Longtime journalist Mark I. Pinsky, author of The Gospel According to The Simpsons: The Spiritual Life of the World's Most Animated Family, was born in Miami, Fla., in 1947. He was raised with his younger brother Paul (now a Maryland state senator) in a Conservative Jewish home in suburban Southern New Jersey, where Mark attended public schools. His religious involvement included bar mitzvah, confirmation and Hebrew high school at Beth-El Synagogue in Camden and a joint congregational Midrashah, as well as participation in United Synagogue Youth.
In the 1960s, he attended Duke University, graduating in 1970. While at Duke, he wrote for The Chronicle - his column for the campus daily was called "The Readable Radical" - and made a general nuisance of himself. A lone and marginal exception was an appearance on NBC's General Electric College Bowl television show, where he answered just one question correctly. He was a civilian volunteer with the Israeli army in Sinai in 1967 immediately following the Six Day War, salvaging damaged Egyptian armor and artillery. After graduating from Duke (barely), he worked on several local underground newspapers and wrote for the Guardian and In These Times before going straight, sort of, joining the Associated Press bureau in Raleigh on a temporary basis to cover the North Carolina legislature. Fired from that job after his arrest at the 1971 Mayday anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C., he attended the Famous Journalists' School of Morningside Heights, graduating with the coveted M.S.J. from Columbia in 1972.
Mark spent most of the 1970s as a free lance writer, bouncing around the Southeast from courthouse to courthouse, breaking numerous stories involving racial and criminal justice, focusing on the death penalty. Trial coverage included serial killer Ted Bundy and Green Beret Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald and the 1979 Greensboro Klan-Nazi murders. Other issues included economic development, including occupational health and safety subjects like textile workers and brown lung disease. His reporting, some supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Star, the Christian Science Monitor and the Miami Herald. He also reported for Reuters News Service, Westinghouse Radio and National Public Radio. Magazine assignments included the Nation, the Progressive, Moment , New Times and Present Tense -ญญ the latter two of blessed memory. Foreign reporting trips during this time included Northern Ireland, Cuba and Haiti. In 1978, Mark was a Sloan Fellow in Economics Journalism at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.
Life changed dramatically for Mark in 1981, when Sarah M. Brown took a flyer and married him in a field, under a tent, in Orange County, N.C. The ceremony was conducted by Rabbi Nathan Perelman, retired spiritual leader of Temple Emmanuel in Manhattan. A local rock 'n roll band played Dylan's "Forever Young" and the dessert was potluck, to the unspoken mortification of Mark's mother, Charlotte. The couple lived in Beijing, China, in 1982 and 1983, where Mark worked as an editorial advisor at the Xinhua (New China) News Agency, and wrote free lance articles for the Los Angeles Times, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post. In 1984, at the age of 37, a long period of arrested development ended when Mark took his first regular, fulltime job in American journalism, as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times' Orange County Edition. At the Times, he wrote about religion, the performing arts and philanthropy and, again, the courts and criminal justice. He played well with others, but bumped heads from time to time with superiors, to no good effect. Sarah, called Sallie, completed a career shift from child development to photojournalism, earning a B.A. from Cal State Long Beach (her third academic degree) and freelancing for the L.A. Times. Asher Joseph Brown-Pinsky, much awaited and prayed for, was born in 1987, and Liza Charlotte Brown-Pinsky joyfully joined the family in 1990.
Mark became religion writer and senior reporter at the Orlando Sentinel in 1995,
specializing in coverage of evangelical Christianity in the Sun Belt. His articles and
reviews on the media appear in the Columbia Journalism Review and Quill. He
is now at work on a sequel to his Simpsons book, The Gospel According to Disney:
Cartoon Faith & Values, to be published in 2002. The Brown-Pinskys worship at the
Congregation of Liberal Judaism in Orlando. The family travels to Yucatan each summer,
where Mark and Sallie often produce words-and-picture packages for a variety of
publications.