My Show and Tell: "Can I get in the Van?" by Erick Lyle

 http://www.vice.com/read/can-i-get-in-the-van-000288-v20n4

This is easily my favorite piece of journalism that I've read in the past few months. Basically, the writer is assigned to write a piece on the two reunited versions of the famed punk rock/experimental/psychedelic band Black Flag. The writer, a musician, hears that Black Flag is auditioning bassists and decides to hitchhike his way across the country to Texas where the auditions are held. He melts the faces of the guys in the band, and he practices with them for a week. They offer him a spot in the band. He turns them down and goes back to New York, bass in hand.

I think this is such a fascinating piece because the writer put himself completely into the story. He showed a Hunter S. Thompson-esque disregard for his original assignment (write about a reunited band) and decided to dive into the story completely. In doing so, he is able to provide a perspective no other journalist will ever get: one from inside the band. We can see the criteria guitar player Greg Ginn has in mind for players (Do you smoke weed?") and it gives the reader an amazing insight into the musical process of how this band jams, man. Furthermore, it's fascinating from a narrative standpoint. It's a damn good story.

It also raises some interesting questions. Did Erick Lyle violate journalistic ethics? Is there too much of him in the piece? Does his involvement render the piece ineffective. I don't think so, but I'd like to hear other opinions.

The Church in the Basement

1,828 Words 

Kalamazoo Gazette Faith Section

The Church in the Basement

            About a quarter of a mile down Winchell Avenue, there is a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Inside the door, there is a grandfatherly greeter named Richard handing out bulletins and hugs. To the right of the foyer, there is an imposing sanctuary with rows of hard wooden pews and another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. The sanctuary is completely empty, and this often confuses first-time visitors, until they are directed downstairs by Richard.

            Travelling down the two flights of stairs reveals a basement lit by fluorescent lights where thirty or so gray-haired men and women are milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard plays guitar, fingerpicking his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. There are plenty of battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, flanked on both sides by large white banners painted in a wide array of colors with people, rainbows and all manners of LGBTQ pride symbols. At the center of this explosion of color is a table covered with a pristine white cloth holding two candles with a tasteful bronze cross in the center. Off to the side, there is a miniature statue of a rainbow-colored phoenix rising from the flames.

            There’s a man behind the altar, about fifty, bald, with glasses. He’s clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with custom gay pride symbols.

            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are between fifty and seventy, and they are a delightful cast of characters.

            On the left side of this semicircle of chairs is Marvel, a retired woman after left behind her Bible Baptist upbringing because she “hated getting in trouble for thinking” and came to Phoenix twenty-five years ago.

            Mark is sitting behind Marvel. Mark is a gay man in his forties and a former Catholic who left the church in disgust one Sunday after the priest gave a gay-bashing sermon from the book of Leviticus. The experience soured him on faith, and he considers himself an agnostic now, but that hasn’t stopped him from coming to Phoenix for twenty years. He still sings hymns and asks for prayers during the service despite his agnosticism.

           Myrna walks in five minutes before the service begins. Myrna is an older woman in her seventies with laugh lines that testify to her readiness to smile. She came here years ago to learn more about gay people, and, in the process, learned that she was a lesbian herself when she fell in love with another member of the congregation.  

            At six o’clock every Sunday night, they meet in this basement, a space they rent from the Kalamazoo Church of Disciples, a faith community brave enough and liberal enough to accept Phoenix’s community with open arms. No one seems to mind meeting in the basement; after all, a basement beats a closet every time.

            Besides, basements are nothing new to Phoenix’s parishioners. In fact, they started out in a basement. On Ash Wednesday in February of 1988, eighteen people met in Pastor Cyril Stevenson’s basement for Phoenix’s inaugural service. Cyril had been dismissed from the United Church of Christ for being gay, and he decided to start Phoenix with co-Pastor Melanie Morrison in order to provide a safe place for LGBTQ men and women to worship. For a long time, theirs was the only church that accepted LGBTQ people.

            After that initial meeting, the church bounced from basement to rented room to basement, staying on the margins of the faith community until acceptance began to prevail in the mid-nineties, and Phoenix was accepted back into the United Church of Christ after a long process of accreditation. After the leadership of other UCC churches in the area examined Phoenix under a microscope, there was a vote, and Phoenix was welcomed back into the fold with open arms.    

