Several months ago amid the debate over whether The Star should offer a daily prayer (we dropped it, then restored it in response to reader reaction), I noted my belief that newspapers are secular institutions. Our job wasn’t to “do” religion; our job was to cover religion, I said.

I bring this up not to rekindle the debate over the prayer, but to remind you of one aspect of covering religion that we did last week. It was our coverage of Holy Week, which for most American faith communities is the most significant week of the year.

Throughout the week, religion writer Robert King and several of our photojournalists — Danese Kenon, Jeri Reichanadter, Steve Sanchez, Charlie Nye and Robert Scheer — covered different aspects of Holy Week observances. Our photos, stories and videos were posted on our Web site, IndyStar.com, and printed in The Star.

We were able to capture the life of faith communities in metro Indianapolis as well as educate readers about the meaning of the observances practiced by different faiths.

It serves as a good example of the story-building process at The Star. Most stories are suggested by reporters. Many are suggested by editors. Some are posed by readers and news sources; others are picked up from other local media. Often, we will see a story done by a newspaper in another city and decide to write about the same issue here.

In this case, photojournalist Kenon mentioned to religion writer King that she was interested in using video to represent Holy Week observances for IndyStar.com. They developed the idea further and proposed the six-day project to their editors, who then worked the package into our daily news plans.

I’m delighted with their work and hope you are as well.

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For months I’ve been concerned that our “metro+state” section was misrepresenting the actual life of where we live. Day after day the cover of that section was loaded up with crime stories — about arrests, trials, convictions and similar happenings. It was as if we lived in a free-fire zone, which obviously isn’t the case.

So I directed that we no longer print crime stories on the cover of that section unless there was a special news reason to do so.

It’s not that crime isn’t important, especially to victims and their families. We will continue to cover crime trends and other public safety issues. We want to look for stories that let you know what police and others are doing to make neighborhoods safer. Should we see another spike in murders, we will report that.

But I want us to work harder to tell you about other things happening in our neighborhoods. I want to tell about people who are overcoming challenges of their own or who are helping others.

Often these kinds of changes aren’t easy to make. We have a finite number of reporters and cannot cover every story we’d like to tell. Also, crime happens too often and is more easily reported than other stories, which frankly explains why we’ve given those stories more exposure than I think is necessary.

If you disagree with our new approach, let me know. Or if there is an aspect of crime coverage that we are missing, let me know that as well.

Thanks for reading the Indianapolis Star.