The Revealer is partnering with Sacred Writes, a Henry R. Luce-grant funded initiative at Northeastern University, to fund one writing fellowship for a scholar of religion to write for the Revealer on the topic(s) of their choosing. The recipient will receive a $2,000 stipend and have access to $1,000 to cover research expenses. Here is all the information you need:

CURRENTLY ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS

Sacred Writes is now accepting applications for a funded media partnership with the Revealer. Applicants must have training in religious studies, theology, biblical studies, or a related field. This partnership is open to faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students. Priority deadline for applications is 31 January 2020.

SCOPE

The Revealer invites applications for one writing fellowship to produce three articles on topics related to religion in the scholar’s area of expertise. This fellowship is thematically open, provided the articles address religion, theology, or biblical studies. These three pieces may take the form of research essays, opinion pieces, or book/film/tv reviews. The Revealer prefers but does not require a variety of formats for these pieces.

Articles will be developed under the direction of Brett Krutzsch, Editor of the Revealer, and must be completed between April 2020 and March 2021. Production schedule will be set in consultation with the Editor and will account for the scholar’s pre-existing commitments. Together, Sacred Writes and the Revealer will provide a $2,000 stipend to the scholar selected for this partnership as well as up to $1,000 for research or publication related expenses, such as travel or commissions for original artwork, photography, or images.

TO APPLY

Please submit the following materials through the online form.

• Cover letter (1-2 pages) explaining your scholarly expertise and a pitch for at least one piece (including a proposed title) that draws on your scholarly expertise

• CV, including any relevant public scholarship experience

The post Media Partnership Application with Sacred Writes appeared first on The Revealer.

1) Is Hanukkah or Christmas on your mind? Did you enjoy Samira Mehta’s article about the “December dilemma”? Learn more about interfaith families in her book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (UNC Press, 2018).

2) Are memoirs about religion, families, and the complexities of love something you enjoy? Were you moved by Briallen Hopper’s beautiful prose in her article, “Learning to Write about Religion“? If so, you will definitely like her book, Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019). It is a 2019 Kirkus Best Book of the Year!

3) Speaking of great writing, are you looking for advice on how to become a published author? Susan Shapiro, whose captivating story on forgiveness ran in the September issue, has an exceptionally insightful book to help you navigate the publishing world: The Byline Bible: Get Published in 5 Weeks (Penguin Random House, 2018).

4) Are you a fan of Stephen Colbert? Are you curious about how Catholicism shaped his professional and personal life? We published an excerpt of Stephanie Brehm’s book in September and you’ll want to curl up with a full-length copy of America’s Most Famous Catholic: Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Fordham University Press, 2019).

5) Looking for a page-turner about kidnapping in the name of religion? We ran an excerpt in November from Kevin Lewis O’Neill’s fascinating book about ministers who kidnap addicts to help them overcome their addictions by saving their souls. Don’t miss Hunted: Predation and Pentecostalism in Guatemala (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

6) Are you curious about how religion shaped LGBTQ politics in the United States? We featured a great conversation between Kali Handelman, then-Editor of the Revealer, and Brett Krutzsch, current Editor of the Revealer, in our Summer issue about Krutzsch’s new book, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019).

7) Speaking of politics, are you interested in learning about the complexities of religious freedom in America and abroad? Jolyon Thomas wrote about how the United States has weaponized religious freedom overseas in our April issue. Discover more in his book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

8) Are you one of the many Revealer readers who has been moved by Liane Carlson’s powerful writing about forgiveness, failure, and facing the climate crisis? Read her new book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Experience and Meaning (Columbia University Press, 2019).

9) And last, but not least, did you enjoy learning about the popularity of Jewish Buddhists in this month’s issue? Don’t miss Emily Sigalow’s book, American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton University Press, 2019).

Happy reading!

The post Winter Reading Recommendations appeared first on The Revealer.

– Kali Handelman, Contributing Editor

***

Mural of queer artist and healer Kiam Marcelo Junio

Every classroom is a risky space of complicated asymmetries of power and knowledge. I am familiar with the texts I assign and their contexts in ways that my students are not, at least not yet – and that is a position of power. But there is also a profound authority that students wield in asserting their own identities and their own experiences and their own interpretations. And while a classroom isn’t a consciousness-raising group, part of liberal arts education is insisting that we bring our whole selves to the classroom. In such spaces, learning doesn’t happen as a top down experience, but in all sorts of unforeseen and unforeseeable lateral lines, in conversations that begin in class but continue elsewhere where faculty never hear them.

I am a straight, white, cisgender woman who teaches our college’s introduction to Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies. I am regularly in the position of teaching the fundamentals of queer and trans theory to students who have, in many cases, more first-person experience dealing with the issues we discuss than I do. I routinely offer theoretical language and explanatory categories for LGBTQ+ students’ lives, which can be a delicate dance.

Adrienne Rich

On the one hand, these categories and concepts can be empowering for students. They can learn new tools and vocabulary for understanding and naming things they encounter and live every day. They can discover different language to put to experiences and own them, and say, I always felt that way but I didn’t know there was a word for it. The experience can be a revelation – like when they read Adrienne Rich and discover the language of compulsory heterosexuality, or when they study Sara Ahmed and learn to imagine heteronormativity in terms of physicality, as a source of comfort for some bodies and discomfort for others.

