Image from the website of the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir

By James Reich and Drew Thomases

Vijah is just the nicest guy. That’s worth mentioning only because he looks like such a badass, sporting a shaved head and heavy metal goatee à la Anthrax’s Scott Ian. He was born in Trinidad, but his distant ancestors are believed to have been three Jewish brothers from North India who came to the Caribbean like many other indentured servants over the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Within a few generations, the descendants of these three Jewish brothers became Hindu, and in 1996, one branch of this amazing family tree headed for a new home in New York. Vijah was 15 at the time. Now, as an assistant priest at the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir–a Hindu temple in Brooklyn catering to the Indo-Caribbean community of New York– Vijah has committed himself to the preservation of his people’s traditions. He is at the temple every Sunday, and every Sunday he is possessed by the Mother Goddess.

There are many such spirit mediums in Brooklyn these days, in the Indo-Caribbean tradition and elsewhere, who offer up their bodies for a deity’s divine work, and Vijah is just one of the priests through whom the Mother Goddess speaks to his community. Vijah stood out to us, however, because on Monday mornings he goes back to his day job as a research coordinator for a psychiatric institute at Columbia University Medical Center. Vijah himself would admit that, at first glance, this seems a surprising combination of jobs. But in practice, his life and words highlight the ways in which the seemingly antagonistic worlds of science and spirituality can reside comfortably enough in just one person.

We should be clear that “possession” is not quite the right word for what happens to Vijah. Possession, for this community, is when some negative force—say, a malevolent ghost or spirit—forcefully takes hold of a person. But when the Mother Goddess decides to inhabit your body and consciousness for a period of time, it is considered a “manifestation,” and it’s most definitely a good thing. Indeed, manifestation serves as a central feature of the Madrassi tradition, a strand of Hinduism in Guyana and Trinidad descended from the folk practices primarily brought over by Tamil and Telugu-speaking indentured servants from South India. Madrassi Hinduism centers around the worship of the Mother Goddess–variously called “Kali” or “Durga” or “Mariamman”–alongside a related cohort of other deities.

In Brooklyn, where we first met Vijah and later encountered the Goddess’s manifestation within him, the Sunday service fully engaged the senses: rapid drumming, multiple kinds of incense, a profusion of colored lights, singing, a variety of fruits and drinks, and intermittent bouts of trance among a group of women who dance wildly in the back of the room when a deity enters them and then collapse on the floor when it leaves. According to Vijah, this is all intended to be aesthetically overwhelming, and thus disorienting and disarming. But the central event of the service is always a manifestation of the Goddess through a spirit medium to whom devotees can appeal for advice, blessings, and healing.

Image from the website of the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir

Like the iconography of the fierce Mother Goddess herself, the outward appearance of a manifestation is quite striking, and again, purposely so. Mediums, surrounded by a crowd of singing and drumming attendants, run continually in place, dump endless jars of water over their own heads as they speak, wield cutlasses, strike themselves with branches from a neem tree–and subsequently eat leaves, giraffe-like, off of those branches–and finally, by way of confirming the authenticity of the manifestation, mediums will pop flaming cubes of camphor into their mouths. During special events, some mediums even request—and receive—lashes on their arms from a rough ceremonial whip that, due to the protection of the Goddess’s presence, does no harm. But the content of the Goddess’s message is always soothing, loving. She addresses concerns both elevated and mundane—a new job, relationship troubles, illness—and grants reassurance, blessings, and worldly wisdom through the mouths of the men (always men) whose bodies she temporarily commandeers each Sunday.

And Vijah is one of these men. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, Vijah grew up in a family committed to the more mainstream strand of Caribbean Hinduism, Sanatan Dharma. If Madrassis aim to represent the religious traditions of South India, then followers of Sanatan Dharma–called Sanatanists–seek to replicate the beliefs and practices of North India. This entails a whole host of significances, but here it suffices to say that a large number of Sanatanists do not like, and are often fearful of, Madrassi practices. Like so many in Trinidad, Vijah’s parents would say that to worship the Mother Goddess in the Madrassi style, accompanied by animal sacrifices and possessions, was “black magic.” “If the drums are playing,” they would warn him, “watch your side.”

So it was with more than a little trepidation that Vijah first came to the Madrassi world. In 2003, after he and his wife had tried for years to have children, nothing was working. Doctors had even told them to stop trying. But there was another option. After consulting a friend who had gone to the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir–and who told him of the Goddess’s powers–Vijah decided to give it a try: “From the very first day I went to the temple and I saw the mother–the manifestation–she told me ‘well I was waiting for you a long time.’” The feeling turned out to be mutual, and thus began a relationship that eventually became so close that it only required one body: some time later the goddess chose him as a medium through the mouth of another manifestation, and he happily and humbly accepted, surrendering his body with complete trust each Sunday to the goddess’s healing mission. He and his wife now have three children.

Regarding the Goddess’s gift of children, Vijah is careful: “Is it mind over matter? I don’t know. I don’t know. Who am I to question? But choose something and believe in it. If it works for you, great… If it works for you, it happens.” The care he takes in this answer is sincere, and the stance he adopts is important. This is because, as mentioned above, Vijah works as a research coordinator at Columbia University Medical Center. He directs an initiative that studies mental health among Puerto Rican youth in the Bronx, and another that looks at anxiety and trauma among the children of 9/11 first responders. Indeed, his interest in psychiatry has existed alongside his interest in religion as long as he can remember–certainly since he double majored in the two subjects at Hunter College.

Many people are familiar with the kinds of questions this raises. What are we supposed to believe, and what do we want to believe, and what do we believe anyway? When is it irrational to believe, and when does it become irrational to resist belief? And how do we reconcile all the different roles we play with their different requirements? One might think that Vijah’s positions as a psychiatric researcher and spirit medium–one rooted in skepticism and demands for evidence, the other rooted in faith and surrender–make these questions more poignant and more difficult for him. Actually, he will tell you, his dual positions simplify the questions and make reconciliation easy. This is because they are united by his deep and practical interest in therapy, in helping people. Therapeutic success makes it unnecessary for Vijah to answer all of the possible psychological questions about how and why therapy works. And likewise, he does not ask of the goddess that she reveal herself to him entirely, divulging all her secrets and laying herself bare; he asks only that she heal. And this she does, and with this Vijah is satisfied, just as he is satisfied with psychiatry and its obvious uses without being able to explain everything about the human mind or all the exact, final, and unambiguous mechanisms of psychiatric intervention. The practical goal of improving people’s lives obviates any conflict, or at least makes it irrelevant for him. Each method is underwritten by very different assumptions about life and the universe but, since in both cases, the help is obvious enough to Vijah, he has assented to belief with humility. As he told us: “[Manifestation] is just therapy. Pure therapy. It’s therapy across the line.”

