A farewell, to beat and blog

This is my last blog post as religion reporter for the Boston Globe.

Today marked exactly ten years since I started work on the religion beat. But I didn’t quite make it to the decade mark – last Monday, the Globe named me the paper’s new city editor, and I started that job immediately.

I leave the religion beat with considerable misgivings, because this has been, without question, the best assignment of my career. Of course, it’s been ugly and difficult and adversarial at multiple moments. Covering religion, sadly, has often meant writing about abuse and violence and division. But the beat has also been remarkably gratifying. Some of those tough stories – and I am thinking primarily about our coverage of clergy sexual abuse – have made the world a better place. And the beat has been so much more – an opportunity for me to talk with so many people across this region and beyond about their most fundamental and cherished beliefs. I’ve had the privilege of meeting the Dalai Lama and traveling to Africa and attending more papal Masses than I can count, but, even more memorably, I also had the opportunity to spend months following a start-up evangelical church in a former chop shop in Dorchester. I am so grateful to so many people – the editors at the Globe (especially Marty Baron) who enthusiastically supported ambitious religion coverage even while under pressure to cut spending; the religion writers around the country who became not just colleagues but friends; the readers who chastised me and praised me and followed my work; and, especially, the many people of faith who shared their stories with me so that I might share them with the Globe’s readers.

In my new job, I’ll help oversee our news coverage of Boston and the region. I am excited about the opportunity to play a broader role in strengthening the Globe at a challenging time, and I am energized by trying my hand at something that, for me, is new and different. I am not done thinking about religion – I will oversee our next religion writer, who will be named shortly. And I am not done writing – I expect to find other outlets and other moments for putting my own pen to paper. I know that while some of you may be relieved that the Globe will at last have another byline on religion stories, others of you will be disappointed that I am stepping away from the beat. I hope you will respect that, at this time, this move feels right, to me and to the Globe.

One of my regrets as I move on is that I will have to stop contributing to this blog, which I created and which I treasured. My successor will have to decide whether to blog at this URL or elsewhere. Until then, to all of you who have contributed to this blog’s success, by  commenting or sending e-mails or just by reading the posts, thank you. And if you ever have an idea or concern for the Globe, you can always reach me here.