But there is a flip side. Learning new conceptual tools and theoretical languages can be alienating for students, especially when the instructor occupies a different position of power and identity than the students do. Teaching such students can easily come across as suggesting that I know, or this academic field understands, more about your identity and your life than you know yourself. Students can experience this as arrogance and even as an assault on their right to interpret themselves as they wish.

As someone who isn’t LGBTQ+ myself, I navigate these double binds day in and day out. Some days I do better than others. As I work to be a source of support for my students, I find myself asking a series of admittedly unanswerable questions.

***

Here are a few of my questions: How can I bring my self – as a Jew on a largely Christian campus, as a woman in the hostile and overwhelmingly male-dominated field of philosophy – to my students without ever conflating my struggles with theirs? How can I make it clear that my own specific experiences of marginalization inform how I teach – but are not some sort of master key to understanding other forms of marginalization, including the ones that may structure my students’ lives? How can I keep myself from falling into the trap of collapsing “difference” into a catch-all term that can’t possibly carry the weight of all that it is asked to bear? How can I refrain from participating in the interpretive violence that is called into being when we wrestle “difference” into a manageable category that surreptitiously flattens out the genuine differences between human beings and the ways in which they live, suffer, name their experiences and identities and desires?

Every year, I teach the essay “Report from the Bahamas,” in which the poet and activist June Jordan meditates on race, class, and gender while on vacation alone in the Bahamas, narrating a series of connections and misrecognitions with the workers she encounters at the Sheraton British Colonial hotel and with her students back in the States. Jordan reminds her readers that connections based on identity—even, or especially, identity forged through oppression—are not automatic: “When we get the monsters off our backs all of us may want to run in very different directions.” How can I refrain from becoming, unwittingly, one of the monsters in my students’ lives?

Pride Flag

How can I honor – in an absolute, unassailable way – my students’ identities and experiences and desires while nonetheless teaching students that identity is not an immutable category and that experience itself is not unassailable? How can I maintain that honor while contextualizing and historicizing categories that make up aspects of my students’ selfhood and are precious and real and essential to them?

What if, as many theorists I teach suggest, we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do? What if it is structurally possible for other people to know us in ways we can’t know ourselves, including seeing us more clearly in certain ways than we see ourselves? What if the belief that the most intimate knowledge of the self comes from the self is wrong? What if we aren’t the foremost authorities on ourselves?

How can I honor experiences that are different from my own in an absolute way while not assuming that each individual is the best or most reliable narrator of their own lives? While still acknowledging that they are nonetheless the most important narrators of those lives?

In mulling these questions, it helps me to read and to teach Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory. Sedgwick says that one of the things that makes the word queer different from other LGBTQ+ identity language is its relation to the speaker. She writes in this connection, “A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are important senses in which queer can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes – all it takes – to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person.” Sedgwick exposes the gulf between a first and third person perspective and point of enunciation, and her insight helps me, at least, make sense of my own simultaneous authority and absolute lack of it.

At some point, though, when you’re running a classroom, you can’t let questions overwhelm you. Theorizing stops, and you have to make some rules. Here are mine.

1) Believe your students.

I have a sign on my office door that says, “I believe you.” It was designed as part of a campus-wide initiative for survivors of sexual assault to know that I’m a safe person to go to, but I’ve come to think it signifies much more than that. It means I will set aside all my theoretical suppositions about knowledge and authority, and trust that my students know more than I do about what they need, and do my best to understand it.

2) Trust students when they tell you about the language they want you to use, full stop.

This might be about pronouns or names or it might be about words that you have never thought about before but your students have and they want you to stop using them, and you should do it right away. This will be humbling, and it will never end, and you will never be perfect, but you don’t have a choice. Besides, for anyone in any position of authority, it’s good practice to be humbled on a regular basis.

Your attachment to particular kinds of language does not outweigh your students’ need for you to stop using it.

3) A corollary: find a way to keep talking anyway, using different language.

4) Find a way to short-circuit any defensiveness that arises when students want you to change your language or your classroom practices.

Understand that students wanting you to change isn’t a referendum on you as a person; it’s about your ability to construct a safe classroom space for your LGBTQ+ students, to create the conditions under which genuine learning becomes possible.

5) Trust students when their desired classroom practices are different from what you’re accustomed to or what you think they need, and ask them from day one about what those practices might be, and then listen.

6) Adopt an attitude of profound epistemic humility.

Ask stupid questions and be willing to be laughed at. Trust that the laughter will be mostly kind-hearted.

7) This is the lesson I feel the shakiest about saying in public, but in some real way, a specifically pedagogical way, you have to love your students. You have to love them in and especially because of their alterity and their singularity and vulnerability and because of your own vulnerability before them, in the knowledge that the classroom is a place where we bare our souls and where all of us, faculty and students both, tell each other more than we know.

And finally, 8) Trust that if you do these things, eventually you will get to do all the problematizing and critique and close reading that you want. But the condition of the possibility of all of these things is safety and trust. And you have to be the one to promise this. And then you have to make good on your promise.

Abby Kluchin is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and Coordinator of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at Ursinus College. She is also co-founder and Associate Director At-Large of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is currently working on a book project that interrogates contemporary debates over sexual ethics alongside classic philosophical texts in order to propose an intersubjective theory of consent.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Ceding Authority: Notes on Identity and Power in the Classroom appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s Introduction.

