And if you’re looking for something to listen to, we can’t recommend these two Longform Podcasts with New York Magazine staff writers highly enough. First up, the wise, and irreverently reverent art critic, Jerry Saltz. And second, the indispensably sharp and galvanizing feminist journalist Rebecca Traister. Their conversations aren’t about religion, but they are about how to write, study, think, and we think everyone could use a dose (or two) of that right now.

Alex Prager for The New York Times. Painting by Vanessa Prager

Now, for the reading:

This gorgeous essay, How Maya Rudolphs Became the Master of Impressions , by Catie Weaver for The New York Times Magazine, made an otherwise hellish commute heavenly.

Supposing that God is real and possessed of a human corporeal form — mankind being created in his image (reportedly) — we might reasonably conjecture that God’s anthropoid body integrates the totality of physical traits expressed in Earth’s human population: the skin tones blended to a light tan; the hair dark and thick; the height neither too tall nor too short — about 5-foot-7, say; every shade of human iris (the iridescent blue of a morpho butterfly, the pale green of lichen clinging to a tree, lots of brown) combining to create eyes that are … also brown. Considering his propensity for giving life, God would probably be a mother. Considering his appreciation of beauty (e.g., snowflake geometry) and busy schedule (e.g., Genesis), he would probably clothe himself in breezily tasteful garments made from natural fabrics cut for maneuverability, like a long denim jumper dress worn over a shirt of pure white cotton. God would look, in other words, like Maya Rudolph running errands on a Tuesday.

Measuring 28 feet by 12 feet, the “Queen’s Window” represents a hawthorn, a thorny floral shrub, in bloom.CreditVictoria Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This gem also provided welcome does of charm on an otherwise grim subway. Turns out, David Hockney Wouldn’t Paint the Queen. By  Farah Nayeri for The New York Times. 

And we’d miss our stop to keep reading Molly Crabapple‘s piece, My great grandfather the Bundist

When the Bund is acknowledged at all today, it is often characterized as naive idealism whose concept of Hereness lost its argument to the Holocaust. But as I watch footage on social media of Israeli snipers’ bullets killing Palestinian protesters, I think that Bundism, with its Jewishness that was at once compassionate and hard as iron, was the movement that history proved right.

A gathering of the Bundist Youth Organization, Warsaw, June 1932

Or maybe we should get out of the city altogether? A Trip to Tolstoy Farm by Jordan Michael Smith for Longreads

But there was another Tolstoy who’s been lost to history. For all his fame as a novelist, in Russia and elsewhere Tolstoy the fiction writer was secondary in fame and impact to Tolstoy the author of political, social and religious non-fiction. “His popular celebrity in 1910 owed more to his political and ethical campaigning and his status as a visionary, reformer, moralist, and philosophical guru than to his talents as a writer of fiction,” the classicist Mary Beard has observed. Though it’s remembered today only by a few literary critics, Tolstoy fashioned an entire coherent way of living centered around his unique understanding of Christianity. Its adherents came to be known as Tolstoyans, much to his annoyance. At one time, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of practicing Tolstoyans around the world, from India to Canada. They renounced cities, comforts, laws, pleasure, modernity. Now they’re all gone. Almost all.

But no, we’re staying here in New York, but we’re grateful to California-based Popula for bringing us pieces like,What it is like to Celebrate Mass by Edmund Wadstein, O.Cist.

To try to celebrate Mass with one’s whole heart is also to be filled with a desire to combat corruption in the Church. As a Catholic priest, the abuse scandal in the Church is given an extra edge of horror to me by the fact that the abusers were priests, supposed to have consecrated their lives to the Holy Sacrifice. What they did instead was the exact opposite. Instead of “this is my body offered up for you,” they essentially said, “this is your body, which I am going to take.” That fills me with anger.

And New York isn’t all bad, at least we get to go see the show everyone is writing about in this new series atThe Immanent Frame: Couture and the death of the real: A response to Heavenly Bodies with contributions by Robert Orsi, Brenna Moore, Emma Anderson, and Stephen Schlosser.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s Spring 2018 exhibition, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, has been described as “a dialogue between fashion and medieval art from The Met collection to examine fashion’s ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism.” Among the artifacts on display are dozens of pieces, including papal robes and jewels, never before seen outside the Sistine Chapel Sacristy. The papal objects are juxtaposed alongside baroque-style dresses from leading fashion houses—among them Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, and Dior—to demonstrate the longstanding influence of liturgical vestments on international designers. While fascination with Catholic dress is not new, the exhibit raises many questions about the Vatican’s involvement in light of histories of American anti-Catholicism and philo-Catholicism. And as this exhibit came in the midst of what Robert Orsi in his introduction to the forum describes as “the worst crisis in the history of modern Catholicism,” issues of sexuality, aesthetics, and power are brought into view.

On another subject entirely, this sounds about right: There are too many gurus in America by Heather Havrilesky for LitHub

The guru is not an expert in happiness or inner peace, although he plays one on the internet. He is not a role model in the realm of fighting injustice or saving the world from disease or throwing his body onto the battlefield. He is a champion of the self. His livelihood relies not only on the defeat of human emotions, but on a denial of the existence of prejudice, of resistance, of the machinery of oppression, of the impenetrable forces that maintain the status quo, of the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, of the disastrously callous habits of the overclass and the bought-out legislators who serve them. The guru will not instruct you on how to navigate a world that distrusts or despises you, nor will he acknowledge that the landscape you inhabit was built to keep you poor, powerless, and suspect.

In other words, the guru is an expert at gaming privilege.

And we definitely cannot not talk about the gutwrenching, infuriating, harrowing, frankly, just totally fucked up, appointment of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last week. But, we’re grateful for Talia Lavin‘s advice on How to  Fight Back Doom in the Age of Kavanaugh in The Daily Beast

To live in a time such as this—in which children are separated from their parents and incarcerated; in which racism and spite and greed and theocratic zeal seem the only animating forces of our government—it is worth remembering that there have been worse and blacker times, and there were those, even then, who fought on in the bilious dark.

