By Patrick Blanchfield

This is the first installment in a new column called Political Feelings: Stories, Scenes and Studies of Religion in American Culture being written by Patrick Blanchfield for The Revealer. Political Feelings is about political affect and the politics of affect in America, and will pay particular attention to questions of religion and religious themes. Blanchfield says of the column, “I’m particularly interested in the affective landscapes of extremism, violence, and civic religion, which I see as both urgently of the moment and marked by subsurface, dislocated temporalities and disguised repetitions: in other words, by traumas.  As a site of both collective and individual memory and communal intensity, bound up in both history and present struggles, religion represents a quilting point and nexus for experiencing, understanding, and working through the traumas that are, and that continue to shape, public life in our newly contentious and painful moment.” 

When I finally see Deepak Chopra, I am confused, because the only thing he has in common with the enormous portrait photograph in front of which he stands are the rhinestones. In the photo, Chopra’s wearing something between a Nehru jacket and an unbuttoned leisure suit with a clerical collar; here, he’s sporting an untucked blue shirt and jeans, and floats above the ground in a pair of expensive basketball sneakers with translucent red outsoles that look like they’ve been hewn from solid garnet. Chopra in the photo is ageless and well-coiffed, the scleras of his eyes distressingly luminous in a way that suggests some serious Photoshop. Chopra on the red carpet looks as haggard, bleary, and unimpressed as I feel.

But then I see the diamonds.

Scanning the crowd in the YouTube event space, Chopra moves his head, and the dozens of gems that stud the rims of his glasses refract the overhead lights and camera flashes. He’s wearing the same glasses in the photo, where their luster suggests a kind of halo emanating from his temples. Amid the weird pastels and earth tones of Silicon Valley corporate décor their gleam is mesmerizing. Are the diamonds real? It is impossible to tell. Chopra ducks backstage. Perhaps he must prepare. Soon, it has been promised, he will re-emerge to debate Skepticism itself.

The event in question has been billed many ways. It has been billed as a stand against “fake news” on the one hand and as a concerned response to supposed campus intolerance toward “free speech” on the other. It is also a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of an organization of self-professed skeptics, which publishes a quarterly magazine. And, finally, it is a “live variety science show” featuring sundry celebrities and a white Canadian hip-hop artist who will rap about the wonders of evolutionary psychology.

The event space, located in the YouTube offices, is located above the sprawling arcades of the Chelsea Market, a block-long former warehouse turned into a warren of restaurants and boutique shops. Looking for the venue, I search end to end twice, feeling like an extra wandering on the set of Blade Runner, disoriented among the rush of people wearing strange glasses and earpieces, the rushes of steam and smell from hissing woks and grilling meat. Only by observing a flow of young men and women, all well-dressed and carrying similar-looking messenger bags, leaving from one hallway under the watchful eye of an unobtrusive security guard do I find a table to check-in with a QR code. A ride in a freight elevator later, I am in a converted loft space. A camera crew is setting up, and caterers thread between rows of chairs balancing platters of California Rolls. A wall of screens behind the stage blares the words: TRUTH? HOW CAN WE KNOW? Filtering in from omnipresent speakers, a soundtrack alternates trap instrumentals and Andean flute music. There is an open bar.

Soon enough, things start. TRUTH? HOW CAN WE KNOW? is being broadcast live online by the progressive-leaning The Young Turks YouTube channel; it’s being MC’ed by Jayde Lovell, who hosts a show on its lineup and is the founder of a science-focused PR consultancy. She works the crowd, starting with “Any skeptics in the house tonight?” and lingering on lines like: “There’s only one kind of facts – real facts.” Lovell’s is the most strictly speaking political voice of the evening, though her jokes about Bernie Sanders (“Yes, there is a God, it’s Bernie Sanders”) fall flat.

Photo by Patrick Blanchfield

The event’s real gravitational center is the founder of the Skeptics Society and editor-in-chief of Skeptic Magazine. An academically trained historian of science turned popular writer and public advocate for scientific skepticism, Michael Shermer has a Wikipedia page longer than many Nobel Prize winners and more than a few nineteenth century wars. His organization, the Skeptics Society, is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to debunking pseudoscience and addressing controversies in science education; among other things, it organizes a speaking series in California (where Shermer is based) whose roster has included Bill Nye, Dinesh D’Souza, and various figures associated with New Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, etc.). The press packet I have been sent makes additional claims. Listed among the Skeptics Society’s “Proudest Moments” is “Investigating the Holocaust Deniers.” “The Skeptics Society was the first organization to delve into the ideas behind this organization,” says the text. “Dr. Michael Shermer interviewed members of this group individually, and published the story in a cover story of Skeptic magazine.” Beneath this, headshots of numerous “Celebrity Skeptics” including “a celebrity illusionist,” a “world-class magician,” Seth MacFarlane, and a propulsion engineer at NASA.

Shermer is friends with Chopra, whom he has promised to “debate” throughout the evening. And so Shermer and Chopra sit opposite each other on stools and talk, sometimes just the two of them, sometimes joined by various internet celebrities and podcasters. There are interludes: that rapper Baba Brinkman performs; a magician bends spoons; and video segment after video segment features Shermer debunking various pseudoscientific misbeliefs or lecturing wryly about the logical insufficiencies of theism. But running through it all is Shermer’s dialogue with Chopra. If “dialogue” is the right word for it. Mostly Shermer talks in wide generalities about the importance of rejecting nonscience and “alternative facts” in favor of “truth” and Chopra responds by asking questions about the ultimate grounding of consciousness or what of the Self endures between our breaths. As the evening proceeds, Chopra’s interventions grow increasingly koan-like (“Where is yesterday now?”) and build to pronouncements like “99.99% of the universe is not empirical,” and “We are all God – in drag.” Shermer, for his part, promotes a campaign whereby people who send him video testimonies about their experiences becoming skeptics will receive a physical card they can carry in the wallet, the better to self-identify as a “Card Carrying Skeptic.”

Shermer and Chopra may present and even think of themselves as radically opposed, but in truth they are sides of the same coin, equally at home here. New Atheism and Skepticism are far from unwelcome in Silicon Valley, and Shermer, with his TED Talks and hot take on “the bias police” and backlash against former Google employee James Damore, fits right in, too. Chopra, for his part, has recently been appointed Professor of Consciousness Studies at Sofia University, a small private institution in the Bay Area, and talks about the lessons he’s learned about human desire by listening in to tech pitches in the lounge of the Palo Alto Four Seasons. He’s also recently released his own Virtual Reality meditation app. “In 20 minutes you get a journey to enlightenment,” he promises, describing his product as offering insights into consciousness that leave René Descartes in the dust: “He was good for his time but didn’t have VR to take it to the next level.” Both men are, in their way, each selling something. Tonight’s gestures at political language (“fake news” and “alternative facts”) are just that, gestures, so many gambits at branding and relevance, current events buzzwords as Celebrity Friends. The only real politics here is money, little else.

I revisit the bar where, as one of the few attendees who is actually tipping, I am greeted warmly. Standing there, I catch a glimpse of the YouTube office down the hallway, guarded by yet another security guard. The fixtures and décor are about what you’d expect – high-tech comfort, with a self-consciously lively chic. The space here is so pristine, so self-consciously new, and hip, and young. Below, the Chelsea Market is also a manicured Disneyland of amusements and pleasures, servicing the tech workers who walk through it each day. The logic seems to be that they can experience New York in all its diversity (which really, as so often, just means culinary diversity) without ever leaving the footprint of their workplace. It feels like being onboard a spaceship, or a cyberpunk arcology – some totally enclosed concentration of resources of cultural capital, at once corporate and hyper-connected, yet also somehow feudal and autarkic. This event, featuring a professional celebrity skeptic and a professional celebrity mystic, feels, in its own way, like a repetition of something much older – priests and philosophes debating as an after-dinner amusement for the Bourbon court, poets and wits earning their keep through banter at the Medici table. The horizon of possibility for contests between belief and skepticism, fact and fiction, truth and lies, all sustained and confined in a hermetic bubble of patronage, wealth, and stardom.

Out of nowhere, Chopra interrupts a panel of podcasters and minor celebrities. He has something to say. He holds his mic in one hand, and shapes his other into some kind of teaching gesture. He grins broadly, and the diamonds in his glasses gleam. A pause, and then: “All knowledge is ignorance.”

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Patrick Blanchfield was the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about US culture, guns, and politics at carteblanchfield.com and is on Twitter as @patblanchfield.

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

The post Silicon Soirée appeared first on The Revealer.

Artwork by Nathan Green

By Ann Neumann

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” Galatians 5:22

In August of 2013 I wrote to Kali Handelman, the brand-spanking-new editor of The Revealer, to see if she might be interested in a monthly column about all the testy, complicated questions surrounding religion and medicine that riddle the rich folds of our American social fabric.

My pitch was rather loosey-goosey: a placing of two terms in relation to one another, a commitment to question both my definition of those terms and their commonly understood meanings, a mapping of where they overlap and don’t. The title, “The Patient Body,” was both a play on words and an ode to that most dissipated virtue, patience, to endure discomfort without complaint.^[1] Suffering in silence doesn’t get many points on my own personal scale, but suffering is —either on a cross or on a hospital gurney— the core of both religion and medicine. With a patient body, our most immediate media, seemed like a sound place to start.

At the time, I was thick into research for a book that explored the intersection of religion and medicine through the lens of end of life care. I couldn’t think of a better format for that book-bound research than a monthly column, with its regular deadlines and enforced thinking-through of entrenched problems—with an astute editor who could poke holes and ask good questions. We have since put out some 45 installments of the “Patient Body” column—altogether practically a book itself. (You can browse the archives here.)

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Religion is the bane and bastion of medical ethics (see “How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine,” August 2015), the tenets of the application of science to bodily health. Like an appendix, both germane and excessive to the body, religion is the shadow and progenitor of ethical practice in medicine.