***

American Buddhists like to tell a popular joke. A Jewish woman travels to the Himalayas in search of a famous guru. She heads east, traveling by plane, train, bus, and oxcart until she reaches a far-off Buddhist monastery in Nepal. An old lama in maroon and saffron robes tells her that the guru she is seeking is meditating in a cave at the top of the mountain and cannot be disturbed. She has traveled far and insists that she absolutely must see this guru. The lama eventually relents but requests that she not stay long, bow when addressing the guru, and say no more than eight words to him. With the help of a few lamas, monks, and Sherpa porters, she trudges up the mountain. Exhausted, she reaches the top and the cave where the guru is meditating. Keeping within the eight-word limit, she bows and says what she came to say: “Sheldon, it’s your mother. Enough already, come home!”

This amusing story pokes fun at the widespread perception that American Jews have a particular affection for Buddhism. Past empirical research seems to support this view. In his sociological survey of seven Buddhist centers in North America, sociologist James Coleman found that 16.5 percent of the Buddhist practitioners in his randomly generated sample were of Jewish backgrounds. Similarly, sociologist Wendy Cadge discovered that nearly a third of those she interviewed at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center as part of her comparative ethnographic study of Theravada Buddhist organizations in the United States were of Jewish background. Through his research for his best-selling book The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz estimated that Jews represented about 30 percent of Western Buddhist groups in the United States. While scholars do not have precise statistics about the number of Jews involved in Buddhist communities in the United States, it seems safe to assert that the proportion of Jews in Buddhist circles is disproportionate to the percentage of Jews in this country (Jews constitute about 2 to 3 percent of the population).

These numbers, and their insinuation that Judaism and Buddhism have a distinctive relationship in the United States, motivated this study. I wanted to know why Buddhism appeals to Sheldon and others like him and was curious how Sheldon arrived at the cave at the top of that mountain at all. I also wanted to know if the encounter between Judaism and Buddhism emerged out of the countercultural ethos of the 1960s, as popularly assumed, or if there were earlier antecedent encounters that required unearthing. This book wrestles with these questions by telling the story of how Judaism and Buddhism met and combined in the United States since the late nineteenth century, and how people incorporate these traditions in their daily lives today.

The distinctive relationship between Judaism and Buddhism has been part of public consciousness in the United States since Kamenetz published The Jew in the Lotus in 1994. His book chronicled the meeting between eight Jewish delegates—a group of progressive rabbis and scholars from across various wings of American Jewish life—and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The book is now on its thirty-seventh reprint and even inspired a PBS documentary of the same name featured in film festivals around the world. It also popularized the term “JUBU”—a moniker for a Jewish Buddhist—for a wide audience.

Since the publishing of The Jew in the Lotus, countless popular articles, memoirs, books, and blog posts have cast attention on the special relationship between Judaism and Buddhism. Television stations, including PBS and ABC, have produced special programs about the Jewish-Buddhist relationship. Dozens of celebrities, including Goldie Hawn, Leonard Cohen, Steven Seagal, and Mandy Patinkin, have publicly extolled their Jewish Buddhist identities in print and on television. US newspapers—from broad publications like the LA Times to niche outlets like the Jewish Daily Forward or Tricycle: The Buddhist Review—have published articles about such topics as “JuBus—Embracing Judaism and Buddhism,” “Zen and the Art of the BuJu,” and “At One with Dual Devotion.” Recently, Tablet Magazine even ran an article about the Jewish roots of mindfulness meditation in the United States, explaining how a group of four American Jews—Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Jacqueline Mandell-Schwartz—popularized mindfulness meditation in the United States, and how, in the word of journalist Michelle Goldberg, they “turned a Buddhist spiritual practice into a distinctly American phenomenon—and a multi-billion-dollar industry.”

Scholars, too, have expressed a curiosity about the Jewish-Buddhist relationship. In The Transformation of American Religion, religious studies scholar Amanda Porterfield noted that Jews “took the lead” in the development of American forms of Buddhism, observing that “one of the most interesting aspects of Buddhism’s merger with American religious and intellectual life is its disproportionate appeal to people with Jewish backgrounds.” Similarly, in his book Buddhism in America, Richard Seager pointed out the “important role played by Jewish Buddhists in the introduction and adaptation of the Buddha’s teachings in America.” And in the new volume Buddhism beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States, scholar Mira Niculescu writes about the rise of Jewish mindfulness as an offspring of Western Buddhism in the United States.

Despite this popular and scholarly notice, we know comparatively little about the relationship between Judaism and Buddhism in the United States. We do not know how Jewish Buddhists experience and narrate their multireligious identities; based on these identities, how they have built institutions, new practices, and staked claims in their communities; and what broad social and historical factors explain how these two traditions came together over centuries to produce these identities in the first place. These are the questions at the heart of this book.