And when there are stories about sex and gender in the news, our list of “must reads” always includes Jia Tolentino (as well as Lili Loofbourow, who is quoted in the next two pieces). Her latest, Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, and the Things Men do for Other Men, is essential:

Part of the reason the Kavanaugh news cycle has been such a flashpoint—part of the reason that so many conservatives have fanatically defended his right to have hypothetically committed the crime he’s been accused of, and that so many women have been spending the last two weeks in a haze of resurfaced trauma—is that it illuminates the centrality of sexual assault in the matrix of male power in America. In high schools, in colleges, at law schools, and in the halls of Washington, men perform for one another and ascend to positions of power. Watching it happen is a deadening reminder, for victims of sexual assault and harassment, that, in many cases, you were about as meaningful as a chess piece, one of a long procession of objects in the lifelong game that men play with other men.

As is Adam Serwer‘s analysis in The Cruelty is the Point, for The Atlantic

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

And It’s Not Like Nikola Tesla Knew All of Those People Were Going to Die by Hanif Abdurraqib

Everyone wants to write about god

but no one wants to imagine their god

 

as the finger trembling inside a grenade

pin’s ring or the red vine of blood coughed into a child’s palm

 

while they cradle the head of a dying parent.

Few things are more dangerous than a man

 

who is capable of dividing himself into several men,

each of them with a unique river of desire

 

on their tongues. It is also magic to pray for a daughter

and find yourself with an endless march of boys

 

who all have the smile of a motherfucker who wronged you

and never apologized. No one wants to imagine their god

 

as the knuckles cracking on a father watching their son

picking a good switch from the tree and certainly

 

no one wants to imagine their god as the tree.

Enough with the foolishness of hope and how it bruises

 

the walls of a home where two people sit, stubbornly in love

with the idea of staying. If one must pray, I imagine

 

it is most worthwhile to pray towards endings.

The only difference between sunsets and funerals

 

is whether or not a town mistakes the howls

of a crying woman for madness.

With that, one last Hockney and we’ll hope to see you again next month.

East Yorkshire, watercolor, David Hockney, 2004

***

The post In the News: Cruelty, Comedy, and Communists appeared first on The Revealer.

Three days into his hunger strike, Bobby Sands weighed 137 pounds. Six weeks later, on the day that he received last rites, the Provisional Irish Republican Army soldier was a little over a hundred pounds. He lived for another three weeks, before dying at the age of 27 on May 5^th, 1981 in H-block, the Maze Prison hospital, County Down, Northern Ireland.

In a photo from shortly before Sands died, one sees a man hunger has transformed into a living cadaver. Gone is the vitality evident in the iconic photograph of Sands as a young man—the same image seen in Belfast Republican murals—a long-haired child of the ‘60s in a red sweater with a handsome, hopeful smile. Before his death, rather, Sands is skeletal, with hair long, dark, and unkempt, a scraggly thick beard framing his angular face, and eyes distilled to hungry, pure intensity. An aura — the presence of that original icon. Sands appeared in life before death as nothing so much as a breathing pieta. The literary scholar Terry Eagleton might explain his transformation by telling us that Sands had undergone a “form of semiosis in which one’s body is converted into a sign.”

In his latest book, Radical Sacrifice, Eagleton notes that to be “martyred is to allow one’s death to be taken into public ownership,” and for insurgents from Belfast to Bethlehem, Sands resonated as symbol of post-colonial resistance. The young IRA soldier, improbably elected to Parliament while in the midst of his hunger strike, who died for national self-determination. For men like Sands, the “act of dying becomes an eloquent piece of discourse, as the flesh speaks more persuasively than any voice,” and so his death made a powerful argument about sacrifice and the sacred, oppression and the state. For his Irish Republican audience, Sands’ “eloquent piece of discourse” spoke loudly, and his argument was clear in international resistance movements from Palestine to Peru.

The reaction of Margaret Thatcher (she who did not believe that society was real), on the other hand, was predictable. Thatcher remained firm that “a crime, is a crime.” British newspapers were not much more nuanced; The Daily Mirror wrote in an editorial a month before he died that “the death of Sands would add another martyr to a history which has a surplus of them.” A columnist for that paper, John Edwards, wrote that Sands’ death was a “pathetic end for a man,” and a cartoon from the Daily Mirror mocked the Christian iconography of Sands’ death by claiming that he “died that others might die.”

Interpretations of Sands’ death varied by audience and political conviction — an ambiguous semiotics of extinction. For republican sympathizers, Sands’ death verified Eagleton’s claim that “martyrdom is a way of reaping sense from what is otherwise a mere fact of Nature, turning one’s mortality into a kind of rhetoric.” By contrast, 10 Downing Street and its media apparatus exoticized Sands’ protest as barbaric sacrament, Catholic theater for the credulous. An undercurrent ran through editorials claiming something unseemly in Sands’ sacrifice, a logic more pagan than it was political. Sands received dismissals that strongly resembled Winston Churchill describing Mahatma Gandhi’s hunger strikes as the act of a man who was a “half-naked… fakir of a type well known in the east.”

Sands evoked everything from toscad, the ritual fasting of ancient Ireland, to the Gorta Mór of 1845 to 1849 when the government he was protesting allowed a quarter of Ireland to starve to death. He drew on a reservoir of history, dream, and mythos far more profound than an editorial designed for the proverbial “man on the Clapham omnibus.” A nation that had, in 1563, pored over the gory stories of Protestant martyrs at Tyburn as described by John Foxe in his Acts of Monuments was no longer conversant in that particular tongue; Corporal mortification no longer spoke with an English accent. Neither Thatcher nor readers of the Daily Mirror thought of sacrifice as logical or fashionable. Thatcherites and others like them may assume the concept has been “consigned by liberal modernity to the ashcan of history,” but Eagleton argues that this is a limited, complacent understanding of sacrifice’s power and meaning and warns that to “see the custom [of martyrdom] in orthodox Enlightenment fashion as a species of savagery” is a grave mistake.

