{"id":4,"date":"2010-06-02T16:23:48","date_gmt":"2010-06-02T16:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/what-im-doing-here.html"},"modified":"2010-06-02T16:23:48","modified_gmt":"2010-06-02T16:23:48","slug":"what-im-doing-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/what-im-doing-here.html","title":{"rendered":"What I’m doing here"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m delighted to be joining Beliefnet’s News and Politics stable. I remember when the site was just a gleam in Steve Waldman’s eye, and a couple of years ago had the pleasure of filling his blogging shoes when he went on vacation. In the online religion world, there’s no place like this one.<\/p>\n

Over the years I’ve wandered back and forth between academic and journalistic life–from studying and teaching medieval history to freelance writing and editing to daily newspapering to directing a center for the study of religion in public life. Blogging combines both lines of work. It’s opinion writing with footnotes.<\/p>\n

A few years of putting together editorials and columns for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/i> taught me that a good piece of opinion aims to instruct as well as persuade, to entertain as well as analyze. Instead of preaching to the choir, I’d rather have a go at the skeptical who have somehow found their way into the pews. Maybe they won’t be convinced, but at least I can hope to send them home with something to think about. If you want to see how I’ve been doing, you can check it out here<\/a>. See you around.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m delighted to be joining Beliefnet’s News and Politics stable. I remember when the site was just a gleam in Steve Waldman’s eye, and a couple of years ago had the pleasure of filling his blogging shoes when he went on vacation. In the online religion world, there’s no place like this one. Over the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat I'm doing here - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/06\/what-im-doing-here.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What I'm doing here - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m delighted to be joining Beliefnet’s News and Politics stable. I remember when the site was just a gleam in Steve Waldman’s eye, and a couple of years ago had the pleasure of filling his blogging shoes when he went on vacation. In the online religion world, there’s no place like this one. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}