Threaded through the book is an argument that the distinctive social position of American Jews, or what I call the “Jewish social location,” led American Jews to their engagement with Buddhism and fundamentally shaped the character of it. The Jewish social location is the set of orientations produced by the position of Jewish Americans as a distinctively left-liberal, urban, secular, and upper-middle-class religious minority in the United States. Jews occupy a distinctive place in contemporary US society in terms of residential patterns, class, education, occupation, and religious beliefs. More than any other religious or ethnic group in the United States, Jews live in and near the largest American cities, exceed all other groups in socioeconomic status, and surpass all other groups in educational attainment. In addition, Jews consistently fall at the bottom of measures of traditional religious beliefs. Compared to all other ethnic and religious groups (except “religious nones”), they are the least likely to be sure that God exists, to believe that there is an afterlife, and to say that the Bible is the exact word of God. A deep-seated appreciation of this particular sense of Jewish social distinctiveness rests at the heart of the stories in this book. The American Jews in this book also relate deeply to the experience of being a religious minority living in a largely Christian society. The Jewish social location—itself a particular combination of a distinctive demographic, religious, and minority position—propelled Jews into their encounter with Buddhism and shaped the historical mark they left on it. Moreover, it defined the pathways through which Buddhism entered into American Judaism, and to this day, continues to structure how people interpret and knit together ideas from both traditions in framing their identities, creating religious practices, and building organizations.

Emily Sigalow is a sociologist of contemporary Jewish life in the United States.  She has held academic positions at Brandeis University, Duke University, and Wesleyan University. Currently, she is an Executive Director at the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York where she oversees the Research, Evaluation, and Measurement Department. She has published over a dozen articles and book chapters. She holds a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology Swarthmore College, a M.A in the History of the Jewish People from Ben Gurion University, and a Ph.D. in Sociology & Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University.

The post American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change appeared first on The Revealer.

Photo by Sacha Styles

“Writing about religion is both freeing and scary.” Laura Ferris

On a gray fall morning in a Queens College classroom, I ask the students in my Writing about Religion class to take out a piece of paper and write about what it’s like to write about religion. I tell them I’m working on a piece about it, and I’d love their help thinking it through. As they settle into their thoughts, the room grows quiet, and I see their heads bowed over their work as if in prayer.

“I was nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. [But] once the class started and we began our assignments I fell in love with the class. I like being able to write about my own religion because it is so personal. It has given me lots of opportunities to self-reflect.” Katarzyna Szmuc

We started the semester by reflecting on what we think religion is. I’ve taught this class many times, and on the first day I always bring in a bag of objects for my students to ponder: a book of yoga poses, a dollar bill, a colander, a tiny bottle of High John the Conqueror oil, a sprig of mistletoe, a box of incense with a lotus on the label, a box of Manischewitz matzo ball mix, a plain Goya-brand novena candle from the bodega or one with a picture of the Golden Girls on it from Etsy … I ask the students to choose an object and work together in pairs to come up with answers: What are some reasons why it might be religious, and some reasons why it might not be? Afterwards we all discuss: Is “religiousness” inherent in an object itself, or does it reside in the object’s use? Is religion reliant on community, or personal intention, or tradition, or labeling? Can satire be religion? Or commerce? Or pop culture? Their answers vary, and I write them all on the board.

One year, a student improvised a spell on the spot, anointing the dollar bill with High John oil after she googled to find out who High John was and how conjuring worked. I felt a twinge of secular anxiety in that moment, alongside a sense of wonder. Should a creative writing class be a place where we interrogate our assumptions about religion, or a place where we learn to cast spells? Or both?

“When it came to the initial thought of writing about religion in class it was a bit nerve wracking. Religion has always been a touchy subject and gets touched with a 10 foot pole often. … I never want to come off ignorant or pushy so I only bring up my religion when asked about it. … I was interested to hear about other people’s walks with religion. Was it long? Was it short? Is the walk still happening? Did you two sit on a bench and take a break? You learn a lot from other people’s experiences and stories and that’s what really help[s] motivate me to keep telling my stories.” Kayla Saxton

At the midpoint in a semester of writing about religion, the students have listened to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a podcast that models its textual interpretation on the Jewish practice of havruta (study partners) and the Catholic practice of Lectio Divina (monastic textual reading), and they have applied these ways of reading to texts that are sacred to them: an autographed novel by Maaza Mengiste, a Top-40 song, and a red envelope covered with good luck messages in Chinese characters. They have read Mary Antin’s migration memoir and Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal; they have read religious coming-of-age stories by Langston Hughes, Laila Lalami, and Jia Tolentino; and they have watched a documentary film by Zareena Grewal about Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the NBA player who converted to Islam and then refused to stand for the national anthem. They have interviewed classmates and family members and friends. And they have written personal essays about doubt and grief and memory and joy; essays illuminated by church candles on sale for ena dolário and household shrines bedecked with gold velvet and Bic lighters. Soon they will write presentations on visits they make to sacred sites. And they will embark on research essays in which they will seek answers to questions that might not have answers.

“It’s like soul searching without physically going anywhere. It’s like yourself, your spiritual self, is being discovered, being understood.” Isabella Costa

“Stories travel.” This is the reassurance my graduate school advisor gave me when I was worried about writing about literary traditions other than my own. I see religious stories and forms traveling across time, space, and religious traditions in the texts my students and I read together, and in the ways we use these texts to write stories ourselves.