Sands appears nowhere in Radical Sacrifice, though seemingly everyone else does. Eagleton, in what is almost his 50^th book, focuses on fictional examples of martyrs from Virgil, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Naipaul, St Aubyn, Yeats, Eliot, and Walter Benjamin among several other men, while one of the only women included is none other than J.K. Rowling. And, of course, Eagleton includes the big examples of sacrifice from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Gospels, though whether these are “fictional” depends on the reader’s epistemological inclinations — and besides, that’s never been the important question anyhow. What is important is martyrdom’s significance, and in Radical Sacrifice Eagleton makes a potent argument as to its perennial import, how it structures both the systems that oppress us and our means of resisting those very same systems. Radical Sacrifice is a brief that explicates not just the revolutionary significance of martyrdom, but also of art, nationalism, apocalypse, creation, and death. In it, he argues that we must embrace sacrifice, that we can understand it in a “positive or political light.” Religion can operate on a frequency that ears congratulating themselves on their rationality are deaf to hear.

“Late Stage Eagleton” has always been a religious project, a committed Marxist returning to the Christian Brothers who educated him in his youth. If you are only familiar with Eagleton from his landmark 1983 Literary Theory: An Introduction such theological concerns may seem unexpected. At a moment when “Theory” was ascendant, with its reputation for continental obfuscation’s and deconstructionist incomprehensibilities, Literary Theory offered a learned and, at times, funny encapsulation of what all the confusing new “-isms,” from post-structuralism to New Historicism, were about. When Eagleton’s obituary is written that volume will be mentioned in the lede, as that slim book remains the best single edition on the subject ever written for a general audience — an accomplishment for a work with a Marxist bent. All of which makes it perhaps all the more incongruous that he’s now written a book blurbed by the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank, though it shouldn’t be surprising.

Stolid son of Irish Catholicism that Eagleton is, theological perspectives have informed his politics since his graduate work and he’s returned to religious themes in several recent works. So, while Eagleton clearly didn’t just develop these theological interests, for several reasons, he has spent the last decade making explicit what was often before left implicit.

Eagleton has always been more at home in the glass-and-concrete universities of Labour Britain than in he is in Tory Oxbridge, even after having studied and taught in those ivy-covered schools. High Theory never quite had a home among the Oxbridge set, and Eagleton always seemed more comfortable at places like the University of Manchester or the University of Lancaster, where the punkish enthusiasms of British cultural studies could flourish among scholars like Raymond Williams (his doctoral adviser) and Stuart Hall.

Rejecting the tweed and sherry set of Oxbridge also meant rejecting particular strains of gentlemanly atheism; the very British, very bourgeois, very Anglican form of disbelief practiced by the biologist Richard Dawkins and Eagleton’s former comrade in the International Socialists, the late journalist Christopher Hitchens. With pugilism, Eagleton has combated the largely moribund movement of “New Atheists.” Commenting on Dawkins (in a manner that U.S. intellectuals should try), Eagleton said that reading him was like being with “someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds.” If people exist on the other side of the Anthropocene they’ll read about Eagleton’s criticisms of Dawkins as one reads about Erasmus’s criticisms of the now obscure Johannes Pfefferkorn do today — with the aid of a critical footnote. Dawkins ostensibly believes that there is no God, but, also, believe that He is an Episcopalian. In truth, his atheism is much more about the rejection of a Muslim God, or a Jewish God, or an Irish one, than it is a coherent metaphysics. Dawkins is the sort of man who could never understand starving oneself to death for principle. Far from being radical, Dawkins’ theology is simply the ontological scaffolding for self-interested neoliberalism; thus, a critique of the New Atheists is always as political as it is philosophical.

Withering in his castigation of New Atheist smugness, Eagleton is also frustrated by the left’s dismissal of the theological. Anyone who has spent much time in the steadfastly secular environs of academic literary theory would assent to Eagleton’s observation that there are “questions not commonly investigated by the political left, and certainly not by its postmodern wing. Love, death, suffering, sacrifice, evil, martyrdoms, forgiveness and so on are not exactly modish preoccupations.” In Radical Sacrifice Eagleton presents an argument for the left that as concerns religion “there is a radical kernel to be extracted from its mystical shell.”

Eagleton’s frustrations are clear in his polemical 2003 After Theory, where he wrote that theorists promise to “Grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fail to deliver.” He goes on to say that they are “shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth.” Adding for good measure that this “is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.” After Theory was Eagleton’s manifesto against theory’s superficiality, but he never traded in his Derrida for Augustine, his Foucault for Aquinas. Rather, for him, the two approaches supplement each other. Eagleton never rejected his beloved nineteenth-century German Jewish philosopher either, preferring rather to make manifest Christ in Marx, and also Marx in Christ. Radical Sacrifice is the latest volley in this regard; how successful it will be is uncertain, but what Eagleton does accomplish is a demonstration that political-theology is invaluable for any cultural theorist who wishes to say something coherent about that rather “large slice of human existence.”

In a contention as crucial as any he’s penned in his storied career, Eagleton argues that the “powers that constitute the social order are sacred, as well as those that threaten to undermine it.” The Gospels may be a revolutionary document, but Eagleton reminds us that Moloch was a god too, and no critique of oppression can ignore the fact that systems like capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and structural racism have their own occult theological kernel defining them (sometimes explicitly). Dismissing far-right manifestations of religiosity as simply being hypocritical is an anemic analysis, and it is better to understand them as their own faith that we must oppose. Political conflict as holy war? Dangerous perhaps, but also, at least in an interpretive sense, necessary.

