Meet the religion reporter who loves writing about UFOs

This article was first published in the State of Faith newsletter. Sign up to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Monday night.

Editor’s Note: Kelsey is on maternity leave, but this newsletter isn’t. Before signing off, Kelsey prepped a few editions of State of Faith that will appear in your inbox about once per month throughout the summer.

Emily McFarlan Miller is an excellent reporter and one of my best faith-beat friends. We both grew up in central Illinois and then became full-time religion writers around the same time.

For this week’s newsletter, Miller spoke with me about how she approaches her work for Religion News Service and other outlets, including why she regularly pursues nontraditional stories about UFOs and Tarot cards. Enjoy!

Kelsey Dallas: How did you get into religion reporting?

Emily McFarlan Miller: My parents met working at a small, suburban Chicago newspaper, which is another story, but it meant I grew up wanting to be a reporter. I landed on religion reporting when I was studying journalism at New York University.

I’d grown up attending Lutheran schools in central Illinois, and I loved discussing religion with my college classmates who were Catholic and Jewish and Muslim and learning what we had in common as well as how we saw things differently, which often helped me think about things in a new way. I wanted to share that experience with others. I love when I read or write an article that makes me think about things in a new way.

I had a few great newspaper jobs — including covering education and managing social media — before layoffs caught up to me in 2015 and I decided to go back to grad school and make a go of freelancing on the religion beat. Then I tweeted too much during a Religion News Association conference and wound up with a job at Religion News Service.

KD: What’s the most common misconception about religion reporting, in your experience?

EMM: I think some readers believe that because we are reporting on religion, we are religious, and that’s not necessarily the case.

Religion reporters at mainstream media outlets aren’t defending our own beliefs or attacking others’ beliefs. We often are writing about beliefs we don’t share.

KD: You and I share a love of covering unique religion stories, like the pieces you’ve done on UFOs and the “spooky” lore behind Christmas. Why do you think it’s valuable to write nontraditional stories like those?

EMM: I can’t be the only elder millennial who remembers reading children’s books about the strange and unexplained or watching episodes of “The X-Files” that mixed stories of levitating saints with hauntings and UFO sightings and people blowing up toasters with their minds. I feel like that cemented the idea for me as a kid that there’s a pretty fine line between the spiritual and supernatural.

As Christopher D. Bader, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, told me in that article about the UFO festival, religion and the paranormal are the same type of phenomena: “It’s belief in things that cannot be proven. That’s the currency of religion.”

It’s all a little weird.

Also, it’s just fun.

KD: Which of your articles from the past year are you most proud of?

EMM: I was really honored to be trusted with the stories of three survivors of boarding schools for Indigenous children — Negiel Bigpond, James William LaBelle Sr. and Ruth M. Johnson — for an article I wrote for RNS last November headlined “What does healing look like to survivors of the US Indian boarding school system?” I never take the privilege of being trusted with others’ stories lightly.

For years, I’ve been covering efforts by mostly mainline denominations to repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery and reckon with their past involvement in the federal Indian boarding school system. One of the things I learned to question both studying journalism as an undergraduate at NYU and intercultural studies as a graduate student at NAIITS (formerly the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies) is whose stories are being told and whose aren’t. I wanted to make sure the stories of those who attended the schools were being told and their voices heard first and foremost in the conversation.

KD: What book, movie or other form of entertainment would you recommend to someone who enjoys following religion news?

EMM: I am the world’s worst podcast listener, but I really enjoy “Oh No Ross and Carrie.” The hosts, Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy, delve into fringe science, religion, the paranormal and other topics of interest to those of us who follow religion news.

Fresh off the press

Southwest Airlines attorneys ordered to attend ‘religious-liberty training’ by federal judge

Couple sues Massachusetts after being rejected as foster parents due to Catholic beliefs

Why religious compatibility matters in relationships

Term of the week: Hebrew school

A Hebrew school is a school that offers supplementary lessons on the Hebrew language and Jewish rituals to young Jews who do not have the opportunity to learn about these subjects at their other school, whether because it’s a secular, public institution or a private institution affiliated with a different faith.

Recent research shows that enrollment at Hebrew schools in the United States has dropped sharply since 2006. That trend is likely tied to a similar decline in synagogue membership, but it could also point to the increasing availability of online lessons and growing enrollment in Jewish private schools, according to Axios.

“The number of children enrolled in Jewish all-day schools in the U.S. and Canada jumped by 43% from 2006 to 2020,” the article noted.

What I’m reading...

Several studies have shown that fewer than half of Americans have written a last will and testament. That’s a problem when you consider the rise of nontraditional family structures, which aren’t accounted for in the longstanding bureaucratic processes designed to distribute your belongings if you die unexpectedly, according to The Atlantic. “In almost no states do non-married, nonbiological family members receive any inheritance if access isn’t explicitly laid out in a will,” the article said.

Daniel Herszberg, a 30-year-old who is currently pursuing an advanced degree in Australia, has visited every country in the world over the past decade. His travels have turned him into an “unofficial student of humanity” and enabled him to develop a deeper understanding of religious diversity, Religion Unplugged reported earlier this year.

Odds and ends

One thing I miss about working from the Deseret News office is having easy access to a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine (You know, the fancy soda dispenser that allow you to add flavor shots to traditional sodas.) I was tickled to learn recently that Coca-Cola actually uses data collected from Freestyle machines to develop new drinks. “Following the Coca-Cola Freestyle’s debut 13 years ago, the beverage giant has brought four creations to bottles or cans, starting in 2017 with Sprite Cherry. Since then, it has also introduced Coke with Cherry Vanilla, Coke with Orange Vanilla and Sprite Strawberry with Lymonade,” Food Dive reports.