Flannery O’Connor

In the prayer journal she kept as a student in her early twenties, Flannery O’Connor expressed her Catholic faith and doubt in the traditionally Protestant form of extemporaneous prayer, writing informal epistolary entries addressed to “My Dear God.” Later, my friend Ashley and I wrote an essay in response to hers, in the form of letters to God, Flannery, and each other. (I’ve been reliably informed that I’m relentlessly Protestant, and Ashley, the child of a Coptic Christian father from Egypt and a Pentecostal mother from Alabama, identifies as “Copticostal.” Like O’Connor, we both believe in borrowing the religious and literary forms we need.)

“I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them.”  Flannery O’Connor

A hundred years ago, Mary Antin repurposed stories about the Exodus and the Promised Land to tell a story about fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and going to public school in Boston as a secular Jew. Antin’s stories traveled from the Pale to the U.S., and now I see them traveling through the work of a student who cites Antin as an influence, and whose own story brought her from China to the U.S., from Buddhist altars to an altar of language:

“Seemingly, the Chinese have constantly recorded their ideologies into books of prayers and chants, to have language ground their belief—to somehow give it tangibility. During this semester, our class did something similar. We collected our ideologies, specifically our religions, and tied them down to our writing. Though we took it one step further through reflective reinvention. Language is perhaps the most tangible, yet abstract, medium—almost ideological itself. Perhaps, what we did was substitute one ideology for another. In other words, substituting religion [with] a belief that exists outside the sphere of any systematic ideology we had previously been tied down to. When I was younger, religion was mandatory, severe, and repressive. By taking control and writing about it, religion has been replaced by something else—by a reinvention of a religion into a liberated belief outside of any type of familial or national conditioning.” Amanda Long

Writing about religion encompasses stories of deracination and alienation as well as their opposite: the literal racination of anointing with oil distilled from a root. Especially at a college where a third of the students were born outside the U.S. and two thirds have parents who were born outside the U.S., writing about religion often involves a reckoning with origins both national and existential.

“On a simple piece of paper, the pen glides through, embedding all my feelings into words. Ink splatter[s] throughout the paper as it spills my thoughts and emotions. It allows me to find my deeper feelings and understand who I am as a person. Writing about religion has humbled me and allowed me to touch base with my faith. It leads me back to my origins, and remind[s] me of who God is and what my faith teaches. Throughout this course, I have learned a great deal about who I am and how I want to embody Islam.” Maria Sultana

I ponder the histories that brought us all here. Recently or long ago, our families found their way to New York City from China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Greece, Guyana, Honduras, Korea, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and elsewhere. In Queens I am often conscious of my status as a white Protestant in a country that has been settled and dominated by white Protestants, in a borough and on a campus where most people are neither Protestant nor white. There are many chasms between my experience and my students’—chasms that I sometimes marvel at, and sometimes try to bridge. In many ways, we are so different from each other. But for all of us, religion has been a thread that connected us across continents, or tangled, or snapped. It has been braided with new threads or left to fray.

“Why do I pray? Why do I fast? Religion writing demands asking questions and investigation.” Zainab Gani

Like I did at their age, and like many college students, my students are reckoning with a religious inheritance that may seem tenuous or overwhelming or sometimes both. As a college student, I often felt estranged from my two worlds: the evangelical subculture I was leaving behind, and the secular world around me that seemed stripped of meaning. My religious struggle was not a crisis of piety or belief but a crisis of community. I had no trouble praying or affirming creeds, but I couldn’t imagine a permanent place for myself in a religious world where women were expected to marry young and submit to men, and where women could not become scholars or writers. I survived that time by writing myself through it. When I felt brave enough, I’d try to write myself towards or away from something. I’d write to uncover and discover.

“It really challenges you to think deeper. Not only on your own but also [with or about] your family.” Ivana Cruz

Unlike many people in this country, but like most of my students, I lived with my family during college. Writing was my privacy and my escape. By going to a secular college and pursuing an academic career, I was slowly writing myself out of a community that practiced excommunication and shunning of wayward women—a community my family had made their life in for decades. I felt that writing had the power to free me, but I didn’t yet know what I was writing myself into.

“The experience was cathartic. The ability to get your own feelings out and ask all these important questions everyone asks but are too afraid to admit it is something very enchanting.” Elisabeth Mercado

I wrote to God, I wrote to my professors, I wrote to no one. Like some of my students, I didn’t have a computer. When I was writing to meet deadlines, I stayed up late at a communal computer on campus, sipping surreptitiously from some smuggled-in caffeine, fueling my papers on Louisa May Alcott and Frederick Douglass with the restlessness of my faith and doubt. At home in bed as I lay with my notebooks, I wrote words over and over in a self-soothing trance that felt like transcribing glossolalia, channeling syllables in flowing ink that turned language into shapes and lines. Lifelines.

“Writing about religion this semester has been difficult. However it has been so therapeutic for me because of my experiences, which were not all good. Writing about it has helped me reevaluate my relationship with it and put some of my hateful experiences in perspective.” Qadeera Murphy

For me and for some of my students, religion has sometimes been an encounter with hate. How do we find the courage to resist the rules that would condemn us? I was told that sex outside of heterosexual marriage made women as worthless as crumpled paper. I was able to embrace my life as a fallen woman when I decided my body was as god-breathed it in scripture. I decided to live as if my experience was a source of authority. Writing about religion requires a sense of one’s own authority.