Eagleton’s claims here are are sweeping. He argues that sacrifice is the core of our totalizing society (both at the center and the margins) and that the “violence that sustains the social order,” as manifested from the law to the military to the church, is sublimated in a “collective amnesia that [allows] civilization” to thrive. An astute reader might be reminded here of the French anthropologist Rene Girard’s seminal 1977 Violence and the Sacred, in which he introduced critical mainstays such as the “scapegoat mechanism” into academic treatments of sacrificial violence. Aware of his indebtedness, Eagleton stakes his originality with almost Oedipal anxiety (more or less convincingly, depending on what page of Radical Sacrifice you’re reading). Eagleton would have you believe that his biggest point of contention with Girard is his commitment to Marxian materialism, even as it sometimes feels as if he is using the example of Christ to convince himself of how much he still agrees with Marx.

“We are natural-born teleologists,” argues Eagleton, and any revolutionary movement is defined by a secularized millennialism. Eagleton has always prayed for the “impending upheaval which Marx calls communism and the Christian Gospel calls the Kingdom of God.” When Eagleton writes it’s not clear how literal he means to be; I suspect not very. But Christian apocalypticism, for Eagleton, does present an apophatic utopianism, an ethic that is based on finality, extinction, and mortality which can serve as an absolute moral even as late capitalism promises to make all that is solid melt into air. Thus, Eagleton proposes a universal morality of radical politics based in “the most radical forms of equality… our common killability.”

Eagleton sees an embrace of not just sacrifice, but death, as the ultimate axiom of revolutionary change. We could call this “gothic leftism,” or perhaps “memento mori radicalism,” but either way, this oozing, squishy, bloody and fragile embodiment is the “demonic truth” on which, he argues, a “more-than-imaginary community might be built.” Far from fearing the reaper, Eagleton claims that “It would be hard to imagine a more potent revolutionary force” than death. Not death as method, but rather the collective grappling with mortality’s implications; a spiritual critique of neoliberalism’s totalizing vacuousness. Freudian Thanatos is as repressed as Eros was in the Victorian era and, in part, Eagleton argues, it’s because there is no instrumental rationality to extinction, particularly to our own deaths, and so the vampiric logic of capitalism is such that we’re all marketed to as if we’ll never die. As though immortality can be fretfully purchased for the price of a few hours at the gym and a macrobiotic diet.

Eagleton encourages us to reengage the tomb, to parse the “ethics of the graveyard” as “death destroys the false, commodified identity of things, and in an ecstatic strike against time lays bare the sense of eternity at their heart.” Questions of why we purchase, why we save, why we work for others and not ourselves are proven to be empty, and as such Eagleton’s anti-utilitarian theology can be understood as an exegesis on the meaning of anti-meaning. The sepulcher lends itself to a paradoxical repudiation of nihilism. A cracked type of humanism, but a humanism all the same (and rare in either case).

Scholastic that he is, Eagleton argues that death is a demonstration of the absurd contingency of creation, for the fact is always that the world didn’t need to come into existence. This is of course true for all of us, and thus death unmasks the superficiality of an economics obsessed with utility, but which never answer the question of “Utility to what end?” There is a chain of production and consumption, and that chain links us, individual-to-individual, until the grave itself severs that link.

Eagleton’s ethics may be that of the cemetery, but it’s still the opposite of nihilism. Though our mortality cares not for “owing us a living,” neither do we owe anyone else our labor. Our “most flourishing acts” are not those done in the service of multinational corporations, but rather ones that are “performed as though they were one’s last, and thus accomplished not for their consequences but for their own sake.” Personal apocalypticism in opposition to “utility and instrumental reason,” where, rather, our “existence and that of others… [is] an end in itself.”

The rare thinker who takes Nietzsche at his word, Eagleton (unlike Ditchkins) understands that the death of God does entail a challenge to morality, that such a metaphysic ultimately implies the contention (often misattributed to Dostoevsky) that if God doesn’t exist, then “everything is permitted.” He can’t quite follow the Christian Brothers of his youth into a literal belief in Christ’s saving grace, but he does think that our shared embodiment can be the basis for a universal morality of a sort. This may seem more sentiment than argument, and yet in taking the question of nihilism seriously, Eagleton at least gestures to the gap left by the dead God.

What he doesn’t gesture towards enough are actual examples of sacrifice, especially those who were led to the gallows unwillingly. Eagleton prefers to dwell instead in literature and scripture, a weakness of the book which makes the entire project a bit arid when it could have been more fully human. Where are Trayvon Martin and Matthew Shephard? Where is Nia Wilson? If Christ has always been an embodiment of those who are treated as the refuse of the world, where are the African-American youths martyred by the police, women murdered by their partners, the victims of homophobic and anti-trans hate crimes? It reflects a certain comfort on Eagleton’s part that such questions aren’t raised in Radical Sacrifice, and it’s a detriment to the potential power of his study.

A mural of Trayvon Martin is seen on the side of a building in the Sandtown neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested on April 30, 2015 in Baltimore.
ANDREW BURTON / GETTY IMAGES

Still, there is a radical kernel to Eagleton’s book that is worth taking seriously. He conceives of Christianity as exemplifying the basis for a full politics in the most classical sense of the word. Eagleton understands the early Christians, in mystical communion with eternity, as having rejected the contingencies of Caesar for the perennial moment of Christ. He describes an ethos in which:

Those who live as though the future has already arrived pose a threat to the status quo. They are prophets, and as such figures marked out as objects of political violence; yet they also live like the lilies of the field and take no heed for tomorrow. In their touch of surrealist madness and casual way with material necessities, they proclaim the imminence of the reign of justice.

Such ruptures against the instrumental reason of our society are “concealed in the unfathomable depths of the present,” for “one should strive to treat every moment as absolute, disentangling it from the ignominy of circumstance.” Millennium is accessible now.

