Kenneth Woodward Gets American Religion

During his 38 years as the religion editor of Newsweek — a span that ended in 2002 — Kenneth L. Woodward stood as one of the welcome exceptions to the clueless, self-congratulatory secularism of the Fourth Estate. He was virtually bioengineered for the assignment: born to an evangelical Christian father and a Roman Catholic mother, raised and educated in Catholic schools all the way through the University of Notre Dame. In his professional life, Woodward ventured outward from his home base in observant Catholicism to explore the fervent and expansive denominational landscape, balancing his believer’s reverence with a sharp journalist’s critical distance. He was and is an elegant, graceful and rigorous stylist. Catholic education could not ask for a better exemplar of why nuns and priests have spent so much time at parochial-school blackboards diagraming sentences.