🚊 Meet Clemente Lisi, Religion Unplugged’s executive editor: 7 things to know 🔌

Editor’s note: Every Friday, “Weekend Plug-in” meets readers at the intersection of faith and news. Click to join nearly 10,000 subscribers who get this column delivered straight to their inbox. Got feedback or ideas? Email Bobby Ross Jr.

By Bobby Ross Jr.

WASHINGTON — Ordinarily, an Amtrak ride from Penn Station in Manhattan to Union Station in Washington takes about three hours.

But last week, New York-based journalist Clemente Lisi’s 225-mile rail journey to the nation’s capital proved anything but normal.

“The train left New York at 6 p.m. Thursday, and we literally went one stop to Newark, New Jersey,” said Lisi, Religion Unplugged’s executive editor. “And at 6:10, everything stopped.”

The reason for the nearly five-hour delay: Amtrak suspended service between New York and Philadelphia after a train struck and killed a father and his two adult sons in Bristol, Pennsylvania.

Some passengers decided to rent cars. Others booked flights or returned home. But not Lisi.

Eager to attend the Religion News Association’s annual conference in Arlington, Virginia — just across the Potomac River from the capital — the Godbeat pro sat tight.

READ: #RNA2025: What the nation's top religion writers — and AI — are talking about

“The whole time, I was just like, ‘I really want to go to the conference. It’s a great event every year,’” Lisi recalled. “I had planned my whole week around it.

“I could have been annoyed, and I was a little annoyed,” he said of the delay. “But it became more like, ‘I’m sitting in an air-conditioned train. I have the internet. I have food.’ I’m like, ‘Whatever. I’ll get there when I get there.’”

Lisi’s laissez-faire attitude — and my apologies for using a French adjective to describe the son of Italian immigrants — won’t surprise anyone who knows the 49-year-old editor.

He’s a calm, steady leader who got his start in journalism in 1998 chasing crime stories and other breaking news for the New York Post.

He provides helpful ideas and positive feedback each week as he edits my Weekend Plug-in column, so I speak from personal experience.

“He’s a quiet, humble editor who is dedicated to the publication and its mission,” said Tracy Simmons, executive director of FāVS.News, a digital media start-up that covers religion in the Pacific Northwest. “I wonder when he sleeps. His byline is everywhere.”

Clemente Lisi, then a reporter for the New York Post, covers Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s elevation to cardinal in 2012. (Photo provided by Clemente Lisi)

On this particular night, he didn’t sleep all that much.

“I’ll wait it out and see what happens,” he texted me from the train. “I may walk in just in time for breakfast.”

The wheels finally started rolling again about 10:45 p.m., and passengers made it to Union Station about 2:30 a.m. Friday. Lisi caught an Uber to the Hilton Arlington National Landing, site of the RNA meeting. He settled into his room by 3 a.m. and dozed for about four hours.

That afternoon, a power outage affected thousands of homes and businesses in Arlington — including the Hilton — disrupting the conference for over an hour and making Lisi wonder if he might have brought bad luck to RNA.

But that night, a group of RNA members — including Lisi and me — rode the Washington Metro to the Nationals’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. I’m happy to report that we enjoyed a beautiful night at the ballpark with no issues and plenty of cherry blossoms.

Religion News Association members, including Clemente Lisi, far left, and Bobby Ross Jr., far right, pose by cherry blossoms at Nationals Park in Washington. (Photo provided by Bobby Ross Jr.)

As Simmons noted, Religion Unplugged readers see Lisi’s stories all the time. I thought they might enjoy learning more about the person behind the byline.

Here are seven interesting facts about him:

1. He’s a native New Yorker.

He spent his childhood in Manhattan, speaking Italian at home and English at school.

His father, Franco, was a trained artist in Italy and restored paintings in America. His mother, Rachele (pronounced “Rachel”), stayed at home with the children and later worked as a school aide.