Often it is the media coverage of the two that muddies our understanding of their historical interdependence: the court controversies, the ethical conflicts, the tensions between personal and public health. Media’s increasing need to tell stories that outrage, incite and ultimately generate sales (of ads, clicks, or anything, really) reduces any issue to two sides, the more closely matched the better the fight, often characterized as science vs. religion or individual vs. the bureaucracy. No one gets to be a complicated human in these matches; no one gets out alive.

The relationship between religious morality and medical ethics is—and we could argue has always been—narrated by the religious (particularly the most politically visible), the medical professions (the farther from the patient body, the more corporatized). Nuance and subtlety, debate and negotiation, have never been the media’s practice— bet that media legacy, new, subscription, or social. Throw in a heap of our country’s religious illiteracy, add a dollop of “capital T” truth dished out by science and medicine—“we own the facts, we’re curing cancer!”—and you have the perfect recipe for our mediated cultural collision course.

Since I made religion and medicine my beat nearly a decade ago, and since we began The Patient Body, the narrowing and calcifying of mediated opinions have most characterized the national climate. Trump’s election, thanks in large part to evangelicals willing to look past most anything for the sake of an ever more conservative US Supreme Court, confirmed that politics today is about winning, not governing. Even if this had been the case for decades, the cravenness of the Democratic party was exposed; the Republican party’s use of moral purpose as a shield for theft was laid bare.

Even if Trump’s election has made our tone more urgent, The Patient Body’s terrain has consistently been the pitfalls—and pratfalls—of these tensions and stories. The November 2013 column addressed kidney donation and medical equity. The opening of “What’s a Kidney Worth?” reads:

If I pay you $10,000, will you give me a kidney? Just one. You have two and you really only need one; you’re healthy, and while I don’t know you, I think you might have an idea of what to do with an extra ten G. I’ll cover your hospital stay, your operation, your recovery*, all you have to do is… let my surgeon cut into your abdomen and take your kidney. You’ll be saving a life. You’ll be richer. You’ll be giving the ultimate gift.

The column asks us to reconsider the emotionally compelling but ultimately false notion that altruism is an unmitigated good. I argued that the international medical industry was patting its own self-righteous back when it declared that organ donors cannot legally be paid for their kidneys; I factored in the astounding shortage of kidney donors and the elaborately inequitable regimes established to collect organs. It’s a piece of humor and dissection that was easier before Trump’s election shifted medical policy from pragmatic recalibration to outright national triage.

Internal Organ Kidney Heart Lungs Liver c. 1850 Heck antique detailed engraving

Patient autonomy and public health can travel in tandem; most often a patient’s medical decisions are not a threat to society. But in the highly publicized and controversial cases when they don’t agree, I have tried to wade in. The most perfect example of how religion and medicine confound patient autonomy—pitting the soul against its pain—is the battle for legal aid in dying in the US. The very first Patient Body, “An Irresistible Force,” looked at the laws surrounding “assisted suicide” and how they were being used by opponents of aid in dying. I examined a highly charged case where a state’s “assisted suicide” laws, being used to confound patients’ end of life choices, caused unnecessary pain and suffering for one family.

Erring on the side of life is an unquestionable principle, perhaps, until you’re standing where Barbara Mancini was on February 7, 2013, in her father’s home outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Joseph Yourshaw asked his daughter, Barbara, a nurse, to hand him a bottle of morphine. Yourshaw was 93, a war veteran with diabetes, end-stage renal disease, heart disease and the effects of a stroke. She gave him the bottle. He took the morphine.

Mancini was arrested; her defense supported by the largest aid in dying organization in the country, Compassion and Choices. Was Yourshaw’s decision to drink the morphine immoral? Illegal? A danger to his soul? His family? Society? Was Mancini’s simple act a threat to anyone? Ultimately the court ruled that Mancini could go free, but her experience no doubt stifled countless families caught in similar horrors of love and pain.

Mancini’s case is of a genre; pain is one of our most potent political currencies. In September 2016’s “Narratives of Women’s Pain,” I wrote about another aspect of medicine’s regard for suffering: the epidemic of women’s pain in the country today. I started with the story of how Phyllis Schlafy, the Religious Right’s grand doyenne of keeping women in their place, once broke her hip at a talk and continued to smile and thank her hosts even while being carried out on a stretcher. “To be female means to bear pain,” I wrote:

Schlafly wielded pain as a moral cudgel, deployed to maintain the narrow roles of behavior she and her political counterparts interpreted as moral. You venture beyond the hearth, the marriage bed, the modesty of appropriate female clothes, the confines of strict gender-sexual alignment and you are punished.

Our enforcement of women’s subservience has fatal consequences—ones that are too often justified as “natural” or noble. This is evident in recent studies that show doctors—both male and female—blatantly ignore or undertreat women’s pain and suffering, disregarding it as the natural state of women. Citing Jessi Klein’s widely-shared, “Get the Epidural,” essay for the New York Times, I wrote:

Women are never allowed to be their natural selves—without make up, unshaven, uncoiffed—unless they’re giving birth. Then the shaming of selfish women who want medication begins. With such disregard for women’s well being, it can be no wonder that the US maternal mortality rate has doubled since 1990.

Shame is so much a part of living with a female body that it works as its own censure on behavior. Women are ashamed to speak of their own pain. The detriment to public health is obvious: women die in childbirth. For July 2015’s column “Impossible Purity,” I looked at the shaming of sex and how failure to teach and discuss individual rights affects public health. With a cue from Sara Moslener’s excellent Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence about iterations of the purity movement, I wrote:

Calls for abstinence are as old as the Garden of Eden, and for exactly none of that time have they been broadly heeded. Nevertheless, Christian evangelicals persist in their cultural and political emphasis on sexual abstinence. And that persistence continues to have serious consequences.

Those consequences are unwanted pregnancies, STDs, financial and educational inequality, shaming of sex and those who have it, and an entrenched double standard for boys and girls. Moslener’s book sets up the argument that (female) sexual purity has historically been conflated with our nation’s purity. The politics of religion influence the politics of health in such a way that individual rights are pitted against nationalism, I wrote, quoting Moslener:

Public health is always rife with the politics of moral judgment (exactly what makes this column possible!). Public health regulations are often a telling barometer of our country’s moral compass, from vaccination laws to the legal drinking age. And no public health category is more fraught with moral minefields than sexual health. Right now, our moral compass is set on shaming and inhibiting the lives of young people, particularly women, by setting up and devoting wads of money to an ideal that will never be achieved (not least by a majority of those espousing it). “That is the erotic dream of Christian conservatism: a restoration of chivalry, a cleansing of impurity, a nation without sin, an empire of the personal as political.”

With the Trump administration’s embrace of inequalities—racial, financial, gendered—not as tacit unfortunate challenges but as designed and moral structures, public health (and how we talk about both nationalism and the health of the country when we talk about it) becomes a cudgel aimed at the most vulnerable. In this administration, the most vulnerable are re-characterized as unsafe, immoral and dangerous; they are a threat to the nation’s physical and financial health: dangerous Muslims and Mexicans, grifting welfare recipients, lazy poor people. In a dog-eat-dog world where survival goes to the fittest, it takes a pretty self-assured ideology to carry this kind of warped “moral” weight.

The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia by Stefano Maderno

 Othering, redefining citizenship, privileging of some rights over others, heightening fears of moral and physical danger or infection: these are the tools of power, political and moral. More often than not, these tools pit the rights of minority groups against a glorious retelling of nationhood. They help shift the definition of morality away from health and care and rights to profit and winning and might. With The Patient Body, my goal is to find the moral truths, to ask who is scapegoated or ignored, to point to what’s at stake.

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Few tasks can be more exciting to a writer than looking back at the accumulation of work diligently amassed over time. As I sat down to mark the passing of our four years by rereading these columns, so many surprised me with their urgency, clarity, and bravery. Much of that freshness is due to Kali’s fine directing, to Angela’s eternal astuteness, and to the history and mission of the Center and The Revealer. Lord, make me a vessel!

There are some true clunkers here too, don’t get me wrong. But the living nature of the column, its unfettered willingness to go into dark corners and to speak up at seemingly inappropriate times has kept the work of the past four years somehow fresh. And—this is an important point—it has continued to engage and motivate me. Not once have I looked across at my Revealer deadline and thought, “what in the world am I going to write about.”

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^[1] Unless you’re into literal interpretation: longsuffering and forbearance are often used in place of patience. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+5%3A22-5%3A23

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU.

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

The post Anniversary Edition: Four Years of “The Patient Body” appeared first on The Revealer.

The School of Athens, Raphael, 1511

By Ed Simon

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.” – Henry David Thoreau

“If those who do not possess knowledge avoid the scholarly discussion, disagreement will end.” – Al-Ghazali

Thomas Aquinas, he whose girth was so great that the monks had to outfit him with a special desk to accommodate the wide berth of his belly, could supposedly levitate. Amazing to contemplate, especially considering his heft, but then again what is a miracle but faith made manifest before our very eyes? And this strange image – a man of consummate rationality capable of such a wonder – is as miraculous as the feat itself. Almost as heavy as Aquinas was his opus: the Summa Theologica, all axiom and argument and postulate and principle, the greatest compendium and synthesis of medieval scholastic philosophy ever published.

Aquinas’ philosophy was born in discussion. His philosophical system germinated in dialogue with pupils, fellow monks and schoolmen, and with the texts of great sages like Maimonides, Avicenna, Averroes, and of course Aristotle. If this Doctor of the Church’s philosophy was based in disputation, then appropriately enough his career was also ended by a discussion (in a manner). In 1273 he had a vision of a levitating crucifix, where Christ asked the philosopher what reward he wished for all of his admirable writings concerning the faith, to which Aquinas responded, “Nothing but you, Lord.” On December 6^th of that same year, as he administered the Eucharist, Aquinas fell into a religious ecstasy. While in a beatified, lackadaisical haze, his amanuensis Reginald of Piperno asked when they would return to dictation. Aquinas, giving no details of the experience, answered “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.” And so the philosopher became a saint; all that had been discussed in thousands of pages and millions of words was finally to be passed over in silence. For Aquinas the ultimate answer had no verbalization, the discussion had finally ended.