            Despite finding a degree of acceptance, they continued to stay in rented spaces for financial reasons. Small churches always live on the edge when it comes to making rent and paying salaries, and Phoenix is no exception. Even at their height of membership, the community never numbered more than sixty, so it was always a struggle to make rent. Inevitably, disputes over money began to arise, and a gulf that was too wide to be bridged grew between two groups within the church. In 2007, a third of the congregation left to form another church.

            But it’s a difficult to kill a phoenix, and the church clung to life, continuing to provide community to those who had been ostracized for the sexual orientation. One person who sought out that community was current Pastor, Ken Arthur. Ken left his faith behind when he went to college because he was unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the idea of hellfire and damnation. After coming out at age thirty, he came to Phoenix in 1996 seeking a support system to aid him in his self-discovery. Over the course of four or five years, Ken’s skepticism gradually melted away, and he came to affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ.

            To further explore his newfound spirituality, Ken decided to enroll in the Chicago Theological Seminary in 2007. While he was there, he received a Master’s in Religious Studies rather than a Divinity degree, because he “definitely didn’t want to be a pastor.”

Within a year, Ken became Phoenix’s pastor.  Because of the split, Phoenix needed an interim pastor, and Ken was asked to step because of his time at the Seminary. His congregation liked him so much that they made him the full-time pastor in 2010. Because Ken was a member for so long, there isn’t much of a hierarchy between pastor and flock. The congregants are quick to mention this, often excitedly. “Feel free to talk to Ken. He was one of us for a long time.” There are no divisions here. He might be the head, but he is still a part of the body.  

            Because of this, Ken doesn’t appear perturbed when the clock reads 6:00 and people are still chatting and making their rounds. He waits patiently, going over notes until people find their seats. When things settle down, he motions to Frank, an elderly gentleman wearing a conservative blue dress shirt, and Frank uses a candle at the end of a long golden handle to light the candles on the altar, signifying that it is time to begin.

            The service begins with a call to worship based on Psalm 148. Pastor Ken exhorts his congregation to “Praise the Great Spirit from the Heavens” and they respond “Praise the Holy One from the skies above.”

            It’s the Sunday after Arbor Day, so Ken invites Jim up to read the poem “Let the trees be consulted” by John Wright. Jim, a former paramedic in his forties, reads beautifully. With passion evident in his voice, he recites “Let lumber be treasured like gold/let chainsaws be played like saxophones,” setting the tone for the environmentally-focused service. Everyone raises their voice to sing a few hymns that celebrate the divine beauty of nature.  

            After a few songs, the hymnals are set on the floor and the members of the congregation share their joys and concerns for the week. This week, the joys outnumber the concerns. There is celebration of retirement, of children being born, and flowers budding. Though there are fewer concerns, they are heavy. The piano player, Linda, had to kick her alcoholic brother out of her house because he recently fell off the wagon. People are hurting and dying, and the members of Phoenix share their grief freely with one another. There is no filter, no effort to put up a front and disguise hurt here. As Myrna later puts it, “The prayers are so much more real here.”

            Once the sharing ends, the prayers commence. Everyone closes their eyes and joins hands, giving thanks to God for their joys and entreating God for help with their sorrows. This prayer can last for a hand-crampingly long time, but no one minds. Cramped hands are just a side-effect of caring.

            Once every joy and concern has been addressed, the Phoenicians recite a gender-neutral adaptation of the Disciples Prayer. Their voices are strong, though people read at different speeds, giving the prayer an off-kilter feel.

            Ken calls up Katy and Mona to sing a song, and they give a spirited rendition of the Indigo Girls tune “A Hammer and a Nail,” accompanied by Jonathan, the guitarist. Such rapid switchbacks between religious and secular happen often at Phoenix, often rapidly enough to give an unaccustomed visitor whiplash.

            As the last note dies out, Ken walks up to begin his message. Ken doesn’t have the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification because the soundboard has been acting up lately. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The quiet passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly.

            In fact, overflowing is the subject of Ken’s message. He reads from the Book of John, emphasizing Jesus’s call for his disciples to “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” Let love overflow. Work to realize the Kingdom of God here on Earth. Work for peace and hope and justice. It is stirring. People are moved, in spirit as well as body: a construction paper poster with a crude tree glued on it boasts 254 hours of community service, 11 trees planted, and 4 letters written as a part of the church’s Arbor Day campaign for environmental stewardship. This is a place of dirty fingernails and grass stains.

