Editor, Sojourners magazine

Julie has been a member of the Sojourners magazine editorial staff since 1990. For the last several years she has edited the award-winning Culture Watch section of the magazine. In her time at Sojourners she has written about a wide variety of political and cultural topics, from the abortion debate to the working class blues. She has coordinated in-depth coverage of Flannery O’Connor, campaign finance reform, Howard Thurman, the labor movement, and much more.

She studied English literature at Ohio State University and has an M.T.S. (focused on language and narrative theology) from Boston University and an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from George Mason University.

Julie grew up on a farm in the northwest corner of Ohio. She has been fascinated by the power of religious expression in and through culture since she can remember. Obsessively listening to her older sister’s copy of the Jesus Christ Superstar cast recording when she was 10 was an especially crystallizing experience. In addition, Julie’s mother often argued about doctrine and the Bible and took her at least weekly to the public library, both of which were useful background for Julie’s current work.

She lives in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Washington, D.C. and is a member of St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church (where she had an unlikely four-year reign as rummage sale czarina). Her personal interests overlap nicely with her professional ones: Music, books, reading entertainment, culture, and religion writing, art, architecture, TV, films, and knowing more celebrity gossip than is probably wise or healthy. To make up for all that screen time, she tries to grow things, hike occasionally, and wonder often at the night sky.

Some Sojourners articles by Julie Polter:

Replacing Songs with Silence
Censorship, banning, blacklists: What’s lost when governments stifle musical expression?

Extreme Community
A glimpse of grace and abundance from - of all things - reality TV.

The Cold Reaches of Heaven
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Bill Phillips talks about his faith.

Just Stop It
Daring to believe in a life without logos. An interview with journalist Naomi Klein.

Called to Stand with Workers

Women and Children First
Developing a common agenda to make abortion rare.

Obliged to See God (on Flannery O’Connor)

Posts By This Author

The Vagina Dialogues

by Julie Polter 06-01-2012
We've come a long way, baby. Or have we?

It’s profoundly disheartening to see people in political leadership and positions of cultural influence whose understanding of women’s anatomy—and that it is possessed by human beings, not mythical prototype “whores,” “virgins,” or “martyr mothers”—hasn’t progressed much past pre-adolescent hooting at drawings on the boys’ room walls.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not actually looking for excuses to chat about vaginas or hormones with strangers or friends. I’m fairly comfortable with prudish reserve in daily life, especially when the alternative is coarse humor that’s usually not very funny. Then again, if you watch TV sitcoms or contemporary comedy films, hearing the word “vagina” outside of a gynecologist’s office isn’t the surprise it once was. As Ann Hornaday noted in her March 13 essay in The Washington Post, the word is now so prevalent, “it’s hard to believe that, just six years ago, Grey’s Anatomy producer Shonda Rhimes made ABC standards and practices executives so nervous about the word that she substituted the far more playful ‘va-jay-jay.’”

By contrast, when Eve Ensler’s “Vagina Monologues” debuted in 1996 it was controversial theater for a number of reasons, the most obvious being the first word in the title. The play was groundbreaking in its forthright exploration of women’s experiences—the brutal, the ecstatic, the ambivalent—in relation to women’s distinctive anatomy. It helped many women reclaim the language for their own bodies in the public sphere, rather than being limited to euphemisms and crudities deployed by others. The play opened up more space to talk about sexual abuse and violence against women, a step in weakening the shame that is part of any abuser’s arsenal.

Mother's Day: Supporting All Women

by Julie Polter 05-09-2012
Stop Violence Against Women word cloud, mypokcik / Shutterstock.com

Stop Violence Against Women word cloud, mypokcik / Shutterstock.com

Whenever there’s talk about honoring mothers and motherhood, I’m always looking for how we as individuals and a society will support the women—of any race, creed, or orientation--who have to scoop up their children and run for their lives or who feel forced to decide between enduring emotional and physical abuse and feeding their children.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) has been one way that our country has acknowledged and worked to stop the abuse that occurs every day. As Lisa Sharon Harper wrote on this blog last week, the House of Representative’s version of VAWA would exclude certain groups from its protections.

Nourishing Words

by Julie Polter 05-01-2012
Sidebar to "Work of Many Hands"

Sidebar to "Work of Many Hands"

Fictional Truths

by Julie Polter 05-01-2012
Four novels with nothing in common except storytelling done well.

Four novels with nothing in common except storytelling done well.

New & Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 04-01-2012

Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation, by Gerardo Marti; The Forgotten Bomb; Let It Burn; Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis.

New & Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 03-01-2012

Homies and Hermanos: God and Gangs in Central America; The Amish; Simplifying the Soul: Lenten Practices to Renew Your Spirit; The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood. 

Passages and Pilgrimages

by Julie Polter 02-01-2012

Why sometimes life can seem like one big road trip.

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 02-01-2012

Widow, Queen, Lover, Warrior; Faith in the Struggle; The Message; ‘Do Not Cast Me Away.’

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 01-01-2012

Free South Africa, To Love More Deeply, When Disaster Strikes, Wrestling with Tradition.

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 12-01-2011

Joking for Jesus, The Courage to Love, Body Meets Soul, Rethinking War.

‘Say, Say the Light'

by Julie Polter 12-01-2011
A shadowed figure stands looking at the galaxy.

Jeremy Thomas / Unsplash

EVERY FEW YEARS I rediscover a song by R.E.M., “You are the Everything.” It juxtaposes despair over the state of things (“Sometimes I feel like I can't even sing / I'm very scared for this world”) with deceptively simple memories: A starry sky. The sensations of a random moment long ago. The feel of our own bodies. The sight of someone beloved (“I look at her and I see the beauty / of the light of music”).

This song gives me cathartic comfort when the news seems too much to bear. It doesn't erase famine, wars, rumors of wars, a friend's bad pathology report, or my concern over the body politic. But my position shifts; I anchor myself to the beauty of creation, to the miracle of being an embodied soul, to the fragile graces of human relationship, and to the One who brought it all into being. Thin guy wires of memory and spirit steady me against sweeping currents of events, so that I can focus on them, yet not drown.

Action Heroes

by Julie Polter 11-01-2011

When spurred on by God and conscience, there's no telling what trouble you might get into.

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 09-01-2011

Life Stories

Alison Owings interviewed members of 16 tribal nations for the oral history Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans, capturing intimate, engaging perspectives from long-overlooked communities. An inspiring antidote to the ignorance many non-Indigenous people may unwittingly hold about contemporary Native American lives. Rutgers University Press

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 08-01-2011

Love Provokes

Three Books On...

by Julie Polter 06-13-2011

... Voices from Africa

Holding On to Hope

by Julie Polter 06-13-2011

Six books on the ongoing search for peace and justice in the Middle East and beyond.

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 06-03-2011

Julie Polter reviews current books and films.

5 Green Reads For Your Summer Reading List

by Julie Polter 04-25-2011

While Earth Day and Good Friday being on the same date this year was a relatively rare alignment, thankfully for many people the everyday companionship of religious belief and care for creation i

New and Noteworthy

by Julie Polter 03-01-2011

Reviews of The Living Wisdom of Howard Thurman, Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made, Somebody's Daughter, and This Sacred Moment.

Sing Without Ceasing

by Julie Polter 03-01-2011

For nearly six decades, Mavis Staples has been bringing the gospel truth to song.