About Julia
Julia Duin is a Seattle-based journalist who is Newsweek’s religion correspondent. She has also worked as a full-time reporter or editor for the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Times and other publications. She’s also written extensively for the Washington Post Sunday Magazine for which she came out with a nearly 6,000-word profile on President Trump’s advisor Paula White in November 2017. In 2019, she published a profile of Delilah Rene, the most famous woman in American radio, for the Seattle Times. Julia has also taught journalism at several institutions, including the University of Alaska, the University of Maryland and Union University.
Julia stands in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican while covering the 2005 election of Pope Benedict XVI.
Julia is a graduate of Lewis & Clark College in Portland, where she got her BA in English. She then earned two master’s degrees: One in religion from Trinity School for Ministry (an Episcopal seminary) in 1992 and one in journalism from the University of Memphis in 2014. Julia writes about lots of topics, but she specializes in covering interesting women in the world of religion, such as Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, former Bahraini Ambassador Houda Nonoo and the womenchurch movement in the Roman Catholic Church. She also landed an extensive profile of the elusive Alice Rogoff, former publisher for the Alaska Dispatch, for the Washington Post.
Julia receives an award from the Religion Communicators Council for a piece she wrote for More magazine
She’s a three-time Wilbur Award winner (from the Religion Communicators Council) for her magazine and newspaper features, most recently in 2018. Also in 2018, she was one of five recipients (out of about 720 entrants) of the Iceland Writer’s Retreat Alumni Award. She’s published seven books, the latest being Finding Joy: A Mongolian Woman’s Journey to Christ, the biography of Yanjmaa Jutmaan. Before that, she published In the House of the Serpent Handler: A Story of Faith and Fleeting Fame in the Age of Social Media, a nonfiction work about 20-something Appalachian Pentecostal serpent handlers who use Facebook to publicize their exploits. During the 2014-2015 academic year, she occupied the Snedden Chair as a visiting journalism professor at the University of Alaska/Fairbanks. She also blogs for getreligion.org, belongs to the Religion Newswriters Assocation and the Society of American Travel Writers. She has a 17-year-old daughter, Veeka, who she adores. Julia also likes anything to do with Kurds, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, ballet, sushi, gymnastics, Iceland, Kazakhstan and the Silk Road, movies by Hayao Miyazaki, covenant Christian communities, the Arctic, New Mexico and Alaska, cats, Mongolia, playing the harp and works by Philip Glass.