SOMETHING TO PONDER …

I’m fortunate to live in a village with two good home-town papers. I’m not talking about Chicago with the Tribune and the Sun-Times. I mean the People’s Republic of Oak Park, Illinois with the Oak Leaves and the Wednesday Journal. Vibrant local journalism is so refreshing and, sadly, so rare these days.

So I thought I’d pass along a column by Wednesday Journal writer Dan Haley. Tackling faith and journalism is not for the thin-skinned or weak of heart. I was surprised to read this and heartened by what he had to say (which included very gracious words about me and my work at the Sun-Times.)

For your perusal:

Can God be found in letters to the editor?
By DAN HALEY

A discussion has been going on back in the letters section of this newspaper in recent weeks that doesn’t shriek or accuse, isn’t about calumny in Downtown Oak Park or who has done right or poorly in the matter of lights in Keystone Park in River Forest.

It’s a dialogue about God-about belief and doubt. And it is what people talk to me about most in the paper of late. It started with a woman named Helen Mildenhall who wrote about her personal choices when it came to going to church, or mainly not. Might have ended there with a single letter to the editor and the only one that did not mention Trustee Robert Milstein. Instead Ms. Mildenhall was engaged by Dean Lueking, the retired pastor of Grace Lutheran in River Forest. Never one to issue screeds or condemnations, Lueking has met Mildenhall where she finds herself, with her doubts and her vestiges of belief. In part, Lueking has met her with his own doubts. A refreshing turn, surely.

The dialogue continues and deepens, trust builds, feelings are shared and respected.

The other night I picked up a book at Barbara’s about a journalist’s unfolding friendship with Fred Rogers, aka Mister Rogers. It is about faith in the clutches of despair, about honestly being there for another person, about not judging but loving. As I’m reading, it reminds me of the exchange going on in our own neighborhood paper.

Newspapers, traditionally, haven’t written well about religion and faith. We, as a profession, ignored it because we were uncomfortable with the subject. When we covered it, it was as a political story. We handicapped the race for pope. We measured the parochial school closings as sociology. We wrote of the sweep of historic contention between faiths and its bursting into violence. But we didn’t write about people’s faith or lack of faith, or the absence of a need for faith.

A few years back, Wednesday Journal more consciously began to look for good local stories about religion. And there are many. These days we are fortunate to have Tom Holmes-a retired Lutheran minister from Forest Park and longtime columnist on religion in our sister paper, the Forest Park Review-writing about faith and religion for us. Watch for that byline. A good story, well told, most always follows.

Oak Park is also home to Cathleen Falsani, the religion beat writer for the Sun-Times. We profiled her back in March. She’s a leading light in how dailies ought to cover religion. Broadly and personally, are a good start. The contrast between Falsani’s piece last week when Roman Catholic Cardinal Francis George returned from sick leave and the piece in the Tribune was startling. The Tribune gave us his respirations per minute. Falsani got the guy to talk about what was in his heart, about facing death.

Newspapers are best when they surprise with light. A few years back we had our “gay” columnist and our “anti-gay” columnists. They surprised us-and themselves-when they started to talk to each other at the Journal’s holiday party. The columns that followed over the next year were a revelation of generosity and concern, about finding a middle that didn’t appear to have previously existed.

The same thing is happening with Mildenhall and Lueking, with the others who have joined the talk. The forum is open.

Join the conversation in the pages of the Wednesday Journal or in your own home-town paper.