Course Description: Covering Religion teaches Columbia journalism students to report and write stories about faith for a secular audience. The course looks at the major religions found in Israel and some of the smaller offshoots, such as the Druze, Mormons, and Baha'i. During the course's first seven weeks, the students study these religions in the New York area through visits to churches, mosques and synagogues, as well as through guest lecturers and class discussions. Each student becomes an expert on a specific faith or denomination, writing articles and sharing with the class what he or she has learned during their reporting. Over spring break, the class takes a 10-day study tour of the Holy Land, which is subsidized by the Scripps Howard Foundation. The students create and maintain a website devoted to the class and while abroad use it to report their daily experiences through articles and photo essays. Special Requirements: Full time students must complete and submit their Master's Project before leaving on the trip March 10th.

Ari L. Goldman
Ari Goldman is Dean of Students at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where he has been a professor for twelve years. This is his fifth year as a leader of the Scripps Howard study tour. In 2000 and 2001, he took the religion class to Israel and Jordan. In 2002 and 2003, he led class trips to the former Soviet Union. Professor Goldman was educated at Yeshiva University, Columbia and Harvard. He is the author of three books on religion. Before becoming a professor, he was a reporter at The New York Times.

Rabbi Michael Paley
Michael Paley is the executive director of Synagogue and Community Affairs at UJA-Federation. A native of Boston, he was a professor of Jewish Studies and dean at Bard College, and the vice president of the Wexner Heritage Foundation. For many years, Rabbi Paley was the university chaplain and director at Earl Hall at Columbia, the first rabbi named head of campus ministries in the Ivy League. He also served as Jewish chaplain at Dartmouth College and Jewish book editor at Tikkun magazine. Rabbi Paley is a vice president of CrossCurrents: The Journal for Religion and Intellectual Life.

Jason Anthony
Jason Anthony is especially interested in new American religions. He has performed internationally with the Dzieci theatre group, which works in the idiom of religious ritual in cooperation with various spiritual traditions. His pieces on religion have appeared in The Washington Post, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Kansas City Star and The San Diego Union-Tribune, among others.

Amanda Bensen
Amanda Bensen grew up in the tiny town of Cambridge, Vt., where her father pastors one of those classic white-steepled churches that looks good in postcards. She earned a B.A. in English from Gordon College and studied abroad in Oxford. Since graduating in 2000, she has freelanced for newspapers in the Boston area, edited a manufacturing magazine, and been a volunteer bartender in an Austrian castle.

Esha Bhandari
Esha Bhandari was born in New Delhi and grew up in Saint John, New Brunswick on the Canadian east coast. She graduated from McGill University with a degree in political science and economics. For the last three summers she worked at an international youth center in Toronto dedicated to social change initiatives. She is interested in writing about international politics and the intersection of human rights, religion, and culture.

Wale Fatade
Wale Fatade is a Ford Foundation International Fellow at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked as a journalist with two newspapers in Lagos, Nigeria, The Guardian and Daily Independent, before coming to Columbia. He holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Nigeria's oldest university, the University of Ibadan, located in the southwest part of the West African country. An evangelical Christian, he covers Reform Judaism for the class.

Abby Gruen
Abby Gruen, a native New Yorker, comes to the Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. in economic geology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After working as a geologist in Nevada, she moved back to New York City and worked in finance and marketing. Since coming to Columbia in 2004 she has written freelance stories for the Journal News and The New York Times on religion and social issues.

Benjamin Harvey
Benjamin Harvey grew up in Birmingham, Ala. He will receive a master's degree in journalism in 2005 and a master's degree in international affairs in 2006 from Columbia. He speaks Turkish and Portuguese and has studied French and Spanish. He is very, very smart and good looking.

Nathan Herpich
Nate Herpich grew up spending Sunday mornings at his father's Lutheran Church just outside of Syracuse, N.Y. After graduating from Tufts University, he decided to move to Paris, where he studied French West Africa at NYU's Paris campus. He spent the past three years teaching at a public school in the South Bronx, and, as much as he misses his students, is ecstatic to be finally pursuing his dream of writing for a living. His articles about the African communities in Central Harlem have appeared in the Amsterdam News.

Ian Lague
Ian Lague was born in California and raised in Oregon. He graduated from Swarthmore College with a philosophy degree in 1997. Since then, he has edited literature textbooks, taught social studies in a yeshiva, sung tenor in a Catholic gospel choir, and served as managing editor for Boston Review. He is interested in covering questions of religious ethics and scriptural interpretation in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.

Nicole LaRosa
Nicole LaRosa is a native of Queens, N.Y., who has been writing for non-profit organizations for the past ten years. Most recently, she was the staff writer at The HealthCare Chaplaincy, a multi-faith community of chaplains working in healthcare facilities. She gave up the glamorous world of non-profit communications for the safe, comfortable world of journalism. Religion writing has brought her back to church, for which her mother is very grateful.

Joshua Olesker
Joshua Olesker was born and raised in New York City and earned his undergraduate degree in English from Yale. Since then he has worked at a variety of jobs including broadcast journalist, waiter, biophysics lab slave, massage therapist, and singer (he's a tenor). Feeling both the mystic pull of the spirit and the earthly desire for steadier employment, Josh enrolled at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, where he is one of four members of the class of 2005 enrolled in the dual M.S./M.A. program in Journalism and Religion.

Joe Orso
Joe Orso grew up in St. Louis, Mo., and graduated from Fordham University with a degree in Creative Writing in Journalism and Literature. Before coming to Columbia, he worked in Beijing at a movie theater and other odd jobs. He is interested in covering intercultural and interreligious dialogues.

Victoria Schlesinger
Victoria Schlesinger hails from the California Bay Area and has been a writer and researcher for more than ten years. She is particularly interested in environmental issues and their ties to culture and religion, and is the author of Animals and Plants of the Ancient Maya (University of Texas Press). She has also written for the Point Reyes Light newspaper, California Wild magazine, and National Park Service publications.

Karen Schwartz
After graduating with a degree in religious studies from the University of Michigan, Karen Schwartz headed to New York to take part in Columbia’s dual degree journalism and religion master’s program. When she’s not out looking for stories, Karen can be found updating HighestWire.com, the youth news website she runs, or working with high school students. She aspires to write about the faith and traditions that drive people’s lives.

Armen Terjimanian
Armen Terjimanian has a strong connection to the Holy Land. His father's family lived in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, and his grandparents are buried in the city. A native of Troy, Mich., Terjimanian grew up in an Armenian household and attended church regularly. When he was 13, he was ordained a clerk in the Armenian Church. In 2004, Terjimanian graduated with a B.A. in Film and Political Science from the University of Michigan. He hopes to be a sports or religion reporter once he graduates from Columbia.

Jaimal Yogis
Jaimal Yogis graduated from the University of Hawai'i with a B.A. in religious studies. He has since worked as a freelance reporter in India, a Scripps Howard Journalism Intern in Washington, D.C. and a San Francisco Magazine intern. He is a candidate for Columbia's dual M.S./M.A. program in Religion and Journalism.