{ "id": "2000-januaryfebruary-religion-with-car", "slug": "2000-januaryfebruary-religion-with-car", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-januaryfebruary-religion-with-car.html", "year": 2000, "month": "January/February", "monthNum": 1, "headline": "Religion with CAR", "kicker": "ON THE BEAT", "author_name": "David Crumm", "author_title": "journalist", "affiliation": "Detroit Free Press", "summary": "A journalist describes how computers and the internet have become essential tools for researching and reporting on the increasingly diverse religious landscape in America and globally, utilizing websites, email lists, and CD-ROMs to track religious movements and developments.", "keywords": [ "religion", "internet", "research" ], "topics": [ "Journalism & Newsroom", "Technology", "Investigative Methods" ], "technologies": [ "Internet", "World Wide Web", "CD-ROM", "Encarta" ], "full_text": "Searching for God at the turn of the millennium requires more than prayer and meditation. It takes a computer.\n\nThe subject is vast and is growing more diverse by the decade. In the United States, 9 out of 10 Americans tell pollsters that they pray and are part of some religious group. While the vast majority of Americans claim to be Christian, most Christians feel increasingly free to switch back and forth among dozens of different denominations - or, if they're feeling restless, to break away entirely and form their own independent sects.\n\nThe influences of the world's other major faiths are surfacing more frequently in contemporary music, television, the Internet, movies and magazines.\n\nOutside the United States, religion also remains a major force for good or ill. It can be a powerful catalyst in ethnic strife, a fuel for political aspirations and, in many cases, a helpful inspiration toward resolving conflicts and building communities.\n\nTo keep up with this amazingly complex landscape, I use my computer in four basic ways.\n\nInternet\n\nAs a journalist, I don't idly surf the Internet, because there are thousands of religious Web sites and most of them are not factually reliable.\n\nOver the past five years, I've developed my own list of reliable religious Web sites, most of them sponsored by well-established groups. The list changes constantly as Web sites appear, evolve and disappear. A good place to start sorting out your own list of useful sites is the Yahoo index to religion, which you'll find linked off Yahoo's main page (as a sub-category of \"Society & Culture\").\n\nA few of the sites I use most frequently are the Vatican's information-rich Web site at www.vatican.va, a large evangelical site at www.gospelcom.net that links to nearly 150 religious groups and a helpful site at www.wfn.org where many Protestant denominations post news releases. A superb place to background yourself on religious history and traditions is the recently upgraded www.britannica.com, sponsored by the encyclopedia.\n\nBy carefully sifting sites, the Internet has played a major role in my reporting on everything from the annual Muslim fast of Ramadan to the plight of the Chinese meditation movement Falun Gong.\n\nI also subscribe to e-mail lists from many of the major religious groups I cover. If you look around the major religious sites on the Web, you'll find places where you can sign up to receive almost daily e-mails from places as diverse as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the National Council of the Churches of Christ, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, informal neo-pagan networks and even the supporters of imprisoned Falun Gong activists. Many of these e-mails are quickly dispatched to my \"trash\" folder each morning - but a quick scan of the dozens of \"subject lines\" I find in my inbox often sparks a future story idea.\n\nCD-ROMs\n\nI use a variety of religion-related CD-ROMs I've collected over the past five years. My CD-ROM library includes a tour of the Vatican, a guide to holy places in the Middle East, a scholarly Bible dictionary, a history of the Holocaust, a text of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a collection of Jewish reference books. These titles tend to be released by publishers and then quickly go out of print, so watch for the release of helpful CDs and snap them up as soon as they go on sale.\n\nOne excellent CD-ROM to consider is \"On Common Ground: World Religions in America\" by Columbia University Press, an in-depth look at many faiths by Harvard University's Pluralism Project. And, because writing about religion often involves references to history and traditional culture, it's very useful to keep a simple copy of an Encarta encyclopedia handy.\n\nThe most basic software for religion writers is a searchable Bible to quickly find key references that may crop up in stories on deadline. But remember that English translations vary widely and you'll probably want at least a King James Version as well as a more modern English version. I have four sets of Bible software on my PC and use the \"New Oxford Annotated Bible\" most frequently.\n\nDatabases\n\nI use a variety of databases to quickly organize and search the gargantuan amounts of information that flow from the world of religion.\n\nMS Access is excellent for building customized databases. For example, the Access database I've created on members of the College of Cardinals - the group from which the Catholic church selects its popes - lets me track this influential group season after season.\n\nI also use askSam-brand SurfSaver software on the Internet, which allows me to save key Web pages in categorized folders on my PC. Later, I can search the entire text of these voluminous holdings.\n\nI use MS Word to create a crude but amazingly effective database out of reams of electronic data I've received about religion. I save important wire stories, significant e-mail press releases and other similar information by copying/pasting these texts into 10 ongoing Word files I have created. They represent categories, such as, \"Catholic,\" \"Politics and Religion\" and \"Islam.\" As an individual file reaches about 1.5 MB, I archive it onto a Zip disk and create a new file. When I'm reporting and want to pinpoint a particular story or document, I simply open up the appropriate Word file and use the Edit/Find function to search for key words.\n\nE-mail\n\nBecause reporting on religion almost always involves an attempt to connect news with the lives of ordinary people, I use e-mail as a lifeline to keep in touch with people I've encountered over the years.\n\nI also maintain specialized lists of people by category related to my beat. For example, when the Catholic hierarchy is considering a change in church rules that might affect local parishes, I will fire off a quick e-mail to my list of Catholics and ask whether they know of anyone especially concerned about such a change. People who e-mail me with an intelligent comment - readers, academics, clergy and others - are potential future sources. I save their e-mail addresses and may include them in the lists I'm building.\n\nUltimately, covering religion at the turn of the millennium is like covering presidential politics - if there were 1,000 parties fielding candidates. The subject can be overwhelming, unless journalists use all the available RAM at their disposal.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2000-januaryfebruary-religion-web-sites", "score": 0.367 }, { "slug": "2003-february-counting-the-faithful-with-church-roll-data", "score": 0.279 }, { "slug": "2003-february-other-sources-of-religion-data", "score": 0.266 }, { "slug": "1994-november-hooking-into-the-internet", "score": 0.19 }, { "slug": "1999-december-coming-soon", "score": 0.186 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-januaryfebruary-religion-with-car.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2000-januaryfebruary-religion-with-car.json" }