            Ken closes his remarks, and Frank extinguishes the flame on the altar candles as everyone sings one more song, a hymn penned by a former member that reminds the members of Phoenix to be the light in the world even as the ceremony ends.

            Ken gives his benediction, and everyone passes the peace. There are no awkward handshakes and mumbled peaceofChristbewithyous here; only hugs and conversation. People linger a little, chatting for twenty or thirty minutes until it’s time trickle out, ascending the steps out of the basement back into the world.    

The Events of October Reading Response

This book was fascinating to me both as a reader and as someone looking to perfect their craft.  I found myself unable to put The Events of October down and I read it in two marathon sessions even though I was a little sick to my stomach. It's pretty easy to alienate the reader when writing about something as awful as a murder-suicide, but Gail managed to tell the story in a manner that demanded my attention. Perhaps this is because the voice of the book is so passionate that it practically forces the reader to pay attention.

One reason I found this book so compelling is it's Middlemarch-like qualities. Gail gives George Eliot/Marian Evans a shout-out early-on, and her influence is pretty easy to see. Kalamazoo College is a lot like the town Middlemarch, in a way: it's a small, cloistered community where everyone knows everyone. And, like Middlemarch, The Events of October is chiefly concerned with the idea of community as a group that changes through constant interaction.

Furthermore, both books are careful to depict the members of their respective communities with great sympathy. Just as Eliot dives into the motives of every character in order to present them in a sympathetic light, Gail eschews judgment in favor of understanding, preferring to explain each subject's motivations. For instance, it would have been very easy to demonize Neenef's friends for their insistence upon a memorial for Neenef. However, the narration makes it clear that this is simply a natural by-product of their grief and trauma. Similarly, it would be easy to ridicule those who preferred to think of the murder-suicide as an isolated incident rather than a femicide indicative of a greater trend of male violence. Instead, Gail tells the reader that compartmentalizing such a traumatic event makes coping easier. Thus, we do not judge these people, even their viewpoint is somewhat pernicious.

This level of sympathy and empathy is quite impressive, and it's indicative of an immense amount of time spent getting to know subjects. We get the sense that the author really knows these people; thus, all of her assertions about motives seem completely valid because they stem from such a deep understanding of the subject. This is a journalistic standard to live up to.

I also thought of Nicholas Lemann's piece in Telling True Stories regarding the "idea track" of a piece of nonfiction. This book's idea track is apparent throughout, and there are lots of excellent "marriage moments." It really serves as a model for lining ideas up with experience.

Long-overdue reading response to Telling True Stories That Was Supposed to be Done 7th Week

Better late than never? Right?

As usual, Telling True Stories proved to be an illuminating read. There were a lot of little "a-ha" moments interspersed throughout the text that were unique to their authors. But, I noticed one common theme popping up: the use of cinematic metaphors to describe good nonfiction writing. Whether explicit (like Ephron's "What Journalists Can Learn from Screenwriters") or using a phrase like "he also pulls the camera back, away from the tight shots of the road grader," they seem to permeate the discourse on narrative journalism.

Of course, this makes sense in the context of 20th- and 21st-century literature, as Adam Hochschild shows in his contrast between Middlemarch and The Great Gastby. Literature has become rooted in concrete images rather than reflection. This forces me to ask myself some unpleasant questions: do I focus too much on reflection? Is this what's bogging down my profile?

I tend to mix reflection and scene pretty evenly, which is great for personal essays but maybe not the best idea for writing journalism. Point taken: I need to focus more on scene and allow my journalistic endeavors to become more cinematic while maintaining some of my trademark reflection. 

I was amazed at the way Hochschild rendered his scene in the printer's shop so artfully and vividly despite the seemingly-small amount of information available. Also, Louise Kiernan's paragraph about broken glass that required two professors and an expert speaks to the depth of research that is necessary for effective reporting. Clearly, I need to step up my research game as well.

Once again, sorry this is so late.

Profile edit

1,148 words

The Church in the Basement

            South beyond Stadium Drive, past rows and rows of suburban homes with immaculate lawns, Oakland Drive makes a T with Winchell Avenue. About a quarter of a mile down Winchell, there is a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Inside the door, there is a grandfatherly greeter named Richard handing out bulletins and hugs. To the right of the foyer, there is an imposing sanctuary with rows of hard wooden pews and another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. The sanctuary is completely empty, and this often confuses first-time visitors, until they are directed downstairs by Richard.

