(RNS) — David E. Anderson, who was editor of Religion News Service from 1997 to 2004 and a signal voice on the religion beat for two decades as a reporter for United Press International, has died at age 84.

His wife, Margaret Hoven, said Anderson, who had been diagnosed with cancer, died Saturday (Feb. 14).

“He was knowledgeable, spiritual, witty, & compassionate,” wrote his son Erik Anderson in a Monday post on Instagram. “He loved a good book, writing, watching baseball and football, art museums and music. He was a great father, husband, grandfather and friend.”

Erik Anderson said his father died peacefully at his home in Missoula, Montana.

Anderson, known for his trademark short ponytail and his lack of pretense, worked at UPI for 24 years, serving as lead religion writer from 1974 to 1991. Earlier in his career he had covered the federal government and national politics, the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s and debates over legal abortion in the 1980s and 1990s.

Anderson became RNS’ Washington correspondent in 1992 and was promoted to editor in 1997. Then-RNS Editor Joan Connell remarked that Anderson had “the soul of a newsman, the mind of a theologian and a well-earned reputation as a journalist of integrity, intelligence and depth. I can think of no one more qualified to carry on the tradition of excellence that has characterized Religion News Service for more than 60 years.”

Anderson was honored with the Religion News Association’s William A. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.

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In an article about his career before the award ceremony, Anderson remembered interviewing South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu — “one of the most delightful and profound people I’ve ever met,” he said — and writing about the Episcopal Church’s 1976 decision to ordain women and the Catholic bishops’ 1983 pastoral letter on peace. Anderson told an interviewer at the time he covered “too many” church conventions, along with seven presidents and three popes.

In a statement on Monday, Religion News Association leaders called Anderson “a pioneering voice in the religion journalism space” who “helped shape how religion is covered and understood through his decades-long career.”

Former RNS national correspondent Ira Rifkin recalled meeting Anderson on a U.S. tour of Pope John Paul II before they worked together. “He was a legend by the time I got to meet him,” said Rifkin of his future supervisor in an interview. “He just seemed to know everything. And so I just lapped up everything I could learn from him.”

Once he was hired at RNS, said Rifkin, whose beats included Judaism, Islam and other minority religions, Anderson encouraged him to pursue in-depth, complicated stories on his beats that stretched his reporting and RNS’ coverage beyond the everyday breaking news of its daily wire service.

Other religion writers also looked to Anderson as a mentor and colleague.

“He provided opportunities and enthusiastic encouragement to new reporters on the religion beat, such as myself,” Peter Smith, the former religion editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who is now a member of The Associated Press’ global religion team, told RNS. “He recognized that topics for religion coverage ranged from soaring theological speculation to the down-to-earth involvement of religion and religious leaders in politics, wars and ethnic disputes. He guarded against sentimentality and cynicism in religion coverage. He valued in-depth reporting and good writing. It’s no wonder that his work, and that of RNS, is so respected.”

Anderson’s entry into journalism was as a copy boy at his hometown paper, the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. He attended the University of Minnesota in what he called a “glancing acquaintance with higher education” before joining UPI. 

After leaving RNS, he became a consultant to the PBS television show “Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly,” writing a 2005 piece about his former University of Minnesota classmate, “Bob Dylan: American Adam,” in which he noted that the musician would not be boxed in by a particular religious, political or musical label.

“Religious and biblical language has been part of the many public versions of Dylan, whether political, religious, countercultural, or minstrel,” Anderson wrote. “He may well be among the last generation for whom biblical language is a normal part of literary allusion and discourse and not an affectation or a necessary signal of a dogmatic belief system.”

Anderson was a co-founder of the Community of Christ, an ecumenical congregation that started in 1965 in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the American Lutheran Church, one of the groups that later merged to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The congregation lasted five decades, concluding with a final celebratory reunion in 2016.

Larry Rasmussen, professor emeritus at Union Theological Seminary, was for more than a dozen years a part of that community, whose members lived for the most part in a one-mile radius in an inner-city Washington neighborhood and met for services in a former restaurant. Not all of the services were led by an ordained minister, and lay leaders sometimes presided over the Eucharist. “The best liturgies were liturgies written by David,” said Rasmussen. “He often did it with other people. But, I mean, you could always tell his hand there in the worship life of the community through the liturgies that he wrote.”

Nor were the community’s gatherings limited to Sundays, said Rasmussen, then a Christian ethics professor at D.C.’s Wesley Theological Seminary. People who’d heard of the community would ask Anderson about attending its Sunday worship, Rasmussen recalled. “David’s reply would be, ‘It would be even better if you came to the party on Saturday night.’” 

Celeste Kennel-Shank, a recent president of Associated Church Press, a network of Christian media professionals, who grew up in the Community of Christ, said Anderson encouraged her at the start of her journalism career. “At the heart of his way of being a lay leader and a mentor to younger writers was an ability to evoke and encourage the gifts of others,” Kennel-Shenk told RNS.

In her group biography of the congregation, “What You Sow Is a Bare Seed: A Countercultural Christian Community During Five Decades of Change,” Kennel-Shank wrote that Anderson returned from observing the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in Alabama in 1965 with a belief that Christians needed to support the Civil Rights Movement and the student peace movements. “I was convinced that the church — especially an urban church — had to find the proper way to support [justice movements] and yet maintain its own identity as church,” he said.

Jerry Van Marter first met Anderson in 1988, when Marter was newly appointed as the editor of Presbyterian News Service, the journalism arm of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Van Marter, a former pastor, had done some local religion reporting but was new to the national beat. He said that Anderson’s leadership of RNS helped him understand where Presbyterians fit into the larger religious landscape.

Anderson became a friend and mentor, and when they found themselves at the same religious convention, the two would often convene with other journalists at a bar or restaurant when the meetings ended to share stories and laughter. “I always deeply admired him,” said Van Marter, who retired in 2014.

“He was one of the really great ones,” Van Marter told RNS in a phone interview. “He had a healthy irreverence for the stories he covered. But he always took stories seriously and took people at their word.”

In an interview before he was honored for lifetime achievement by the RNA, Anderson spoke about his concern that “focus on strife” — particularly debates over sexuality and gender — left social justice concerns unreported.

“But on a day-to-day level, a lot of people are committed to living faithful lives that do justice to one another and try to overcome the hurts and brokenness in the world,” he said, pausing. “And we forget that sometimes.”

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