Tim Townsend

Writer and Producer

United States

I'm a writer and podcast producer in Washington, DC.

I've produced the improv comedy podcasts, "Ark," found recordings of Noah and his wife interviewing animal couples aboard the ark, and "Optophobia," a deep dive into made-up conspiracy theories. I also write a newsletter on fake cocktail origin stories.

In 2014, HarperCollins published my book, "Mission at Nuremberg: An American Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis," which Kirkus said "authoritatively addresses the excruciating moral and religious issues confronting wartime chaplains...”

I was a reporter for many years, first covering financial news for the Wall Street Journal and then covering religion for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I've also written freelance pieces for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone among other publications. In 2005, 2011 and 2013, I was named Religion Reporter of the Year by the Religion News Association, the highest honor on the “God beat” at American newspapers.

Since 2013 I've been an editor at a think tank, a history app, an edtech company and a law firm. I hold master’s degrees from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Yale Divinity School.

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Portfolio
Ark Podcast
Ark

In 2018, archeology students from the Antiquities Institute at the University of Tehran who were excavating a cave system near Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey uncovered 26 large ancient ceramic vases. Inside were reels of 5,000-year-old audio tape-a clear and complete recording of Noah and his wife Naamah interviewing thousands of pairs of animals aboard...

Optophobia Podcast
Optophobia

Optophobia is the fear of opening one’s eyes. Our show is dedicated to encouraging you — our listeners — to move beyond that fear. To solve riddles they don’t want us to unriddle. To investigate supposedly ironclad truths. To unearth evidence, buried for so long they believed it would stay buried.

HarperCollins
2014
Mission at Nuremberg

Detailed, harrowing, and emotionally charged, MISSION AT NUREMBERG is the story of Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke, a farm kid from Missouri who at age 50 volunteered to be a World War II chaplain. When the fighting was over, Gerecke was asked to minister to the 21 imprisoned Nazi leaders awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. A nuanced reflection on the nature of morality and sin, the price of empathy, and the limits of forgiveness.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
06/09/2013
Two Stories About Faith and Grief

Story 1: Window for ‘normal’ bereavement is narrowed to 2 weeks in new manual for diagnosis of mental illness. Story 2: A woman’s husband and sons lost their way, their lives on a hike, she remains guided by belief

WSJ
09/09/2011
Can We Forgive?

I first met Father Patrick Ryan 10 years ago in the shadow of the World Trade Center. I was a reporting assistant for this newspaper and was interviewing anyone willing to stop for a minute. Fr. Ryan had been scheduled to take part in a photo op with then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Rolling Stone
10/25/2001
The First Hours

The first thing I saw in the parking lot across Liberty Street from the South Tower was luggage. Burned luggage. A couple of cars were on fire. Half a block east, a man who'd been working out in a South Tower fitness club was walking barefoot over shards of glass, wearing only a white towel around his waist; he still had shaving cream on the left side of his face.

The Atlantic
11/07/2011
A Broadway Revival Fit for Occupy Wall Street

Two weeks before Godspell opened off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater on May 17, 1971, 12,000 protesters were arrested in Washington while chanting "The whole world is watching," and demanding that Congress ratify a "people's treaty" to end the Vietnam War. When the curtain goes up on the show's first Broadway revival today, its actors will look out at an America similarly disenchanted.

Washington Post
04/10/2015
Military Chaplains Are Finding New Ways to Treat Vets With Invisible Wounds

War is such a constant in the American experience that most of us are all too familiar with the evolving names we have given its emotional consequences in the past century: Shell shock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion, and most recently, post-traumatic stress disorder.

Religion & Politics
08/23/2016
Aboard Noah's Ark, in a Kentucky Corn Field

Noah's Ark has a great kitchen. Above the butcher block countertops, gleaming knives and a pizza peel adorn the wall. Garlic cloves hang from a ceiling lattice, while loaves of bread sit on cooling racks.

CNN
04/13/2014
Forgiving the unforgivable in Rwanda

When the killing began in earnest, Steven Gahigi fled his home in Rwanda to neighboring Burundi. By the time he returned the next year, 52 members of his family were dead. He had nothing: no family, no home. He entered a Christian seminary and began visiting Rilima Prison to offer spiritual counsel the thousands of génocidaires, the men who wielded the machetes. It was in Rilima that Gahigi met the band of 15 men who killed his sister.

The Daily Beast
03/28/2014
The Biblical Roots of Darren Aronofsky's New ‘Noah’ Movie

The first few chapters of Genesis contain some of the strangest prose in the Bible, but the big reveal is a God making peace with man's sinful nature. In the beginning, the earth was a formless void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, according to Genesis.