“My self and experiences that I had are the sources and proofs of my writing.” Eunice Chang

Treating one’s experience as a sacred text to ponder and to wrestle with, or as a ritual to reinvent: This is the work of an essayist and a memoirist. It might also be the work of any religion writer. What you have witnessed, you must testify. In a world full of libraries and search engines, your own varieties of experience are still evidence. Your experience of libraries and search engines is evidence too.

“To write about religion means to write from the heart, to be truthful and transparent. I think it has little to do with persuasion, rather it serves as a testimony/recollection of one part of a person’s life. … It brings perspective.” Jaylin Yee

My testimony is that after a turbulent time in my teens and twenties, when my religious life was in chronic crisis and my writing life was punctuated by panic attacks, I arrived at a tenable truce in both. I’m now an amateur believer, a professional writer, and midwife to the writing of others. My writing no longer feels like spirit writing. Instead it feels like a daily service that must be rendered, as comforting and tiring as any other ritual practice that feels both optional and not.

“Having faith in something … It brings people a lot of comfort but also a lot of frustration.” Maggie Chen 

The best writing advice I ever received was from a graduate school professor who told me to write out of a sense of unease. I’d already been doing this all my life, but she gave it the stamp of approval I needed. I tell my students that uneasily mixed feelings are a writer’s gift, and nothing creates more mixed feelings than religion. One of the taglines of Killing the Buddha, the publication I co-edit, is “a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches.” Are you exasperated by the smell of incense? Are the prayer beads in your palm getting slick with sweat? Does the sound of a Hammond organ start to dissolve your own organs? Maybe you, too, might be a religion writer.

Or maybe your unease is the unease of homesickness, and an uncertainty about where home might be.

“I’ve felt the urge to want to connect with religion. I distanced myself and had doubted God because of all the faults I have made. Writing made me realize that I do believe in God and have faith. It is challenging because although I want to reconnect myself with religion, I don’t know if it’ll be as a Catholic. … I am open to anything.” Chelseajoy Cabrega

Not all my students are on a personal religious quest. Many end up taking the class because it fulfills a writing requirement and fits with their work schedules. Some use it as a way of learning about their friends or neighborhoods. Others take the opportunity to write about their pre-existing interests in The Handmaid’s Tale or astrology or digital art. Regardless of why they are here, I want them to have the time and opportunity to find their visceral curiosity and write from it. In the midst of long commutes and long days, I want their writing to make them feel alive. I want them to be thinking about their research questions as they stand and sway on the subway. I want them to experience their own uncertainty as a place to begin.

“I always figured that in order to write about religion, you need to know your views the way you know the back of your hand. I’ve found that this is actually not true.” Nick Armont

For the past two weeks the back of my hand has been recovering from a burn that turned it brown, then fuchsia. For a while the skin swelled like a water balloon and then it collapsed and wrinkled like an elephant’s hide. I can’t give a clear account of my religious views, and I don’t know the back of my hand at all. Some people write to find out what they know. It’s also worth turning to writing as an alternative to knowing. 

“I’ve truly come to believe none of it and all of it. So now my question isn’t why people believe or what they believe, but how they believe in just one thing.” Allison McFarlane

How do other people believe what they do? How do they pray as they do, and eat as they do, and desire as they do, and mourn as they do? How do they live? These are questions that express a desire for connection, and they motivate so much of what my students and I have read together: Zora Neale Hurston apprenticing herself to a practitioner of hoodoo in New Orleans; Ellen Willis arguing with her Orthodox family in Israel; James Baldwin sitting down to a meal with Elijah Muhammad. These questions express a desire to understand others beyond the self, even and especially when they mystify us most. They are outward looking in a way that I aspire to be when I think about writing and religion. My own religion writing started with my internal struggle, and it has turned into a social practice. I wrote a syllabus that starts with writing about ourselves, and ends with research about the world around us. But of course this is a false dichotomy: because writing is a conversation between multiple voices, a dynamic between different worlds and selves. 

“Most of the time it feels LOVELY to hear [about] the lives of other people. I learn a lot from others when they speak of their lives. But sometimes it can feel very difficult to speak about myself and the things I’ve dealt with. What really resonates with me is to hear my classmates’ stories and how they have dealt with hardship much worse than mine. This class teaches me how to figure out my religion while observing and respecting other religions. And with the multiple stories we read, I can say I’m getting closer to becoming a much more peaceful and accepting person.” Antonio Martinez 

Eleven years ago, I thought God might be calling me to be an academic chaplain—a minister to college students. I applied to academic jobs and divinity schools and decided to let God decide. God chose Yale Divinity School, where for two years I trained to minister and to preach. But in the end God was no match for my student loans. After sinking deeper and deeper into debt, I realized I needed a job with benefits as soon as possible, and I left divinity school a year early to become a writing teacher. In the years since then, I’ve mostly stopped preaching. Instead, I’ve been listening to the sermons and khutbahs and letters and blessings and sacred texts and incantations my students are writing—to me, to each other, and maybe to you—as they learn to write about religion from classes, from novels, from radio waves, from tarot cards, from grieving, or from Friday Prayer:   

“When I write I am able to come to terms with doubt and fear. When I write about religion, I am able to look God in the face and the world in the face through pen and paper and say that I am in control of my life. When I write about religion I find the divine in those I love. I find religion in things not usually considered religious. I find holy the body, the mind, the interconnectedness of society.” Sayyid Mohammed