At the end of the movie On the Waterfront, Marlon Brando, a former mafia soldier who has a change of conscience and becomes a police informant, is confronted by his former boss, who calls him traitor and a rat. “From where you stand, maybe,” Brando responds, “But I’m standing over here now.” Brando’s character is pointing out a line on either side of which the demands and the frameworks are different enough as to be incommensurable. We understood Vijah to be referring to just such a line, to be saying that he has a foot in two incommensurable worlds, and that although there is some sort of goal or project–therapy–that can recognizably be pursued in each, the two worlds meet at a line on either side of which the horizon is entirely different. Unlike Brando’s character, however, Vijah does not choose between the worlds. He works on both sides of the line.

Of course, working “across the line” is neither unique to Vijah or Hinduism. Take Richard Gallagher, for example, a professor of psychiatry who sometimes teams up with the Catholic Church as well as clergy from other Christian denominations in order to determine whether alleged cases of demonic possession are really real. In an article for the Washington Post, Gallagher writes that in most cases, he is able to determine that the “possession” in question is actually just schizophrenia or dissociative identity syndrome–or something similar. In these cases, he recommends medical treatment. In others, however, he is forced to conclude from testing the patient that there is no recognizable psychiatric illness at play. In those situations, Gallagher tells the clergy the simple truth that whatever is going on with the patient is not a psychiatric problem, and they take over from there. But he personally believes these very few, select instances to be “the real thing.” He has encountered, for example, people speaking languages they have never studied and a woman telling him obscure personal details about his mother’s death; things which he cannot reduce simply to the absence of mental illness. He recognizes full well that his views are controversial among his colleagues, and his corner of the psychiatric world is a lonely one, but he stands his ground. In fact, he altogether refuses to see a conflict at play: “Questions about how a scientifically trained physician can believe ‘such outdated and unscientific nonsense,’ as I’ve been asked, have a simple answer. I honestly weigh the evidence.” In Gallagher’s opinion, the blanket dismissal of all claims of spirit possession emerges from a worldview as driven by dogma as their unquestioned acceptance. Careful appraisal of the evidence leads him to humbly accept certain conclusions, regardless of what he wants them to be or expects. And ultimately, like Vijah, Gallagher’s willingness to take that trip “across the line” and into the “spiritual realm” is propelled not by declarations of capital-T “Truth,” but by a commitment–simple and strong–to helping people in need.

Our position as scholars of religion is different. Unlike Vijah, the Goddess does not manifest within us. And unlike Gallagher, our powers do not combine to form some kind of dynamic duo of psychological and spiritual diagnosis. Unlike them both, we don’t really help people–at least in not in the same direct, professional sense. We are just scholars trying to understand what is going on. Moreover, our interpretive possibilities are many. As a start, we can echo Gallagher in saying that there is more to possession than an individual’s mental health. We can go even further and say that there is more to possession than the mere individual. In countless places across the globe, possession happens in public and for the public. For Vijah in particular, who claims to lose all memory and consciousness when the Goddess manifests within him, the witnesses are all that matter. Possession, therefore, is what Emile Durkheim, the 19th century sociologist and cornerstone of the religious studies canon, would call an “eminently social thing.” Thus, as scholars interested in “eminently social things,” we are inclined to ask questions like: What does possession do for the community? Does it lift morale? Does it make the meaningless meaningful? Does it cushion blows and provide succor to the weary? Does it bind individuals to a set of practices and identities? Probably all of those things, and more.

Image from the website of the Shri Maha Kali Devi Mandir

And yet, it is not always so simple to remain on one side of the line. It is all well and good to treat possession as an “eminently social thing.” But researchers’ ethnographic involvement can sometimes threaten to chase them to the other side of the line. On our first visit to the temple, for example, we were ushered in front of two men in the middle of manifestation. One was Vijah, the other a middle-aged Guyanese man with an avuncular haircut, neither of whom we had ever met before. The Guyanese man spoke to us in a voice meant to convey a certain femininity, and our conversation began with distanced friendliness and respect. He welcomed us and told us he was happy we had come while we smiled and nodded. Next, though, he proceeded to describe to each of us some extremely sensitive, personal emotional and professional issues we were each, respectively, dealing with, giving details about which, in at least one case, we had barely even dared to speak to close friends. Here, vertigo. Maybe the man wasn’t speaking at all; maybe it was the Goddess, speaking through the man, now soaked and jogging in place. She offered to help us with these issues, but also reminded us that ultimately, we were in charge of our own lives and had to make our own decisions and take our own risks.

No amount of professional or personal skepticism could mitigate the feeling of astonishment and even elation that this conversation provoked, and the clash between these two stances, of skepticism and skepticism about that skepticism, stances which both seemed obvious to us, prompted us to wonder later, looking back on the event, not so much whether we believed it, but why in the world we still, somehow, didn’t believe it? That’s what truly felt puzzling to us. To witness a parlor trick, or even a sophisticated personality analysis, in which one’s secrets are divulged, is impressive. To feel transparent and vulnerable, even readable like an open book, and yet also to feel accepted and loved, added an emotional element to the interaction which was as difficult to ignore as it was to embrace. We had encountered the line. And though the line may be where professional anthropology ends, we feel compelled, both because of Vijah’s story and out of a sense of intellectual honesty, not to stop there.

