The sound of a metal bat hitting concrete is constant on Sunday in Brooklyn’s McCarren park. On the first sunny weekend of the Greenpoint Neighborhood softball season, dozens gathered to play a little ball. Some have been coming since 1971, dressed in sweatpants and jerseys. But in recent years, some players have been showing up in formal black loafers, dress pants and white button-down shirts. They’re called the Stormers, a team of young, mostly Hasidic Jews.

I’m doing a series of stories on the team. A radio feature aired on the local NPR station, WNYC this past weekend:

This short slideshow was produced though the Knight-Carnegie Fellowship I did during the summer of 2007. Click on the icon to the right of the print story here.

I spent a night at a San Bernardo mosque while I was reporting on Muslim polygamy in the United States. Note: The people in this slideshow are NOT all polygamous.

It’s just a self portrait of me in the bathroom of an Egyptian restaurant in upstate New York! I was on my way to a Muslim midday prayer service with a 22-year old convert and first wife in a polygamous religious marriage.

The Qur’an says a man may marry up to four wives, and some American converts are practicing the prophet’s lifestyle. So I decided to do a print and radio piece about how it’s done in the United States.

Reporting this story blew all my preconceived notions about Islam and the human heart out of the water. Many of the polygamous wives I interviewed either considered themselves feminists or said their love of God prevented them from feeling jealousy. They were some of the strongest and wisest women I’ve met.

Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece (and comments) here. Or, the slightly longer version on the News21 site.

For a new media journalist, I was pretty damned skeptical of the digital world Second Life. I was one of those who called it a video game (if you’re a new media geek, your hand is probably covering your dropped jaw right about now).

Well, I still don’t think it’s the most ethical of platforms to display journalism, but through my summer religion reporting fellowship, we decided to experiment with it. Multimedia extraordinaire and tech-geek Kara Andrade headed up the project. She produced a panel discussion about faith practices in the virtual world. Avatars were invited to cruise around the tent city we created to show off our religion-oriented stories. My tent, “Plural Living, God Willing,” resembled more of a mosque than a movie theatre mainly because we were holding content so as not to get scooped.

So, despite my initial grumblings about the projet, I wrote about my encounter with one of the avatars in the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent. It reads like a conversation, and if you continue reading on the “Faces of Faith” page, be sure to turn on the virtual soundtrack:

After the panel discussion and a little celebration on the dance floor, I retreated to the “Plural Living, God Willing” tent for a little alone time. I wanted to see if any participants were milling about ripe with questions about Islam and polygamy. Instead, I found Germi Runo in front of the tent pointing a long gun at me. It instantly turned into a sword, which swooped towards ClayW Winkler’s head, shaped like a fox.

“PB: what are you doing there?
PB: what is that gun?”…

read the rest of the story here.

Pastor Drew Phoenix is the first openly practicing transsexual minister within the United Methodist Church (UMC). Through my Carnegie-Knight Fellowship I had this summer, I traveled to Baltimore, Maryland to see how the recently self-outted minister interacted with his parishioners. See for yourself, in this slideshow I produced for NPR’s Bryant Park Project.

When the UMC’s Judicial Council met to decide his fate within the denomination, I worked with NPR’s Bryant Park Project producers to post a story on their blog. Check out the discussion it generated.

One of the stories I worked on through my summer Knight-Carnegie News21 Fellowship aired October 13th.

The 8-minute Saturday Weekend Edition feature was called “American Muslim Family Chooses Polygamy,” a slightly shorter version of the piece I did this summer called “Matters of Love and Faith.”

I encourage folks to listen to the longer version - it gets more personal and has a lot more ambient sound.

There’s been some web discussion about the piece, which I’m happy about. But I didn’t always feel that way. Given the extreme sensitivity of the issue (Islam, polygamy and race, all in one!), I considered disabling online comments on the newsinitiative.org site to prevent a flame war. But so far it’s received positive feedback overall, especially from Muslims.

Special thanks to Sandy Tolan for editing, and for encouraging me to tell the story I felt most passionate about.