Award-winning TV series on religion and ethics to air final show
The television series Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly will end its run of 20 years on PBS on February 24.
Bob Abernethy, a broadcast journalist who is a member of the United Church of Christ denomination, started the series and hosted it.
Writing for the Christian Century in 2000, Abernethy said religious pluralism presented “the greatest challenge of all the thousand or more stories we have reported.”
Pluralism creates questions such as “How do I remain committed to the truth of my own faith and, at the same time, learn to understand and respect the truths of others? Are there many paths up God’s mountain, any one of which will lead to the summit?”
Those were the kinds of questions he asked on the show and pursued in the interviews collected in a 2007 book, The Life of Meaning, which Abernethy edited.
“Since 1997, Bob has promoted intelligent, insightful examinations of faith issues on American public television,” said Douglas F. Cannon, then president of the Religion Communications Congress, in giving Abernethy an award in 2010.
WNET, the television station that produced the series, announced that the show’s website, including its archives, would still be available at pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics.
Donna Williams, a spokeswoman for WNET, wrote that most television stations around the country were no longer airing the series on their primary channels but rather through multicast channels available via cable services. “The multicast channels have fewer viewers, and the costs and benefits didn’t really make sense for WNET any longer.”
Prizes the series received included top honors from the Religion News Association, as well as awards for television and online journalism on any topic.
This article was edited on January 17.
