Christian school mural, 1-story high, on Livonia Ave, Brooklyn

After a short trial period, A Journey through NYC religions was formally launched 6 months ago today– July 9, 2010!

And today we are #1 for searches on “NYC religion” or “NYC religions” on Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Altavista, Lycos, Baidu (Chinese), and Yandex (Russian)!

Sometime today or tomorrow, we will register our 390,000th viewer.

However, we are still tiny compared to the giants. But with your help, we are making an impact by showing objectively, lovingly and excitingly what you are doing. We hope that we help people never forget the tremendous faith-based compassion for “the least of these” that exists and is growing in our city.

In the last six months, we have published 78 articles, 30 videos, 35 maps, 170 briefs about faith-based organizations, and 76 feature photos. We published our first magazine flip-style booklet (“The Chapel. The great heart of The Bowery Mission”). We had an exclusive video coverage of lighting The Angel Tree ceremony at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We have covered all five boroughs and 19 community districts.

A Journey has published several in-depth series. We just finished our 12-part series on “The Making of Postsecular NYC. The Manhattan Evangelicals.”

We also did a path-breaking 4-part series on Muslims in NYC along with a 10-part op-ed series on the Ground Zero mosque controversy. While other media were reporting that NYC had 99 mosques, we noted that we had visited at least 175 mosques personally and had interviewed mosque leaders at about 40 of those mosques.  We got praise for our objective and fuller coverage from Muslims around the world. We even had the satisfaction of hand-delivering a message of greetings from an Australian Muslim leader to iman in the Bronx.

More than any other media, A Journey allowed more religious leaders and more diversity of religious leaders with congregations around Ground Zero to share their voices with the city in our 10-part op-ed series.

We were also the first local media to commemorate Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial but important report on the Black family. We were the only local media that covered its religious dimensions.

We also published a series called “The ‘Mixed Veggies’ of Sunset Park” and a photo series called “Compassion for the Immigrants.”

Our magazine also featured on religious organizations, events, and leaders in Staten Island, Flatbush, Sunset Park, Jamaica, Manhattan, Astoria, East Village, Lower East Side, Woodside, and Flushing#mce_temp_url#. We covered NYC’s religious history, the pioneering photojournalist Jacob Riis, social service provision and education by faith-based organizations, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Brazilians, Africans, Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Anglos, Middle Easterners, Messianic Jews, Taoist priests, Hassidic rappers, Chinese evangelical rappers, the Mexican holiday honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe, Memorial Day, and a host of other organizations, leaders, and ethnicities.

Confucius opened his Book of Analects, “When friends come from afar, isn’t that delightful?” We have received hundreds of your comments, emails, phone calls, tweets, Facebook messages and the like. We are delighted with your encouragement, ideas, information, and criticisms. You are the destination of all our journeys, and we are deeply impacted by your hospitality.

And you have shared with us a lot of fun, good eats, and adventure. To the churches with great fried chicken luncheons, to the Chinese pastor who invited us to work off the calories by shooting a few hoops in Flushing, to the proprietors who offered us haircuts and braiding at faith-based businesses, to the wise counselor at a Flatbush faith-based bookstore, to the educators who showed us their schools, to the preachers who rehearsed their upcoming sermons, to tremendous musicians in the congregations, to the whole congregations who prayed over us at their Sunday services, to the rabbis who shared kosher food and disks of cantors, to the record producers who shared their music, to the bride and grooms who welcomed us weddings in progress, to the mourners that allowed us to mourn with them at funerals, to the tour guides of temples, mosques, synagogues and churches, to the chefs at several faith-based restaurants and catering services, to the pastor who blessed the motorcyclists (and us), to the compassionate people serving the poor, to the gardeners at faith-based gardens and to many, many more—

Thank you!!!

As the prophet Habakkuk of Israel said, we will wait upon our watchtower to see what the Lord will say and do!