Richard and Joan Ostling

Richard Ostling is an American author and journalist living in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He and his wife, the late Joan K. Ostling, are the co-authors of Mormon America: The Power and the Promise.

Richard Ostling

Richard N. Ostling, born (1940-07-14) July 14, 1940, is a journalist who reports on religious topics. He is a senior correspondent for Time magazine and the president of the Religion Newswriters Association. Once a senior editor of The Michigan Daily, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Michigan and holds master's degrees in journalism and religion. He has conducted religious interviews on at least four continents.

Richard Ostling previously reported for the Morning News and Evening Journal and Christianity Today as well as once being the chief religion writer for the Associated Press, where he spent eight years.

He has written a number of cover stories in over 27 years at Time. He has broadcast on CBS Radio. He has reported regularly for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Over the course of his career, he has interviewed several notable religious figures such as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, the late Mother Teresa, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). He authored many of the Time magazine stories on the rise of fundamentalist Christianity, including cover stories on Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggart. Ostling was the co-author, with Dr. Bernard Nathanson, of Aborting America, a history of the abortion rights movement in the United States.