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Email required Address never made public. Name required. Journalists are sometimes compared to the horses in Black Beauty —all we want is a nice master, a little hay to lie down on, and a sugar cube once in a while.
We got that and a lot more from Katharine Graham, now immortalized by Meryl Streep in the film The Post , who until her death in was the best proprietor imaginable. While more publicly identified with The Washington Post , she would hold monthly editorial lunches at our plush headquarters at Madison Avenue and later W. Dinosaurs still roamed the media earth, and the Grahams were satisfied with modest profits at best. And we were a distant number two, well ahead of U.
Now that magazine is perilously thin and was recently sold. Last week, workers replaced the Time Inc sign outside its downtown Manhattan headquarters with Meredith, an Iowa-based company with little interest in news. In the rest of the country, news-starved subscribers, unsatisfied by a limp local paper and a half hour of John Chancellor, ripped through every issue, happy to have a cogent way of catching up on everything they had missed during the previous week.
Of course technology—first television, then the internet—changed that habit. A tardy summary of the news was no longer as useful. And with the advent of a hour news cycle a decade ago, online newspapers, smaller magazines, and cable-news networks began to eat our analytical lunch.
Newsweek hired black journalists early—and Mark Whitaker became the first African American editor of a major American publication in —but the magazine was infamously late in promoting women in the s.
With short hair and large glasses, Anne was now in her late 20s but looked younger. She said she rarely had enough money for small luxuries like coffee.
We chatted with a mutual friend while we waited for her husband, Caleb, who also worked for a ministry: the International Business Times , the flagship publication of an eponymous online news company that would, nine months later, become the new owner of Newsweek magazine.
When he arrived, he shook my hand and, without meeting my eyes, sat beside his wife. For the last year and a half, Caleb said, he and Anne had worked at Community ministries while living in San Francisco on visas they received for Caleb to attend Olivet University , a small Bible college Jang founded in Caleb was enrolled at Olivet, but he rarely had time to study.
Instead, he told me, he translated articles from English into Chinese for 10 to 12 hours each weekday, and commonly worked weekends. I asked him how much he was making. His hand trembled as he picked it up. He and Anne looked at each other. Two days later, Newsweek returned to print with a splash, alleging—to much acclaim and debate—that it had identified the mysterious creator of the electronic currency bitcoin.
I tried to reach Jang through Olivet, which he founded , and two other organizations he still officially leads. A Mother Jones reporter also visited an Olivet satellite campus in downtown Manhattan where Jang preaches to deliver written questions, but Jang never responded.
IBT is hardly the first media company with close ties to a religious group. Anne began attending off-campus Bible study twice a day. Before long, her tutor told her she was ready to become an evangelist herself. Anne was sent to a nearby college, where she led Bible study sessions in a house close to campus.
She soon found herself devoting nine hours a day to Apostolos: three hours of Bible study, three hours of evangelizing, and three hours of praying. The practice, another former member told me, is an expectation throughout the Community that leaves little time for anything else.
Anne dropped out of school and, at the direction of a group leader, moved to Beijing to recruit other students into the Community. She shared a small house with members of Apostolos and another group that Jang founded, Young Disciples of Jesus. To survive, they borrowed money from their friends and families. When those funds dried up, Anne decided to apply for a bank loan, telling the loan officer that she needed it to pay her college tuition. She gave the money to Apostolos, then asked her parents to help pay off the loan.
Parables related by the pastor appeared side by side with the teachings of Jesus and other biblical characters. The lessons all seemed to lead toward some larger revelation. Susan Chua, another former Community member, gave me a similar account. Indeed, every ex-Community member I spoke to either said they believed Jang was the Second Coming or said they were aware that others believed it. But Jang himself has repeatedly denied that he is the Second Coming and discouraged his followers from using the term.
I asked Anne whether she ever heard anyone in the Community publicly refer to Jang as Christ. As a child, he often retreated to the mountains near his home, where he spent long hours praying.
On one such occasion, Jang recalled during a Bible study session in San Francisco in February , he looked up to find a young man who looked much like himself on his knees beside him.
This is the supernatural power. I came out of myself, and I can see myself. Soon, such out-of-body experiences became a regular occurrence.
My head would hit the ceiling. Once, while other children played at recess, Jang stood watching a balloon float into the sky and wondered if he, too, would one day float up to heaven. But around the time he founded the Community in , his views shifted. Christians, he has said, should not focus on their reward in heaven; instead, they should work to create heaven on Earth, building institutions that will remake the world in the image of the church.
Now 64, Jang has a kind face, with perpetually bemused eyes and a thick, dark head of meticulously coiffed hair. In , a Japanese court resolved an almost six-year-long libel case that Christian Today , a Jang-founded website, filed against Makoto Yamaya, a Salvation Army major.
Yamaya had claimed the Community was part of the Unification Church and that Christian Today had mind-controlled its employees; the court found that these charges had no basis.
But it also found that Jang joined a Unification Church student group as a young man, eventually rising to the rank of executive director of another church-affiliated student organization.
He then went on to a church-run theological institute, and helped manage the transition when it became Sun Moon University in , subsequently leaving the church. Jang now rejects the Unification Church.
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