Yet, nearly 744 years after Aquinas fell silent, that practice which claims its love of wisdom continues to operate primarily in the medium of language. Ample evidence of philosophy’s continuing infatuation with discussion as a mode of inquiry is on display in Garry Gutting’s collection of interviews, Talking God: Philosophers on Belief. Western philosophy has seemingly always prided itself on being a project built upon an edifice of dialogue. Call it what you like – debate, discussion, or dialectic –conversation has been the central medium of philosophical discourse since the Platonic dialogue. In Plato’s model, philosophical truth is formulated as a negotiation between two partners, a process by which the questioner and the questioned can arrive at ever greater degrees of truth (even while unconvincing claims to intellectual humility on behalf of the questioner in a Platonic dialogue make clear that it’s often less a negotiation than a browbeating). In Platonic dialogues the dominant interlocutor is, of course, Socrates, and the Socratic Method has often been the standard bearer of philosophical conversational practice. This emphasis on exchange has of course always been one of philosophy’s great strengths, but arguably also one of its weaknesses, especially when people take on the religious. In approaching the ineffable, indescribable experience can often by a more potent guide than rational discussion.

The academic discipline of philosophy has a vested interest in preserving an image of itself as rooted in conversation: Philosophers debate one another now as they debated then, they debate their ancestors as their progeny will debate them. So goes and will go the canon. It’s a flattering pretension, this idea that the field has an unbroken connection back to the earliest days of pre-Socratic philosophy. But Philosophy (at least Anglo-American analytical philosophy) is, at this point, the one discipline among the humanities that has avoided the historicizing, cultural analysis, and acknowledgement of the ideological problems with canonicity with which other disciplines have grappled since the 1970s. This is a not-terribly well-kept secret for people who have followed how those very same disciplinary customs have in part contributed to institutionalized sexism (and other forms of bias) within scholarship. Some conservatives bemoan the supposed obsession with race, class, and gender in much of the academy, but those critics miss the point. Historicizing our own disciplines is crucial if we’re to stay honest about our own biases and subconscious historical influences. That some philosophers resist historicizing their own field– and considering the ways that history intersects with race, class, and gender – is to ultimately resist self-knowledge about their disciplinary field; ironic, as self-knowledge is supposedly one of the central aims of philosophical discourse. In English departments the Author may be dead, but down the hall in Philosophy the Great Man is still plugging away at his logical proofs.

Philosophers attached to the idea of their work as continuous, ahistorical conversation, refuse to see that their discipline is as historically or culturally contingent as every other field of the humanities. Most are not interested in questions about how Immanuel Kant was influenced by his Lutheran upbringing, or how ancient Greek philosophy bears more similarity to some kind of occult mysticism than it does to our modern conception of rationality. No, for my straw-philosophy professor the discipline has always been a coterie of (overwhelmingly) men imagine they are part of a 2,500 year discussion about what is true, beautiful, and good. My undergraduate philosophy intro even titled itself “Beginning the Conversation,” as if all of the disparate threads of what’s been called “philosophy,” done by all of the divergent figures we’ve called “philosophers,” were at some Platonic 3A.M eternal bullshit session in the sky that we could stumble into with a six-pack and a copy of Beyond Good and Evil. For a certain type of student – frequently male – it’s a pedagogical model that can be alluring, flattering our egos by making us members of some sort of Platonic University. But the difficulty of such a position, attractive though it may be, is that it obscures the culturally contingent vagaries of philosophy’s evolution. Far be it from me to suggest that a discipline whose very name is “Love of wisdom” could be more forthcoming about the ways in which the field intersects with history and culture.

These problems are very much on display in Notre Dame Philosophy professor Gutting’s illuminating, frustrating, enlightening, and obscuring collection of interviews. Composed of a series of email conversations that originally appeared in The New York Times’ frequently excellent Stone column, Talking God provides an overview of how a very small slice of philosophy of religion treats religious experience, and the collection appropriately enacts both the strengths and weaknesses of that discipline. Philosophy of religion, arguably of no fault of its own, is caught between theology on one hand and secular philosophy on the other. Perhaps its unavoidable for any discipline stuck between two other fields, but philosophy of religion is sort of a no-man’s land between those other two, and open to attack from both sides. As a result, there is a (not always unfruitful) ambiguity about what philosophy of religion is, strung between the apologetics of theology and the rationalist language of philosophy.

One of the biggest deficiencies in the field of philosophy – and it is mirrored in Gutting’s book – is a profound lack of diversity. There is an admirable overture to (some) intellectual variety, with philosophers ranging from the Neo-Calvinist scholastic Alvin Plantinga to the deconstructionist Catholic heretic John Caputo, and the volume engages with theological positions from the fairly orthodox to the explicitly atheistic. Yet the backgrounds of the scholars’ themselves are fairly uniform, and overwhelmingly male. Indeed out of the thirteen philosophers interviewed, Louise Antony is the only woman. The lack of equity in this regard is especially galling as Gutting even takes time to “interview” himself at one point – surely, in that case, there was space and time to find some more women philosophers working in the field of philosophy of religion? Whether this reflects an editorial oversight on Gutting’s part, or the overwhelming Old Boys Club nature of philosophy (where the percentage of female graduate students is lower than in many of the hard sciences) is an open question.

There is a bit more of an overture towards denominational variety in the volume, including interviews with the Jewish philosopher Howard Wettstein, the Hindu scholar Jonardon Ganeri, the Buddhist philosopher Jay Garfield, and Sajjad Rizvi who is both a scholar of Islamic studies and a practicing Muslim. Yet, there are major problems with how all of this material is presented, and at its worst there can be a whiff of tokenism implicit in the editorial methodology. This is manifested particularly in discussions of Islam, with Rizvi’s important contributions largely limited to simply discussing the obvious fact that Islamic theology deserves Western academic intellectual respect, with little detail given to the actual content of said theology. In fairness to both Gutting and Rizvi, even basic observations as to the intellectual legitimacy of Islamic philosophy are still an important point to make in our current political environment, but one does hope for more. This flaw points to the larger issue, which is that there are perilously few scholars of color interviewed in the book, an incredible oversight when one considers the rich vein of contribution Black philosophers and theologians have made to American pragmatism. Was Cornel West’s number absent from Gutting’s rolodex?

Gutting’s myopia regarding Islam (and other non-Christian faiths) leads him to some very problematic and incorrect conclusions. For instance, one could leave his book thinking that the major difference between Muslim and non-Muslim societies is that for the former, according to Gutting, there has been “no movement parallel to the Enlightenment [which has] established religious tolerance as a fundamental principle…. [because] Enlightenment tolerance primarily derives from a weakening of faith.” Conclusions such as this, as trite and popular as they may be, are bluntly simplistic, reductionist, ahistorical, and triumphalist. With a bit of disciplinary competition perhaps at the core of some of my critique, I can’t help but wonder if these sorts of erroneous claims are born from so much of philosophy’s steadfast avoidance of historicizing their own discipline (it’s telling that one of the most successful interviews in the book is with Daniel Garber, an historian of philosophy). In passages such as the previous one, Gutting reinscribes a Whig view of Enlightenment historiography, that old hobby-horse which imagines that history is simply an account of our previous dark age being supplanted by a glorious flowering of rationality in the eighteenth-century. But as satisfying as this simplistic view might be it ignores the Enlightenment’s concurrence alongside modern capitalism, the slave trade, and colonialism, and it obscures the complex interrelationships between “religion” and “secularism” during that time period. Indeed as regards western imperial ambition, how can one possibly castigate Islam for its supposed “lack of an Enlightenment” (a position which ignores the vastly complicated histories of Islamic secularism and materialism over the past millennia and a half) while overlooking the role that colonialism played in the development of Islamism?

Contemporary philosophy, with its too-frequent disdain for cultural context (perhaps still holding to that myth of system building from axiomatic first principles) often goes in for this type of thing, making broad generalizations about unfamiliar world-views under the guise of a sober and objective rationality. What’s even more shocking is that Gutting, as a Foucault scholar, would seem poised to avoid this particular pose, but Talking God frequently takes recourse to the most insular, provincial, and arrogant of disciplinary sins. Louise Antony even warns her interviewer that “It’s presumptuous to tell someone else why she believes what she believes – if you want to know, start by asking her,” but he roundly ignores her. For example, in the introduction he claims “that many religious believers don’t have an adequate understanding of the real truth of their religion.” Of course one is then lucky to have a philosophy professor to tell you what the “real truth” of your religion is! Such an assertion can’t help but leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Such a dismissive claim being made about believers in a volume of religious studies, theology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, or literary criticism would easily raise hackles. These disciplines largely recognize that believers constitute the actual heart of how religion is practiced and experienced, much more so than the arid proofs of an Anselm or Plantinga. These non-philosophers know that you will learn as much about Catholicism from a pious Italian grandma as you will from Aquinas. It’s not that all of academic philosophy is blind on this score, there are philosophers of religion who importantly ground their work in the actual lived reality of the faithful. Gutting gestures to as much when he observes that “The most important ground of belief is probably not philosophical argument but religious experience.” But as important as that observation is, you get no sense of it from Gutting’s actual interviews themselves, which too often replicate some of the structural problems of the discipline.

