To: News21 Guest Speakers

From: Don Lattin, Bob Calo and the UC Berkeley Fellows

Subject: Circle of Spiritual Commentators

We would like to thank all of you for taking the time to speak to our journalism class this semester at the University of California, Berkeley. As we look forward to the summer, our project on
“God, Sex and Family” now shifts from the learning phase to the reporting and production phases of our experiment.

You may recall that one of the innovations of this project is a re-examination of the roles of journalists and their sources of information. We see all of you as experts in your religious traditions and faith experiences. That being the case, we would like to invite you to participate and share your knowledge by telling your own story through bio videos or joining in some of our blog debates and possibly being part of a forum.

In that spirit, we invite you to join the News21 “Circle of Spiritual Commentators.” This invitation goes out to a diverse guest list – students at a evangelical Christian high school, a woman rabbi, a Muslim community leader, a Catholic priest, a Southern Baptist seminarian, a self-described “queer” theologian, a professor of sexual ethics and a young man who grew up in a polygamist Mormon sect. You all helped us understand the varied expressions of religion and private life and we hope you can guide us in our continuing exploration.

Would you like to join a community blog we are setting up on our web site at http://newsinitiative.org/ucb? You can write as much or as little as you want as you see the way we are approaching our stories. We intend to be as transparent as we can about how we decide what the stories are and to include the ongoing dialogue between the community and ourselves.

Please respond to this invitation by initially replying to don@donlattin.com. If you want to participate, we will set you up so you can give us—and the world – your unedited, unfiltered thoughts on our project as it unfolds. Please send us via email a photo and a brief description of your work, studies or ministry and let us know if we can put your email address on the site. We may also want to make an appointment at your convenience to visit you and shoot a short video interview that would also appear on the website.

Thanks for being an important part of the News21 team.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 10:12 am and is filed under Upcoming Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.