Paula Routly: Journalist Joe Sexton Sets His Sights on Barre

“What Would Jesus Do in Barre?” That was the whimsical working title of this week’s cover story when Joe Sexton brought the idea to a group of Seven Days editors six months ago. A renowned journalist of New York Times and ProPublica fame, Joe moved his family to Vermont during the pandemic; a mutual friend connected us.

Looking at his new home with the eyes of an experienced journalist, Joe sees stories we don’t. When he spots something, we want to know about it — and, ultimately, to share his view with our readers.

His first Seven Days byline was on a shocking October 2023 exposé about the former Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center. Nearly a year later, Joe authored a deeply researched piece tracking Vermont’s guns-for-drugs trade, which we copublished with the national news site The Trace.

It was only a matter of time before he discovered Barre, perhaps the state’s grittiest and most storied city, and started peeling back its layers. The Granite City was once a multicultural mecca, where immigrants coaxed the rock from the surrounding hills and sculpted it to memorialize the dead.

But Barre’s relationship with mortality has changed. In 2024 the city of roughly 8,000 has lost nine residents to drug overdoses — more than any other year since the start of the opioid crisis.

Joe was moved by the Sisyphean struggle of the living to save those caught in the lethal spiral of addiction. We initially cautioned him: Barre is an easy target. Why single it out when so many other Vermont burgs are facing the same challenges?

But Joe kept reporting: He returned to Barre again and again and talked with cops, prosecutors, social workers, medical professionals, undertakers — and, notably, two devoted church planters.

Two months later, he came back to us with a different, sharper story pitch: Barre was getting a new place of worship. “It would not be an ordinary church,” as Joe writes. The plan, “at once radical and rooted in the New Testament, was to organize a church for the addicted … a church, God willing, that would rescue lives and save souls.”

In a city of churches, Joe had found an unexplored angle on Vermont’s addiction problem: the potential lifesaving power of religion.

We green-lit the project, and he delivered “Acts of the Apostles.” At 10,556 words, it’s twice as long as most Seven Days cover stories. But Joe’s searing narrative of the men and women called to this work — and the people they serve — is as memorable and artful as the headstones in Hope Cemetery. We hope you’ll make time to read it.

Seven Days rarely writes about faith, not simply because we live in one of the most secular states in the nation. Seventy-five percent of Vermont adults seldom or never attend religious services, according to the Pew Research Center, compared with 66 percent in New Hampshire and Maine.

More likely we avoid the topic because journalists are trained to be skeptical, to concern themselves with verifiable facts and evidence, datasets and test results. We want proof.

Joe got over that in 2007, working on a yearlong project for the Times about a Pentecostal church in Harlem. He recalled, “All it took was a determination to take believers seriously, to be comfortable writing about the idea of the miraculous, to realize that such churches in fact had their own array of empirical evidence: mouths fed, homes repaired, lives rescued.

“Those hard facts are every bit the equal of the documented good achieved by government programs and modern science.

“So why not tell the story of those faith-driven, honest efforts? For one thing is sure: None of it, the public dollars spent or the simple power of faith, has been enough.”

Preach.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Leap of Faith”