The lack of intellectual expansiveness isn’t limited to the bracketing out of religious experience. Gutting will also frequently discuss non-Abrahamic and non-Christian theologies purely through recourse to Christianity (and a heavily Protestant Christianity at that, despite Gutting himself being Catholic and a professor at Notre Dame). As a result he makes claims such as “Hinduism is perhaps most valuable to our thinking about religion as a counterexample to a standard Western picture of how religions develop,” which doesn’t take a religion of close to a billion adherents on its own terms; or he’ll talk about outdated historical concepts such as a supposed “medieval unity of faith,” which was ended by the Enlightenment, a reductionist understanding of both periods that is a few generations out of date. Ironically it is that positivism (itself a type of hermeneutically secular literalism) which often makes Gutting seemingly unable to depart from a definition of religion wholly indebted to its Protestant inheritance. It would seem that in a post-Wittenberg world we’re all Protestants now, and words like “faith,” “belief,” “practice,” and “ritual” have become severely limited in scope and connotation. But, it is in fact the tensions around these words where one sees the most fruitful space for creativity in both theological and philosophical questions.

As such, one thing Talking God does admirably accomplish is providing an overview of current opinion concerning theological issues within philosophy. A conflicted endeavor, since 60% of professional philosophers are self-declared atheists or agnostics (more than double the average for other academic fields). But what’s so fascinating isn’t that Talking God presents contemporary philosophers as dividing easily between believers and non-believers (as Gutting says of religion in general “believers are much further from faith and… nonbelievers much closer to it than they think”). The major schism doesn’t even fall along conventional analytical or continental divides (as a refresher, according to the standard joke: analytical philosophers know everything about nothing and continental philosophers know nothing about everything). Rather the biggest distinction between individual thinkers struck me as less the degree and conventionality of their fideism than how they define the God whose existence they’re debating. The biggest division is between thinkers who define God by positive characteristics, those within a “kataphatic tradition,” and philosophers who use a negative or paradoxical vocabulary, as in the “apophatic tradition” (I should note that Gutting never uses these terms himself). There is more similarity between the atheism of Antony and Philip Kitcher and the Calvinism of Plantinga than between Plantinga and Caputo’s paradoxical, deconstructionist, almost mystical version of via negativa Christianity. Whether one believes in God or not isn’t the issue here, the question is how does one define the being that one then does or does not believe in?

It is with the apophatic faith that I draw the most intellectual sympathy myself. Caputo’s post-structuralist “weak theology,” which is strongly indebted to Jacques Derrida is, to my mind, the most profound current of contemporary theology, and Caputo remains one of the finest theological minds today. When Gutting describes Caputo as an “avowed, if unorthodox, Catholic” I think “Me too!,” and when Caputo says of Derrida that the French philosopher is “a slightly atheistic quasi-Jewish Augustinian,” I respond “Hell, that sounds like me as well!” He avoids placement in the comforting confines of Huston Smith-style WASPy Protestant liberalism, emphasizing that he is “not resurrecting the old comparative religion thesis… Different traditions contain different desires, promises, memories, dreams, futures, a different sense of time and space. Nothings says that underneath they are all the same.” Rather what Caputo emphasizes is how the incompleteness of language gestures towards a sacred beyond mere words, demonstrating the fallibility of syllogistically approaching questions of divinity in the manner of Plantinga.

For the kataphatic thinker, faith must be tamed by preposition, axiom, and conclusion. But faith cannot be reduced to holding onto the veracity of unproven propositions with utmost conviction. Often orthodoxy and orthopraxy are set in distinction, but ultimately faith itself is a practice, which is why the medieval understood it to be a gift. Faith is a way of holding yourself in the world rather than a set of beliefs about the world. That’s why faith is so difficult for so many of us. Belief is easy, faith is hard. Whatever Luther’s intent, since Wittenberg our popular definition of the word has mutated, to where faith is now popularly defined as holding doctrinal claims to be true regardless of evidence. Yet faith and belief are not synonyms, nor is faith reducible to a type of knowledge. Faith may be the substance of things hoped for and the evidence for things unseen, but crucially it is also the capacity to dwell amongst those unseen things as well, to be able to carve a space from paradox in which you are able to pray. Faith is a belief that untrue things are true, faith is to believe beyond truth or falsehood, for accuracy has nothing to do with faith. As Gutting inquires of Caputo, “the propositions that express faith aren’t what’s interesting or important about religion.”

As a story: I dimly remember having a debate once with a rather evangelical believer. And I asked, “If I could give you absolute, empirical, objective proof that Jesus Christ had not lived, was not crucified, and was not resurrected, would you lose your faith in salvation through Christ’s sacrifice?” And, after quibbling over the possibility that such certain proof could be found, he admitted that such a demonstration would destroy his faith. “But then,” I said as a man of no real faith myself, “how can you say that you ever really had faith to begin with?”

For a faith that can so easily be slayed by proof is not really faith, but rather just a hypothesis about reality. And that sort of cheap faith, like any other sort of hypothesis, could always potentially be disproven. The god of the philosophers is of course not the God of revealed religion. Philosophy, as enamored as it remains with the logical law of non-contradiction, cannot fathom that the God of revealed religion need not even be a god that actually exists in order to still be a God that saves and gives life meaning. Analytical philosophy approaches God with syllogism, but God can only ever be approached with paradox. We can assent to belief while dissenting on the issue of God’s existence – there is no need to tilt at windmills, for when it comes to God, when it comes to the very Ground of Being, the distinction between belief and existence should be irrelevant. Wettstein, who though firmly within the analytical tradition exhibits a deep and profound understanding of God as mediated through the orthopraxy of the Talmud, explains that “The perceptions and understandings of the religious practitioner are more like the outpourings of a poet than they are like theoretical pronouncements,” to which Gutting responds with “This sounds like Whitman: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.’ Hardly a philosophical response.”

True, Wettstein’s claim is hardly a philosophical response – and is thus all the more true, essential, and beautiful for it. Let us sometimes be against philosophy and for poetry, let us sometimes be against theology and for the sacred. For the speech of God is in the outpouring of the poet, it is the practice of “Dreaming in league with God” as Abraham Heschel called it, whether such a God is real or not. For the practice of religion, the practice of faith, is not in proofs or counter-proofs, but rather in Wettstein’s example of a rabbi friend of his who explained that belief was itself not essential to faith, but rather that he “asked of his congregants only that they sing with him, song being somewhat closer to the soul than assent.” Do I sound like some sort of mystical pietist? Very well then, I sound like some sort of mystical pietist. God is large and contains multitudes, one of which may very well be non-existence. And yet we pray despite this; perhaps we pray because of this.

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Ed Simon is a senior editor 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.

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

The post Seems like Straw to Me: On Garry Gutting’s Talking God appeared first on The Revealer.

Once in Nigeria, my father and I drove almost 1,000 miles from Lagos to Enugu and back, visiting a few villages in between, all within the predominately Christian south of the country. As a consequence, there is a running theme of roads and cars in this essay – many photos are of cars, or taken from inside them of other vehicles or roadside buildings. Religion in Nigeria is about the travelling message that glory must always be given to God on more than just Sundays, in more than just church. It journeys down these roads on bumper stickers and commercial vehicles, making pit stops at construction sites and gas stations. Though these roads are rough in reality, the message is able to travel smoothly far, wide, and fast, reaching even the most remote of places. Most of the religious imagery I saw on my trip was Christian. Christian piety has become so conspicuous thanks to the foundation laid over a century ago by British colonizers and missionaries, Now, their legacy is carried forward in the influence of foreign faith-based aid. Though I have also seen Jesus bumper stickers and roadside churches in the United States, Nigeria’s history means that religious expression has a very different feel – one cannot deny that its origins are marked by foreign justifications and restrictions, a very different story from the one we tell in the US about religious expression’s birth in opposition to such strictures.

That history of Christian nationalism was among the many the stories and comparisons I thought about as we drove and photographed. Now, I hope that they will help others to think more critically and widely when they think about religious life in Nigeria today.

“Evangelism” “Miraculous Surprises” “I Peter 5:10” “God of all Grace” “Jesus 4 Life” – Lagos, Lagos State, Nigeria

Travelling down a crowded highway in Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, one sees an abundance of bumper stickers proclaiming drivers’ religiosity. They adorn private cars and vehicles used for public transportation alike. Though some stickers are just preset sayings, other drivers use individual letters to spell out custom messages.

“Marked for Destruction” – Lagos, Lagos State, Nigeria

While briefly stranded at a gas station, I saw a family in a nice SUV pull into a corner away from the pumps. They did not come to get gas, but to “spread the word of the Lord.” After handing me this paper, the man, his wife, and two young boys urgently crossed the street to continue spreading their message. The passage makes an analogy wherein each condemned building marked with a red ‘X’ signifies a sinner likewise doomed. It extends the metaphor, advising that those who take the time and effort to rebuild will be forgiven, but those who do not will remain condemned and suffer the consequences. The pamphlets are produced and distributed by Grace & Truth, an American evangelical ministry and publishing company in Illinois.

Southern Nigeria, Unknown State

Problems with Nigeria’s infrastructure can seem endless. Well-travelled roads go unpaved. Those that are paved, unmaintained. But the sheer amount of active construction sites along the roads tells a different story. A significant number of these sites will become churches, their construction often funded by U.S.-based international church groups that give grants to groups looking to build a self-sustaining house of worship. Church planting websites offer advice and support to those in Nigeria who have undertaken this mission given to them by God. Often times, aspiring Nigerian pastors initiate these new developments.

“Enugu State is in the Hands of God”- Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria

Elected governor of Enugu State in April 2015, Lawrence Ugwuanyi (affectionately known as Gburugburu, meaning “one who rules over all” in Igbo) is a Roman Catholic who likes to invoke this quote in his speeches. Roughly half (49.3%) of the Nigerian population identifies as Christian and lives primarily in the southern part of the country. Phrases explicitly invoking the name of God are often heard in conversation in a way that removes the possibility of human agency and gives all credit to God. “Glory be to God,” “In Jesus name, Amen,” “God is good all the time. All the time God is good,” are just a few of these refrains. Religion is such an integral part of life that most Nigerians cast their political vote based on the religious backgrounds of political candidates during an election.

