Tribune's religion writer wins top national award

Chalk up another top honor for The Salt Lake Tribune's prize-winning religion reporter.

Peggy Fletcher Stack has captured the 2014 American Academy of Religion Award for Best In-Depth News Writing on Religion and the $1,000 prize that goes with it.

According to a news release this week, the judges — who included Laurie Goodstein, national religion correspondent for The New York Times, and Jeffrey Weiss, veteran religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News — lauded Stack's 2013 work as "a sterling example of journalism that combines academic scholarship, careful reporting and sophisticated writing about very sensitive and complicated issues."

Stack's stories also won praise for the "palpable humanity woven through" them. Her entry included a profile of D. Michael Quinn, an excommunicated LDS historian who still believes in Mormonism, the end-of-life decision of the late Brooke Hopkins, a beloved English professor at the University of Utah who was paralyzed in a bicycle accident, and even a Thanksgiving feature about the sin of gluttony.

Second place went to The Huffington Post's Jaweed Kaleem while another Utah reporter, the Deseret News' Matthew Brown, finished third.

The American Academy of Religion, the news release notes, is the world's largest association of academics who research or teach faith-related topics.