- Date Of Birth: 27 October 1928
- Date Of Death: 22 March 2021
- Spouse: Mary Eleanor (m. 1953)
- Occupation: Clergyperson and journalist
- City: Elmhurst
- State: Illinois
James McKendree Wall (27 October 1928 – 22 March 2021) was an American Methodist minister and journalist who wrote extensively on religion in the United States.
Wall was born on October 27, 1928, in Monroe, Georgia. He received an undergraduate degree in journalism and a Master of Divinity degree from Emory University, as well as a Master of Arts degree from the University of Chicago. He was ordained as a minister in the United Methodist Church in 1955.
He edited the United Methodists’ Christian Advocate from 1962 to 1972. Time wrote that “Wall brought to that journal a bright streak of professionalism while indulging his affection for writing; he was his own film critic.”
Subsequently, he served as editor and publisher of The Christian Century in Chicago from 1972 through February 1999. The Century was considered the flagship magazine of US mainline Protestantism. From 1999 through 2008, he wrote a column for The Christian Century, while serving as senior contributing editor. He was a contributing editor from 2008 until July 2017 when his name was removed from the Century’s print masthead. According to Newsweek, Wall began his Century editorship by resolving a financial crisis and shifting the focus: “I see the Century as the midwife of ideas and issues. We’re less interested in being programmatic than in reporting the world from a religious perspective”, he said. He began his blog on April 24, 2008.
From 2012 to 2017 he served on the editorial board of VNN, an online news and opinion site that the Southern Poverty Law Centre identified as a neo-Nazi hate site.
In its obituary for Wall, The Christian Century noted “his ecumenical interests, his stabilization of the magazine’s financial picture, and his encouragement of some new directions for the Century’s pages” as well as Wall’s love for politics and “extensive pro-Palestinian writing that at times devolved into anti-Semitism.”
Wall died on March 22, 2021, in Elmhurst, Illinois. – Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from Wikipedia.
