12/07/2025 08:30
- 10:45
HALL: Main Ceremonial Hall
Proponent:
Di Benedetto E.
Chair:
Di Benedetto E.
Speaker:
Chitwood K.,
Di Benedetto E.,
Grande P.,
Królicka B.,
Topkev A.
This panel features a combination of journalists and scholars exploring the ways the news media both contributes to, and reports on, religion and socio-cultural transformation in Europe. Journalists featured on the panel reflect on what it means to report on religious landscapes and communities with balance, accuracy, and insight. Keenly aware how "journalistic representations of religion can assume a reality distinct from religions' actual, in-the-world existence," (Winston 2012) the featured journalists will offer comments on how coverage of religion can avoid contributing to or exacerbating hate-speech, conflicts, and tensions among religious communities and/or towards religious communities. Elisa Di Benedetto, a freelance reporter and Managing Director of the International Association of Religion Journalists (IARJ), will explore the challenges journalists face when covering religion, faith and spirituality. Ken Chitwood, a religion reporter and scholar in Germany, compares and contrasts the norms, aesthetics, and ethics of academic and journalistic coverage of religion, offering suggestions for additional collaboration and cross-pollination between the two. The winner of the IARJ 2025 Piazza Grande Religion Journalism Award will discuss their awarded work and what might be learned from their award-winning coverage.
At the same time, every journalist appreciates that a key aspect of reporting on intertwined religion and socio-cultural issues such as individualization and secularization, gender identification and sexual orientation, digitalization and the ecological crisis, necessitates access to resources from the work of scholars doing in-depth research on such themes. Thus, this panel invites scholars to contribute their own comments on, experience with, and critique of media coverage of religion in Europe, with the aim of contributing to further dialogue between scholars and journalists in order to advance conversations around religion among various publics.