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 International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) is launching a series of dialogues on how the COVID-19 is impacting faith communities in different parts of the world. We bring together journalists from different regions to share their stories and also the challenges they face in reporting them.

In this interview in our Journalism Spotlight series, religion reporter Priyadarshini Sen of India discusses the importance of religion journalism and the challenges of covering faith and religion in her part of the world.

Journalists who cover religion will find a wealth of story ideas and powerful quotes in a new project launched by the Elijah Interfaith Institute in Jerusalem called Coronaspection. Some 40 religious leaders—including Pope Francis, the Archbishop of Canterbury, leading imams, chief rabbis, swamis, cardinals and teachers—offer their perspectives on the pandemic.

The International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) and the Fondazione per le Scienze Religiose Giovanni XXIII (FSCIRE) announced the winner of first edition of the Piazza Grande Religion Journalism Award. The international jury also awarded three special mentions.

The coronavirus outbreak didn’t stop the 1st edition of the Piazza Grande Religion Journalism Award. The international Jury is in the process of selecting the winner, who will be announced on Monday, June 22nd. We received many powerful entries and we very much look forward to reading the story selected by the jurors. If you are also eager to know the winner, check out the IARJ and FSCIRE websites on 22nd June!

A new wave of research on religious leadership is finding that significant numbers of clergy show evidence of struggling with clinical signs of narcissism. The troubling discoveries cross liberal and conservative boundaries, and can be found among evangelical, mainline Protestant and Catholic religious leaders, as well as among rabbis and imams. This problem—and promising solutions through developing healthy forms of humility—are explored in this new Global Plus column by Dr. Steven J. Sandage, research director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Psychology, and David Briggs, who writes for the Association of Religion Data Archives.

The COVID-19 pandemic is posing new challenges to journalists covering faith and religion. In early April, we invited our IARJ members covering this unprecedented story to share their holiday-related religion stories. We continue to receive news reports related to the impact of COVID-19 in different regions of the world—and we are passing along these fascinating reports by our members.

Two of the IARJ’s top journalists report on a wide range of research that suggests active involvement in religion promotes health and well being. They collaborated on this Global Plus column, which was sponsored by the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA), a leading association of university scholars who study religion.

ALERT for journalists across Europe and around the Mediterranean basin: only one week left for submitting your works to the first Piazza Grande Religion Journalism Award.