Radical Sacrifice offers an almost Taoist Marxist-Catholicism, explicating the radical potential of the present, that portal through which millennium could always arrive. His is an ethic that rejects the endless chain of dependence, singular lives rather justified as the thing-in-itself (like Creation, like God), and where the “sacred represents a critique of instrumental rationality.” Death, the great equalizer of medieval Fortuna, of Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre with king and beggar, pope and peasant alike dancing with skeletal alacrity, their exuberance encouraging us to reject those things of this world, those things of this market. Placing the universality of death at the center of our radical politics allows us to say that the Market should be not proud, though some have called it mighty and dreadful, for Capital shall have no dominion.

***

Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions and the Editor-at-Large of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a frequent contributor at several different sites. His collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books in 2018. He can be followed at his website, on Facebook, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

***

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

The post Ethics of the Graveyard: Terry Eagleton on Death appeared first on The Revealer.

Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss Haversham in 2012

“Be careful,” a friend said as I slouched across from him in the low, sagging vinyl chairs of the library. “You can do it, but you should know that you’re doing it entirely to make him feel bad.” His voice was neutral. Unspoken was the rest of the thought—he’s certainly not going to apologize or even respond, much less come back, newly chastened to be the boyfriend you had dreamed of in those early, hopeful days of easy banter. I stared at the watery half-ring of coffee staining the lip of my cheap paper cup. He was right, of course, both that sending an email detailing all of the ways he had made me feel unsafe was almost guaranteed to be pointless from the perspective of reconciliation, and that I should be suspicious of my motives. Still, I had seen this particular ex for the first time in three months earlier that day and, when he had passed me on the street with a jaunty wave and a friend’s bookcase half-perched on his shoulder, something about his insouciance, his utter lack of embarrassment, infuriated me. I had spent months thinking about everything that had gone wrong, scrupulously trying to disentangle my responsibility from his. And there he was, blithely unconcerned with any hurt he had caused. I didn’t want reconciliation. I just didn’t want to be the only one who had to bear the weight of thinking about it.

I looked up. “He deserves to feel bad.”

He nodded. There was no judgment on his face. “Yes.”

I sent the email, telling him that I refused to forgive him and why. It felt amazing. I never did hear back from him, but that night I went on my first date with the man who would become my husband.

Five years have passed since I sent that email. They have been the years of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and so, so many others killed by the police while unarmed. The months of Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Matt Lauer, and Avital Ronnell, all sunk by #MeToo. The time of Trump. Now, since Senator Susan Collins is finishing her speech in support of the most controversial Supreme Court nomination of my lifetime as I write, they also look primed to become the decades of Brett Kavanaugh.

No one looks much in the mood for forgiveness.

We have heard plenty of lamentations about the collapse of civility in public life and exhortations to reach across the aisle—to reconcile and forgive—alongside more resigned calls to give up the idea of forgiveness as a fantasy that leads to election losses. What we haven’t heard is a full-throated case for refusing to forgive—not as an act of spite, not as a temporary state to be overcome, not a lack of Christian virtue, but as a moral stance in its own right.

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham (photographed by Cecil Beaton) in 1945

And why would we when an image of the woman who refuses to forgive is arguably one of the most despised figures in Western literature? She is Miss Havisham, cadaverous in the yellowed satin of her wedding dress. One stocking is shredded from years of pacing around her dressing room in one shoe, the other shoe still perched on the vanity exactly where it had been the moment the letter arrived telling her of her lover’s betrayal. The clocks are stopped and her wedding cake crawls with spiders and beetles on the table where it was set all of those years ago—the same table that she surveys with gloomy satisfaction, remarking “that is where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come look at me here.” Her injury is real enough but her tenacity in clinging to it and her brooding hatred of all men are excessive, morbid, perverse. She is like Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground, “A sick woman, a spiteful woman.”

When philosophers talk about forgiveness and the refusal to forgive, their reference is most often to Bishop Joseph Butler, the eighteenth century Anglican moralist, not Charles Dickens, but the portrait amounts to the same. The person who refuses to forgive is resentful, nurturing her sense of being wronged to keep her wounds open. At times, Butler admits, the resentful person’s dogged insistence on remembering her wrongs can even cause a good Christians to question God’s providential plan. In a 1726 sermon addressed to his lawyer filled congregation at Rolls Chapel in London, Butler worried over the existence of resentment.

Since perfect goodness in the Deity is the principle, from whence the universe was brought into being, and by which it is preserved; and since general benevolence is the great law of whole moral creation: it is a question which immediately occurs, Why had man implanted in him a principle, which appears directly contrary to benevolence?^[1]

Gillian Anderson as Mrs. Havisham in 2011

Resentment is a “settled anger,” roused by the sense of being given less than one’s due, he concludes in his seminal analysis. Like all private passions, it serves the public good in much the same way Adam Smith would argue in the following generation that private interest drives the free market. Thus, in moderation it is good, a testimony to the innate sense of justice all people share and a way of creating social cohesion through collective indignation. But, in excess, resentment destroys social bonds and feeds on the natural tendency to imagine ourselves more innocent, and our enemies more base, than is the case. Worse still, resentment rejects the healing gift of time that God gives to stitch all wounds.

Nietzsche, meanwhile, lauded mercy as an act of strength and dismissed resentment as limited to “such creatures who are denied genuine reaction, that of the deed, and who compensate for it through an imaginary revenge…. The resentful person is neither sincere, nor naive, nor honest and forthright with himself. His soul squints; his mind loves hiding places and back doors; everything concealed gives him the feeling that it is his world, his security, his balm….”

Sadistic, squinting, insincere, weak, perpetually trapped in a past that can never be overcome—who would want to be the resentful person who refuses to forgive? Isn’t it in her best interest to forgive? Wouldn’t Miss Havisham’s whole life have been better if she had kicked off her wedding shoes for dancing shoes and learned to move past her broken heart? Isn’t that what conventional wisdom and self-help books insist on telling us? Forgive for yourself, so you can move on.

