Cathleen Falsani biography

Cathleen Falsani is both the religion columnist and religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper, where since 2000 she has covered her diverse "God beat" from locations as far afield as Vatican City, Vedic City, Ireland, Germany, Mexico, the West Indies, the West Wing, the Playboy Mansion and the dugout at Wrigley Field. In 2005, the Religion Newswriters Association honored her as the James O. Supple Religion Writer of the Year. Cathleen has written her weekly column on spirituality and popular culture for the Sun-Times since 2001 and Universal Press Syndicate has distributed the column since 2004. Her work has also appeared in Rolling Stone and Christianity Today magazines, Religion News Service, the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Tribune.

Cathleen's first book, The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People, a collection of 32 spiritual profiles of glitterati and literati including Bono of U2, Sen. Barack Obama, Ann Rice, Billy Corgan, Melissa Etheridge, Hakeem Olajuwon, Sandra Bernhard, Studs Terkel, Hugh Hefner and Elie Wiesel, was released to critical acclaim in March 2006 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

A graduate of Wheaton College, Cathleen also holds a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University as well as a master's degree in theological studies from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. She also has been a Gralla Fellow in Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, and was the 1996 Stoody-West Fellow in Religious Journalism. In 2003, she was the third-place winner of the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year Award, and was the 2000 winner of the Peter Lisagor Award for Feature Writing from the Chicago Headline Club.

A Connecticut Yankee by birth and a Cubs fan by osmosis, she has lived in the Chicago area since 1988.