Briallen Hopperis an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Queens College, CUNY and co-editor-in-chief of Killing the Buddha. She is the author of Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (Bloomsbury, 2019), a Kirkus Best Book of the Year.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post Learning to Write about Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

The OC television show

In America, the fusion of Christmas and Hanukkah even has its own name, “Chrismukkah,” made popular by the early 2000s television show The OC. The show’s main character, Seth Cohen, a child of a Jewish father and Presbyterian mother, describes Chrismukkah as eight days of presents, followed by one day with tons of presents. The term was so popular that Chrismukkah was one of Time magazine’s words of the year in 2004. Consumerism quickly followed, with a slew of kitschy items hitting the market, ranging from coffee table books to Chrismukkah cards from Hallmark and American Greetings. There are Chrismukkah ornaments and Chrismukkah recipes. The recipes include the inglorious Passion of the Iced, a Long Island Iced Tea pulled from stereotypes about Jews on Long Island and “the Passion of the Christ,” which, confusingly, should be associated with Easter, not Christmas. But those details are not what drive Chrismukkah commercialism. Whether these products are “a merry-mishmash” or a problematic blend of stereotypes, they are principally consumption oriented. They avoid many of the traditions and stories that root these holidays in their historical and theological contexts. The creators of Chrismukkah commodities are often deeply secular. They are looking to keep the fun elements of Christmas and Hanukkah that might easily unite Jewish-Christian interfaith families without stumbling into the murkier waters of theological or historical differences.

For many interfaith families, however, the holiday season can be more fraught than Chrismukkah would suggest. Since the 1970s, when American Jews started to marry Christians in large numbers, the question of whether interfaith families should celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas, both, or neither, has been referred to as the “December dilemma.” For the past four decades, countless rabbis, ministers, and relationship experts have debated if it is acceptable for Jews and Christians to intermarry and, if they do, how they should navigate competing religious and cultural demands.

As the interfaith marriage rate began to rise, clergy responded to the phenomenon in several ways. Interfaith marriage was particularly troubling to many in the Jewish community because of dwindling demographics. Jews make up less than 2% of the American population and less than 0.2% of the world population. Jewish leaders worried that interfaith marriage would damage Jewish numbers beyond repair. As a result, many rabbis refused to perform interfaith marriages and many liberal Protestant clergy actually encouraged interfaith couples to stay connected to Jewish communities. The few rabbis who would marry interfaith couples typically expected those couples to maintain a Jewish home. More often than not, those rabbis, who were members of the Reform movement—both the largest and most liberal of the Jewish movements—were not asking interfaith couples to do things like keep kosher or keep the Sabbath. Rather, they were asking them to “not do Christian things,” that is, to abstain from Christmas, at least in their homes. Christian spouses in interfaith marriages were told they could celebrate Christmas with their birth families, but they were not to decorate for, or celebrate, Christmas in their own homes. The absence of Christmas became the litmus test for whether or not the interfaith couple was, in fact, keeping a Jewish home.

For some interfaith families giving up Christmas worked well. The couples, and their children, were happy with their Jewish lives and identities. Some made a big deal out of Hanukkah, which is a surprisingly minor holiday in the Jewish liturgical calendar, but which serves many Jewish families (interfaith and not) as a festive holiday in the midst of massive cultural Christmas cheer. Others enjoyed Christmas celebrations with their birth families and did not object to keeping the yuletide trappings out of their own homes.

Other interfaith families, however, found giving up Christmas difficult. While conducting research for my book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in America, I discovered that spouses from Christian backgrounds sometimes became depressed living in homes in which Christmas was forbidden. Other times I learned about spouses who suddenly found themselves with nowhere to celebrate Christmas after their parents had died and they had promised not to celebrate Christmas in their homes. Many Christian women, married to Jewish men, reported that they resented working hard to maintain their husband’s Jewish traditions while their own customs were banned from the home.

The prohibition against celebrating Christmas has been enforced in a number of ways, but Hebrew School has been a particularly common place where people monitored Christmas observance. One woman told me that she grew up celebrating Christmas with her Jewish mother and Irish Catholic father in New York City. Even after her parents divorced, she continued celebrating Christmas with her Jewish mother. Christmas, to her, was New York—the window displays at Saks Fifth Avenue, ice-skating by the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, seeing Santa Claus at the 34^th Street Macys. She never questioned her Jewish identity. Her parents had agreed that she would be raised Jewish; her father was not a practicing Catholic and, because Judaism is matrilineal, she was Jewish in the eyes of all Jewish religious leaders. She grew up, married a Jewish man, and continued to celebrate Christmas until her daughter’s Hebrew School director told her she needed to stop. The Hebrew School director insisted Christmas would confuse her daughter’s sense of Jewish identity. Though the mother had grown up celebrating Christmas and did not feel in the least confused, she complied. And even though she had committed to Judaism in many other ways, her community found her celebration of and love for Christmas to be a significant problem that threatened her child’s connection to the Jewish people.

