for years at the Associated Press.

So here is the note from Ostling:

Along the beat: Our highly respected colleague, former AP Religion Writer Rachel Zoll,  is still being treated for brain cancer. 

People who follow the religion beat closely will remember that she was suddenly stricken on Martin Luther King Day two years ago. However, this encouraging New Year's update was posted by her sister Cheryl:


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Friday Five: RNS staff hirings, LA Times death, Messiah Trump, Pete Buttigieg's faith, Chick-fil-A

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There’s news concerning that $4.9 million Lilly Endowment Inc. grant that will fund 13 new religion journalists at The Associated Press, Religion News Service and The Conversation.

RNS announced this week that it has hired three new journalists related to the grant: Roxanne Stone as managing editor, Alejandra Molina as a national reporter and Claire Giangravè as Vatican reporter.

In other Godbeat news, the Los Angeles Times reported on the death at age 76 of K. Connie Kang, a pioneering Korean American journalist:

Connie Kang covered religion in her final years at The Times. After leaving the paper in 2008, the deeply devout Christian decided to become a minister. She graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary in 2017 and shortly after passed the U.S. Presbyterian Church’s ordination exam. Her dream was to build a Christian school in North Korea.

Finally, if you’re interested in how a leading religion journalist approaches her job, check out this podcast featuring the New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias.

Now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:


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Friday Five: Rachel Zoll update, Notre Dame fire, bad vibrations in NYC , Kent Brantly's next mission

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This week, GetReligion’s Richard Ostling visited longtime Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll, who is staying with her sister Cheryl in Amherst, Mass.

Ostling and Zoll worked together as AP’s national religion team for years.

Most know that Zoll, recipient of awards last year from AP and the Religion News Association, has been coping with brain cancer since January 2018.

She passed along the following message to her many friends on the Godbeat: “I miss you all. I love hearing what people are doing and working on and wish you the best.”

By the way, Ostling is now on Twitter. Give him a follow!

Now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Once again, we have no clear honoree this week. So I’ll call your attention to Terry Mattingly’s post on a must-read New York Times multimedia report on the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.

In his post, tmatt also links to Clemente Lisi’s piece on how French church vandalism cases finally are starting to get the journalistic attention they deserve.


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A day after Lilly Endowment news, Associated Press posts job opening ads for seven religion journalists

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We shared the big news Wednesday about the 18-month, $4.9 million Lilly Endowment Inc. grant that will fund 13 religion journalists at The Associated Press, Religion News Service and The Conversation.

We had a few questions, too, about the specifics of the Global Religion Journalism Initiative, which RNS CEO and Publisher Tom Gallagher calls a “transformative and historic grant by Lilly.”

A few of the answers — such as the specific descriptions of the positions and where they will be based — began emerging today.

AP posted job opening ads on its careers website for seven Global Religion positions, including:

• New York-based Global Editor: “an experienced journalist and news leader to lead its new Global Religion team and direct the cooperative’s coverage of religion around the world in all media formats, with a focus on explanatory and accountability reporting.”

• New York- or Washington-based news editor: “this senior producer will help lead a team of journalists who cover religion around the world and will have direct responsibility for crafting video news report on religion that is rich in exclusive spot news, compelling live video and distinct, deeply reported enterprise.”

• New York- or Washington-based newsperson: “a talented multiformat journalist to join its new Global Religion team and report on the intersection of politics and religion as a newsperson.”

• New York-based newsperson: “a talented multiformat journalist to join its new Global Religion team and report on youth and faith as a newsperson.”

• New York-based newsperson: “a talented text and digital presentation editor to join its new Global Religion team as a newsperson. … (T)his editor will direct and edit breaking news coverage, working closely with news managers and journalists worldwide to ensure AP content about religion is accurate, fast, distinctive and packaged creatively for audiences around the world.”

• Cairo-based newsperson: “a talented multiformat journalist to join its new Global Religion team and report on Islamic faith and culture as a newsperson.”

• Washington-based videojournalist: “a videojournalist with a history of successful television and online video storytelling to join its new Global Religion team as a videojournalist in Washington.”

As you may recall, Wednesday’s news release noted:


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