Author Archives: Nick Shindo Street

About Nick Shindo Street

Nick Shindo Street was most recently Senior Writer at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, where he reported on Pentecostal and charismatic religious movements in the global South. Previously, he served as a contributing editor for LGBT issues at Religion Dispatches and as a contributing writer for the Jewish Journal. His reportage on science, religion, sexuality and culture has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Global Post and L.A. Weekly. He is a student at the Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles.

Religious Right Stages a Skirmish to Win in a War It’s Losing in Mississippi

According to the stark red-state vs. blue-state narrative that shapes news media coverage of contemporary politics in the U.S., conservative places are becoming redder and progressive places are becoming bluer with each passing election cycle. But in the tightly interwoven … Continue reading

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The Good, the Bad and the Underreported

You know you’re a journalism geek when good reporting excites you. Such was my experience upon reading Sonia Paul’s most recent post for the New York Times’ India Ink blog. I’ve been working with students in Diane Winston’s J585 reporting … Continue reading

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Depth of Myanmar Crisis Still Poorly Reported

The government of Myanmar has forced Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders (MSF) to cease its operations in Rakhine state, home to Myanmar’s tiny Rohingya Muslim minority. Rohingya Muslims constitute one of the world’s poorest ethnic groups—MSF has for … Continue reading

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Everything is Connected

The pressure of the atmosphere around you, the average intensity of the sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, the force of gravity, genetics, nutrition, whether Mommy loved you—there’s a limitless number of variables in the equation that produces an individual. That … Continue reading

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Al Jazeera America: Land of Lost Opportunity

The New York Times today reported on fresh sectarian violence in Baghdad, jihadists coming home to stoke unrest in Cairo and the take-him-home-to-mother charms of pledges to a newly minted Muslim fraternity with chapters on college campuses in Dallas and … Continue reading

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Terrorist! Tyrant! Time-out! Covering the Syrian Peace Talks in Geneva

As the Wall Street Journal frames the story, the fractious Syrian National Coalition, whose members oppose President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s unending civil war, arrived in Geneva like a bloodthirsty Eliza Doolittle—an uncouth rabble cleaned up and taught how to … Continue reading

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Hearts of Darkness: African Leaders Tighten the Limits of Tolerance

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria and Gen. Abdel Fattah Sisi of Egypt are playing fast and loose with the unsettled rules of democracy in two of Africa’s most populous and volatile countries. Dismay colors the narrative in most news media … Continue reading

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Seeing the Big Picture in a Small Story from Tunisia

A disciple of Hillel, the 1st-century rabbi who founded a dynasty of scholar-sages, exhorted students struggling with a perplexing passage from the Torah not to give up but to “turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” Good … Continue reading

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(Not) Covering the New Gilded Age

A century ago, muckraking journalism was in its heyday, Progressive Era religious activists were organizing movements for social justice and a series of legislative initiatives—from Teddy Roosevelt’s “Square Deal” to the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913—imposed tight constraints … Continue reading

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Seeing Burma in the News-Media Funhouse Mirror

Through the lens of the prevailing mainstream news media narrative, religious movements tend to be either completely invisible or distorted in order to play up violence and sensationalism. This complaint has appeared countless times in the USC Knight Chair blog, … Continue reading

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