Why should you read a website burdened by the unwieldy title of “Knight Chair in Media and Religion”? Because the woman in the chair is Diane Winston. Now, The Revealer is indebted to Diane, who in a previous incarnation as a program officer at the Pew Charitable Trust scratched EMET (Hebrew for TRUTH) onto the clay forehead of The Revealer and created a golem that has lumbered through the mean streets of religion and media ever since. But that’s not why we sing her praises — The Revealer, after all, is an unholy monster naturally inclined to bite any hand that offers a morsel. No, we direct you to the website of the Knight Chair in Religion and Media (let’s shorten that to Knight Chair, a more meditative version of the world’s most famous Trans Am) because Diane Winston, tenured and owing nothing to print editors, big-hearted but sharp-toothed, is going to do what The Revealer was made to do, only better.
For example: Diane’s take on the much-discussed LA Times piece by Stephanie Simon on the so-called New Monastics. The Revealer, sipping a g-&-t, wrote that the story was “exceptionally well-observed, though it suffers a bit from lack of context.” A bit, indeed, old chap. Diane Winston, on the other hand, wrote: “Stephanie Simon’s piece on the new monastics first made me want to smack her subjects. Then I decided it was Simon who needed an intervention.”
Yes!
Well, now, we actually like quite a bit of Simon’s work, and — see? The deference? The — ugh — generosity? That’s why we need Diane Winston. When The Revealer began in 2003, Diane was a polite foundation officer, and the revealers — Jeff Sharlet, Kathryn Joyce, Nicole Greenfield, and many others — were malcontents, throwing rocks at establishment media. Now, we settle for the occasional shiv. Some of us are, for better and worse, establishment media. But Diane — who’s been there, done that, and escaped — doesn’t owe anybody anything.
Knight Chair is centered around a feature called “The Scoop,” a commentary on religion in the news, but it also has departments for religion and sex, politics, Hollywood, and science, with frequent updates by Diane’s students at the USC Annenberg School. Science is boring, of course, which is why we’re glad Knight Chair is well-designed, filled with exciting pictures (female popes, men with swords, Aslan, Jon Stewart) to look at whenever embryos or stem cells come up. Religion and media isn’t about ethics! It’s about smackdowns.
Well, not really. It’s not about ethics or smackdowns — it’s about smart, informed analysis from a woman who’s worked in some of the nation’s most prestigious newsrooms, taken a Ph.D. in American religious history from Princeton, published with Harvard University Press, and left it all behind to train up an even better generation of religion writers. Read Knight Chair.