My college life centered around a Wednesday ritual: staying up past midnight finalizing the week’s edition of our student newspaper. Sometimes I was editing copy, or designed the page layouts or translated the content into our website. The other days of the week, I assigned stories, wrote copy, or photographed campus events. In this work, my closest mentor was my journalism professor Judi Hetrick.

In one of our journalism classes, Judi introduced me to the framework of peace journalism and prompted me to think deeply about the role of stories in the work of reconciliation. She pointed out that most media outlets reflexively focus on conflict, because conflict gets attention. High-conflict drive readership — ultimately garnering the ad funding that fuels news outlets. But while conflict was profitable, Judi didn’t think it was always ethical. She invited my peers and me to consider other ways of framing stories.

“What if you focus on areas of overlap, or people who are bringing communities together or otherwise helping to negotiate conflict?” Judi asked us. “What if you cover people and initiatives that are the seeds of peace?” 

Judi’s teaching changed the way I saw the news around me. Her point about centering conflict was certainly true for coverage of warring groups and competing political candidates. I saw it in stories about a mosque planned for downtown Manhattan, and debates over environmental conservation restrictions. When I went on to intern at an NPR station, I realized just how much this two-sided, oppositional framing was baked into reporting. My manager would guide me on how to frame stories and who to interview: “Oh, there’s a new study about the dangers of indoor smoking? Call Joe for a quote, he’s the restaurant owner who’s been so outspoken against smoking bans.” 

My career path eventually steered away from journalism, but I still read the news with peace journalism in the back of my mind. This was especially true during the early 2010s as the Supreme Court heard a range of cases about same sex marriage. The news coverage typically featured Christians on one side, and LGBTQ advocates on the other. 

I recognized these mainstream stories had a void: people like me who are both queer and religious. Being both was so unthinkable that even I overlooked my religious identity much of the time. I never once saw an interview with a queer, religious voice speaking in favor of same sex marriage. I genuinely wondered, “How do other people in this intersection make sense of their spiritual lives?”

I eventually set out on a pilgrimage to interview LGBTQ people of faith about their religious lives. Those conversations have been transformative in their own way. Many people modeled a deep integration, and they have helped me to become reconciled within myself. I met people living out reconciliation and peacemaking work within their religious communities and denominations. I also saw the deep grief that people felt when they conceived of their sexuality or gender as incompatible with their religious lives, and could not be at peace with themselves or their communities. 

I continue to live in the imprint of those encounters. I carry their stories with me, and hear the wisdom that was whispered to me years ago. All of this richness is a legacy of Judi’s instruction to look at the spaces of unexpected overlap, and the reconciliation that may be happening there.