In our continuing series of IARJ board-member profiles, Indeewari Amuwatte talks about the dramatic challenges of covering religion in an accurate and balanced way in Sri Lanka. In 2019, those challenges included covering the tragic Easter bombings.

The International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) is launching a second global series of dialogues with journalists on the challenges of Religion and Politics. The new chair of our IARJ board Uday Basu moderated this first panel, which features IARJ members from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Watch the seventh in our global series of dialogues. Do you have suggestions for our planning team about future dialogues? Click on the “Contact” link in the upper-right corner of our front page and send us a note.

Members of the IARJ in Asia held their dialogue on August 18, 2020. Please help us spread this news about this video, which was streamed real-time by dozens of men and women around the world.

“The Nexus between Freedom of Religion or Belief, and Freedom of Expression in Southeast Asia” seminar and workshop took place in Nusa Dua, a facility on Indonesia’s island of Bali in spring 2019. The IARJ’s Director Endy Bayuni shares an overview, plus a link to further coverage in The Jakarta Post.

In Part 1 of a Global:Plus report on anti-Semitism, Rachel Kohn looks at a dangerous rise in this centuries-old hatred across Australia and New Zealand. She also looks at signs of hope and recommends further reading for journalists covering this trend.

In our second profile of our IARJ Regional Representatives, Rachel Kohn (our representative for Australasia) reports on some of the milestones in her own career of covering religion around the world—starting with the challenge of covering the Centennial of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago in 1993. We also share links to follow Rachel’s work, especially her long-running series of broadcasts, The Spirit of Things.

A Global Plus report on the use of cows as religious symbols by Hindu extremists to pursue their nationalist cause, sometimes with violence as a result. The report was written by Uday Basu, coordinating editor of The Statesman, a national daily newspaper published simultaneously in Kolkata, New Delhi, Siliguri and Bhubaneswar.

Douglas Todd reports on the importance of the 2017 conference for the International Association of Religion Journalists in Indonesia: “Our Indonesian conference beautifully accomplished one of the key goals of our organization, which is to work with global peers to raise awareness of the crucial importance of balanced, accurate and fair writing about matters of faith.”

Two of IARJ’s most active members, Executive Director Endy Bayuni from Indonesia and Waqar Gillani from Pakistan, met with journalists from the tiny Asian nation of the Maldives in a peer-to-peer seminar sponsored by the German nonprofit Media in Cooperation and Transition to help improve best practices in covering religion in the news.