“Restitution Chapel” – Isuochi, Enugu State, Nigeria

Bus stops are a common place to post bills. Plastered on these walls are numerous advertisements for Restitution Chapel (aka Lion of Judah’s) three-day sermon. Underneath are more bills for past religious gatherings as well as messages from Governor Gburugburu.

Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria

A common form of public transportation, yellow kekes are the equivalent of yellow taxis in the U.S. and are often covered with religious allusions. Here they are parked in a designated area outside Ogbete Market, Enugu’s main and largest outdoor market, waiting to pick up passengers. Behind them are mirrored figures of a crucified Jesus, the Catholic image of Jesus and the Sacred Heart, and the Virgin Mary. The market itself is densely packed and full of venders selling everything from TVs to goat meat to tobacco. But also within these narrow rows of stalls are numerous preachers with microphones who each draw small crowds, bringing religion into a place of commerce.

Ogidi, Anambra State, Nigeria

This door, visible on the balcony of my grandfather’s compound, was meticulously hand carved with religious images that are replicated on the left and right. From top to bottom: The hands of God as he created Earth, The Holy Bible, the cross on an elevated platform, a dove that signifies peace, and a plant that represents all things living.

Enugu, Enugu State, Nigeria

Each door in my grandmother’s compound has a wooden cross hanging over its center. They have withstood the harshest of monsoons and the scorching sun for nearly a decade. Plastered on each door are at least two religious bumper stickers indicating a particular belief or belonging to a particular church group. In addition to the cross, both doors in this photo have a square sticker with a white dove in flight encircled by a blue ring that says “The Catholic Prayer Ministry of the Holy Spirit.” It is interesting to note that each portrayal of Jesus falls line with the convention: a supposedly Middle Eastern man depicted as a white savior.

Southern Nigeria, Unknown State

Paintings in Nigeria can regularly be spotted on roads and highways. Large commercial trucks are more often than not hand-painted with religious imagery: in the south it is primarily Christian, in the north Islamic. On this tank truck is an interpretation of the Last Supper, but paintings can range from representations of Jesus to quotes and phrases praising the Lord or shunning Satan.

God is Good Motors is one of Nigeria’s most successful transportation companies with a reputation for excellent service. Its name draws upon the common Nigerian phrase “God is God” and though the full name can still be seen on most of their transport vehicles, their website says “a landmark” for the company was changing their name to GIGM.com.

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Fortune Onyiorah is a Master’s student at NYU’s Religious Studies Program.  She is currently writing a thesis on the subject of intersectionality in the Black diaspora. 

The post God is Good: Religious Expression in Southern Nigeria appeared first on The Revealer.

Image: Ecumenical and interfaith clergy activists gathered at Selma, Alabama (1965) and Charlottesville, Virginia (2017). Details of photographs by Matt Heron (above) and Jordy Yager (below)

Image: Ecumenical and interfaith clergy activists gathered at Selma, Alabama (1965) and Charlottesville, Virginia (2017). Details of photographs by Matt Heron (above) and Jordy Yager (below)

American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice. By Albert J. Raboteau. Princeton University Press, 2017. 248 pages. $29.95 (Hardcover).

By Geoffrey Pollick

Recently in the United States, activists have prompted new conversations about the nature of extremism in the nation’s social and political life. As protests rumble across ideological borders, Americans are searching for sources of authority that will bring coherence to experiences of crisis and difference.

In this foment, urgent questions rise to the surface: How can a good society emerge across disparity and disagreement? When perspectives clash in fundamental terms, how can people resolve conflicts productively? Many of these questions—particularly over issues of race, gender, religion, sexuality, and economic status—cut to the very grounds of our individual and social existences. And, when activism demands that we reconsider history and politics, how do we define the character of radicalism itself?

Religion plays a crucial role in the American contest of political extremes. As The Revealer wrote last month in its roundup of writing on “U.S. politics, race, racism, white supremacy and Christianity,” religious leaders from a range of traditions are advocates for interests on all sides. Notably in Virginia, the Charlottesville Clergy Collective assembled faith leaders as counter-protestors to the now infamous “Unite the Right” rally held there in mid-August. The Charlottesville group was initially organized in response to the June 2015, mass shooting and murder of nine African American Christians in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Their mission is to “establish, develop, and promote racial unity within the faith leadership of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Region.” In August, emulating the linked arms of religious leaders who marched in support of voting rights for African Americans during the 1965 protests in Selma, Alabama, these clergy members adopted the mantle of radicalism in witnessing against white supremacy.

While Charlottesville’s clerics were organizing in 2015, the eminent historian of African American religions Albert J. Raboteau completed the manuscript for American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals and Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice. In his newest book, Raboteau attends to the biographies of religious leaders who turned their faith towards activism during the twentieth century. The author, Princeton University’s Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion, delivers a popular account voiced in an honorific rendering. His goal is more to formulate a clear moral vision than it is to create a single volume of critical history. Overall, American Prophets is the work of a prominent thinker and historian putting his skills and wisdom to use in order to advance a social disposition, delivering an activist missive into the radical religious tumult of twenty-first-century U.S. America.

In American Prophets, Raboteau intervenes at an important crossroads for theorizing the relationship between political radicalism and religion. Scholars and activists alike have clashed over questions about the compatibility of the terms. Is religion essentially antithetical to radical politics? Is political activism an appropriate venue for expressing religious sentiment? Often assigned as a species of left-wing ideology or “Godless communism,” radicalism carries associations with antireligious animus. Conversely, religion has been understood as inimical to fair political process.

As concepts and forms of practice, however, religion and radicalism stand adjacent. Both terms are concerned with the fundamental ground of reality, pointing towards basic causes. Deriving from the Latin radix, meaning “root,” radicalism has to do with getting at the fundamental essence of problems. In Karl Marx’s much-quoted phrase, “[t]o be radical is to grasp things by the root.”[1] Similarly, religious systems and ideas often function to lend coherence and meaning to experience, explaining origins and orienting humans to the cosmos. Even more, as iterated through politics, Marx tied the emergence of radical revolutionary impulses to Christian roots, in the reforms advocated by Martin Luther’s propulsion of Protestantism out of early modern German society. In this telling, religious activism birthed political radicalism through its drive towards the individual as an object of principal concern in structuring society.

Although he avoids reference to Marx, Raboteau unfolds a similar construction of the radical and the religious. He does this by developing prophethood as a device for bridging the two concepts, characterizing the advocacy of social and political interests as an expression of spiritually defined justice. In Raboteau’s rendering, “prophets” are those who focus their energies on “conveying…compassion [for those suffering injustice or oppression] to the larger American public through writing, speaking, demonstrating, and/or organizing.” In this, American Prophets signals no essential deviation from communism’s infamous theorist: Marx’s “radical” was justice-seeking too, aiming “to overthrow all those conditions in which [the person] is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being.” On this point, however, Marx opened a line of division between religion and radicalism wherein religion imposes a false awareness of reality that obscures the true nature of things.

Where this aspect of Marxian analysis has calcified into stock perceptions of religion’s antithetical alignment with radicalism, Raboteau and his company of prophets see the opposite. He considers “prophet” as a species of radical tasked with reminding humans about the narratives of spiritual struggle and social redemption that comprise the ground of reality. These heralds of divine justice draw on disparate sources to assemble their rhetoric, repurposing logic from ancient Israel’s prophets, the Christian gospels, writings of American antislavery activists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Henry David Thoreau, and other justice-minded figures like Tolstoy and Gandhi. For Raboteau, “it is the heuristic power of these accumulated stories that feeds the moral authority of the prophet, especially when reenacted in the dramatic action of demonstrations and public protest.”

American Prophets accumulates its own special stories that together fulfill Raboteau’s typology of modern prophethood. Dedicating a chapter to each, the book narrates the biographies and intellectual contributions of seven figures, elevating them as exemplars of spiritually engaged social and political radicalism. The figures include: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hasidic rabbi and mystic; A. J. Muste, pacifist Quaker leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation; Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Wormer movement; Howard Thurman, Baptist minister, Christian intellectual, and co-founder of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples; Thomas Merton, Trappist monk and theorist of nonviolent activist spirituality; Martin Luther King, Jr., Christian minister, political theorist, and principal leader of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement; and Fannie Lou Hamer, local voting-rights activist in Mississippi and leader of efforts to reform the national Democratic Party.

As a record of the events, experiences, and ideas that these figures encountered, American Prophets defines ideal parameters for orienting thought and activism towards justice. The book focuses on its subjects’ conceptions of theology, ethics, rhetoric, and strategy in order to “illuminate how these exemplars of twentieth-century prophecy in the United States persuasively mobilized some of their fellow citizens to commit themselves to movements for social change.” Through these descriptions, Raboteau advances a shift in scholarly interpretations of religious radicalism that is produced by and further supports the moral stance he advocates.

In this connection, American Prophets contends not only that society should give greater attention to its exemplary prophets; the book also calls for a renewed emphasis on race as a definitive feature of radical religious engagement, both in the past and for the future. As exponents of justice-seeking activism, prophets target their efforts at contextually significant causes. In the United States, Raboteau argues, “[t]he ongoing issue of race…remains the paradigmatic test of civic community.” It follows, then, that America’s religious radicals have “attempted to bring this issue to the fore of the national consciousness and conscience.”

Focusing on two moments during which prophetic attention to race exemplified religious radicalism with particular clarity, American Prophets argues that nineteenth-century abolitionism and twentieth-century civil rights activism have “served…as a paradigm of religious activism for social justice in the public square.”

To elaborate this thesis, Raboteau sequences chapters in three phases. In the first, Heschel, Muste, and Day comprise a palette of characteristics from which Raboteau illustrates the features of radical religious activism. In the second, Thurman frames the core direction of his argument, fusing together race and spiritual experience as the fundamental locus of religious radicalism. And finally, Merton, King, and Hamer exemplify the book’s thesis, displaying the theoretical development and activist deployment of antiracism as an outgrowth of experiential religion.

