ROBERT E. MARQUAND

MARQUAND, Robert E. Foreign Correspondent Journalist Robert Marquand passed away late last November. During Thanksgiving the Marquand family and Bob's friends deeply mourned the loss of such a bright light. Bob was an energetic and dedicated writer who traveled the world as a 20-year veteran of international reporting. Personable, principled and generous, he inspired love and devotion among his family, friends, sources, neighbors and colleagues. Robert Edwin Marquand, Jr. was born in Melbourne, Florida in the nineteen fifties and grew up in Indialantic, on the barrier island between the Indian River and the Atlantic. It was the emerging 'Space Coast' of the Gemini, Apollo, and Space Shuttle years. His father worked at Kennedy Space Center. Bob was a paperboy, became an outstanding golfer, and wrote for his school newspaper, the Telstar of Satellite High School. In spite of sporadic interest in academics as a youth, Bob graduated from Principia College in southern Illinois with English and religion degrees, and with a reputation for a powerful intellect and curiosity. Later he did coursework at Harvard Divinity School. Bob joined the staff of The Christian Science Monitor in Boston in the early 1980's as an editor of the creative writing page. In an era when many left journalism, Bob would remain at the Monitor for 34 years. He became an award-winning journalist, editorial writer, and foreign correspondent. In the U.S. Bob covered education, the Supreme Court, national politics, and his favorite pet topic, the Miami Dolphins. He spent at least six years in each of his foreign postings in New Delhi, Beijing and Paris writing on politics, culture and religion. He observed first hand the siege of Sarajevo, Taliban aggression in Musharraf's Pakistan, the challenges of monks in Tibet, and effect of North Korean tyranny on its refugees. He reported the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka for the PBS Newshour. Bob recalled that his mother was often a "one-person cheer-leading squad" as he worked his way through difficult assignments. Bob considered American democracy an "experiment", and one that would fail if he and his colleagues in publishing were not competent watchmen of the principles, rights, and spirit of the Constitution of the United States of America. A child of the Cold War and the Watergate era, Bob was inspired by Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Marshall Ingwerson, former Editor of The Christian Science Monitor, said "the observable world of the news was to Bob but the surface rippling of a webwork of ideas charged with moral, philosophical, and spiritual currents. He had a gift for making that a little more apparent to those of us who, through his work, got a glimpse of those depths." Bob was a perfectionist who refused to publish anything half-baked, or even seven eighths baked. As a young reporter, he won national awards in his coverage of education reform in the nineteen eighties. His three decades of articles on Christianity in the modern world culminated in a 2015 cover story from China. It focused on the remarkable sincerity and political growing pains of evangelical congregations there, winning an award from the Religious News Association. Overall, he wrote on dozens of faiths and their cultural cross-currents. One project was a four-part series on Muslims in America in the 1990's. Bob's interest in the wide world came partly from his devotion to the Christian Science church. He authored articles and personal testimonies for church religious periodicals. The teaching presents the Christ as purely spiritual and no respecter of religious, cultural or national borders. This allowed for deep friendships with Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and the non-religious. He was a mentor to young writers in the U.S. and abroad, and a Santa Claus figure to his beloved niece and nephew. An avid fan of Mad Magazine in his youth, Bob brought humor, irony and wordplay to every segment of life, especially the 'serious' ones. As a student of Bible-based spiritual healing, he once cracked among church friends, "Here's two citations - call me in the morning." Bob was married for four years in the early nineteen eighties to Cynthia Hanson, currently of Princeton, Massachusetts. Of his immediate family, father Robert, mother Virginia, and brothers William and Jonathan, he is survived by William, by his sister-in-law Martha, and by his niece and nephew, Robin and David Marquand, all of St. Louis. A public service in Boston will be held to commemorate Robert the second week of August 2017. Please contact Bill Marquand at wbmarquand@gmail.com for further information.

View the online memorial for Robert E. MARQUAND