From the

Official News Magazine of the Diocese of Spokane

‘Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly’ to debut on Spokane public television

the Inland Register

(From the Aug. 22, 2002 edition of the Inland Register)

For its sixth season, Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly makes its debut on KSPS-TV, channel 7 in Spokane.

The half-hour program is hosted by Bob Abernathy. It will air Sundays at 2:30 p.m.

Although other public television stations in the surrounding area have carried the program for some time now, this will be the Spokane debut.

The program was a year in the making for its launch in the fall of 1997.

Abernathy is a former correspondent with NBC-TV. He specialized in religion reporting for part of his four decades with the network before semi-retiring, and then taking up the challenge of the PBS program.

“It’s a great gift to be able to do it,” he told Catholic News Service in an interview that year.

Since then, the program has worked to present a broad range of viewpoints on topical issues of the day, examining those events in light of the ethical and religious considerations often ignored in regular newscasts and other journalistic outlets.

The Catholic Church has been the topic of stories regularly, as have other religions, Christian and otherwise. At least four Catholics serve on the program’s advisory board. Two are laity — George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, editor of Commonweal magazine in New York. The other two are Fathers J. Bryan Hehir, president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, and Virgil Elizondo, founder of the Mexican-American Cultural Center, a national Catholic pastoral institute for leadership and language in San Antonio, Texas. Father Elizondo also serves as director of programming for Catholic Television of San Antonio.

Besides the programming, the broadcast offers a web site which includes study and discussion materials related to broadcasts.

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