Transcending the News: Religious Ambivalence Among the Famous Journalist-Literary Figures and Literature as the Uncertain Path to Immortality

Abstract

Journalists in the work-a-day world have few opportunities to muse publicly about their religious beliefs or struggles. As a result, some of the most telling tales of journalists' feelings about religion and spirituality come from the accounts of the impressive number of British and American literary figures who began their careers as journalists but who came to express themselves most intimately in fiction. As part of a study of 189 of these well-known figures, this article focuses on how they expressed their religious and spiritual views in their journalism and their literature and how this reflected cultural attitudes that have become prominent within the journalism profession. Although many of these great journalist-literary figures are famous for their heterodox views and their antipathy for institutional religion, many continued to search for spiritual meaning in the private realm of faith and by exploring alternative and unconventional forms of spiritual practice.

Notes

¹James Darsey, in his discussion of the “prophetic” voice on the rhetorical tradition, mentions such journalist-literary figures as Paine, Franklin, Coleridge, Whitman, Dickens, Shaw, Sinclair, Lewis, Carlyle, Bryant, Whittier, Du Bois, and MacLeish.