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.
Women and Children First
Developing a common agenda to make abortion rare.
Obliged to See God (on Flannery O’Connor)
Posts By This Author
And the Survey Says...
The Borderlands of Publishing
Writers who want to let both their faith and their creativity run free are finding a home in the Christian literary underground
The Gospel Truth About Organizing
In the September-October issue, Danny Duncan Collum cuts through paranoid misrepresentations of community organizing to the quiet, hopeful truth: Congregation-based organizing groups are helping pe
Game Changers
Insights on being the first in the family to graduate from college.
'I Kneel to the Desert God': An interview with Richard Rodriguez
Telling Stories True: An Interview with Sara Zarr
Kirkus Reviews calls Sara Zarr's third young adult novel,
Antidotes to Cynicism
The words “hope” and “change” have been taking a beating lately: mocked by some, tarnished in the political sphere by partisan gridlock, seeming like mere illusions to many who need them most. But hope and positive transformation are more profound realities than will ever fit comfortably in the 24-hour news cycle; they germinate in individual hearts and local communities and grow along the long arc of history.
Whether you’re trying to nurture change in your church community, neighborhood, or on a larger scale for our battered, beautiful world, here are some books that can get you started, keep you going, or help you begin again. Because hope, while sometimes down, is never out.
For starters, there’s the new and revised version of Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in Challenging Times, by Paul Rogat Loeb (St. Martin’s Press). Through the stories and voices of dozens of activists from a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs, Loeb names the psychological and cultural barriers that can stop us from becoming involved in issues that we care about and explores how such hindrances can be overcome. While not writing from a faith perspective, Loeb sees the search for meaning and values as key to the activist life, and includes several people of faith among his interviewees. This thoughtfully researched, engaging book is both grounded and inspiring. First published in 1999, it has been updated to include perspectives and insights from the tumultuous first decade of the 21st century.
Resources on Privacy and Facebook
For the casual Facebook user, it can be a little confusing to find all the available options for privacy control that are on Facebook.
5 Books to Spark Your Soul
New and Noteworthy
Spirited Women with Jesus Girls: True Tales of Growing Up Female and Evangelical