Why we JOURNEY
Why we JOURNEY. No. 2. Charting the geography of faith sites in New York City.
Why we JOURNEY. No. 3. Getting to know the peoples of New York City.
Why we JOURNEY. No. 4. Spiritual maps of the city.
Why we JOURNEY. No. 5. The best way to do hyperlocal reporting.
Why we Journey. No. 6. Journeying decenters power from the editor to the reporters and the audience.
Why we Journey. No. 7. The spiritual life of the Journeyer.
The values of the journey: sympathetic objectivity
Sympathetic Objectivity Part 1. Sriracha sauce for journalism
Sympathetic Objectivity Part 2. At A Journey we have a different approach which is built into our organization. Our idea of sympathy is that we have a “fellow-feeling” with our respondents. This solidarity is extended to “fellow understanding.”
Sympathetic Objectivity Part 3. Sympathetic objectivity may help us to bring together the sympathy of the heart with the objectivity and skepticism of the mind.
Sympathetic Objectivity Part 4. Get more bang for your buck with empathy first. Open ears and heart makes for better interviews. Skepticism later, if needed.
Journey design
Complexity and contradiction in the art of online religion news reporting
No. 1 Introduction. The design of news media came into play, at least by name, in the very first newspaper in America, Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick.
No. 2 Sensationalism versus Sobriety in the religion news media in the 19th & 20th Centuries. Over the next two hundred years after the publication of the first American newspaper Publick Occurrences in 1690, the news media proliferated while the number of pages and design elements grew. The reign of “objective news” was gradually supplanted by the reign of screaming headlines and sob-provoking stories.
No 3 The incompleteness theorem of news designs. The complexity and contradictions of today’s society is why news design should aid narrative unity but also reflect the incompleteness and jaggedness of today’s stories.
No. 4 Disrupter City. Creativity rarely flows out of an act of complete originality. It is rarely a virgin birth. It is usually the clash of two value systems or traditions, which, in collision, create a transcendent third thing.
No. 5 A chronology of the disruptions of news media and its design by digital technologies. 1962-1975 The internet age begins. The era of plain text.
No. 6 A chronology of the disruptions of news media and its design by digital technologies. 1976-1983 The PC Age.
No. 7 Design of religion news in the Browser Age 1990 – 1999.
No. 8 The art of religion news in the broadband, multimedia, & social age, 2000-2005,
No. 9 The art of religion news in the broadband, multimedia, & social age, 2006-2009.
No. 10 The art of religion news in the broadband, multimedia, social age, 2010-2011.
No. 11 The art of religion news during the redesign of big news media, 2012-2014.
No. 12 The art of religion news during the redesign of the New York Times, 2014.
No. 13 The art of religion news during the redesign of big news media, 2015-2016.
No. 14 The 7 senses of the art of religion news in the digital age. Part 1. Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling, believing and remembering
No. 15 Showing the soul. The 7 senses of the art of religion news in the digital age. Part 2
Time-travel: Journey Retrospectives
Journey Retrospectives/Retros I. “Retrospectare,” Latin for taking a look back. “Retrospectives,” Journey’s word for our look back at the tremendous religious dramas of New York City
The City Q/A. Journey Retrospectives II. Journey Retrospectives show how the great questions of life have always been central to New York City
Journey Retros on disruptions and catastrophes. Retrospectives III. Creativity rarely flows out of an act of complete originality.It is usually the clash of two value systems or traditions, which, in collision, create a transcendent third thing
Journey Innovation Retrospectives. Part IV of the series. Jacob Riis brought a new way of doing journalism and photography in order to realize certain religious values
Journey Dowser Retrospectives. Part V in the series. Journey Retros hope to find religious innovations buried in NYC’s past that can be recycled. We practice “history that you can use.”
Journey Workshops. Learn how to do your own journey through religions!
Other Journeys
Tips on spiritual sightseeing by Ken Chitwood
The Art of City Walking by Tara Isabella Burton
Bible — Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler. Also see his PBS program Sacred Journeys.