And we are not the first. In a remarkable article on Ihamba possession in Zambia, Edith Turner offers a vision of what an anthropology of religion across the line would look like.^[1] While participating as an “objective” observer in a ceremony in which a tooth spirit (ihamba) is extracted from an afflicted person’s back, Turner claims to have actually seen the spirit: “I saw with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. It was a large gray blob about six inches across, opaque and something between solid and smoke… I still laugh with glee at the realization of having seen it, the ihamba, and so big!” From this, Turner leaves behind the too-scholarly question of what possession does for a community, and instead presents a simpler and more elusive question that scholars never ask: “What is actually going on here?” Turner’s answer: Well, first off, spirits are real; but just as important to her is the idea that we in the academy need to begin to “recognize the ability to experience different levels of reality as one of the normal human abilities and place it where it belongs, central to the study of ritual.” Whoa!

There is a problem with Turner’s article, however, and it emerges from the fact that her story is so compelling. Or rather, the very compellingness of the article is predicated upon the idea that here is Edith Turner–wife of famed anthropologist, Victor Turner, and an amazing scholar in her own right–who actually, really, totally sees a spirit. That is, her story retains a degree of authority not because of what she says, but because of who she is. What happens when some other person–that’s to say, a “native,” someone inside the tradition–sees the same thing? Well, we empathize, and we “take seriously,” but we probably “stay secular” and don’t believe.

We are not arguing that scholars should blindly accept the idea that all spirits are real all of the time. Turner leaves room for the idea of multiple realities, and thus we too might consider the possibility that such phenomena can in fact be really real, but real in a reality we don’t currently share or to which we rarely have access; real on the other side of the line. Pushing anthropology of religion across the line means going past “taking seriously.” It means being willing to see things we don’t believe in. To practice it, we would have to ask ourselves: What do we do when we cross over? And what do we bring back with us? Answering those questions might change the way we regard realities which we are told “compete” with our own.

Or maybe, by way of conclusion, we can simply echo the original line crosser, Vijah, and his thoughts on the matter: “I don’t know. I don’t know. Who am I to question? But choose something and believe in it. If it works for you, great… If it works for you, it happens.”

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^[1] Edith Turner. “Visible Spirit Form in Zambia,” Being Changed: The Anthropology of Extraordinary Experience. Eds. David E. Young and Jean-Guy Goulet. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1994.

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James Reich is a Faculty Fellow in the Religious Studies Program at New York University. He holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Harvard University, and his research focuses on literature and philosophy of aesthetics from South Asia. More recently, he has become interested in urban and diaspora religion, and particularly in the Indo-Caribbean community in New York and its relationships with its own past, its new environment, and with its Indian immigrant neighbors.

Drew Thomases is assistant professor of religion at San Diego State University. His work focuses on the anthropology of religion in North India—more specifically, Hindu pilgrimage and practice—though he is broadly interested in tourism, globalization, environmentalism, and theoretical approaches to the study of religion. His current book project, Guest is God: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Making Paradise in India, analyzes the dynamics of religion and tourism in the pilgrimage site of Pushkar, Rajasthan.

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

The post Therapy Across the Line: Goddess ‘Manifestation’ in an Indo-Caribbean Hindu Temple in Brooklyn appeared first on The Revealer.

By Patrick Blanchfield

A bitter wind is coming off the Delaware River, and the Trump supporters at the rally in Neshaminy State Park are growing restive. We’re in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Jersey, not far from Levittown and Trenton, it’s below freezing, and the People 4 Trump “Spirit of America” rally is starting fifteen minutes late. A crowd of some five hundred people stamp feet in the cold, rub mittens together, and drag on coffee and cigarettes. Finally, on the stage at the center of the lawn, someone gets a sound system working and starts playing music. It’s Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)” and soon people are hollering and belting out the lyrics together.

Justice will be served and the battle will rage

This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage

And you’ll be sorry that you messed with

The U.S. of A.

‘Cause we’ll put a boot in your ass

It’s the American way

It’s early March, Trump’s been in office for only a little more than a month, and here in Southeastern Pennsylvania, supporters have gathered to rally in support of a sitting President. The event website promised a “sign waving rally [that] will be peaceful, positive, patriotic, uplifting, and open to anyone that supports an America First agenda.” At least as far as the signage goes, the participants have delivered, bringing hundreds of flags and hand-painted cardboard signs and banners.

The crowd itself is full of middle-aged and older men, bikers in leather outfits, dudes in camo hunting gear, men in work clothes. But there are dozens of families, toddlers in Trump gear, and a not-inconsiderable number of women carrying tiny dogs in their arms and purses. The cars in the lot are all sorts – not just pickups, minivans, and SUVs, but more than a few luxury cars too. The organizers have proclaimed that “unlike those protesting against President Trump’s vision, we are a diverse coalition that are the heart and soul of America that wants our nation to fulfill our potential, as the greatest nation on God’s green earth!” Practically speaking, though, the sea of faces is overwhelmingly white. I count maybe two-dozen people who might be Latino, and fewer still Black people. In fact, there are more Black folks on the stage in front of the cameras than there are in the crowd itself.

After a song and a prayer, the event gets underway in earnest. The organizer, Jim Worthington, is a local businessman, the owner of an athletic club who spent some $30,000 campaigning for Trump and went as a delegate to the Republican National Convention. He’s lean and photogenic, and gets visibly emotional talking about Trump, a “great man,” and the “movement” this rally represents. He’s also relentless in extolling “positivity,” telling everyone in the audience that we should appreciate the media: “We’re grateful they came out in the cold to the cover this, we should thank them.”

Meanwhile, while Worthington speaks, a man in a black hoodie and sunglasses roams the crowd, confronting people he believes to be journalists, demanding “Are you fake news?” He shoulders into an interview being conducted by a TV correspondent and a cameraman, and asks, “Who are you with?” The reporter says he’s with a local TV affiliate, but that doesn’t satisfy the man. “That’s not good enough, that doesn’t mean anything, you could be fake news.” The reporter tries to turn around and resume to his interview, but the man isn’t having it, cutting in front of him and starting to get handsy, jabbing his fingers at the reporter’s chest and throat. “Are you fake? Are you fake news, man?” The reporter and his cameraman abandon their interview attempt and walk away, the man in the hoodie following them, only getting angrier and louder. Later, I see him berating another cameraman – this time, one wearing a Trump Make America Great Again hat in addition to his press badge. But that doesn’t stop the questions. “Who are you with? Are you fake?”