With Heschel, Muste, and Day, American Prophets identifies the theme of religious experience as a source of human unity. Prophets make effective radicals because they fuse spiritual experience with political conviction in order to promote common well-being. In this, religion’s capacity for moral vision brings it into alignment with activist mentality. For Muste, materialism, racism, and militarism served as three “great evils” that demanded opposition. These correspond to three central Catholic Worker principles of voluntary poverty, personalism, and pacifism that structured Day’s efforts. These attitudes and concerns furnish the baseline for Raboteau’s prophet-type.

Experience carries forward as a central feature in Raboteau’s theoretical exposition of prophethood-as-radicalism through his narration of Howard Thurman. As was the case with Muste, Thurman drew insight from the Quaker mystic Rufus Jones, who “insisted that religious experience ought to result in social action to transform the world into the kingdom of God.” Theorizing more than participating in social action, Thurman instead “chose to exercise leadership behind the scenes by force of his personal presence and pastoral counsel.” He focused on cultivating influence, using his writing and speeches to share his spiritual and political message.

In this case, an ability to convey profound experiences to others becomes a core trait of radical prophethood, one that Raboteau has adopted for himself, frequently shifting into his own prophetic voice throughout the book. Through Thurman—who “described the situation between the races…as a confrontation”— the author makes clear his own intention behind publishing American Prophets. Raboteau claims that “[w]e still face a confrontation insofar as we still fail to see each other face to face:

Faces must be shown and must be seen before interracial community is possible. This confrontation—in the sense of face to face—without the masks of evasion, fear, discomfort, and false civility, must occur between white and black, painful and difficult though it may be, if we are to continue the search for common ground—the search that is the very manifestation of the life within.

With this passage, Raboteau puts into practice what Thurman imagined as the skill of “spiritual communication beyond, or rather beneath, differences of speech and culture.”

From this, Raboteau turns to Merton, King, and Hamer in order to narrate the prophetic typology more fully. In this trio, Raboteau finds ideal examples of his category, “which models a kind of communication across differences of racial, vocational, and biographical backgrounds.” The characteristic values of Heschel, Muste, and Day fused with the experiential worldview of Thurman to find expression in these latter exemplars, for whom “the interrelatedness of human beings—the hidden wholeness that binds us all together—is key to understanding and accepting our responsibility for social justice.” The assembled witnesses of Raboteau’s seven radicals thus outline the contours of an orientation to society and politics that Raboteau finds to be of continuing urgency in the United States.

As a study of religion’s radical valences, Professor Raboteau’s new work partakes in a peculiar feature of writing on political radicalism. In such works, with attention given to ideological extremes, the author’s own ideological perspective resides at the foreground of his analysis, rather than being pushed into an imagined rhetorical objectivity. Raboteau sets this characteristic to interpretive purpose and constructs a laudatory account of the seven chosen figures.

This falls in line with much of Raboteau’s other writing. As a scholar, he is a preeminent interpreter of the African American religious past, but is also a significant theorist of the role played by religious faith in the life and work of historians. American Prophets merges his voice as a Christian contemplative with critical historiography to portray narratives that advocate for a vision of the common good. And that vision is part of the entrenched problems stemming from America’s racist social foundations. The complex, essential interaction between religion and radicalism emerges for Raboteau in the various iterations of racism and antiracism that unfolded through the U.S. past, and which resonate forcefully into the present.

Where Heschel understood the problem of race in the United States as “God’s gift to America, a spiritual opportunity to rise above complacent prosperity,” Raboteau envisions a key for unlocking both interpretations of and activist interventions into a fundamental social problem. This is where Raboteau’s double voicing carries special importance.

In other writings, Raboteau has named the difficulties and insights that emerge from the intersection of historiography and religious adherence. “In my experience as historian and believer,” Raboteau explains, “faith and the academic life exist in a dialectical relationship of affinity and challenge.” For him, the two poles of faith and history stand in “contrapuntal relations [that revolve] around the human need for story.”

Through this dynamic relationship, faith and history pose essential questions to one another. In Raboteau’s conception, faith asks history to address questions of significance and application: “How can you find a vantage point within history from which you can judge the significance of human events?” Without applicable purpose, historical interpretations lack meaning. History, in turn, demands of faith an acknowledgment of the contingency that is forced by context, an awareness of “the historicity of their religious doctrines and institutions.” The two “coalesce [for Raboteau] in their mutual admission of the necessity of plot.” As interpretive frameworks, faith and history both rely on narrative.

Thus, the stakes of historical writing are higher than just the standard historicist drive to understand the past for its own sake. Understandings of the past can exert powerful force on how life is lived in the present, on how one orients oneself towards progress and social change.

One of the primary thrusts of Raboteau’s career has been to correct interpretations of U.S. history that “denied black people any past of significance.” Before historiographical shifts that Raboteau helped to initiate in the 1970s, religious histories of African Americans were flattened into narratives that “dismissed [African Americans] … as mere imitators of white culture.” Acknowledging the personal agency, cultural creativity, and resilience of African Americans opened historical interpretations to a full range of wildly diverse expressions of religion. In turn, these acknowledgements transform notions of individual and collective identity for those within and outside African American communities.

Where Raboteau has striven to support the widening of such narrative possibilities, American Prophets extends that work to alter understandings of power and motive in some of the major events and causes of the twentieth century. The book uncovers ways in which white radicals imitated and drew inspiration from black thinkers and activists. More than this, the book emphasizes the implications that such interpretations hold for life in the real world. On this point, Professor Raboteau reveals a personal motive for delivering this narrative, stating that, “as historian and believer, I cannot but hope that our history is touched by the providence of God.”

Through this frame, American Prophets adopts concepts from its subjects in order to advance its own activism. Promoting Thurman’s perception of “the interrelatedness of all created being” as a foundation for justice, for example, Raboteau urges his readers to consider how social inequality relates to their lived experiences, concluding that: “When discrimination and racism intervene to destroy community, the very thrust of life itself is frustrated.”

This application of scholarly advocacy forms the crux of Raboteau’s analysis. As the book nears its conclusion, the author continually underscores the assertion that, if we follow the examples of his chosen prophets, we can also overcome racism and injustice.

After the events at Charlottesville, Raboteau’s remembrances of Selma call with steady urgency. In the strains of that call, American Prophets reasserts the importance of empathic communication and human interconnectedness for social problems today: “The sacrifices of those exemplars in the civil rights struggle must not lie immured in amber in civil rights museums, but recalled to life in the many sacrificial acts, small and large, by which we seek to ‘re-member’ our sundered communities, and in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase, ‘achieve our country and change the history of the world.’”

In essence, American Prophets reduces radicalism to a form of engaged religious experience. The radicalism that it champions rests on and valorizes the mentality of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who believed that “our actions hasten or delay the healing of the world. This is why marching in Selma was simultaneously a political act and an act of devotion helping to release the divine sparks into a world darkened by the evil of racism.” For Raboteau, the root that radicalism grasps is fundamentally religious.

***

[1] Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (Norton, 1978), p. 60.

***

Geoffrey Pollick, Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College, teaches and researches the history of religion in the United States. His work emphasizes religion’s entanglements with political radicalism, the role and dimensions of religious liberalism, critical theory of religion, and the cultural history and historiography of religion.

***

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

The post Radix Redux: Characterizing American Religious Radicalism appeared first on The Revealer.

What do you do when your life doesn’t go according to your plan? Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces is about building a life failed dreams and missed opportunities. Kelly J. Baker finished her PhD in religion and hoped that she would get a tenure-track job. She had done everything right: written a well-researched and award-winning book about the KKK, given presentations at national conferences, published articles, and created and taught a number of popular classes. Doing everything right, however, isn’t a guarantee, especially if the humanities job market crashes. In the modern university, the career she trained for was no longer sustainable. But after five years of job rejections and a new baby on the way, she decided to take a year off to figure out if the career she trained for was actually the life she wanted. Grace Period is a book of essays that she wrote to make sense of how her life went off-track. Expanding on her popular Chronicle Vitae column of the same name, she documents her transition out of academia and the emotional turmoil of rebuilding a life beyond what she had prepared for. Instead of telling an easy story about her exit from the academy into a brand-new post-academic career, Baker resists smoothing over the hard reality of transitions, the importance of waiting and anticipation, and the realization that the lives we imagine for ourselves are tenuous at best and often are impossible to achieve.  

This excerpt is about giving advice, even when you don’t want to, and realizing what you said might have been what you needed to hear all along.

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Missed Turn

I woke up on Sunday convinced that I had no words left. That I had nothing to say, and perhaps, I was done as a writer. That I had already written my best essays. That I had no good sentences left in me. I was out of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and pages. I was done.

Sundays are rarely writing days for me. Weekends are family time, so I let my partner and kids distract me from the angst chasing me. They are always my favorite distractions.

On Monday morning, my alarm on my watch buzzed me at 4:45 a.m. There was a plane to catch to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I had been invited to Elizabethtown College, where my friend, Richard, teaches, to give a reading at Bowers Writers House. My reading was from an essay on Dozier School and my hometown, one of the most personal essays I’ve ever written. (A story that is still unfolding and that I am chasing as hard as I can.) The day before I was to be a visiting writer, I was convinced that I might no longer be able to write. The irony was not lost on me. My angst was fitting, and truth be told, somewhat expected. My writing life can be narrated as story of doubt, angst, and anxiety. I keep trying to tell another story, but this is the narrative that continues to emerge.

As I pulled out of my driveway, I probed this fresh (and melodramatic) concern about writing. Out of the neighborhood, take a left, pass construction and new development, take a right, drive past big churches and small churches, other neighborhoods, stop at red lights, and take a right onto I-10 to get the airport. The interstate snaked in front of me, but the darkness of the early morning meant I could only see what the headlights made visible.