Brazil — A Journey through Rio de Janerio religions
Canada — Highway to Heaven in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
Chicago — Old St. Patrick’s Church
China — Shanghai’s Sacred Spaces
Global — Out of Eden Walk by Paul Salopek. This ongoing journey sponsored by National Geographic will retrace on foot the global migration of our ancestors in a 21,000-mile, seven-year odyssey that begins in Ethiopia and ends in Tierra del Fuego.
Global — A history of the World in 500 Walks by Sarah Baxter
Indonesia — A Journey through Indonesia religions
Los Angeles — Mapping religious institutions in Los Angeles
Minnesota Houses of Worship in Saint Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mapping of houses of worship between 1829-1924.
New York — Exploring the Burned-Over District in Upstate NY
New York — In God’s House: The Religious Landscape of Utica, NY by S. Brent Plate and Robert Knight. Recycling & sustaining sacred places in a rustbelt city.
New York City — Cemetery Project by Mary French
The New York City Cemetery Project chronicles the graveyards of this great city. Hundreds of cemeteries—including small family burial grounds and churchyards, as well as larger cemeteries containing hundreds, thousands, even millions of bodies—have existed throughout the five boroughs since the 17th century, with qualities as diverse as the numerous groups that established them and histories as distinct and ever-evolving as the city itself. These cemeteries record patterns of history and immigration and the traditions and customs of numerous religious and ethnic groups, and many are the only remnant of an area’s rural or neighborhood past. They are the story of New York City in microcosm.
New York City — A walk through NYC by William B. Helmreich
Sociologist and walker extraordinaire died of COVID-19 in the Spring of 2020. He reflected on his mixed feelings about his childhood education in a memoir, “Wake Up, Wake Up to Do the Work of the Creator” (1977), and later studied more advanced yeshivas in “The World of the Yeshiva: An Intimate Portrait of Orthodox Judaism” (1982).
Silicon Valley, California – Living Religion Collaborative @Santa Clara University
Thailand
United States — Thirty Mosques in Thirty Days
Journey Retros
Wanderlust. A history of walking by Rebecca Solnit. “Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. … The magic of the street is the mingling of the errand and the epiphany.”
Europe, 1930s. Leigh Fermor walked across Europe and produced several classic travel books on the trips: A Time of gifts; Between the woods and the water; and The broken road (assembled posthumously). In a travel through monasteries Fermor found “tranquility to quieten the mind and compose the spirit” (A time to keep silence, 1957).
United States, 1970s. Peter Jenkins, A Walk across America: from New York “I started out searching for myself and my country and found both.” To Dick Staub he recounted his experience at a revival in Mobile Alabama: “I walked in and there were thousands of people there. I had to go to the front to take pictures. I looked at it as a sociological experiment. I was actually working for National Geographic at the time, so I’d read about various spiritual events over in Africa and Tibet. And the Deep South was like being in a foreign country to me at the time. When the revival begins, this guy from Texas named James Robison comes out screaming and preaching and throwing his arms around. And I was thinking, “Wow man, these are great pictures I’m getting.” There was sweat dripping and everything. He was dressed in a three-piece suit and cowboy boots. He kept preaching. I dropped the camera and started paying attention. And I honestly felt like when he was preaching the gospel, a huge sword was slicing me into a whole bunch of pieces.”
Journeys as great religious Quests
Journey to the West (Chinese novel as translated by Anthony C. Yu)
Journey reading
Intersecting Journeys. The anthropology of pilgrimage and tourism by Ellen Badone. Also “Conventional and Unconventional Pilgrimages: Conceptualizing Sacred Travel in the Twenty-First Century.” In Redefining Pilgrimage: New Perspectives on Historical and Contemporary Pilgrimages. Antón Pazos, ed. pp. 7-31. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014.
First International Congress on Tourism and Pilgrammages, sponsored by the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, Sept 17-20 2014. One out of every three tourists in the world is a religious pilgrim, adding up to 330 million religious pilgrims per year.