Disjunctions like these keep piling up. Worthington’s followed by the emcee, a woman who was a former contestant on the Apprentice (“I was on a little show … maybe you’ve heard of it …”) who receives tepid recognition when she compliments everyone on their civic engagement and eagerness to contribute to a new phase of the “movement.” Then another speaker gets up and promptly launches into a tirade that I find hard to follow, but that the audience loves. He starts by bringing up recent controversy over the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, which he paints as a “fake news” misdirection. “The moment Trump announced Sessions,” he says, “They [the Democrats] went after him. What are they trying to hide?” Someone in the crowd yells “Pizzagate!” but he keeps going – the real story is how Hillary “sold uranium to the Russians.” Next he’s on to condemning Philadelphia Democrats and sympathizing with the “good people who moved out” following various outrages. He mentions “that time the Democratic Mayor blew up a whole block in West Philly,” alluding to the MOVE bombing, and then in the next breath accuses city Democrats of “being soft on ISIS,” and introducing an unacceptable soda tax. The crowd loves all of this – some yell “Lock her up!” and others start to chant “Trump! Trump! Trump!” in rapid cadence. Everyone has gotten the memo about being “positive and uplifting” but their actual enthusiasm seems to lie elsewhere.

On the stage, Worthington takes over again, congratulating the crowd on its “diversity” and recognition of how “the time has come to work together, to celebrate difference, to embrace the other side.” There’s no room for hate or “divisiveness,” he continues, as the cameras focuses in on his perfect hair and manicured features. Meanwhile, only feet away, another man walks around taking pictures and chatting people up. He’s wearing a jacket with “Infowars, Est. 1996” printed on across the black shoulders. Below that logo is a caricatured face of a green-skinned old man with a hooked nose, beady red eyes, and sharp vampire teeth complete with dripping blood; a caption beneath the cartoon reads “Deport Soros.” It’s like Count Dracula meets the Jud Süß, a cartoon that feels like it’s ripped from the pages of Der Stürmer.

I admit I have a hard time processing all this. Anodyne pap about tolerance and democratic participation unfolds seamlessly alongside barely contained rage and images of bigotry so galling they almost don’t seem real, and which no one apparently feels any need to conceal.

And then, with a few parting words of further congratulation and pride from Worthington, the event suddenly ends, fifteen minutes early. We walk back to our cars as the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” plays on the sound system.

Waiting to leave the jammed parking lot takes almost as long as the event itself. Idling in the car alongside scores of others, fumes rising from exhaust pipes and cigarette smoke from cracked windows, I find myself wondering – what was the purpose of this event? From the music playlist to the speakers’ rhetoric, it felt like a kind of exercise in repetition, a sort of hollow reprise of a campaign event. But, of course, Trump wasn’t here, he’s already won. And so here these people were, listening to a speaker break down in tears telling the story of how he met Trump visiting a hospital (“such a great man”), and yelling about how Democrats are “thugs,” all as though trying to recapture some sort of long-gone glow. I kept looking for some kind of collective effervescence on the field, but I couldn’t feel any of it. People seemed ardent, sure, but never particularly joyous; if anything, the unifying emotion seemed to be loneliness itself, a force that brought everyone together while still leaving them somehow apart.

I finally get out of the parking lot, pulling past a crude roadside memorial to someone apparently killed in a car crash. Then it’s on to the state road and the highway, passing vacant industrial parks, moldering factories, boarded-up row homes, and stripmall after stripmall. The roadside billboards are like a catalogue of bleakness: treatment centers for painkiller addiction; an alert with mugshots of two brown men wanted for a bank robbery; recruiting posters for the military; an ad for something called “Nostalgia Fest” (“Meet Gary Busey!”). And then, just past the big casino, an ad for a gambling support hotline: “If I could just win again.”

A few miles further on, as the neighborhoods get wealthier, right next to the highway, I pass a strange structure, a tower with massive vents along its bottom. It contains a special chamber into which paying customers can enter and stand in a vertical wind tunnel with fans above and beneath them. A switched is flipped, and then the fans turn on, lifting the customer into the air and suspending them there. For a little bit, the attraction promises, you’ll be able to experience what it’s like to fly.

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In the Godforsaken Wilderness is a blog being written by Patrick Blanchfield in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. You can read past posts here.

All photographs taken by Patrick Blanchfield. Please do not reproduce without permission.

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Patrick Blanchfield is the 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 Sound and Fury on the Delaware appeared first on The Revealer.

By Ann Neumann

For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Matthew 25: 35-36

Facets of American Exceptionalism have long been used as a wholesale justification for ignoring—and even enforcing—the country’s systemic inequality. Though not coined until the 1920s by American communist Jay Lovestone, the idea of American Exceptionalism today incorporates Puritan theological concepts and colonization (later characterized as Manifest Destiny), Enlightenment self-reliance, and what Alexis de Tocqueville praised as “the nation’s promise of class mobility.” Broadly, the term means that America is special, blessed and directed by God’s moral hand, just in action and intention. But as applied to policy, at home and abroad, the story that the country has told itself about its specialness has wrought both good and bad—on each side of the national belief that hard work and application guarantees every American religious freedom, liberty, and financial security.

In a brief but handy history of the term’s use, Peter Beinart wrote that the postwar interpretation, epitomized by the concept of upward mobility and summarized by sociologists Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, prevented unrest among the poor. “The American poor didn’t seethe with class resentment and turn to revolutionary ideologies because upward mobility gave them the chance to rise,” they stated. Today, as President Trump pursues his “deconstruction” of American government, the uses of American Exceptionalism, particularly as applied to one of the most basic health issues the country faces—hunger—is instructive. And it hints at an opportunity within the Democratic Party (its voters, if not its entrenched leadership) to incorporate counter-definitions of American Exceptionalism.

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Political leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—have always shaped the meaning of American Exceptionalism for their own purposes, redefining it as needed. On the campaign trail in 1992, Bill Clinton told an audience at Notre Dame that they could become productive members of society through hard work and “moral principles”:

I want an America that offers every child a healthy start in life, decent schooling and the chance to go on to college or to job training worthy of the name, not only because that’s essential for our economic success but because providing opportunities is how we fulfill obligations to each other and the moral principles we honor.