Travelling down the two flights of stairs reveals a basement lit by fluorescent lights where thirty or so gray-haired men and women are milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard plays guitar, fingerpicking his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. There are plenty of battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, flanked on both sides by large white banners painted in a wide array of colors with people, rainbows and all manners of LGBTQ pride symbols. At the center of this explosion of color is a table covered with a pristine white cloth holding two candles with a tasteful bronze cross in the center. Off to the side, there is a miniature statue of a rainbow-colored phoenix rising from the flames.

There’s a man behind the altar, about fifty, bald, with glasses. He’s clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with custom gay pride symbols.
            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are between fifty and seventy, and they are a delightful cast of characters. There’s Marvel, a retired woman after left behind her Bible Baptist upbringing because she “hated getting in trouble for thinking” and came to Phoenix twenty-five years ago.

And there’s Mark, a gay man in his forties and a former Catholic who left the church in disgust one Sunday after the priest gave a gay-bashing sermon from the book of Leviticus. The experience soured him on faith, and he considers himself an agnostic now, but he’s been coming to Phoenix for twenty years, singing hymns and enjoying the community.

            Then there’s Myrna, an older woman in her seventies with laugh lines that testify to her readiness to smile. She came here years ago to learn more about gay people, and, in the process, learned that she was a lesbian when she fell in love with another member.

 At six o’clock every Sunday night, they meet in this basement, a space they rent from the Kalamazoo Church of Disciples, a faith community brave enough and liberal enough to accept Phoenix’s community with open arms. No one seems to mind meeting in the basement; after all, a basement beats a closet every time.

Besides, basements are nothing new to Phoenix’s parishioners. In fact, they started out in a basement. On Ash Wednesday of 1988, eighteen people met in Pastor Cyril Stevenson’s basement for Phoenix’s inaugural service. Cyril had been dismissed from the United Church of Christ for being gay, and he decided to start Phoenix with co-Pastor Melanie Morrison in order to provide a safe place for LGBTQ men and women to worship. For a long time, theirs was the only church that accepted people of different sexualities. 

After that initial meeting, the church bounced from basement to rented room to basement, staying on the margins of the faith community until acceptance began to prevail in the mid-nineties, and Phoenix was accepted back into the United Church of Christ.

Despite finding a degree of acceptance, they continued to stay in rented spaces for financial reasons. Small churches always live on the edge when it comes to making rent and paying salaries, and Phoenix is no exception. Even at their height of membership, the community never numbered more than sixty, so it was always a struggle to make rent. Inevitably, disputes over money began to arise, and a gulf that was too wide to be bridged grew between two groups within the church. In 2007, a third of the congregation left to from another church.

But it’s a difficult to kill a phoenix, and the church clung to life, continuing to provide community to those who had been ostracized for the sexual orientation. One person who sought out that community was current Pastor, Ken Arthur. Ken left the church when he went to college because he was unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the idea of hellfire and damnation. After coming out at age thirty, he came to Phoenix in 1996 seeking a support system to aid him in his self-discovery. Over the course of four or five years, Ken’s skepticism gradually melted away, and he came to affirm the divinity of Jesus Christ.

To further explore his newfound spirituality, Ken decided to enroll in the Chicago Theological Seminary in 2007. While he was there, he received a Master’s in Religious Studies rather than a Divinity degree, because he “definitely didn’t want to be a pastor.”

Within a year, Ken became Phoenix’s pastor.  Because of the split, Phoenix needed an interim pastor, and Ken was asked to step because of his time at the Seminary. His congregation liked him so much that they made him the full-time pastor in 2010.

Ken promotes a brand of theology that rejects easy answers and “simple-minded, warm-and-fuzzy peace.” He welcomes questions and uncertainties. When asked about the specifics of the afterlife, he shrugs and says, “Who knows?” “When I talk about the Kingdom, I’m talking about realizing it here: working for peace and hope and justice here on Earth.” And they do indeed do work. A construction paper poster boasts 254 hours of community service, 11 trees planted, and 4 letters written as a part of the church’s Arbor Day campaign for environmental stewardship.  

And Ken doesn’t do talk about the Kingdom in the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly, as he preaches, love, justice, and reconciliation in the basement of a church.