Why, I thought, did I feel like I had nothing left to say? Was I not nourishing my creativity? Were there no more stories for me to tell? Was I actually running out of words? This seemed improbable, impossible even. Of course, there are still things I want to write. At any given moment, there’s a revolving set of essays stored in my head, on to-do lists and Post-it notes, and in my journals and planner. Perhaps, what I really meant was that there are topics on which I have nothing left to say. Topics that no longer interest me. This could account for some of my fatalism, but not for all of it.

While trying to figure out my anxiety about writing, I noticed the sign for mile marker 190 on the interstate. I missed my exit to the airport six miles ago. On I-10 outside Tallahassee, the next exit was nine miles away. I looked at the darkened road stretched before me and slammed one hand on the steering wheel. I could cut across the median, but it is uneven with sharp inclines and declines. The morning was too dark to navigate it safely. I didn’t want to wreck my car in a stupid attempt to make my plane.

“FUCK,” I screamed. And then, I screamed in frustration. And screamed again. With my rage expressed in a mostly wordless howl, I began to breathe deeply. I briefly comprehended why my toddler yells in anger. The sense of calm that settles on you afterward feels pretty spectacular.

I kept driving. Miles passed by quicker than I imagined: one, two, three, four, and then nine. I turned onto exit 181 and managed to get back on interstate headed in the right direction. I would make it to the airport in time for my flight, but I could feel the tension taking over my shoulders. I needed to make it there soon. “Typical,” I muttered, “This is typical. I get distracted and miss a turn.”

But, I only missed a turn. I was able to make it again when I had another chance. I made my flight and then the next. When the plane touched down at Harrisburg International Airport, there was snow piled on the edges of the runway. It was grey and slushy and beautiful. I snapped a picture of the snow for my daughter.

When I gathered my purse and laptop to deplane, I found myself thinking again, What if I have nothing left to say? Hell of a visiting writer I was going to be. Visions of cherubic undergrads asking me about the writing life bounced around in my head. Wide eyes and eager smiles waiting patiently for me to disperse wisdom. What would I even say? I got a handle on my nerves as I walked through the concourse, by security, and beyond baggage claim. By the time I reached the parking lot, I decided to table all of my concerns and enjoy my time with Richard and his students. Angst can always wait.

Hours later in my warm hotel room, Chris called to check in. We talked about a recent post on Impostor Syndrome. He sent it to me earlier, and I read andtweeted about it. I admitted that I live and breathe doubt as a writer. This was likely nothing new to Chris. We’ve been married 14 years. He knows me and my neuroses pretty well. But still, the moment felt like a confession.

“I look over my essays and wonder what if I’ve written the best essay I’m ever going to write? Or the best sentence?”

I can almost feel Chris’s smile through the phone. I close my eyes and imagine his dimples and the mischievous glint in his eyes. He laughs his easy laugh, one of things that I love most about him.

Teasingly, he asks, “That sentence from the last issue of Women in Higher Education? Or maybe the best word is from your ‘I look like a professor’ essay?”

There’s a dramatic pause. “What if your best word is ‘the’?”

I dissolve into giggles. “I’m pretty sure my best word is ‘asshole’ in the upcoming issue.”

We laugh together.

After the call ends, I recognize that this is my familiar anxiety before a break through. That I’m not so much afraid that I have no words left, but that the words that I have to give are part of a bigger project, likely a book. That I’m finally ready to direct my creative energies to something else. I have newer and different things to say.

I’m at a beginning, and I’m terribly afraid. The road is dark. The headlights only illuminate a few feet in front of me. I’m not sure I’ll make my exit, but I’ll get another chance. I keep driving anyway.

February 2016

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Kelly J. Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, racism, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others. She’s the author of an award-winning book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011) and The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Bondfire Books, 2013). Her newest book is Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (killing the buddha and Raven Books, 2017). She’s also the editor of Women in Higher Education. When she’s not writing assignments, editing, or wrangling two children, a couch dog, and a mean kitty, she’s writing about zombie apocalypses and their discontents for the University Press of Kansas, pulling together a collection of essays called Sexism Ed on higher education, and slowly making her way toward a collections of essays about endings and other apocalypses.  

The post (Excerpt) Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces appeared first on The Revealer.

Scorpion Dagger

Our favorite reading experience of the month was Helen Rosner‘s comprehensive ode, Dear Olive Garden, Never Change, published by Eater

There are two globally renowned olive gardens: Gethsemane, the grove where Jesus and his disciples prayed the night before his betrayal and crucifixion, its agony painted by Gauguin and by hundreds of other painters, and the fictional Tuscan hillside that lends its name to Olive Garden, a massive restaurant chain with more than 800 locations in North America. The two appear to be unconnected: According to Darden Restaurants, owner of the Olive Garden chain, the phrase is intended to call to mind ideas of the olive harvest and Tuscan authenticity, not the final, anguished night of a prophet, dark hours spent in prayer, wrath, and silence.

We also loved seeing these two pieces in the Los Angeles Review of Books this month.

First, Recline of the West by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft 

Lying down on my analyst’s couch I first feel my body against the upholstered surface, and then, in a transition once novel and now familiar, my consciousness moves from my skin to the weight of my body. When I speak I can feel my voice in my throat and in my chest. In certain moods my eyes dart around the room, and fasten on a painting (a Chagallish cow frozen in mid-leap above the couch, next to the window), or a plant in its pot. But more often than not, even as my eyes half-focus on the track lights on their rails, my attention is internal. It is not that the rest of the world, or the rest of my life, vanishes for 50 minutes. Rather, by reclining I shift my perspective on that world and that life, and by reclining next to my analyst’s chair, observed but not observing, I literalize the idea that I may not be the foremost expert on my own experience. Time develops a different thickness, consecrated to a purpose, and I am reminded of the lovely short book, The Sabbath, in which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel suggested that the Jewish people had built a cathedral out of time, rather than out of brick and mortar.

And second, Philosophy and the Gods of the City by Jon Baskin who generously opens his review of Benjamin Wurgaft’s book Thinking in Public by citing Wurgaft’s recent Revealer article “The Call to Theory“ 

Thinking in Public goes even further: it offers a provocation not just to partisan intellectuals but to all of us who claim that philosophy or the arts have the potential to enrich public life. True to his promise to avoid normative pronouncements, Wurgaft ultimately leaves open the question of whether thinkers — as philosophers or as public intellectuals — have played anything like the role often claimed for them in the progress of history or the enlightenment of mankind. “After the experience of our generation,” wrote Strauss in 1954, “the burden of proof would seem to rest on those who assert rather than on those who deny that we have progressed beyond the classics.” One could imagine someone plausibly advancing a similar challenge today: how would we thoughtfully respond to it?

We’re also very excited to read Peter Manseau‘s new book, reviewed for NPR by Genevieve Valentine: ‘The Apparitionists’ Raises the Specters That Haunted America

Of course, like any good history, The Apparitionists also has a distinct air of the present. We’re reading about a religion so new that many Americans worried it was necromancy, but we’re also reading about a time in which new technologies suddenly upended the way people thought about communication, war upended the way people thought about life and death, and unprecedented access to things — newspapers, tourism, “objective” photograph portraits — upended the way people thought about what was true. (Called to the stand to testify about the veracity of his exhibits, Barnum presciently announces a capitalist cri de coeur: “They paid their money, and they had their choice.”) The past makes its eddies into the quaintly out-of-date, but it always brings us back to the present.

And we hope you’ll take the time to listen to The Revealer‘s publisher, Angela Zito discuss “religion as media” on the Online Gods podcast

Online Gods is part theoretical exploration into some of the key concepts in the anthropology of media, and part research into how increased online interaction is changing the public sphere. Taking India and the India diaspora as its focal point, the podcast continues in the great anthropological tradition of bringing the global and the specific into conversation with one another as it analyses what online discussions do to political participation, displays of faith and feelings of national belonging. We are also intrigued as to whether a podcast can produce ethnographic theory. We believe It is possible to be both sophisticated and yet comprehensible, and that the spoken form can bring forth an accessibility that is sometimes missing from the written form. We even wonder whether academic podcasting might herald a technologically-enabled return to the centrality of oral traditions in intellectual exploration – can podcasting weaken reading’s hegemonic hold on consumption of academic knowledge? Online Gods is a key initiative of the project ONLINERPOL and is cohosted with HAU Network for Ethnographic Theory. This podcast is hosted by Ian Cook.

Also from the world of religious studies, this great resource for Teaching law and religion case study archive is curated by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, “building on and expanding our earlier work with Peter Danchin and Saba Mahmood in the “Politics of Religious Freedom” project.

A digital repository providing legal documents, analyses, and teaching resources for teaching religion and law. The modules below contain summaries and documents to help teachers and students analyze legal cases from around the world.

While elsewhere, Hurd published a piece going Beyond religious freedom: the Rohingya and the politics of religious rights in Myanmar for The Religion Factor

When policymakers describe the Rohingya’s plight as a problem of religious persecution and develop policy based on that understanding, they misconstrue the situation, overlook the real culprits, and risk exacerbating the violence against them and other vulnerable communities. To focus on intolerant religion as the problem, and religious freedom as the solution, blinds us to a larger and more complex set of challenges. An informed response requires that the international community grapple with a bigger picture and a longer global history.

And from over in literary studies, Tokens of Ruined Method: Does literary studies have a future? by Marco Roth for n+1 gave us a lot to think about

Illustration by Jonathan Wolstenholme

Regardless of its importance in theory, “theory” now represents an important set of experiences with which any new practical criticism will have to reckon. Nor can one discount the continued influence of religious or crypto-theological methods of textual interpretation that color many readers’ experiences of literature and culture — whether Evangelical fundamentalist typologies, Talmudic exegeses, or remnants of Midwestern Lutheran “Higher Criticism” — sustained by separate and dense networks of religious secondary schools and degree-granting colleges and universities that participate in institutions like the MLA. Anyone who has seen a superhero flick from the past ten years can tell you that most Americans encounter culture within an allegorical framework, and that this taste for allegory, nourished by the culture industry, also serves and is served by the historicist/contextualist paradigm, which teaches that literature itself is an encoded site of political or existential struggle.