Ann Bancroft as Mrs. Havisham in 1998

And yet, my own experience with refusing to forgive makes me doubt that the choice really is between dwelling forever on a wrong or absolving someone for their misdeeds. I have spent remarkably little time in the years since I wrote to him thinking about the ex in question, except occasionally to marvel over how freeing it was to dump him in the mental basket I had labeled “deplorable.” Refusing to forgive him was not a declaration of eternal resentment for me. It was a decision that I simply did not want to take on the emotional labor of absolving him. What had happened, happened. He had taken enough of my energy. I refused to give him any more. Is this attitude resentment nonetheless? Maybe, though on my part I felt it was an act of self-respect.

My story is private and quotidian, but there are much more significant ones. When Dylann Roof opened fire on the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015 and killed nine people, there was an immediate rush of opinion pieces about forgiveness. Would the survivors forgive Roof? Should the survivors forgive him? Did he even deserve forgiveness, given his utter lack of repentance? After all, even weeks after the shooting, he steadfastly refused to repent, writing in prison:

I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did…I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed…I do feel sorry for the innocent white children forced to live in this sick country and I do feel sorry for the innocent white people that are killed daily at the hands of the lower race. I have shed a tear of self-pity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place. I feel pity that I had to give up my life because of a situation that should never have existed.

Jean Simmons as Mrs. Havisham in 1989

Debate only picked up a few days later, when a group of those who had survived the shooting did announce that they forgave Roof, with one survivor, Nadine Collier, very simply acknowledging the world-shattering depth of her loss by saying, “You took something very precious from me. I will never talk to her again. I will never, ever hold her again. But I forgive you. And have mercy on your soul.” Many praised the survivors for their magnanimity. Others argued that forgiveness was an act of resistance to a racist society, a refusal to be brought to the depths of hate of the white supremacist Roof. Still others, more cynically, wondered if the entire conversation around forgiveness was a monumental act of bad faith by a society that wanted to extort forgiveness from its weakest, most marginalized members in order to paper over ongoing injustices and avoid actual change.

While I share these doubts about the ethics of demanding forgiveness, I am even more skeptical of the efficacy of forgiveness. Most accounts of forgiveness claim its aim is the reparation of the relationship between two people, the injured and the injurer. Yet the trappings of forgiveness, most notably apologies, are routinely dragged into public conversations, as if the right words, the proper display of remorse, could fix our damaged social relations. Every apology in the wake of #MeToo—Harvey Weinstein’s, Louis C.K.’s, Junot Diaz’s, Mario Batali’s—has been dissected and nearly every has been found wanting. Were they insincere or at times strangely flippant? Yes, but they were also the wrong medium for rectifying sexual assault and inequality.

Gillian Anderson as Mrs. Havisham in 2011

In all of these cases, the problem is that our expectations of forgiveness have not caught up with our explanations of social harms. We know that Harvey Weinstein is the type of story that he is because he is the product of an entire culture that props up the right of powerful men to exploit and degrade women, just as we know that Dylan Roof is a story because his decision to shoot a church full of Black people manifests the social reality of racism. In another more equal society, both acts would be horrifying, but they would not be representative of a whole system of social inequality and violence in the same way. But, as it stands in our present, imperfect world, when we examine Junot Diaz’s or Louis C.K.’s apologies for whiffs of insincerity, we are not asking if we believe they have made amends to the particular individuals they injured. Rather, we are asking if they have adequately apologized for their role in the whole rotten social system that made their abuses possible. This is an impossible thing to demand from an apology, at least so long as we continue to understand forgiveness as a way of repairing relations between individuals. Junot Diaz can only apologize for being Junot Diaz. He can’t apologize for the man who pressed up against you on the subway or the middle-aged man who stymied your career or the wage gap. The fact that this is the case might suggest that our discussion of forgiveness has missed something important about the ways a wrong can feel symbolic of a whole disordered social world, or it might indicate that forgiveness has a much smaller social role than normally recognized, but, regardless, it means that the scope of forgiveness needs to be rethought to address twenty-first century ideas about social responsibility and the origin of violence.

My point in writing all of this is not that we should never forgive (Miss Havishams of the world, unite!). My point is that Miss Havisham was dreamt up as an act of propaganda. For all sorts of reasons (good and bad, dangerous and anodyne) people can’t forgive or actively refuse to forgive. This piece is the first of a series I will write for The Revealer over the next year exploring why people don’t forgive, whether forgiveness is an act of will or an act of the body, how forgiveness fits into a theory of systemic violence, and what these questions about the ethics of demanding forgiveness mean for movements like reparative justice. I don’t know yet what I think about all of these questions, but I do know that they will never get asked so long as the only model we have of someone who refuses to forgive is a fictional woman from two hundred years ago, who stalks around her house in a tattered wedding dress, entombed by her resentment.

Women dressed as Mrs. Havisham ride a London bus in a promotion stunt for a BBC production of “Great Expectations” in 2014.

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^[1] Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons and Other Writings on Ethics, ed. David McNaughton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 68.

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Liane Carlson is the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. From 2015-2018 worked as the Stewart Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. Her book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2019.  She is currently working on a new book on the refusal to forgive.
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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Against Forgiveness: A Manifesto (Or, Miss Havishams of the World, Unite!) appeared first on The Revealer.

Brian Edwards, a Wiccan High Priest and paid contractor with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, prepares to lead a ritual with prisoners at the Ohio Reformatory for Women (ORW) in Marysville, Ohio, on May 31, 2018. He used incense to cleanse the area and candles to balance different forces, then cast a sacred circle, within which the ritual took place. Edwards visits ORW twice monthly, both providing educational guidance for the women there and leading them in rituals. Approximately 300 prisoners at ORW identify as pagan.

