From news editor Daniel Silliman: National Public Radio reporter Robert Krulwich had a problem when he first started interviewing people on air: He would slip into imitations of people’s accents. In Texas, he started talking like a Texan. With a government official from Eastern Europe, he’d start sounding like the cartoon Russians on The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
I have never had an unintentional accent problem. But anyone who has interviewed people for a living will recognize the peril here. You want to connect with people in conversation. It’s natural to connect by signaling, Yeah, me too. But if you do that, the focus of the conversation shifts. You don’t want it to be about you.
A good reporter learns to create a little distance. You position yourself that way to ask people to explain stuff and work to draw them out. It makes for better interviews. It better serves the reader or listener. It teaches the interviewers to go into conversations asking themselves what they don’t know. Also, not to pretend like they’re from Texas.
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The Christian story shows us that grace often comes from where we least expect. In this issue, we look at the corners of God’s kingdom and chronicle in often-overlooked people, places, and things the possibility of God’s redemptive work. We introduce the Compassion Awards, which report on seven nonprofits doing good work in their communities. We look at the spirituality underneath gambling, the ways contemporary Christian music was instrumental in one historian’s conversion, and the steady witness of what may be Wendell Berry’s last novel. All these pieces remind us that there is no person or place too small for God’s gracious and cataclysmic reversal.
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