The fellowship, returning for its second year, will run from September 2022 to March 2023. This fellowship serves to develop future religion news journalists by deepening their understanding of religious expression in individual lives and civic life and to develop skills specific to covering religion, belief, faith, and spirituality. 

“The community of inquiry and learning that we built in the inaugural year of the 2021-22 RNS/IA Fellowship was every bit as exciting and rewarding as the excellent journalism that came out of it,” says Paul O’Donnell, editor-in-chief at Religion News Service. “As we’d hoped, the four fellows improved their religious literacy, but they also brought their own concerns and deepened everyone’s understanding of how faith fits into the issues that they care about.”

The 2022-23 fellowship builds on the success of the inaugural class, in which more than a dozen stories by four fellows appeared on RNS and in RNS subscriber publications.

Over the course of seven months, fellows had the opportunity to speak with some of the nation’s leading religion journalists including Sarah Pulliam Bailey, Adelle Banks, Yonat Shimron, Whitney Bauck, Wajahat Ali, Monique Parsons, and former NYT religion reporter Laurie Goodstein.

This year, fellows will again dive deeply into the world of religion news through a series of mentorships with senior journalists, workshops, journalist panels, editorial meetings, tutoring on critical religion resources, and a fully paid trip to the Religion News Association Conference.

The fellows will be awarded a $4000 stipend and expected to report and write at least one feature religion story per month, which will be published on the RNS website and the Interfaith America Magazine, and will receive a fellowship certificate upon completion.

Applications are open to all US-based journalism graduates who have completed their degree in the past three years, and to US-based freelance reporters who may not have a journalism degree but have at least a year of relevant reporting experience.