With her eyes wide and her hands thrust before her, Kerry Vadasz, a practitioner of Wicca, works to banish impurities from the space where she is participating in a group ritual. As she leans forward, an intricate medallion — what appears to be a combination of a lotus flower and the traditional Wiccan pentacle — dangles from her neck. Next to it hangs an identification card with her headshot, a barcode, and bold, white letters: “INMATE.”

Vadasz is one of about 300 prisoners at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio, who identify as pagan, and one of approximately 3,000 with this religious affiliation in the state, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC). She is also part of a growing number of prisoners nationwide who belong to such communities – a demographic that correctional facilities find themselves increasingly pressed to understand and accommodate.

Kerry Vadasz, a Wiccan practitioner at the Ohio Reformatory for Women, centers herself in preparation to perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, a practice used to rid a sacred space of impure or chaotic elements. Although the rituals Edwards leads are Wiccan and occult in feel, aspects of them are applicable across pagan traditions, he said. The women he assists have a variety of different pagan backgrounds and beliefs.

Broadly speaking, paganism encompasses an eclectic mix of nature-based, polytheistic traditions – many of which, adherents believe, are rooted in ancient, pre-Christian practices – that started gaining popularity in the mid-20^th century. Unlike mainstream, monotheistic religions, Wicca, Asatru, Druidry, and others often avoid dogma and tend not to have central texts or authorities. Many offer freedom of interpretation and practice. Although exact numbers remain elusive, Harvard’s Pluralism Project suggests that the U.S. pagan population could be upwards of one million.

That such belief systems would thrive in the highly regulated prison environment may seem counterintuitive, not to mention logistically difficult. And yet, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Forum, more than a third of American prison chaplains reported that pagan communities were growing in their facilities. In this survey, significantly, Pagan/earth-based religions were given an explicit category of their own instead of being lumped together with other minority religions, as they often are. The prison chaplains surveyed estimated that about 1.7 percent of prisoners adhered to such religions (a percentage that, if extrapolated to the U.S. prison population, would suggest that there were about 40,000 incarcerated people in 2012 with this religious affiliation). Since then, prison officials and clergy continue to note an uptick.

One woman anoints another with oil in preparation for the ritual, which focused on honoring earth and seeking balance with the natural elements. Although the rituals that Edwards leads are Wiccan and occult in feel, aspects of them are applicable across pagan traditions, he said. About 40 prisoners of diverse pagan backgrounds participated in the gathering, which was held in a room utilized by multiple religious groups.

Although there are many reasons prisoners might choose to follow a religious tradition, the growth of paganism could have to do with America’s changing religious landscape, suggested Mike Davis, Religious Services Administrator for the ODRC, explaining, “I believe that the trends in religious practice that occur within the correctional system reflect the religious diversity, and religious pluralism, that shape our entire culture.”

Religion is also widely viewed as a moral, corrective force for prisoners and a way to help reduce recidivism. Christianity, in particular, has a long history in American prisons; in fact, principles of “human sinfulness and redemptive possibility” formed the very foundation of the American penitentiary movement, according to religion scholar Jennifer Graber in her book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America. Today, prisons are very religiously diverse, and laws like RLUIPA (the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act) require facilities not to restrict religious practices unless there is an important reason to do so, such as safety. Prisons typically accommodate different religions through the efforts of both staff chaplains and external volunteers.

Although pagan traditions do not use language of sin and redemption, adherents emphasize that their traditions also offer rehabilitative possibilities. Vadasz, a former Jehovah’s Witness, said that the ability to worship a goddess instead of a masculine god can be therapeutic for women, especially those scarred by trauma involving men. She also finds the practice of introspection to be extremely helpful.

“To me, it’s freeing. I can be me,” she said, later adding, “My being feels empowered.”

Mindfulness and self-awareness are at the core of work done by Brian Edwards, a Wiccan High Priest and the first paid pagan prison clergy member to be hired by the state of Ohio, the ODRC informed him. He travels twice monthly to the Ohio Reformatory for Women, where he regularly oversees about 40 prisoners, including Vadasz, in lessons and rituals.

Brian Edwards joins hands with prisoners at the Ohio Reformatory for Women as he guides them in the Cone of Power, a practice of raising and directing energy through chants and song.

“It is easier for someone to put a parachute on and to jump out of a plane . . . than to turn inward and reflect on one’s emotional landscape,” he said. “That is the scariest place for a person to look.”

The sessions that Edwards leads tend to be Wiccan and occult in feel, but applicable across pagan traditions, he said. He also offers one-on-one guidance to the women and assists them in finding resources for their individual pagan practices.

Among other topics, Edwards educates the prisoners about the natural elements — earth, air, fire, water — believed to be in every person, and about the psychology attached to each; fire, for instance, is associated with passion, the ability to create, and the ability to destroy. His students can then contemplate how the elements function inside of them personally, how these may be out of balance, and how to get them back in harmony. Edwards also helps the women understand any “supernormal” experiences and abilities that may be present in their lives, such as having visions, which can easily lead to destructive impulses, but with proper guidance, can be channeled in productive ways, he explained.

A woman participates in the Cone of Power, a collective practice of raising and directing energy through chants and song.

Women cup their hands to receive blessings during the ritual on May 31, 2018.

“Either you learn how to use these abilities, or these abilities will use you,” he said.

At other correctional facilities in Ohio and elsewhere, volunteers guide prisoners in the practice of heathenry, which centers on beliefs and practices thought to have originated in ancient northern Europe. The tradition of Asatru, which is rooted primarily in Norse mythology and folklore, encourages practitioners to lead noble lives, and to honor each other and their ancestors. Concepts such as frith – which emphasizes one’s responsibility toward one’s community and family — resonate with some prisoners.

“I think of it more as a way of life. It’s an honorable way of life. It’s how you should live,” said one follower of Asatru incarcerated at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County.

