c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-When the 1995 Pulitzer Prizes were handed out Tuesday (April 9) religion was a big winner.

Newsday religion writer Bob Keeler won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting for a year-long look at a Roman Catholic parish on Long Island, Columbia University School of Journalism announced.

And in the arts category, Jack Miles, a book columnist and editorial writer for The Los Angeles Times, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for”God: A Biography”(Vintage), a literary analysis of the central figure of the Bible.

Both Keeler and Miles spent time studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood before choosing journalism as a profession.”I can tell you, it certainly made me nervous that they were meeting to decide this prize on Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the beginning of Passover,”a jubilant Keeler observed in a telephone interview from the Newsday newsroom.

Keeler, 52, spent most of his 25-year career at Newsday as a political writer. But, he said, the rigors of covering Republican Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s last electoral campaign led him to change to the religion beat in 1993.

Keeler won the Pulitzer Prize for a year-long look at the life of St. Brigid’s, a Roman Catholic parish in Westbury, N.Y.

A left-leaning, multicultural Long Island parish, St. Brigid’s is a melange of classes and cultures-Haitian, Filipino, Hispanic, Anglo. The seven stories Keeler wrote over the course of the year examined the life of the parish and the souls of its members.”There are parishes and there are parishes-and to visit some of them would be like spending 40,000 years in purgatory,”said Keeler, who described himself as a”serious Catholic”who reads theology and attends church regularly. He had compiled a list of seven churches to choose from, but the warmth of St. Brigid’s captured his imagination.

Keeler said he was first attracted to St. Brigid’s when he visited the parish to hear dissident priest and anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan speak on the life Thomas Merton, the late Trappist monk and mystic.”I’m a Merton freak,”he conceded.”I could feel the vibes, I could feel the love coming from this community. We weren’t looking for scandal or disruption, we just wanted to see the way they lived their faith.” But Keeler acknowledged that writing about the lives of the people of St. Brigid’s was just as challenging as covering the rough-and-tumble of politics.”Writing this series helped me to pray a little bit better,”he said.”The act of writing was tough. I felt like I was typing with boxing gloves on. And I’d find myself praying, `Hey, pal, you got me into this. Now get me out.'”

MJP END CONNELL