Another Jewish woman I interviewed married a Christian man. Together, they joined a Unitarian Universalist congregation and chose to decorate their home for Christmas and celebrate Hanukkah. Every year, her Jewish sister refused to enter their home while it was decorated for Christmas. Not only did her sister and family skip all Christmas celebrations, they insisted that she take down her tree and put away the ornaments before hosting their annual New Year’s Day brunch. Her sister’s refusal to enter her home meant that she could never host their family’s Hanukkah gathering, and every year she was reminded of her sister’s disapproval. Although celebrating both Christmas and Hanukkah worked for these two women, their communities and birth families registered strong disapproval of their choices, such that the first woman ceased to celebrate Christmas and the second spent the entire month of December upset by her sister’s discontentment.

Christmas, then, is often a sticky time for interfaith families. Plenty of people in interfaith families, even those who actively identify as Jewish, do, in fact, celebrate Christmas. Interfaith families also often celebrate Hanukkah. But over and over again, despite how important “Chrismukkah” has become as a cultural phenomenon, when completing the research for my book, I found very few people who actually celebrated the combined holiday of Chrismukkah. Interfaith families that are committed to doing both Hanukkah and Christmas, such as a Mormon woman and Jewish man I met, are often careful to make sure that their children know the distinct stories of both holidays. Because the Jewish husband has what he describes as a “Jewish allergy” to Christmas trees, they do not have a tree in their home. The Mormon wife explained that a tree is not essential to her, and therefore not worth asking her husband to experience discomfort. Christ, however, is essential to her and so they have a nativity scene. Their children know the Christmas story, from the Gospel of Luke, and also the Hanukkah story. They have chosen to avoid the gift giving frenzy that both holidays can invite. Other families I met are more secular in their observances, downplaying Christ in favor of more general messages of peace on Earth and avoiding the commonly-held idea that the Hanukkah story is a fight against assimilation in favor of emphasizing Jewish survival. Regardless of the holidays’ messages, interfaith families, like other families, fill this season with family recipes, family stories, and family visits. They watch Christmas specials, wear ugly sweaters, and light menorahs that children made out of modeling clay in preschool. The holidays in these homes run parallel with each other and overflow with meaning, tradition, and ritual.

In the end, most interfaith families I met keep their Christmas and Hanukkah celebrations separate. In these homes, Christmas gets its time, and Hanukkah gets its own time. The whole point of the holidays, for these families, is to honor the traditions, stories, souvenirs, and rituals that their parents and grandparents found important, be those hand-knit stockings or hand-grated latkes (potato pancakes), stories of the birth of the Jesus, or stories about the survival of a small but scrappy group of ancient Jews against all odds.

The result is that when Christmas and Hanukkah overlap, years like this one pose a challenge for interfaith families. It is one thing to light the menorah in the shadow of the Christmas tree because you already have it up. It is quite another to hit pause on the Christmas celebrations so you can light the menorah for the fourth night in a row. These overlaps do not, however, necessarily mean an unhappy holiday—just one that needs a little bit of thought. And increasingly, interfaith families find ways to keep December from being a dilemma.

Samira K. Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her current project, God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America examines  Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant debates about contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs. 

The post The December Dilemma: Less Oy, More Joy appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers

Several Decembers ago, my husband and I received an unexpected package from my mother. Inside, we found two holiday stockings that she had made, one for him and one for me. My husband and I are what some call an “interfaith” couple, and my mom had designed stockings to reflect our celebrations of both Christmas and Hanukkah. His stocking, in the Christmas spirit, was red and white and had a gay Santa in the middle who looked like he was proudly prancing with a bag of toys. My Jewish stocking was blue and white and had a bright rainbow menorah. My mom, a crafting wizard, had created the most delightfully queer interfaith stockings for us to hang in our home.

Stockings by Cherry Cassell, the Editor’s mother

For the past nine years, my husband and I have celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas. On the eight nights of Hanukkah, we light candles on our menorah while Skyping with my mom who is doing the same. On Christmas, we exchange gifts, eat freshly baked cinnamon rolls, and meet up with friends for “Jewish Christmas”—a movie and Chinese food. These are traditions I cherish. Once a grinch about the holidays, I now look forward to blending rituals with my husband in a queer mélange of religion, food, and chosen families.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer explores identities that are seemingly in conflict. Each article considers how our identities shape us, our interactions with others, and how our identities can change over time. In “The December Dilemma: Less Oy, More Joy,” Samira Mehta describes how Jewish-Christian interfaith families navigate the holiday season. In “Learning to Write about Religion,” Briallen Hopper reflects on how to write about religious traditions that are different from one’s own experiences. In an excerpt from her book, American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change, Emily Sigalow explores the popularity of Jews who practice Buddhism. And, in “Ceding Authority: Notes on Identity and Power in the Classroom,” Abby Kluchin considers the complications of teaching Gender and Sexuality Studies courses as a straight Jewish woman to students who identify as queer at a predominantly Christian college.

As the articles in this issue emphasize, conflicting identities can create turmoil as well as new possibilities for how to live in the world. We inherit identities and we create them. Identities describe us and mischaracterize us. We are judged because of our identities and we make assumptions about others because of theirs. So this December I am going to take a cue from my own mother and remember, amidst the spectacle of Christmas and the cultural pressures to enjoy the winter holidays, that Santa could be gay. And Hanukkah can be an eight-night festival of pride.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D. 

P.S. Don’t miss our “Winter Reading Recommendations” for great books by recent Revealer writers.

The post Editor’s Letter: Intersecting Identities appeared first on The Revealer.