It never occurred to me to wonder why I, a religion reporter, got the biggest story of the day, though, clearly, whatever else it was, it was a religion story. It wasn't until about twenty years later that a friend who had been managing editor at a Gannett paper said to me: "Rob, don't your realize you were probably the ONLY religion reporter in the whole country who got that story?" I still don't know why I got it. Maybe they figure I was the only one in the newsroom who had any idea what a Sikh was. Or knew how to find them, let alone Hindus, in Orange Country, California

In the heat of the 2000 election, then Governor George W. Bush of Texas made an off-the-cuff statement that we ought to take the log out of our own eye before calling attention to the speck in the eye of our neighbor. The New York Times reported the remark as a minor gaffe -- what it termed "an interesting variation on the saying about the pot and the kettle."The reporter -- actually a fine and balanced journalist -- did not recognize the biblical reference. Neither did his editors. And this, of course, was not an obscure biblical reference. Not only is it found in the red letters of the New Testament, it is taken from the Sermon on the Mount.

In a story on the U.S.-brokered security pact between the government of Sudan and southern rebel groups, the New York Times referred to the war in Sudan as "a pet cause of many American religious conservatives." It is hard to imagine the Times describing the plight of Soviet Jewry as a "pet cause" of American Jews, or opposition to apartheid as a "pet cause" of African-Americans.