The International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) is launching its third series of online global dialogues, bringing together reporters from different regions of the world. The 2023 theme will be religious extremism in their countries.

The International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ) is launching a series of dialogues on religion and politics. We bring together journalists from different regions to share their stories and also the challenges they face in reporting them.

As the IARJ’s co-managing director, based in Italy, Elisa Di Benedetto reports on the Vatican’s leading role in trying to motivate faith-related institutions and communities around the world to focus on the global crisis in caregiving for the world’s elderly.

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.

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.

All journalists regularly covering religion around the world find themselves reporting on Islam and, in 2019, we encounter extreme voices—fueled by a rising tide of nationalism in response to global conflicts, migration and the plight of refugees. IN THIS COLUMN, you’ll find helpful resources you can use today—and a series of fresh ideas about ways you, too, could contribute to the global conversation in a helpful way.

In a series of profiles of the IARJ’s Regional Representatives, Peggy Fletcher Stack (our representative for the United States) describes the importance of this specialty in journalism and shares links to some of her own recent news stories. Reporting on religion “touches all the important topics—values, ethics, communities, rituals, philosophical underpinnings, politics, meaning. It has some of the most compelling narratives as well as the richest ironies and an extraordinary cast of characters.”

The most important holidays in the Jewish calendar are coming in early October: Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur. Joe Grimm of the Michigan State University School of Journalism shares tips for journalists covering this minority community.