Trailblazers like Wycliff make the journey a little easier.

Editor's note: Barely a generation ago, the ranks of editorial and opinion writers were notably white and male. Thanks in part to the efforts of NCEW to foster diversity, as well as the talent and commitment of individual writers, women and people of color have been bringing new and welcome perspective to editorial pages and broadcast studios.

Here are the story and words of one of the journalists who helped blaze the trail.

Don Wycliff became editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune in May 1991, succeeding the highly honored Lois Wille.

Under Wycliffs leadership, the Tribune's editorial page continued a tradition of excellence, winning one Pulitzer Prize, being a finalist for another, and winning this year the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award for Editorials.

Wycliff came to the Tribune in September 1990 from The New York Times, where he was a member of the editorial board for more than five years and wrote on a wide range of issues, including social policy, education, religion, and race relations. Earlier he had worked as a reporter or editor at several other newspapers, including the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Houston Post and the Dallas Times-Herald.

As editorial page editor, Wycliff presides over the Tribune's editorial board and supervises the editorial column, the Voice of the People column, and the Commentary page.

Wycliff has served as a Pulitzer Prize juror and as a member of the writing awards committee of ASNE. He is a member of ASNE and the National Association of Black Journalists. He is also a member of the advisory council of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame and is a youth soccer referee and a Cub Scout leader in Evanston, Ill., where he lives.

A Texas native, he was educated in Catholic schools in several states and earned his undergraduate degree in government at the University of Notre Dame in 1969. He was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow that year and attended graduate school in political science at the University of Chicago.

He is married and is the father of two sons.

RELATED ARTICLE: My vocation, my calling

BY DON WYCLIFF

I have always been a believer in the notion of vocation, of being called. That is how I think of journalism and, more particularly, of editorial writing: It is my vocation, my calling.

I was inspired to become a journalist by an event: the 1969 police raid on Black Panther Party headquarters in Chicago in which two Panther leaders were killed. As I watched the coverage of that event by the Chicago newspapers, I became aware that journalism could be the means to do what I had always hoped to do: foster greater justice, especially racial justice, in American society.

I write a lot in Christian religious idioms because I was raised in a Christian religious household and educated in religious (Catholic) schools. I like those idioms because they're so often poetic in a way that our modern, bureaucratic, computer-generated idioms are not.

My concerns as an editorial writer are the same today as they were when I first started: racial peace and justice, the proper education of children, welfare and our social responsibilities to the needy, the role of religion in society, both constructive and destructive.

When I think about my career thus far, I spend far more time ruing what I've failed to do than rejoicing about what I have done. You see, I have a vocation, and I've not fulfilled it perfectly just yet.

RELATED ARTICLE: Faith, religion, and help for pain

This editorial by Don Wycliff appeared in the Chicago Tribune July 31, 1996.

In his recent book Integrity, Yale University law professor Stephen Carter observed that "in an earlier age, when religious devotion was more common, no laws against perjury existed because everybody assumed that God would take His own measures against false swearing."

How different things are now.

"In the cynicism of our age," Carter writes, "nobody assumes that simply because an individual swears by God to tell the truth that the person thereby is telling the truth. Indeed, hardly anybody seems to think that an individual who swears by God to tell the truth is probably telling the truth."

And the reason for that is that, deep down, few of us believe in a God of that old sort.

Carter's astute observation about the effect of this loss of faith on the legal system is but one evidence that while Americans may be among the most religious peoples in the world, they are not necessarily the most faith-filled.

"The Sea of Faith," evoked a century ago by the English poet Matthew Arnold, has retreated under the relentless advance of modernity and rationalism, leaving us with the forms of religion, but not, it often seems, with the faith that is its substance.

Another recent example of this loss of faith has emerged in the aftermath of the dreadful tragic crash two weeks ago of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island.

To the dismay of many observers, some family members of victims have routinely conducted news conferences at which they take to task the authorities for not giving appropriate priority to the recovery of the bodies of their loved ones.

This has not been remarked about much publicly, because no one wants to seem unsympathetic to people who have experienced losses that for most of us would be grievous beyond the power of words to express.

What's more, there is legitimate reason to question the actions of some of those involved in handling this disaster - New York governor George Pataki comes most readily to mind.

But people have dealt with such losses throughout human history, and generally not by excoriating blameless third parties. Remember Job? He had to contend with the loss of his entire family. He complained to and argued with his God, but ultimately found solace in Him.

Why is it, apparently, impossible for so many of us - the TWA families are hardly unique in their behavior - to find such solace? It is a vexing question for a disconsolate age in which religion abounds but faith, alas, is elusive.