I Think I Might Have Really Shit the Bed on This One: Week Six Process Writing

This assignment was rough. I haven't written anything that could be considered "journalism" since my days as the editor of my middle school newspaper, and it's safe to say that I'm a little rusty. Lots of questions question kept popping up  throughout the process of writing, such as:

1. "How do I do journalism?"
I've never done a profile before. It shows. Obviously, I'm going to totally blow the first few times. It's part of the learning process. That knowledge doesn't make it any less distressing to end up with a profile I'm not entirely satisfied with--especially since it concerns subjects that matter a great deal to me.

2. "What the hell was I thinking when I interviewed my subject?"
As I was writing, I found myself wishing for information that I didn't have. I spent a solid block of time interviewing my subject, but I still found myself wishing I had asked more questions or pressed more in certain areas. Again, I'm guessing that knowing what questions to ask is another skill learned through trial-and-error. I have to learn how to anticipate the information I'll need while interviewing. If I'd had time to do a follow-up interview, I think this piece would have been a lot better. Because I had a false start on another subject, I was kind of pressed for time and I did the best I could.

3.  "How do I do words good?"
This came after asking the above questions too many times.

4. "asdfjaskdjfasdfjkasdjfklasjdfklmcsdfjklsdjfkl?"
This question came up after trying to do words good for several hours.

5. (uncontrollable sobbing)

In terms of the actual content, I think there are two main flaws. The most critical is that the focus of the piece seems hazy. I couldn't decide whether to focus on the church or the pastor, and I kind of did both. I'm not sure if it works at all because of this. Also, I'm afraid the piece lacks concrete detail and that it reads like a list of things that happened rather than an actual story.

Of course, I'm very self-critical. Only time  will tell if it was a caffeine-fueled misadventure or a decent start. At any rate, I'm glad that I'm going to have a shot at revising it and I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's feedback in workshop on Wednesday.  

The Pastor in the Basement

1,095 Words
Target publication: Some religious magazine


           Drive South down Oakland Drive past rows and rows of suburban homes with immaculate lawns, and then take a right down Winchell Avenue. Keep going for about a quarter of a mile until you see a large brown-brick church with a wooden cross in the yard facing all who drive by. Open the door and accept a bulletin and a hug from the grandfatherly greeter. Look to the right at the empty, imposing sanctuary, with another cross standing behind a raised pulpit. Walk towards the sanctuary, only to be directed to the stairs on the left by the smiling greeter. Step into the basement lit by fluorescent lights, take a drink from the white water fountain and see the thirty or so gray-haired men and women milling around and finding seats as a younger man with an immaculately-trimmed beard fingerpicks his way through one of today’s hymns one last time before the service. Take a seat in one of the battered, mint-colored chairs arranged two-deep in a half-circle, and look at the man standing behind the communion table.

            He’s about fifty, bald, with glasses, clad in a dark-blue shirt with a blue-striped tie and grey pants, and he would look like a well-dressed accountant were it not for the fact that he is standing behind an altar wearing a rainbow-colored stole emblazoned prominently with various gay-pride symbols.

            That man is Ken Arthur, pastor of Phoenix Community Church, a small United Church of Christ congregation that rents out the basement of the larger Disciples of Christ church upstairs. He is gay, and so are about eighty percent of his parishioners. Most members of his flock are in their fifties or sixties, and they wear their identities proudly: their church’s symbol is a rainbow-colored phoenix rising up from the flames against the backdrop of the LGBTQ symbol. The church switches between the traditional and the nontraditional at breakneck speed. On any given Sunday, an Indigo Girls song might follow a traditional hymn or a reading of one of Whitman’s poems might follow the recitation of The Disciples’ Prayer. The one constant is Pastor Ken, the mastermind, the glue that holds the whole post-postmodern religious collage together.

            Ken never planned on becoming a pastor, even though he grew up attending church in his hometown of Anderson, Indiana. The church was quite rigid and conservative, though Ken remembers thinking it was liberal “because they let us go to the movies and play cards.” He distills the general mindset of the church thusly: “God is nice if you believe, and if you don’t, you go to hell.” This image of God as an angry father troubled Ken, and, unable to reconcile the idea of a loving God with the existence of hell, he dropped out of church and left his faith behind when he came to Kalamazoo College in 1984.

            After getting his bachelor’s degree in math from Kalamazoo and a master’s in Computer Science, Ken began working as a freelance computer programmer.  During his twenties, Ken says he was an agnostic, though he frequently picked up spiritual texts such as The Dao of Pooh, a book that is still jammed in his office bookshelf with scores of other texts about religion and philosophy.

