Cathleen Falsani


Cathleen Falsani is an American journalist and author. She specializes in the intersection of religion/spirituality/faith and culture, and has been a staff writer for the Chicago Sun Times, The Chicago Tribune, Sojourners magazine, Religion News Service, and the Orange County Register in Southern California. Falsani is the author of several non-fiction books on religious, spiritual, and cultural issues.
She was the 2005 Religion Writer of the Year, as awarded by the Religion Newswriters Association, and has twice been a finalist for the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year award.

Early life and education

Falsani was born on September 25, 1970. She graduated from Wheaton College in 1992, and holds masters degrees in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and in theological studies from Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. She was born into a Roman Catholic family of Irish and Italian descent, but her parents left the Catholic church when she was 10 years old. With her younger brother, she was reared as an evangelical Protestant from grade school forward, largely in a Southern Baptist church in Fairfield, Connecticut. Falsani attended Christian Heritage School, an evangelical Christian prep school in Trumbull, Connecticut, graduating in 1988. She pursued undergraduate studies at Wheaton College in Illinois, the evangelical Christian school that also counts the late Rev. Billy Graham among its notable alumni.

Career

Falsani is the author of ', a collection of 32 spiritual profiles of famous "culture shapers" including Bono, Elie Wiesel, Anne Rice, Hakeem Olajuwon. Falsani's first book, it was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2006, launching Sarah Crichton Books, a new imprint of the publisher. It was named among the best non-fiction books of 2006 by the Christian Science Monitor.
Falsani joined the Chicago Sun-Times in September 2000, and served as the paper's religion reporter until 2007, continuing on as its religion columnist until Jan 13, 2010. She wrote, a spiritual memoir and travelogue and ', both published by Zondervan.
Falsani is a correspondent and columnist for Religion News Service and a featured writer and correspondent for Sojourners. She also was Web Editor and Director of New Media for Sojourners from 2011 to 2012. Cathleen was the staff "faith and values" columnist for The Orange County Register from 2013 to 2014.

Interview with Obama on religion

In March 2004, Falsani conducted an interview with Barack Obama. At the time of the interview, Obama was a state senator from Illinois and democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in the 2004 election. The interview focused on Obama's religious beliefs and spiritual predilections.

Personal

The granddaughter of Italian and Irish immigrants, Falsani was born and raised in Connecticut. Since 1997, Falsani has been married to Maurice Possley, the Pulitzer Prize–winning former Chicago Tribune investigative reporter and New York Times bestselling author. The couple has a son adopted from Malawi in 2010, and they live in Laguna Beach, California.

Books