• Home
  • Archives
  • Profile

Bill's Faith Matters blog

Bill Tammeus writes about religion and ethics.

Home Archives Profile

Bill's brief biography

BillcolpixBill Tammeus is the former Faith section columnist for The Kansas City Star. He came to The Star in 1970 as a reporter, spent nearly 27 years on the paper’s editorial page, mostly writing the daily "Starbeams" column, and then moved his column in March 2004 to the weekly Faith section. He took formal retirement in mid-2006 but continued as Faith section columnist on a freelance basis until mid-November 2008. In addition to this daily blog, Bill writes columns for The Presbyterian Outlook and, from March 2010 until September 2018, wrote columns for the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter. He also writes a monthly column for Flatland, KCPT-TV's digital magazine.

A 1967 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, Bill was a member of the Star staff that won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. His many other awards include several from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and the American Academy of Religion, in addition to receiving the 2005 Wilbur Award given each year to the best religion column in the country. He received the David Steele Distinguished Writer Award from the Presbyterian Writers Guild in 2003 and is the author of A Gift of Meaning, published by the University of Missouri Press in 2001, and co-author of They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust, published in September 2009 by the University of Missouri Press. He's also the author of Visitation: Celebrating a Century of Faith, published by a division of Kansas City Star books. It's available from Visitation Catholic Parish of Kansas City. In 2014 he published Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans, and in 2015 he co-authored, with the Rev. Dr. Paul T. Rock, Jesus, Pope Francis and a Protestant Walk into a Bar: Lessons for the Christian Church. He published The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith in 2016. And his latest book, published in January 2021, is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety.

 

Bill is past president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. He's an elder at Second Presbyterian Church in Kansas City. He’s married to Marcia Tammeus. Between them they have six children and eight grandchildren.

My Photo
Who is Bill? I'm the former Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star. For a more detailed bio, look under the "Check this out" headline below. While you're here, I invite you to explore the archives, too. You can follow me on Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/billtammeus.bsky.social.

My books

  • Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety
  • The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith
  • Jesus, Pope Francis and a Protestant Walk Into a Bar: Lessons for the Christian Church
  • Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans
  • They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust
  • My Visitation Parish book
  • A Gift of Meaning

Recent Posts

  • Commemorating some of history's explosive events on 7-16
  • America's racial sins require broad measures to repair the damage
  • One moral outrage after another requires our response
  • Modern antisemitism finds yet another path to spread its hatred
  • Yellowstone National Park: A river (and lots of religion) runs through it
  • Church-state barrier questions arise anew under Trump
  • The idea of forgiveness may be more complicated than you thought
  • Lots of help is available for our nation's many caregivers
  • Mark Twain's cutting criticisms may have hid his religious faith
  • More examples of destructive behavior wound religion's reputation

Check this out

  • Anti-Judaism in Christian History
  • Bill's books
  • Bill's brief biography
  • Boards on which I serve or have served
  • Get my blog by e-mail
  • How to comment
  • My Flatland columns
  • My National Catholic Reporter columns
  • My Presbyterian Outlook columns
  • Tammeus-Barnet conversation
  • The Bible and homosexuality
  • The Holocaust Book Project
  • Where's Bill speaking?

Archives

  • July 2025
  • June 2025
  • May 2025
  • April 2025
  • March 2025
  • February 2025
  • January 2025
  • December 2024
  • November 2024
  • October 2024

More...

View Bill Tammeus's profile on LinkedIn
See how we're connected

Search

Blog powered by Typepad

.

  • .
  • Bill's 'Faith Matters' Blog •
  • Powered by Typepad
Top