Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.

(OPINION) I was raised as a news junky. My dad subscribed to the Kentucky Louisville Courier-Journal and Somerset Commonwealth-Journal (dad’s hometown daily) and both our local weeklies.

My mom and sister weren’t as fanatical about the news as Dad and I. He and I devoured all four publications. My heroes weren’t baseball players. They were newsmen such as the Courier-Journal’s John Ed Pearce and Billy Reed.

News was the inky black plasma flowing through my veins. I later become a reporter. I’ve never decided which of my vocations is holier: journalism or the clergy.

And yet I’ve found myself disengaging from the news, even as I continue to pay for my subscriptions to newspapers and other outlets.

For several years now, it’s felt like the whole world has gone mad. Trying to keep track of, much less digest, the daily flood of outrageous news stories and hair-on-fire op-ed pieces curdles my mind, steals my joy and leaves me staring gape-mouthed into a tsunami of chaos.

I’m not alone. I’ve talked to other news junkies who feel as I do. They’re taking vacations from the news.

But coincidently, on a recent day, I happened across two articles that helped me rethink my news avoidance.

The first was a short essay on Bible Gateway, a Christian website I subscribe to for its biblical study resources.

There, writer Steph Juliot of Omaha, Nebraska, observes that the news can often be “divisive, doomy and gloomy, or drivel (or some combination).” Those aren’t excuses for opting out, though, she argues.

Staying abreast of the news keeps us connected to our neighbors, she says. Whether or not we care much about the headlines, our neighbors probably do, and we owe it to our relationships to be informed about what’s happening.

(The devil’s advocate in me might reply that political news, particularly at this moment, can easily drive a wedge between us and our neighbors.)

Anyway, Juliot also says the news also informs us about things we may need to respond to — approaching snowstorms, upcoming elections and the like. Plus, the more we know about current events, the more we can help shape our community’s conversations.

She advises a three-step approach for engaging, or re-engaging, with the news in a manner that’s not crazy-making:

— Brevity: Sometimes less is better than way too much, she says. As little as five to 10 minutes of news consumption daily can keep us abreast of major events, without driving us bonkers. She suggests — wisely — that we spend at least as much time pursuing our spiritual development as we do reading the news. That balance helps us keep our perspective.

— Levity: For Juliot, Christians, specifically, “can approach the day’s headlines with light-heartedness and peace because we have an unshakable hope. Those who live without hope are grave and pessimistic about the news of the day, fearing a dark and uncertain future.” Faith helps us be more optimistic.

— Dignity: We handle bad news more productively when we remind ourselves that every person in the headlines has been created in God’s image, Juliot says.

“This leaves no room for disrespecting or disparaging people in the news. … That politician pursuing policies you disagree with is a person made in God’s image whom God loves. Your neighbor displaying a different candidate’s yard sign is an individual motivated by their own fears and convictions, a broken person (like you and me) in need of mercy. Even that terrorist across the world — gulp — is not excluded from God’s love or ours.”

The same day I read Juliot’s article, my wife alerted me to a beautiful piece by Margaret Renkl, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times who lives in Nashville. Like a lot of folks, Renkl has been discombobulated by the nonstop news emanating from President Trump’s White House 2.0.

“What kind of president dismantles and threatens to shut down an agency that feeds hungry children?” she asks rhetorically. “Or appoints as health secretary a crackpot vaccine skeptic at a time when avian influenza may be on the verge of human-to-human transmission?”

Her list of Trumpian depredations continues at some length.

Anger surely is a default response to all that, she says. But anger is unsustainable.

“Already I am exhausted by my own fury, and the second Trump presidency is only three weeks old.”

Tuning out might be a tempting, she says. But that won’t work, either, because apathy, by definition, accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t help.

Instead, Renkl arrives at a fairly radical alternative: She’s keeping her heart tender. She’s opening up to the pain and suffering around her, not allowing her soul to become seared over.

She concludes:

“All around us, too, is beauty — art and music and stories, like the brave mouse in ‘The Tale of Desperaux,’ that make us feel brave, too; evergreens that shelter singing birds and hardwoods trembling on the verge of green; lighted planets lined up in a parade across the night sky; glowworms hiding deep in the leaf litter, waiting for warmth to turn them into fireflies; and ponds with clouds scudding across their shining surface and turtles sleeping deep in their soft mud.

“Anger lets in too little beauty, but heartbreak? A tender heart feels the fury and the fear, the sorrow and suffering, the beauty and the bravery alike. In the years ahead, we will need them all.”

Whatever your political or religious persuasion, that’s sound advice: Let your heart remain tender and open.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.