From an early age, Lisi loved sports — including soccer and the New York Yankees — and that passion contributed to his affection for newspapers. As a boy, he devoured the major tabloids’ sports sections every day.

He grew up a few blocks from the New York Daily News building — a newspaper where he later served as deputy head of news.

“I remember my dad and I would go out late on Saturday night and get the Sunday paper, and it was still hot from the presses,” Lisi said. “And every immigrant, I feel like, you graduate from the Daily News to the New York Times at some point. Like as your English gets better, and you make more money, you gravitate toward a bigger, better newspaper.”

2. He’s Catholic, but that’s no surprise, right?

“Being Italian and Catholic is kind of like the same thing, you know?” he said. “If you’re not a religious person — definitely culturally it’s a part of your identity. And that’s no coincidence. The Vatican is located in Italy, and it’s a country that’s 80% Catholic.”

Lisi grew up going to Sunday Mass and attended Catholic secondary schools. He earned a communications degree at Catholic-affiliated Fordham University before completing a master’s at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He remains a practicing Catholic, even though the clergy sex abuse scandals — detailed by the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative series in 2002 — caused a crisis in his faith.

“Over time I was able to realize that this is an institution run by men,” Lisi said. “It’s flawed, like anything else. And I think the journalism accountability on the Catholic Church helped the Catholic Church get better.”

Clemente Lisi attends a game at Nationals Park in Washington during the Religion News Association annual meeting. (Photo by Bobby Ross Jr.)

3. He covered the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York.

Lisi was a 26-year-old general assignment reporter for the New York Post on Sept. 11, 2001. He had begun work at the tabloid in 1998 after finishing graduate school.

“Every day you’d get up, and you didn’t know what you were gonna do,” he said. “One day it was covering a fire. The next day you’re covering a murder.”

On that Tuesday, Lisi was told a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

“So I went downtown, and I got pretty close to the scene, but the subways were all backed up,” he recalled. “So I started walking, not knowing that one tower had already collapsed, because we lived in a world where the cell phone wasn’t a thing yet.

“And I didn’t know what was happening. And the second tower collapsed, and I was pretty close to that, and I had to basically run away — run for my life. And I was locked down in Manhattan all that day, all that night, interviewing people.

“And then I was there, basically, for three more months in Lower Manhattan, talking to people about what had happened.”

Lisi, who later taught journalism at the since-closed King’s College in New York, reflected on his experience in 2018 remarks at the College Media Association’s annual conference.

“I don’t consider myself a 9/11 survivor,” Lisi said in the speech. “I am not. I was just a journalist doing his job.”

4. Opposites attract, as Lisi and his wife, Kate Lucadamo, can attest.

Friends planned a birthday party for Lisi on Aug. 14, 2003, but news got in the way — in the form of a major blackout that exposed flaws in the nation’s power grid.

The party was rescheduled for a week later, and Lisi’s future wife showed up at the party with one of his friends.

She grew up in Queens. She cheered for the New York Mets (and he definitely did not). She worked for newspapers that competed against his Post — first the Sun and later the Daily News.

Still, the couple fell in love and exchanged wedding vows three years later.

“We do have a mixed marriage,” Lisi said with a chuckle.

She now works in public relations. They have two children: Grace, 15; and Mark, 12. They live in Brooklyn, where Lisi works remotely.

5. He spent nearly two weeks at the Vatican in 2012, reporting on New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan’s elevation to cardinal.

That assignment came near the end of Lisi’s 15-year tenure with the Post.

“I always was interested in telling stories about religion,” he said. “When I was at Columbia J-school, I took a religion reporting class there.”

Since he spoke Italian, Post editors often turned to him for insight on news at the Vatican.

Lisi said of his coverage of Dolan in Rome: “All I can tell you was, there was lots of good eating and lots of hanging out at churches in Rome. And Cardinal Dolan is a very interesting character, very gregarious, very media savvy. And he’s not a native New Yorker, but he’s almost like a New Yorker in that he really understood the importance of being the cardinal of New York City — which, in a lot of ways, makes you one of the most powerful clergymen in the United States.”

