Tom Gjelten
Tom Gjelten reports on religion, faith, and belief for NPR News, a beat that encompasses such areas as the changing religious landscape in America, the formation of personal identity, the role of religion in politics, and conflict arising from religious differences. His reporting draws on his many years covering national and international news from posts in Washington and around the world.
In 1986, Gjelten became one of NPR's pioneer foreign correspondents, posted first in Latin America and then in Central Europe. Over the next decade, he covered social and political strife in Central and South America, the first Gulf War, the wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
His reporting from Sarajevo from 1992 to 1994 was the basis for his book Sarajevo Daily: A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege (HarperCollins), praised by the New York Times as "a chilling portrayal of a city's slow murder." He is also the author of Professionalism in War Reporting: A Correspondent's View (Carnegie Corporation) and a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know (W. W. Norton).
After returning from his overseas assignments, Gjelten covered U.S. diplomacy and military affairs, first from the State Department and then from the Pentagon. He was reporting live from the Pentagon at the moment it was hit on September 11, 2001, and he was NPR's lead Pentagon reporter during the early war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. Gjelten has also reported extensively from Cuba in recent years. His 2008 book, Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (Viking), is a unique history of modern Cuba, told through the life and times of the Bacardi rum family. The New York Times selected it as a "Notable Nonfiction Book," and the Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and San Francisco Chronicle all listed it among their "Best Books of 2008." His latest book, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (Simon & Schuster), published in 2015, recounts the impact on America of the 1965 Immigration Act, which officially opened the country's doors to immigrants of color. He has also contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other outlets.
Since joining NPR in 1982 as labor and education reporter, Gjelten has won numerous awards for his work, including two Overseas Press Club Awards, a George Polk Award, and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, he began his professional career as a public school teacher and freelance writer.
-
The filmmaker of Going Clear, which is critical of the church, says the documentary treats the dangers of "blind faith." Scientology officials have hit back with their own public relations effort. -
Pope Francis has maintained high approval ratings even as the Catholic Church struggles with declining membership and the effects of the sexual abuse scandal.
-
A quarter of all countries — home to 75 percent of the world's population — are coping with high levels of religious intolerance, and harassment of Jews has risen for the seventh straight year. -
Many leaders are reluctant to say al-Qaida's or ISIS' terrorism has roots in Islam. But some Muslims say the time has come to acknowledge an extremist strain in the religion, and to combat it. -
The suspect in the shooting deaths of three Muslim students in North Carolina is a self-described anti-theist, what some some experts see as a new extremism developing among some atheists. -
The Senate Intelligence Committee has released a new bipartisan report on the 2012 Benghazi attack. The report finds that the attack was preventable. According to the committee, fault lies with the State Department for failing to provide adequate security or heed warnings about a deteriorating security situation. The committee claims that individuals associated with al-Qaida affiliates participated in the attack, but it stops short of saying the attack was pre-planned. The report also does not implicate the "core" al-Qaida leadership.
-
In the six months since leaks about NSA surveillance began, the intelligence community has struggled to cope with the ramifications of the unauthorized disclosures. With the scandal still reverberating, we take a year-end look at how NSA contractor Edward Snowden got the documents, the scale of what he took, what other categories of documents might still be revealed.
-
Google and five other tech companies sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee supporting legislation to reform NSA surveillance programs. -
The controversy over the National Security Agency's surveillance programs has exposed a problem in the oversight of those programs. Changes to adapt have come so fast that legislators, judges, policymakers and technology firms can't keep up, and major gaps have appeared in policymaking and legislating. -
Cisco Systems warned this week that revenues could fall 10 percent this quarter, partly because disclosures about U.S. government surveillance have created "a level of uncertainty or concern" among customers.
