Remembering Roy Larson, Legendary Religion Journalist and Teacher

Bob Smietana | Religion News Service | Published: Feb 28, 2020
Remembering Roy Larson, Legendary Religion Journalist and Teacher

Remembering Roy Larson, Legendary Religion Journalist and Teacher

(RNS) — In the spring of 2001, I sat in Roy Larson’s office, drinking coffee and hoping to make a good impression.

I was new to the religion beat, working at a small but feisty denominational magazine that few people had ever heard of.

Roy, who died this week at the age of 90, was then the director of the Garrett-Medill Center for Religion and the News Media, a joint project between Northwestern University’s journalism school and a seminary down the street.

The center ran a summer program on religion journalism and I wanted in. I hoped it would open the door to a life in religion journalism, writing for a bigger world.

Roy, the former religion editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, held the keys to all that I wanted for the future. Or at least it felt that way at the time.

We drank coffee and talked. He asked about my work, my hopes and my dreams. And he had heard of that feisty little magazine and liked what we did.

A few weeks later, he said yes, and changed my life. I spent that summer with a cohort of about a dozen other reporters, visiting mosques and megachurches, synagogues and temples — we even meditated for a while — and hearing lectures from experts explaining major trends of religion.

Along the way we laughed, ate Krispy Kreme donuts and Thai food, and talked about the way religion shapes the world. I learned that the best reporting happens with your notebook in your back pocket and your eyes and ears open.

We also learned a bit about Roy.

How he’d taken on Chicago’s then-archbishop, Cardinal John Patrick Cody, in the early 1980s, exposing his alleged misuse of church funds to benefit a family member at a time when Cody was one of the most powerful clergymen in the country. (The cardinal died before a law enforcement investigation into his actions was completed.) We heard about Roy’s love for his family and his students, and his friendship with Studs Terkel, the game-changing Chicago radio host, author and historian.

Roy wanted us to dive into this world of religion reporting and see all its delights and challenges and joys. I think he also wanted to see that we could be both hard-nosed reporters and decent people.

Roy – who a fellow religion reporter described as “respected and crafty” — had a way of asking difficult questions without demeaning other people. He had both a skeptical eye and common courtesy, which made him stand out.

“There was a kindness that he had that was a gift,” former Sun-Times photographer John White told the newspaper. “When he was talking to you, you felt the humanity.”

A former pastor turned reporter, Larson did not feel any obligation to spare his fellow believers and former colleagues from a critical eye when reporting.

“One of the things that I very strongly believe as a churchman is the New Testament thing: Judgment begins with the household of God,” Larson told fellow journalist John Conroy in 1987, according to a 2014 profile of Larson written by his former student Manya Brachear Pashman, a former religion writer at the Chicago Tribune.
“If the church’s own house is not in order,” Larson said about his reporting about the Catholic Church, “it really is not in a moral or ethical position to be proclaiming righteousness to everybody else. And what appalled me was that this self-corrective, which is anchored in the biblical vision of the church, was not brought into play. The system did not work.”

A few weeks after the program ended, I had the chance to put all that I’d learned into practice. Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to know about Islam.

I’d just been in a number of mosques and talked to Muslim leaders. I covered a group of Christian college students who went to visit a local mosque to reach out to their distraught Muslim neighbors after the attacks. Thanks to Larson, I was ready to do the job.

A few days after the attack I had my first piece of work — written for Religion News Service — published in the Washington Post. My time with Roy had opened that door too, and eventually led me back to RNS as editor.

Larson, a graduate of Augustana College who later studied at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, served several United Methodist churches around Chicago as pastor before joining the staff of the Sun-Times in 1969 as religion editor, a post he held for 16 years.  At the time, religion reporting was moving from the “church page” to more hard news about religion and religious institutions.

He later became editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter, a monthly that covered race and poverty issues, before starting the center at Northwestern.

In 2014, Roy was honored for his lifetime of achievements on the religion beat by the Religion News Association, receiving the William A. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award.

We visited for a bit at the awards ceremony. He had the same keen wit and smile, although his health had slowed him down a bit. We laughed and talked about that summer so long ago, and he left me feeling that I’d turned out pretty well as a religion writer.

Roy leaves behind a beloved family and Dorothy, his wife of 70 years, whom he had met in the eighth grade, according to the Sun-Times.

He also left a legacy of students carrying on his vision for the religion beat as a sphere where journalists compete like hell and yet cheer each other on, even when a colleague gets the story before we do. We are fierce rivals and dear friends all at the same time. It’s an approach that requires gentility and courage.

Roy Larson taught us well.

(Bob Smietana is editor-in-chief of Religion News Service.)

READ THIS STORY AT RELIGIONNEWS.COM

Article originally published by Religion News Service. Used with permission.

Photo courtesy: ©RNS/Sally Marrow



Remembering Roy Larson, Legendary Religion Journalist and Teacher