We read a lot of good articles that were, in one way or another, about Islam.

Let’s do the funny stuff first: A Guide for Writing About Muslim Americans for the Struggling Male Reporter Who Doesn’t Want Anyone to Know Muslims Make Him Nervous by Zahir Janmohamed for McSweeney’s

President Trump announced another Muslim ban this past weekend and your editor wants a piece on the subject by 2 pm. She already rejected your pitch about why Riz Ahmed was your favorite character in Rogue One and now she wants you to talk to “everyday Muslims.”

It sucks, I know. And it’s confusing. Sunnis? Shias? And what’s that? There are Ahmadis, too? Of course, it doesn’t help matters that Kumail Nanjiani is being so damn unhelpful by not responding to the questions you tweeted at him about Islam.

Speaking of Kumail Najiani, his opening monologue from SNL on October 14 was extremely on point.

For more about Sikhs, Religious Symbols with a Hipster-Sikh Twist by Matt Sheedy for the Bulletin for the Study of Religion

There are many interesting threads to this story that I can’t touch upon here, including the metonymy of symbols, the slippery lines between “culture” and “religion,” and the discourse on Islamophobia, to name a few. What I’d like to focus on is the attempt to naturalize the meaning of “religious symbols” within public discourse, which I would claim is fuelled by essentialized definitions of religion that fail to account for its imbrications in culture, politics, and the like, along with its ever-shifting meaning.

And for a deeper dive on work about Islam, check out The Idea of the Muslim World: History and critique a new forum at The Immanent Frame

Drawing from provocations to think differently about the idea of the Muslim world and the Muslim country, this forum seeks to explicate the various ways in which these terms have been taken up in scholarship and political discourse more broadly. How have they been used to explain the political action of Muslims beyond the imperial context, that is, beyond their deployment as historically specific solutions to particular political problems? How has the notion of a “Muslim world” been utilized to mark civilizational and racial difference both historically and in the present? In what ways has the political calculus of the modern nation-state drawn upon idealized or demonized notions of “Muslim countries” and “Muslim actors” to enact its policies? What does it mean to take up these questions in the political present concomitant with a global rise in authoritarian rhetoric, racism, white nationalism, and Islamophobia?

These are but a few examples of questions this forum will engage. The responses draw from various fields of expertise and touch upon these larger themes concerning the racialization of Islam and Muslims, the construction of the “Muslim world” historically, and its relevance for political discourse surrounding the “Muslim country” in light of its contemporary iterations.

Rachel Aviv also does not struggle to write well about Muslims, as you can see in her recent piece for The New Yorker The Trials of a Muslim Cop

Luna Droubi, a lawyer who filed a class-action complaint last year on behalf of officers who have beards for religious reasons and have been penalized for growing them, told me that there was a “massive influx of Muslim officers who joined the N.Y.P.D. to help fight a branch of their religion that they disagreed with. But they’ve lost the energy to fight the battle, because they have to fight the battle of being Muslim on a day-to-day basis in their own work.”

We also read a number of very different stories about Christianity this month:

First, some history: Speaking Truth to Power is As American as Apple Pie by Marcus Rediker for LitHub

The debate about the suitability of Confederate generals as national heroes invites us to search the past for figures who better exemplify our declared ideals of democracy and equality.

A little-known radical abolitionist from the 18th century, Benjamin Lay, deserves our consideration. Two generations before the emergence of an anti-slavery movement, Lay, a Quaker and a dwarf, endured persecution and ridicule as he fiercely attacked slavery and imagined a new, more humane way of life. Lay was born of humble origins in England in 1682, labored on the high seas, sailed to Barbados where he first witnessed the horrors of slavery, and then settled in Philadelphia—where he utilized dramatic guerilla theater in his fight against prominent Quaker (and other) slave owners. His long, lonely fight against bondage was nothing short of heroic. He deserves to be remembered and honored.

In the current moment Colin Kaepernick vs. Tim Tebow: A tale of two Christians on their knees by Michael Frost for The Washington Post

They’re both Christian football players, and they’re both known for kneeling on the field, although for very different reasons.

One grew up the son of Baptist missionaries to the Philippines. The other was baptized Methodist, confirmed Lutheran, and attended a Baptist church during college.

Both have made a public display of their faith. Both are prayerful and devout.

This is the tale of two Christian sports personalities, one of whom is the darling of the American church while the other is reviled. And their differences reveal much about the brand of Christianity preferred by many in the church today.

And Jelani Cobb brings us From Louis Armstrong to the N.F.L.: Ungrateful is the New Uppity for The New Yorker

It’s impossible not to be struck by Trump’s selective patriotism. It drives him to curse at black football players but leaves him struggling to create false equivalence between Nazis and anti-Fascists in Charlottesville. It inspires a barely containable contempt for Muslims and immigrants but leaves him mute in the face of Russian election intervention. He cannot tolerate the dissent against literal flag-waving but screams indignation at the thought of removing monuments to the Confederacy, which attempted to revoke the authority symbolized by that same flag. He is the vector of the racial id of the class of Americans who sent death threats to Louis Armstrong, the people who necessitated the presence of a newly federalized National Guard to defend black students seeking to integrate a public school. He contains multitudes—all of them dangerously ignorant.

And Ben Austen writes in depth about The Trauma of Being a Black Activist in 2017 for Highline “

Every activist and organizer I know is traumatized in their own way,” DeRay Mckesson, one of the leading figures of the Black Lives Matter movement, said. “They’ve sacrificed job stability, relationships, educational opportunities to fight against a system that was literally killing people. They’re still processing those sacrifices. We are young people who are trying to figure out how to build a better world and still be healthy and sane and strong and loving and a partner and a brother and a sister.”

Speaking of trauma, As Overdose Deaths Pile Up, a Medical Examiner Quits the Morgue by Kathryne Q. Seelye for The New York Times

After laboring here as the chief forensic pathologist for two decades, exploring the mysteries of the dead, he retired last month to explore the mysteries of the soul. In a sharp career turn, he is entering a seminary program to pursue a divinity degree, and ultimately plans to minister to young people to stay away from drugs.

“After seeing thousands of sudden, unexpected or violent deaths,” Dr. Andrew said, “I have found it impossible not to ponder the spiritual dimension of these events for both the deceased and especially those left behind.”

And lastly, tragic but inspiring, Could Mychal Judge Be the First Gay Saint asks Ruth Graham for Slate

But just because Judge seems to fit perfectly the expanded definition of sainthood does not mean he is destined for the canon. A saint is not just someone who has ticked off certain boxes of Catholic virtue. He is also someone who, in the words of Pope Francis, as he canonized two former popes in 2014, “gives direction and growth to the Church”—a church that, in 2017, still regards homosexuality as “objectively disordered.” In Judge’s embrace of his own sexuality—even if it was a celibate embrace—he presents an implicit challenge to Catholic orthodoxy. Sixteen years after Mychal Judge’s death, what would it mean for the Catholic Church to elevate an LGBTQ person to sainthood and all the honors that come with it?

Still on the subject of religion and politics, but shifting over to Judaism, we highly recommend watching Judith Butler on BDS and Antisemitism on Verso’s blog

Judith Butler addresses the charges of antisemitism leveled at supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, and the related anti-boycott acts currently before both the US House and Senate, which would effectively criminalize support for the movement. 

And reading Jew-in-the-Box: What Americans can learn from Germany’s confrontation with the past by Julia Bosson for Guernica

Although the idea of putting anyone in a glass box in a museum runs the danger of being crass, I found it rather clever. What its international critics may not realize is that many Germans who visit the Museum may have never encountered a Jewish person. Jewish communities are largely restricted to Germany’s big cities, often in self-contained communities. Despite the museum’s best attempts at education, Jews are still something of a mythical group. The exhibition also plays on one of the fundamental ironies of heritage museums: it offers a sanctuary to a culture whose people were never provided with security and belonging. 

Lastly, beyond denomination or current creed, we recommend God is a Bot, and Anthony Levandowski is His Messenger by Mark Harris for Wired

Many people in Silicon Valley believe in the Singularity—the day in our near future when computers will surpass humans in intelligence and kick off a feedback loop of unfathomable change.

When that day comes, Anthony Levandowski will be firmly on the side of the machines. In September 2015, the multi-millionaire engineer at the heart of the trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car company, founded a religious organization called Way of the Future. Its purpose, according to previously unreported state filings, is nothing less than to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

That is, if there’s time. A few apocalyptic notes before we go:

Photos: This Apocalyptic NYC Church Facade Depicts City Collapsing Beneath Giant Waves & Nuclear Explosions by Jen Carlson for Gothamist

On Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan, etched into the exterior stonework of the landmarked Cathedral of St. John the Divine, you’ll find a scene that depicts the End of Days. The backdrop to this apocalypse is NYC, and features the Twin Towers toppling, the Brooklyn Bridge breaking in half, and a series of mushroom clouds above it all. There are skulls, snakes, and people running, as chaos reigns and the four horsemen trot in. This is presumably a depiction of NYC as “Babylon the Great,” as mentioned in the Book of Revelation. In other words, the city that suffers destruction at the hands of God. “Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a home for demons.”

And some more advice from McSweeney’s: The Red Horse of the Second Seal Is Not the Appropriate Time to Be Discussing Armageddon by Tom Russell

So, in the meantime, we should be mindful of when and when not to discuss the Apocalypse. Certainly not in the midst of such chaos and confusion. Nobody is served when we rush to conclusions after watching the sun turn black as sackcloth made of hair. What even is sackcloth anyway? Does anyone know? Is it even really black? Is it made of hair? So many unexplored questions! Come to think of it, if the sun IS black now then maybe we need to revisit the budget we have set aside for solar energy altogether.

And with that, we wish you a happy Halloween and hope to see you again next month! 

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

***

You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

The post In the News: Apocalypse, Saints & Breadsticks appeared first on The Revealer.