At this facility, he and other men have formed the Fara Af Tr’u (Journey of Faith) kindred, a group to observe and study Asatru. Some of the men are now pursuing higher education as a result, said Chaplain Abdul-Wahab Omeira, who is the prison’s Muslim chaplain, but has helped oversee pagan practitioners. Others have had their sentences reduced.

Thomas Wheelock, an incarcerated follower of Asatru, lectures to fellow prisoners during a Yule ceremony at the California State Prison, Los Angeles County – a maximum-security men’s facility in Lancaster, California – on December 24, 2014. As gothi, or priest, of the Fara Af Tr’u (Journey of Faith) kindred, he helps lead a small group of men in studying and observing Asatru, a heathen religion thought to be rooted in the beliefs and practices of ancient northern Europe, especially Scandinavia. The tradition draws on literature such as the Icelandic sagas and Eddas. During Yule, a celebration of the winter solstice, Norse gods including Odin, Thor, and Freyr are typically honored through feasting and ceremony.

But paganism faces a number of challenges in carceral facilities, including a lack of resources – namely, a shortage of clergy. Prisons often do not have staff chaplains who are trained in pagan traditions, leaving prisoners largely reliant on unpaid, external volunteers for guidance and rituals. Mike Davis emphasized the difficulty of finding willing providers, and of accommodating the growing diversity of pagan religions. According to the 2012 Pew survey, 35 percent of prison chaplains nationwide said more volunteers were needed to assist pagans. Only the need for Muslim volunteers ranked higher.

Additionally, there are issues of race and extremism to contend with. Because of their associations with northern Europe, heathen religions in particular are often fraught with racial politics: While some adherents believe heathenry can be practiced by anyone, others believe it should be reserved for people of this specific ancestry. Heathen traditions and their symbology have been attractive to white supremacists — especially in prisons, where racial divisions run deep. Some prisoners have also allegedly cited heathenry as justification for violence: For example, in a Virginia facility, an incarcerated follower of Asatru murdered another prisoner at a makeshift altar and claimed that the Norse gods had inspired his actions. The shortage of resources may make pagan prisoners more vulnerable to these kinds of ideologies.

Wheelock uses a Thor’s hammer to hallow a sacred space for the Fara Af Tr’u kindred Yule ceremony at the prison. Asatru emphasizes living a noble life, honoring one’s ancestors, and recognizing the far-reaching impact of one’s actions – concepts that resonate with some prisoners. However, because of their association with northern Europe, heathen religions like Asatru and its counterpart, Odinism, are sometimes attractive to white supremacists – particularly in prisons, where racial divisions run especially deep. Knowing this, the kindred has striven to remain inclusive of racial minorities.

Prison officials are cautious, and, for instance, may vet literature and religious items before pagan prisoners are permitted to use them. Depending on the facility, pagans may not be able to gather for meetings or rituals without approved clergy to oversee them. But some prisons have reportedly taken such discipline a step further and engaged in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior. There have been many lawsuits, including one filed by William Rouser, a Wiccan prisoner in California, who claimed he was repeatedly denied access to basic religious items, such as oils and herbs. In response to his complaints, he said, prison staff put him in solitary confinement.

“I think it’s just ignorance. People don’t understand, and what they don’t understand they’re afraid of,” said Lisa Morgenstern, an ordained priestess who belongs to the international heathen organization known as The Troth and volunteers at prisons in California. She recalled hearing a prison staff member mock pagans as “devil worshippers.”

Wheelock uses an evergreen sprig to trace a rune –a type of ancient symbol– on the forehead of another Asatru practitioner, blessing him during the Yule ceremony on December 24, 2014. The day’s festivities were facilitated by Lisa Morgenstern, a volunteer from an international heathen organization known as The Troth, and overseen by Chaplain Abdul-Wahab Omeira, a Muslim prison chaplain also responsible for overseeing pagan prisoners.

Issues like these are motivating members of the American pagan community to act. Prisoners themselves are working to change perceptions of their beliefs. For instance, members of the Fara Af Tr’u kindred in California are aware of the racial politics of heathenry, so they have striven to be inclusive of minorities. Outside organizations including The Troth and the Appalachian Pagan Ministry also engage in “in-reach” at prisons across the country, providing guidance for incarcerated people, educating prison staff, and working to curtail extremism. They also field mail and literature requests from prisoners. Supported primarily by donations, Rev. Donna Donovan, founder of the Appalachian Pagan Ministry, and a colleague spend multiple days on the road each month serving pagan people in nine Ohio prisons and several West Virginia facilities. Some of the prisoners they serve are on death row.

A member of the Fara Af Tr’u kindred prepares an offering for gods and land spirits during the Yule ceremony.

Prisons, too, are actively seeking assistance for pagans. The ODRC recently hired Brian Edwards to serve as pagan clergy at a second facility, the Marion Correctional Institution in Marion, Ohio. However, due to his full-time day job, the requests can be overwhelming, he said, and he wishes there were more help available.

“People need to be aware of the fact that there is this need out here,” he said. It’s a huge one.”

Members of the Fara Af Tr’u kindred and guests partake in a banquet following the Yule ceremony on December 24, 2014. Kindred members saved up about $200 to pay for all of the food, which included several hams, bread, veggie trays, cupcakes, pie, and soda.

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Lauren Pond is a documentary photographer who specializes in faith and religion. She is currently a multimedia producer for the Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion, where she uses photography and sound to study Ohio’s diverse religious communities, including neopagan movements and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. In 2017, Lauren published Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation (Duke University Press), a photography book about Pentecostal serpent handlers, which received the 2016 Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.  Lauren received dual Bachelor’s degrees in journalism and art from Northwestern University in 2009, and a Master’s degree in photojournalism from Ohio University in 2014.

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

The post On Being Pagan in Prison appeared first on The Revealer.