His subsequent 1996 “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act” required that “entitlement” recipients quickly find jobs.

Former Clinton advisor and Brookings Institute fellow, William A. Galston, has further expanded upon the particularly American intermingling of hard work and faith. He wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2014, “The United States does continue to differ from most other developed democratic countries. And the heart of that difference is religion. The durability of American religious belief refutes the once-canonical thesis that modernization and secularization necessarily go hand in hand.” Elsewhere, he’s called American Exceptionalism “a moral lingua franca with global reach.”

In a 2013 address meant to rally support for a military strike in Syria, then President Obama remarked that America is “exceptional” because it heeds the call to save the lives of those in need. A flurry of commentary about American Exceptionalism ensued. Republican Presidential candidate Marco Rubio then wrote in an essay at the conservative National Review that, “History teaches us that a strong and engaged America is a source of good in the world.”

Conservatives like Mitt Romney, who launched his unsuccessful 2016 presidential campaign with a focus on poverty, and Newt Gingrich, who wrote a book on American Exceptionalism, A Nation Like No Other, have both applied American Exceptionalism characteristics to inequality. They subscribe to a version of American success that privileges “self-reliance” without reckoning with its corollary, the inability to get ahead or even get by. Policies enacted under this version of the country’s stated values become a double bind for those caught inside discriminating systems: liberty is really the freedom to make better choices; higher employment rates are dependent on unfettered capitalism; and Christian faith becomes the imposition of morally correct behavior, like marrying, to improve lives.

Obama shifted the definition of American Exceptionalism to include the integration of various types of people, like himself, who came from a racially mixed family. Beinart writes,

For Obama, what made America exceptional was its ever-expanding circle of inclusion. By overcoming its history of bigotry, and building a society where people of different races, ethnicities and religions lived in harmony, America overcame the tribal hatreds that marred other lands and became a model for the world.

Donald Trump, according to Beinart, has turned at least the foreign policy aspect of this version of American Exceptionalism upside down, applying a fearful nativism to his foreign and immigration policies. But the ways that Trump has addressed domestic inequality, and specifically hunger, are nothing but the old American Exceptionalism resurrected: work hard and you will eat. Trump has no religious bona fides; his party espouses them for him. Paul Ryan, a Catholic who has designed the failed Obamacare replacement and is touted as the Republicans’ budget expert, wrote in his 2014 book, The Way Forward, about how his faith and his economic policy are intertwined:

The federal government has a role to play, but it’s a supporting role, not the commanding one. Its job is to give people the resources — and the space — to thrive. Two principles of Catholic social teaching — subsidiarity and solidarity — can help show the way here.

Subsidiarity, he explains, is an idea that’s “echoed in our federalist system,” and holds that problems “should be handled at the lowest level at which it’s possible to achieve a successful resolution.” The family. The Church. The soup kitchen. And solidarity “holds that we have a responsibility to stand together with our brothers and sisters — and there are social and moral goods that can only be gained through the broader society.” Charity. Yet, Ryan has no explanation for why these principles haven’t yet alleviated poverty and hunger. His objective is to remove social support from the federal budget.

What such cuts will do to those already struggling to feed themselves is hard to fathom. But a look at one program, Meals on Wheels, and the current administration’s designs for it, is instructive.

Take St. Joseph’s Community Services and Meals on Wheels in Merrimack, New Hampshire, one of only two Meals on Wheels providers in the entire state (Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter is the other). The number of elders in New Hampshire who struggle with hunger is estimated at 27,011, or 10.3% of the state’s residents over the age of 60.^[1] More than 21% of those seniors live at or below the poverty line. And New Hampshire is doing well when you consider the number of poor seniors in other states. Texas (31.2%), Louisiana (35.6%), Arkansas (35.8%) and Mississippi (40.9%) have some of the highest proportion of poor elders in the nation.

Which makes last month’s news that the new Trump budget proposal will cut Meals on Wheels particularly devastating. Any veil of cynical justification wielded to support the Republican Party’s fiscal objectives fell away when the president delivered his budget proposal.^[2] The cuts are breathtaking and extraordinary, not only for their strategic cruelty, but for the minuscule percentage of the budget they represent—and for the health and financial burden that many cuts will pass on to other already-burdened social service, health care and safety systems.

More than 2.4 million elders received food from Meals on Wheels in 2015, via more than 5,000 organizations run locally and predominately by women. What Meals on Wheels doesn’t get from its primary government funder, the Community Development Block Grant Program, it does from corporate sponsors like Subaru, PayPal, Lyft, Kellogg’s and Home Depot. (I’d rather the program’s funding came from right-minded, reliable and sustained government taxation of corporations, but I digress.)

A 2015 study by Brown University’s Kali Thomas, and funded by the AARP, shows that the benefits of Meals on Wheels programs are greater than elders’ full stomachs. The program saves money. In addition to better nutrition and daily social contact, the study shows that receiving Meals on Wheels resulted in fewer falls and hospitalizations for elders. According to the study, the primary benefits of home food delivery include: improved mental health; decreased isolation; improved self-reported health; increased feelings of safety; and increased ability to stay in the home. The secondary effects are: reduced healthcare visits and reduced rates of falls, which, as I’ve written here and here, are the single leading cause of hospital admissions for elders. Falls cost Medicare alone an average of $31 billion a year.

The backlash to Trump’s proposed cuts was resounding. Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce wrote:

Who in the hell zeroes out Meals on Wheels? Who decides that a program that spends $3 million to help volunteers feed the elderly and infirm in their communities is something that the country can no longer afford? Who are the men in the meetings who make this kind of call?

Charity kicked in. Donations to Meals on Wheels surged. NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who became the subject of media attention when he refused to stand for the National Anthem last fall—donated $50,000. But unless Trump’s efforts to cut the program’s budget are defeated, the same problem—without the media blitz to raise awareness—will occur next year. Already precarious and underfunded, hungry seniors will suffer.

