I had a particularly geriatric habit as a fourth grader: I set an analog alarm clock for 5:45 every morning. Without hitting snooze, I’d get up, pour myself a bowl of Special K cereal and sit down in front of the TV to watch the “Today” show.
As a Mormon kid in Arkansas, I found the show to be my portal to other worlds — my way of crossing the boundary between the religious and the secular.
For a moment in 2005, though, that boundary seemed to collapse. After the death of Pope John Paul II, the show relocated to Vatican City, where the pageantry of the broadcast (the anchors, their makeup, the outfits) mixed with the majesty of Catholicism (the cardinals, their crosses, the robes). For those weeks, religion wasn’t dismissed as peripheral. It was the whole story. That was when I first felt I could become a journalist.
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