Religion Unplugged

🏆 Hello, Adelle: Longtime RNS journalist to receive Lifetime Achievement Award 🔌

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By Bobby Ross Jr. | Religion Unplugged

Best of the best: “Surely there’s someone out there who doesn’t like Adelle M. Banks.

“I just haven’t found that person yet.”

Noting the respect afforded Banks by colleagues and competitors alike, that was the lede I wrote four years ago on her 25th anniversary with Religion News Service.

My statement remains true today.

Award winner: The Religion News Association announced Thursday that Banks, production editor and a national reporter at RNS, will receive its 2024 William A. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award.

Read all the details about the plans to honor Banks at RNA’s 75th anniversary conference in Pittsburgh, set for April 18-20.

Richard Ostling, retired longtime religion writer for Time magazine and The Associated Press, heard the news before I did and emailed me.

“Assume u will mention colleague Adelle Banks,” he said in his quick message.

Indeed!

When I asked him to describe Banks, Ostling replied, “One of the greats on our challenging  beat, who upheld the highest standards of fairness and accuracy.”

Ostling, by the way, was the 2006 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award. See the full list of past winners.

Congrats roll in: RNA President Ken Chitwood praised Banks as “a top-notch example of religion news professionalism” and said he was honored to profile her for the announcement.

Some of the terrific details from that announcement:

Across four decades, Banks covered a swath of stories, from alternative worship services and programs for people with dementia to (the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s) ongoing legacy among sanitation workers on the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Along the way, Banks interviewed Desmond Tutu, Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson, and covered events featuring Billy Graham, Jeremiah Wright, and Bono. She also enjoyed covering the intersection of faith and baseball, including when Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass with 46,000 at the newly built Nationals Park in Washington in 2008. “It was stunning to see the baseball park transformed, with everything bathed in white,” she said, “to see a place known for secular gatherings turned ‘holy.’” 

Reflecting on her twenty-nine years with RNS — almost one-third of the outlet’s existence — she also noted how so many gatherings on the National Mall in Washington, from the March for Life to the Promise Keepers and from the Million Man March led by Louis Farrakhan to the Reason Rally led by prominent American atheists, reminded her that almost every place in the nation, and every story, has a religion angle to it. 

Banks also noted that in her time on the beat, she watched it go from “Protestant-Catholic-Jew to Zoroastrians-atheists-and-beyond.”

Despite the honor of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the RNA and one from the Washington Association of Black Journalists in 2022, Banks said she has no plans to call it quits anytime soon. “There are too many stories to write,” she said, “and so many facets to religion to explore!” 

I look forward to highlighting many more of Banks’ stories in the years ahead. Congrats on the RNA recognition, Adelle!

Read the full column.

This column appears in the online magazine Religion Unplugged.

Photo via Nancy Lovell