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Our government has long shirked the moral responsibility of caring for “the least of these,” preferring to blame those in need, rather than systemic injustice or even the inability of many to be productive members of society.^[3] We have done so in part because American Exceptionalism has provided a religious cover for our national ideology of self-reliance. When the American faith (a conflation of nationalism and self-determination) is based on the belief that unlimited mobility exists for all, so long as they make the right moral decisions, those who are subject to unfair and unjust social systems are blamed for their economic plight. Our cultural and legislative will to support them is faltering; we are failing to see economic stability as a national cause and instead we are ascribing it to individual incompetence. So here we are today: our federal budget treats hungry seniors as a drain on the national budget, as lesser citizens, rather than as members of our society worthy of support. In the perverted parlance of this administration’s American Exceptionalism, funding Meals on Wheels, then, is un-American and unexceptional, as though responsibility and compassion have been turned on their moral heads.

As the Democratic Party falls apart after the election of Donald Trump, as it grapples with how to put itself together again, disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters are making solidarity with Black Lives Matters protesters, and Women’s Marchers, Catholic social justice warriors, Fight for $15 supporters, and suburban moms who want better public schools are working together to finally shake off the inequality built into our systems. “American exceptionalism is not a set of enduring national characteristics that a president can undermine. American exceptionalism is a story that America’s leaders tell about what makes America different,” Beinart wrote. Perhaps uprisings in the wake of the election can give us new leaders who will redefine what makes this country special.

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^[1] Food insecurity is a concept that refers to the social and economic problem of lack of food due to resource, physical, or other constraints, not voluntary fasting or dieting or for other reasons. Food insecurity is experienced when there is uncertainty about future food availability and access, insufficiency in the amount and kind of food required for a healthy lifestyle, and/or the need to use socially unacceptable ways to acquire food. Food insecurity can also be experienced when food is available and accessible but cannot be utilized because of physical or other constraints such as limited physical functioning by elders.

^[2] Trump’s budget proposals do not represent an approved budget; rather they are a template for Republican legislators as they prepare the budget, which will have to be passed by both the House and the Senate. What Trump’s proposed cuts do, in their extreme and ruthless tackle of discretionary spending, is make vulnerable the programs he has targeted. Any “walk back” in the approved budget will seem like a moderation.

^[3] There is controversy over who Jesus meant by “the least of these” but it continues to look like a side-show distraction regarding social and religious obligation and defies centuries of interpretation.

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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, now in paperback) 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 Remaking American Exceptionalism appeared first on The Revealer.

GIF by Scorpion Dagger

Hello, and happy Springtime.

First up in the round-up this month, some dispatches from The Resistance we hope you’ll read.

First up: “What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right” by S. Brent Rodriguez Plate for Religion Dispatches. 

Political movements, like religious movements, rely on strange alliances. Issues are seldom singular, but meet across a range of social mores, cultural productions, religious practices, and political codes. As the United States continues under the fraught leadership of Donald Trump, we find new iterations of the “Christian nation,” new connections and clashes between immigration bans, the religious right, and women’s rights. But if oppression relies on strange alliances, so does resistance.

There’s no resister we’ve admired more than Grace Paley. We’ve been turning to her example and her words a lot lately, as has Nicholas Dames, as we discovered in “The Stubborn Optimist: Following the persevering example of the writer and activist Grace Paley” written for The Atlantic. 

From her Bronx childhood to her maturity in Greenwich Village’s radical heyday, lasting to the Vermont retreat of her old age and her death in 2007, Paley was a fearless and unflagging arguer. She was someone who gained energy through the give-and-take of political debate, whose brash, blunt New York manners made the tacit sayable. A co-founder of the Greenwich Village Peace Center and a noted member of the War Resisters League whose pacifism was rooted in a continually evolving feminism, Paley blended the socialism of her secular Jewish upbringing with the unruly passions of the left during and after Vietnam: The civil-rights, antiwar, and environmental movements each counted her as an ally. Much of her arguing happened on the ground—at protests, at the constant meetings that her life as an activist demanded, during visits abroad to nations that her own country was spending its young men and money ravaging. But from the 1950s until the 2000s, much of it also happened in writing: in poetry, in essays and political reportage, and in short stories, where her brilliance found its best outlet.

We’ve also been reading the excellent work being done by Sarah Jaffe who has been publishing Interviews for Resistance in The Baffler. Each one is as revealing and informative as the next.

We are pleased to share a new, syndicated series of interviews by Sarah Jaffe. INTERVIEWS FOR RESISTANCE will introduce you to some of the key figures in the growing movement(s) against our reactionary new federal government. We hope you will find comfort in knowing the crucial work of fighting back has already begun in many (sometimes unexpected) places, and find tools in these conversations for your own part in the struggle.

And we really appreciated and felt compelled to share Ijeoma Oluo‘s pointed, funny, and pointedly funny: “Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed” from The Establishment

Hi! I see you there! Welcome to the anti-racism movement. I know you were kind of hoping to sneak in the back of class in the middle of this semester and then raise your hand in a few days to offer up expert opinion like you’ve always been here — but you’ve been spotted, and I have some homework for you, because you’ve missed A LOT and we don’t have the time to go over it all together. I’m glad you are here (I mean, I’d really rather you arrived sooner and I’m a little/lot resentful at how often we have to stop this class to cover all the material for people who are just now realizing that this is a class they should be taking, but better late than never I guess) and I know that once you catch up, you can contribute a lot to the work being done here.

There’s been no shortage of really excellent writing on race and religion in the last month. A few especially noteworthy examples include:

“Kameelah Rasheed: Who Will Survive in America?: The visual artist on “the stutter” in history, strategic opacity, and Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter” a conversation between Kameelah Rasheed and Imani Roach in Guernica

In this particular moment, many of us are scared. The question is, what are the archives directing us to do, because it’s not as if we don’t have examples. It’s not as if people have not done this work. It’s not as if people haven’t been living under a particular version of Trump’s America for a long time. I’m often reminded by elders that we’ve already been through some things. So this is not a discontinuity of our history—it is a continuation of things that are and feel familiar. I’m interested in what folks have done in the past to organize covertly to get things done. What have folks done to protect and take care of one another in moments like this? It’s very important to think about the archive as a starting place, a place to go and get lessons, but also as a place that needs to be continuously maintained and taken care of.