            But that all changed in 1996 when Ken turned thirty. As Ken puts it, “I was thirty when I started dealing with being gay.” Ironically, Ken wound up coming back to church as part of the coming-out process. He heard that Phoenix Community was a church with a gay pastor, and he visited hoping to “meet more gay people in a safe environment.” Attending Phoenix, along doing affirmation exercises that made him “feel like Stuart Smalley,” helped Ken come to terms with his identity as a gay man. Ken kept coming on Sundays, and within two years became a full-fledged member of the church.            

            But despite his regular Church attendance, Ken remained a skeptic for several more years. Eventually, though, he wavered from his agnosticism and fell back into faith. Ken says that rediscovering faith was a slow, gradual process. His one “A-ha!” moment came when the pastor at Phoenix led the congregation in a decidedly non-Christian spiritual practice: shamanic journeying. Essentially, shamanic journeying is a distillation of shamanic traditions from man varied cultures. By listening to a repetitive tribal drumbeat, would-be journeyers are able to enter a trance-like altered state that allows them to tap into the collective unconscious. Ken relates shamanic journeying to Jungian psychology, saying that it is a way of “dreaming symbolic meanings from a divine power.” The experience opened him up to the more intuitive, visceral aspects of faith. Eventually, Ken began to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

            Shortly after rediscovering his spirituality, Ken decided to pull up stakes and attend the Chicago Theological Seminary. While studying in the windy city, Ken decided that he “definitely didn’t want to be a minister” and opted to get a M.A. in Religious studies rather than the ministerial Master’s of Divinity.

            Shortly thereafter, Ken would, in fact, become a minister. When he returned, he found Phoenix in turmoil. Money, always a problem for small churches like Phoenix, had caused a great deal of discord among the congregation, and “enough people hurt enough other people” that one-third of the church left along with the pastor. Because of his background in the seminary, Ken was asked to fill in as an interim minister. However, as the interim period dragged on, he seemed more and more like the best candidate, and became Phoenix Community’s official pastor in 2010.

             As pastor, Ken promotes a brand of theology that rejects easy answers and “simple-minded, warm-and-fuzzy peace.” He welcomes questions and uncertainties. When asked about the specifics of the afterlife, he shrugs and says, “Who knows?” “When I talk about the Kingdom, I’m talking about realizing it here: working for peace and hope and justice here on Earth.”

            And Ken doesn’t do talk about the Kingdom in the prototypical preacher’s voice. His is a wispy tenor, not a booming baritone, and he speaks without amplification. His is a voice that is easily drowned out by anyone with a microphone, or even just a determined, loud man holding a sign on a street corner. He is not loud enough to compete with the Pat Robertson of the world. Yet when he preaches the Gospel, he still grabs you. The passion in his voice is palpable, like a cup running over quietly, as he preaches, love, justice, and reconciliation in the basement of a church.

Reading Response for Firth Week (for real, this time)

I apologize for the lateness of this response. I was like "No class today? I'll immediately forget about all assignments!"

Telling True Stories turned out to be a fountain of valuable advice. In fact, there was so much information that I felt somewhat like a cracker on the business end of a sandblaster. Every author has so many little "tricks" and piercingly insightful points that it's difficult to keep track of them all. Often, the various authors are in conflict with one another, ie:

"Use a tape recorder!"
"Don't use a tape recorder!"

"Become broskis with the subject!"
"Remain as aloof and mysterious as you possibly can!"

This problem is compounded by the fact that all the authors make their points in a compelling way. Over the course of the reading, I found myself nodding with one author, then swinging to another point of view a few pages later. Who do I believe?

Ordinarily, this would be maddening. However, instead of reacting by screaming "NOOOOOOOOO!" at my book until I cry (like I normally do), I was instead overcome with a strange sense of peace. If I've learned anything about journalism from this book, it's that there are a multitude of ways to report and interview correctly. Two different reporters with different styles can interview the same person and write totally different pieces that are equally successful. No particular style is "right" or "wrong;" it's largely up to the individual.

Of course this isn't to suggest that you can just do whatever and be fine, because you're just "doing you," as the kids say. Even though each person's method of approaching their craft is different, they still have to work to perfect that craft, and be open to other methods of doing things. 

Questions of discussion: Am I right in the assertion I made above? If so, what is your style as an interviewer/reporter?