Somehow, I’ve become a religion communicator. Maybe I’ve always been.

After a whirlwind two weeks of producing Friends Changemaker Weekend and the Religion Communicators Council annual conference, I got hit with a nasty cold. Ten days straight in hotels will do that to you.

I love putting my producer hat back on a few times a year. I spend so much time behind the computer, moving pixels around and submitting invoices, sometimes I forget the work that I’m doing is a spiritual practice. It is a practice that I share with professionals around the country at the intersection of faith, justice, and narrative development.

It felt good to get out of DC for a stretch into Cincinnati, to step away from the important work we are doing on the Hill in this time of political violence, warfare, and authoritarianism, and into fellowship with a cross-section of religion communicators.

I joined the board of the Religion Communicators Council last year when my boss, Adlai, retired. He was a board member for many years and had encouraged our team to take time each year to enter our best work into the DeRose Hinkhouse Memorial Awards for review and judging. I also had served as judge for many years and the board was aware of my work. To be honest, I’ve taken home a lot of DeRose-Hinkhouse awards over the years.

I’d been eager to do more board work in this stage of my career. I have been on boards most of my life, in different functions. I come from a family of joiners. My parents modeled participation and leadership as an accessible process.

I finally got a chance to meet the Board in person late last year when we met up in Cincinnati to plan this year’s conference. It was an incredible weekend. I’ve somehow become not the youngest person at my job. We have a pretty young staff and a bit of annual turnover in our Program Assistant roles, which are one-year assignments. And so I suppose it’s been a while since I’ve been in a room with all people more experienced than me.

The Board of the RCC includes folks from a spectrum of different faiths and organizations. We connected on travel, reading, music, art, and just a certain collective spirit about what faith brings to the world.

There were many highlights to the event. The city of Cincinnati, briliant panelists, great questions, two award ceremonies where we got to see excellent work of colleagues and the mainstream press in how they cover the faith community. I got to meet Julian from Bechol Lashon, whose fantastic new book Hyphen is a graphic novel exploring the edges of Jewish and other ethnic identities. I also led a panel on AI in faith communications with Andrea Gils Monzón and Kendra Ramirez.

I’ve been clerking FCNL’s AI in the Workplace committee for the last few years, and we’ve developed a compelling framework which puts staff autonomy front and center to choose whether or not to use AI in their workflow. We emphasize transparency, communication, and personal responsibility when it comes to data privacy and factual accuracy.

I’ve been using a lot of AI in my workflow. Mostly in workflow: writing scripts for repetitive tasks, building small applications to keep me organized, tools. We all shared concerns, excitements, opportunities, and potential pitfalls, as I’m sure these conversations are happening in conferences around the world right now. We heard and confirmed that our communities look to us to connect truth to reality, and the human experience to the divine.

We got to visit the American Sign Museum, which is just a fantastic experience if you’re in Cincinnati. For those of us in design and communications, it is a crash course in the sensory opportunities of how to grab the public and tell your story in an instant. Neon, spinning, colorful, hand-painted, all kinds of Americana at the height of design and commercialization. I loved the hand-drawn sketches of Googie signs and the small detailed goldleaf hand-painted door signs. At the end of the day, this is what we’re competing with: the distraction, the ever-beating drum of American consumerism.

I also had a chance to run out and visit the American Jewish Archive at Hebrew Union College, a longtime dream. At an auspicious time, HUC is navigating the difficult waters of organizational restructuring. The deep joy I felt standing on that campus though! I grew up in the Reform movement, went to UAHC camps, taught music at URJ camps, and have a deep love for the history of the movement, especially in Cincinnati.

Dr. Dana Herman, Director of Research and Collections at The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives was extremely kind with her time and gave me a peak behind the scenes at the archive, and then led me down into the stacks so I could geek out on the collection. I have recently been digitizing and exploring World Over Magazine, a bi-monthly publication that the Jewish Federation in New York put out from the 1940s-1970s. The colorful covers caught my eye last year on eBay and I’ve now collected about 30 issues of them. AJA has the full set, going back to the black and white editions in the early 1940s.

Back at the conference, we had this year’s DeRose-Hinkhouse Awards, where FCNL took home some great awards, including:

• Top Single Work winner on The War in Ukraine and the Urgent Need for Diplomatic Solutions: One-Year Update (I designed this one)
• Top Photography for Article/Story Resilient for Justice / Our Resilient Democracy: FCNL Annual Report FY 2025 (I designed this one)
• Top Videography for Tell Congress: Immigrants Make America Whole (I shot and edited this one)
• Top Public Awareness Campaign for Peace, Justice, and Music: FCNL Hits the Road with Neil Young (I went on the road for our first two shows in Detroit and Cleveland for this)
• Top Public Affairs Campaign for Postcards for Peace (Card 1, Card 2, Card 3) (I designed these too)

We didn’t take home any Best-in-Class this year, but it’s okay. We have a nice shelf of them!

Then we got to have the fantastic WILBUR AWARDS where we get to hear from mainstream media sources and the work they do to cover religion. This was a night beyond compare, and the stories being produced and celebrated were awe inspiring. Truly. I couldn’t even start to name the favorites, but do check out the winner list here and dive into any of the stories. They’re stunning.

It’s getting late and long so I should wrap this travelogue up.

With any conference, the best part are the random conversations you have, the kismet stories, the late night rants. After the Wilburs, I spotted a few folks in the hotel lobby that I’d been dying to talk to—the team from the Fetzer Institute, whose Spiritual Solutions Library is stunning, Rabbi Eric Greenberg of the Focus Project, and Liam McGrath of Scratch Films, who earned a bit of a keynote role for his incredible career and for having traveled all the way from IRELAND for the awards.

I was so inspired by Liam’s consistency, focus, and humanity he brings into the stories he tells through video. You can see a deep love and empathy in his work, and we got to talk about the compulsion to capture these stories and the challenges of sitting on hard drives full of material that needs to find a home. He has partnered with government institutions to make sure his archival work has a forever home. And we got to meet and drink with his incredible mother Hannah who was, without a doubt, the life of the entire party.

This turn in my career over the last ten years has been unexpected, full of surprises. I always think about how if you had told me before this latest set of turns that I’d be a full time graphic designer for a Quaker lobby in Washington DC and own a home in Baltimore, Maryland… I wouldn’t even know how to start walking down that road. But here I am. And it all lines up. A lifelong pacifist, activist, spiritual seeker, communicator of communities of faith and belief and art and joy. A universalist. A humanist. It all aligns. And that is beyond a blessing, to be able to walk in this world and do this work, hand-in-hand with brilliant minds and huge hearts.