Also on the topic of race, religion, gender, and history, Josef Sorett wrote “Religion and Gender Trouble in the Black Arts: Remembering Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman” for Religion Dispatches.

In bringing together a wide range of voices in a single volume, Toni Cade Bambara’s editorial debut made a singular intervention. The Black Woman directed focused attention to the perspectives of black women, which were all too often undervalued in Black Power art and politics. In this way, the volume was not entirely out of step with the attachment— albeit an ambivalent one—to black masculinity that provided the normative gender politics of the Black Arts. At the same time, Bambara’s anthology largely affirmed the means (i.e., images, myths, symbols) and substance of the revolution, social and spiritual, called for by Black Arts men.

And in “Poets and Preachers: How Black Literature Blurs the Lines Between Sacred and Secular” Josef Sorett gets interviewed about his own work:

The meta-question that inspired Spirit in the Dark was a desire to understand the importance of debates around secularism for interpreting African American culture. One misconception I’m hoping to trouble is the idea that modern black literature is, by default, secular. At the same time, I don’t want to reinforce another misconception: namely that African Americans are all, by disposition, naturally religious, or more religious than the general population. There is no singular sacred/secular line that African Americans either embrace or resist. As is the case with all human beings, black folks have and continued to mark the boundaries between the religious and the secular, as well as to blur the presumed lines between the two, with different motivations, to different ends, and in different ways on any given day of the week.

Images from How to Suffer Politely (and Other Etiquette), 2016 by Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Reaching out into the subject of race, religion, and sports Michael S. Goldberg writes about the work of Onaje X. O. Woodbine in the multimedia piece “Of Hoops & Healing” for Bostonia

Sitting on a courtside bench at Malcolm X Park, Woodbine discusses his ethnographic research on courts like this one in support of his doctoral thesis, and later his adaptation of that research for his book, Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball (Columbia University Press, 2016), named by the Boston Globe as one of the Best Books of 2016. He spent four years interviewing young African American men about their experiences playing in street basketball tournaments and documenting what he describes as their lived religion. The court, he says, is where they confront central human questions.

And, lastly, Kelly J. Baker has some important words about “The Look of White Supremacy” in Sacred Matters

The assumption that white supremacy is so obvious to see is troubling. The pop portrayals of white supremacists render white supremacy as an individual’s extreme belief, not as a system that appears in institutions and structures our lives. These portrayals are always about bad white people and hardly ever about the systems we inhabit that privilege white people over everyone else. White supremacy structures our lives.

Speaking of white supremacy, Jacobin published “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia” in which Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss make the argument that:

If the Left wants to resist the alt-right’s growing power, it needs to return to the roots of Enlightenment rationality, which insists on the equality of all people and provides a strong theoretical basis for social transformation and universal emancipation.

What about some work about Judaism itself, then?

Well, first, there’s “The High Price of Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Life” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for The New York Times Magazine

It’s hard to talk about O.T.D.ers as a group, because like the rest of us, like ultra-Orthodox people, too, they are individuals. No two people who practice religion do it exactly the same way, despite how much it seems to the secular world that they rally around sameness; and no one who leaves it leaves the same way, either. In the region of New York City, New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley that Footsteps serves, 546,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews live in one of about five different sects. With a few exceptions, like the Skver sect in New Square, N.Y., which has actual boundaries and operates its own schools, the ultra-Orthodox live not in cloistered neighborhoods, but among secular America in Crown Heights, Flatbush and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and beyond. Perhaps it’s easiest to think of them as living in a different dimension — occupying the same space but speaking a different language (Yiddish, for the most part), attending different schools, seeing their own doctors, handling judicial issues among themselves and eating their own food from their own markets.

For some more straightforward, but really beautifully written, dealings with anti-semitism and Jewish identity, we recommend, Ben Purket‘s “Being Jewy: What was ‘Jewy’? Was it me?” in Guernica.

Why was I trying to prove anything to this bigot? How Jewy of me, treating the exchange like an argument of ideas. What made me think I could ever persuade him? Or even have an honest dialogue? How could I share with him what I knew absolutely to be true: that my Jewish grandfather was both the cheapest and most giving person I’d ever met?

We also really enjoyed Simchi Cohen‘s review pf Maya Barzilai’s Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, “The Mutable Monster ” for In Geveb

Barzilai’s book, as it winds its way through warfare, thoroughly complicates any neat distillation of time, of mythology, of monstrosity. Her version of modern history and its ensuing “golem cult” is a hybrid of, on the one hand, linear time, with its advent of new and fantastic technologies and increasingly horrific wars, and, on the other hand, the cyclical recurrence of the golem. With each resurgence, the golem brings to bear a host of its previous interpretations even as it is being mobilized and interpreted anew.

As we did, “A Guide to Religious Anarchy: Gershom Scholem’s Kabbalah” by George Prochnik for The New Yorker has us excited to read more of his book, from which the piece is excerpted.

Scholem’s interpretation of Kabbalah supplied exactly the sense of intellectual excitement and imaginative fecundity that had been lacking in my attempts to envision a life within the framework of my father’s religion. His portrayal of the Kabbalists evoked a realm of mystics who succeeded in being absolutely subversive of Jewish tradition while somehow remaining within its historical folds. The book also gave theological weight to the revulsion I had felt at witnessing the destruction of nature while growing up in the suburbs. In his final years, when Scholem spoke about what form Jewish mysticism might eventually take in the land, he invoked Walt Whitman as a kind of neo-Kabbalistic muse. “Those of us who labor here as Jews in the land of Israel may find great interest in the book of poems by Walt Whitman, who a hundred years ago sang the song of America with a feeling of the absolute sanctity of the absolutely secular,” Scholem wrote. Whatever form the new, historically dynamic mystical experiment might take, he declared, it might be “embodied in naturalistic and secular forms of consciousness” that found their core Scriptures in the natural world rather than in any traditional religious concepts.

