My mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, loved journalism and her English parents’ Anglicanism so much that, without even trying, she bequeathed to me both my vocations. My friend and colleague Canon for Common Life Bob Williams, one of our era’s premier ecclesial journalists, loves the same things. Bob announced his retirement this week after 40 years serving four Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles bishops diocesan and, during a stint as a communications executive for The Episcopal Church, two presiding bishops. The sun still never sets on the worldwide Anglican Communion. And so Bob has reported from all over the world on the workings of the spirit of the risen Christ.
Bob and I offer comparable Mother’s Day thanksgivings for strong, inspiring women. His grandmother, Betty, columnist and reporter for the “Vista Press” in north San Diego County in the sixties and seventies, encouraged journalistic vocations in Bob, who got his masters at USC, and his sister, Wendy. Jean, who got no further than a graduating senior at Detroit’s Redford Union High School, probably knew Bob before I did. Another of his mentors, legendary diocesan editor Ruth Nicastro, first met her in the eighties, when she was Los Angeles Times associate editor. Bob once sequestered Jean in the retreat center of St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park to serve as a judge in a church-wide journalism contest.
Jean and Bob also shared a friendship with the late Malcolm Boyd, legendary priest and the author of “Are You Running With Me, Jesus?” (1965), one of the most popular devotional books of the modern era. This time, Jean may have gotten there first. She knew Malcolm in the early sixties, when he was a chaplain at Wayne State University and she the only woman with a desk in the newsroom of the Detroit Free Press.
It is up to others to say how well I served my vocational gods. Journalists are trained to report the news, church people to hasten the coming of the kingdom of God’s righteousness, justice, and love. Bob and Jean, at least, did both. His beautifully crafted news articles, features, and obituaries brought the work of the church to life for generations of readers, especially as the church has strained against its own injustices. Godparent of LA multi-religious ministry, Bob has tended networks of relationship and collaboration that will be vital if people of faith are to unite and rise to the vital challenge of claiming their place in the public square as our secularizing culture gets lonelier and meaner.
A lifelong advocate for civil rights and gender equity, my mom also did her part. In 1958, she published a column in the newspaper of Detroit’s editorial workers union under the headline “What About Giving Our Girls a Little Freedom of the Press?” She wrote, “Almost every competent newspaperwoman enjoys her work and is received kindly by the men with whom she works. But individual worth is forgotten when the beers are lifted and men discuss ‘women.’ Wives. Girlfriends. Newspaperwomen. Lump them all together and pour them a cup of tea….The right of a woman to be anywhere this side of the cradle is often disputed. Even after she proves herself.”
Jean proved herself by her relentless trailblazing and, it must be said, a knack for leveraging the delicate egos of male supervisors. For a time, she and Charlotte Curtis of The New York Times were the country’s top-ranking female print journalists. When Jean died in 2015, the media’s shifting financial model was already laying waste to local journalism, even in big markets like Los Angeles. Bob, his brilliant reporter and editor colleagues Janet Reinecke Kawamoto and Pat McCaughan, and their publisher bishops decided years ago to stop printing and mailing The Episcopal News, though it retains a robust online presence.
We will see what the future holds. Most people get their news from social media. But social media still gets most of their news from traditional long-form reporting. I read the other day that the New York Times employs seven percent of the nation’s total editorial workers. Eventually, we will either run out of trustworthy information, or the market and the Holy Spirit will save the day.
We can all be part of the solution and reckon ourselves as ecclesial journalists. The church brims with beautiful narratives, sights, and sounds. As a former journalist, I’ve enjoyed using Facebook to tell the stories of our missions, parishes, and other institutions, employing all of Jean and Bob’s techniques — snappy ledes, spelling names right, and good art showing smiling faces. Sometimes I write these late on Sunday, through blurry eyes. Now and then, I get gentle texts from Bob or Janet right after I publish: “Nice post on your visit. But I believe you meant to write that you visited St. Paul’s, not St. Willoughby’s.” It has been a joy to hang out in the newsroom with them.
(Photos: Bob with former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry; Jean and John in Detroit with Geoffrey Francis Fisher, archbishop of Canterbury from 1946-61)