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Chris Herlinger (BLF'91) Receives Egan Award for Journalistic Excellence

January 1, 2007—

The seeds of Herlinger’s interest in international relations were planted early by “good public school teachers” in Denver, where he took his first Asian studies course. When he came to Macalester College in Saint Paul to study history (with a focus on East Asian studies and U.S. diplomatic history), the school’s international emphasis helped those seeds take deeper root. Herlinger studied for a semester at the Chinese University of Hong Kong at a time when going to mainland China “was still kind of exotic.”

Out of college and ready to pursue a journalism career, he found work at first the Fergus Falls and later Rochester newspapers where his editors supported his interest in international concerns by giving him time away from work to travel (at his own expense) to the places he wanted to write about, among them the Philippines and Chile. That freedom to explore international issues “says a lot about the culture of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest.”

A 1991 Bush Leadership Fellowship took Herlinger to the Union Theological Seminary in New York City; as he wrote in his fellowship application, he saw divinity school as “just one more way to get beneath the surface” of the complicated stories he was trying to tell. Journalists who report on world issues, he felt, would benefit from a deep understanding of how religion shaped the situations they reported on. Herlinger left seminary with a master’s degree in theology and social ethics.

Now he is communications officer for Church World Service (CWS), an ecumenical relief and development agency, as well as a freelancer who writes about religious issues and international humanitarian concerns. His work regularly appears in National Catholic Reporter (NCR), Christian Century magazine and (through news agencies such as Religion News Service) in major U.S. dailies like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. These days he travels to international emergencies on behalf of CWS, trips that give him access to hard news sources as a freelancer. It was while on leave from CWS as a fellow at Harvard Divinity School that he traveled to Darfur and gathered the material for his Egan Award-winning story.

Herlinger is just back from Israel and the Palestinian region, a trip that was part of the Egan Award. While he’d been to the Middle East many times —Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Jordan, among others—he’d never been inside Israel or Gaza. “It was a big hole that got filled in a big way,” he said. (You can read his take on the Israel/Palestine conflict in the archives at ncronline.org.) For now, it’s back to studying.

Herlinger will spend early 2007 focusing on his thesis for a second master’s degree, this one in international relations from Cambridge University in England. The part-time program is designed for people who work. The thesis is on security issues in Colombia, a country he’s visited three times.