Julia doubles as a senior writer for The Washington Times, covering events ranging from inner city ministries in Brooklyn, N.Y. and a church/state conflict in northeastern Alabama to a famous child abuse case in eastern Washington state and the 2005 election of Pope Benedict XVI.
Julia has won several national awards for her religion reporting. She has covered Pope John Paul II, the Lambeth Conference for Anglican Bishops in England, religious persecution in Egypt and Jordan and the millennial celebrations in Israel. She has covered other international events as well, including events in Italy, France, Canada, India, Greece, Spain, Iceland, Guatemala, Ecuador and the Caribbean, which is why she is fluent in French, conversant in Spanish and German and speaks portions of Kurdish, Arabic and Italian.
A native of Baltimore, Julia has been to nearly every state in the union, as her travels started at the age of six weeks when her family moved to Hawaii. She received her bachelor's degree at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., and her master's degree at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a seminary near Pittsburgh. She began magazine writing in high school, and gained national recognition as a correspondent for evangelical publications such as "Christianity Today" and "Charisma."
She is not afraid to tackle tough topics and her first two books, which were on single Christians and sexuality, landed her on numerous radio and TV shows. She demonstrated her versatility in writing styles by producing a children's book as her third work: "Waiting for True Love," a collection of 19th century fairytales that have a message. It was published in May 1998 and reflects her concern that children receive the kind of literature that inspires them to live noble lives. The book has since been renamed "Knights, Maidens and Dragons: Six medieval tales of virtue and valor" and can be purchased on Amazon.com. Her fourth book, "Power and Desire," which awaits publication, is about the rise and fall of the charismatic movement - one of the most powerful religious movements to ever shape the American landscape. She has also finished a children's book about Kurds, called "The Kurdish Princess" and is working on a sixth book about why so many evangelical Christians are boycotting church. It is due out in early 2008.
Julia likes to ski, hike, bike and play the Celtic harp. She pursued her harp studies at a worldwide gathering for folk harpists in 2001 in Edinburgh and has attended many other harp conferences. She has even won a few blue ribbons in harp competitions. She also has a soft spot for homeless cats, of which she has adopted three. In 1999, she and a group of Washington Times staffers volunteered their time tutoring inner-city first-graders on how to read. She has taught journalism as an adjunct at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., and has been nominated three times by her newspaper for a Pulitzer Prize. Her two brothers and parents live in the Pacific Northwest, a lovely part of the globe where Julia spent 11 years before moving around the country in search of the Perfect Journalism Job. She is still searching for that, but at least she's working out of Washington, DC, the site of the world's largest concentration of journalists.