Clemente Lisi covers the 2018 World Cup soccer final in Moscow. (Photo provided by Clemente Lisi)

6. He has served as executive editor of Religion Unplugged for two years.

Lisi moved into the top post when Paul Glader, the former editor and a founder of the online religion magazine, left to take a new job at CNN.

But Lisi was a part of the original group that met to discuss launching the new website — powered by The Media Project, a nonprofit organization — in 2019. Lisi and Glader both taught at King’s, a Christian institution, at the time.

In fact, Lisi pitched the idea for the name Religion Unplugged.

“In the early years … Clemente was super helpful as a fast and clean writer who covered Catholic news and a mix of other news and feature topics,” said Glader, now a managing editor for Stand Together. “I remember how he would cover Catholic news and a mix of other news and feature topics. I remember how he would cover World Cup soccer events in places like Russia and also find religion stories for Religion Unplugged while there.”

Lisi’s book “The FIFA World Cup: A History of the Planet's Biggest Sporting Event” was published in 2022.

7. The size of Religion Unplugged’s staff has grown — as has the reach of its journalism — under Lisi’s guidance.

“Clemente is a born editor and leader,” Stacy Varghese, The Media Project’s president/COO, said in an email. “I’m amazed at the skill and speed in which he sorts through dozens of great stories and pitches from around the world to curate what we post on the site each day.

“He works with 70 freelance writers from 17 countries on subjects ranging from religious genocide and conflict in other countries to the latest in faith-based arts and culture,” she added. “He just won awards both for his writing and photography (on an iPhone no less!) from the Religion Communicators Council for his reporting at the Vatican.

Clemente Lisi’s photos that accompanied his story “Meet the Swiss Guard: 500 years of protecting the papacy” won a Religion Communicators Council award.

“At the same time he maintains the website, designs the layout (which also won two EPPY Awards last fall) and manages the day-to-day operations. Our readership has grown 28% year over year, not through advertising, but just on the basis of great content and reporting. This is all due to his hard work and vision.”

It’s a big job, and to help Lisi do it, Religion Unplugged is taking applications to hire a managing editor.

Lisi said his goal is to keep growing Religion Unplugged’s audience — which now is about 90% U.S. readers — around the world. That means pursuing a wide diversity of interesting, insightful religion stories.

Too often, mainstream news organizations cover stories through the lens of politics, he said, while ignoring the religion angles.

“I read like five newspapers a day,” he said, “but they’re giving me an opportunity to fill a void because they’re not doing it. And that’s the beauty of the job, too, because there’s all these stories out there, and they’re just not being covered.”

By the way, Lisi’s train ride back to New York on Sunday afternoon went as smoothly as possible.

No delays at all.

“In the end, coming home was super easy,” he told me. “But I will say that I was tired.”

Inside the Godbeat

Christopher White, the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent for the past four years, has taken a new job.

He’ll join Georgetown University’s Initiative for Catholic Social Thought and Public Life as associate director for strategic engagement and senior fellow.

I first met White in 2019 when we were among a dozen journalists who traveled to Israel through the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange.

The final plug

How can journalists cover natural disasters without exploiting the tragedy?

Are there practical tips for going to disaster-affected sites and producing quality pieces?

I’ll be addressing those questions at the Associated Church Press annual convention in Chicago in early May, and I did a video teaser about that talk this week. Check it out.

Happy Friday, everyone! Enjoy the weekend.

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Bobby Ross Jr. writes the Weekend Plug-in column for Religion Unplugged and serves as editor-in-chief of The Christian Chronicle. A former religion writer for The Associated Press and The Oklahoman, Ross has reported from all 50 states and 18 nations. He has covered religion since 1999.