RECORDED 8/31/15: I was excited to speak with Susan Katz Miller about her writing and work on embracing two religious identities in a family.
She is the author of Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family. We talk about “post-authenticity” and “bringing the blur” and the parallels between the mixed race experience and the interfaith experience. You can listen to the episode here or download it from itunes.-Heidi Durrow
Author and journalist Susan Katz Miller is both an interfaith child and an interfaith parent. Her father is Jewish, her mother is Protestant: she grew up in Reform Judaism. After marrying a Protestant, Miller and her husband decided to raise their children in both religions, in a community of interfaith families. Miller served as Board Co-Chair of the Interfaith Families Project of Greater Washington DC.
Miller graduated from Brown University, and began her journalism career at Newsweek in New York. After working in the Los Angeles and Washington bureaus, she moved to Dakar, Senegal for three years. While there, she wrote travel pieces for the New York Times, was tear-gassed in the streets while covering an election, interviewed the President of Senegal for Newsweek International, and wrote Christian Science Monitor pieces from Benin, Togo, the Gambia, and Sierra Leone. On returning to the States, she became a US Correspondent for the British weekly magazine New Scientist. She then spent three years freelancing from northeastern Brazil. After her two children were born, she and her husband settled in the Washington, DC, area, and she founded the first blog devoted to interfaith family communities and interfaith identity,onbeingboth.com, and began blogging at Huffington Post Religion.
Miller’s writing has also appeared in Time, Slate, Utne Reader, Discover, Science, National Wildlife, Health, Moment, Jewcy.com, interfaithfamily.com, and many other publications. Miller studied photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and her photographs have been published in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and International Wildlife. Her work on interfaith families has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, NPR’sHere & Now, NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, on the PBS program Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and on HuffPost Live, and in dozens of other media outlets. Miller also writes for the Jewish Daily Forward‘s interfaith relationship advice column, The Seesaw.