Speaking of Israel, Ben Erenreich published his insightful review of “The Settlers” in”Framed Narrative: In a new film, Liberal Zionism finds its fall guy” for The Baffler

Consenting to some version of the settlers-did-it narrative is now an obligatory rite for Americans who wish to voice criticisms of Israel without being shunned for their dissent. Agree to it and you are safe from the slurs traditionally heaped on Israel’s critics: anti-Semite, apologist for terror, dupe for Muslim fanatics. Ignore it and you’re on your own. Besides, its great virtue is that it gets nearly everyone off the hook—everyone but those nutty settlers. Meanwhile, Zionism’s liberal heart is left unsullied, buried somewhere beneath the miles of concrete and razor wire. If only the settlers would let us dig it up.

Shimon Dotan’s documentary The Settlers, released in Israel last summer and screening at Film Forum this week, is an artful distillation of this narrative.

Elsewhere on the big screen, “‘My Scientology Movie’ Pokes the Hornet’s Nest” writes Gordon Haber for Religion Dispatches

My Scientology Movie is the latest from Louis Theroux, who is perhaps best known for his BBC documentaries about fringe groups like black nationalists and ultra-Zionists. Theroux’s work is ostensibly about investigating and perhaps humanizing extremism. But more often it exemplifies a kind of deadpan eccentricity-tourism associated with another British journo-entertainer, Jon Ronson. Both Ronson and Theroux specialize in pretending to take crazy people seriously, a strategy that helps them to avoid seeming smug and superior while allowing the audience to feel exactly that.

Sounding much more promising, we have “An Immigrant Love Story About Religion, Comas, And “The Beauty of Compromise” reviewed by Nadia Chaudhury for Fast Company

Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl break up because his Muslim parents wouldn’t approve. She gets sick and goes into a coma. Boy stays at her bedside with the girl’s parents. You know, your usual love story.

We were really happy to hear about “A Children’s Museum ‘Surprise Blockbuster’: A Show on Islam” by Janet Morrissey for The New York Times. 

Muslims in the United States in recent years, the Children’s Museum of Manhattan is doing its part to help defuse the rising anxiety. Its exhibition “America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far” showcases the history, art and traditions of Muslims, with the belief that education will beat back ignorance and hate every time.

But we haven’t been able to stop thinking about “The woman who washes the dead” by Fahrinisa Oswald for Al Jazeera

As the crisis continued over the autumn and into winter, the number of female refugees making the journey to Europe rose sharply. So did the number of women who died.

Warda says she has never questioned her role, although she has had to find ways to deal with the psychological effects of it.

“I’m disconnecting myself most of the time. I don’t remember a lot of details afterwards,” she says. “In my head, I’m thinking about the families, about the fact that though this journey came to an end – in that they lost a lot of things and people along the way, or they lost their lives – they still need to have dignity.”

Two pairs of gold earrings, one belonging to Ghalia Abdi and the other to her daughter, were removed from their bodies and given to Ghalia’s sister, Shadia Abdi [Fahrinisa Oswald/Al Jazeera]

In a seventy-six-page guide for treating uppgivenhetssyndrom, published in 2013, the Swedish Board of Health and Welfare advises that a patient will not recover until his family has permission to live in Sweden. “A permanent residency permit is considered by far the most effective ‘treatment,’ ” the manual says. “The turning point will usually be a few months to half a year after the family receives permanent residence.” The guidelines draw on the Israeli sociologist Aaron Antonovsky’s notion of a “sense of coherence.” Mental well-being, Antonovsky theorizes, depends on one’s belief that life is orderly, comprehensible, structured, and predictable. Antonovsky suggests, as Freud did, that psychological illness is born of narrative incoherence, a life story veering off course.

In more uplifting news, “New Zealand river granted same legal rights as human beings” reports Eleanor Ainge Roy for The Guardian

In a world-first a New Zealand river has been granted the same legal rights as a human being.

The local Māori tribe of Whanganui in the North Island has fought for the recognition of their river – the third-largest in New Zealand – as an ancestor for 140 years.

On Wednesday, hundreds of tribal representatives wept with joy when their bid to have their kin awarded legal status as a living entity was passed into law.

Especially inspiring in light of this piece,”On Native Grounds: Standing Rock’s new spirit of protest,” by Alexander Zaitchik for The Baffler

Following the defeat of Bernie Sanders’s insurgent democratic-socialist run for the presidency, the NoDAPL occupation provided a focus and a fight for many disenchanted rank-and-file members of the American left. For those who came to Standing Rock, it also provided a literal community: security checkpoints waved arrivals inside with the greeting, “Welcome home.” Donald Trump’s victory only intensified the sense that the encampment constituted an embryonic rebel alliance—a movement-building laboratory that brought fracktivists and Black Lives Matter activists into a resistance-ready coalition with the Native American tribes. The tribes provided a historical and spiritual framework, supported and bolstered by a post-Occupy infrastructure of media, medical, legal, and direct-action volunteers. But unlike the Occupy movement, this action had a clearly identified organizational leadership in the form of a seven-tribe council of elders that provided a central hierarchy and message discipline. This hierarchy contained its own tensions, and its directives were not always respected. But the elders served as a reminder that there are alternatives to the horizontal leadership experiments of recent years—an invaluable object lesson, given the tendency of neo-anarchist models of protest to devolve into chaos and unaccountable, easily decapitated crypto-hierarchies.

On what we can only think to call the other side of things, there’s this: “Citigroup Hires a Theologian To Save It From Eternal Damnation” by Bess Levin for Vanity Fair

What senior executives are more worried about is the impact their missteps will ultimately have on their souls. So while they apparently couldn’t get a man of the cloth to sign on as a paid consultant, Citi did find a Princeton professor who specializes in ethics and theology to lend a hand.

On a whole other side, there’s Heather Schwedel spending “A Night Among the Witches Fighting the Trump Administration” for Slate

“When I heard about witches doing performance art/dance/nightclub for a resistance against a totalitarian government, I was like, ‘Wow, that really sums up everything I’m about,’ ” a witch named Peter Mercury told me, before helpfully explaining what I could expect during the calling of the corners. “I think witchcraft is making this unique resurgence in this sort of doomsday world we’re currently living in,” Mercury went on. I asked him if he’d participated in the mass spell against Trump outside Trump Tower a few weeks back: “I couldn’t get there, but I did cast the spell, so my energy was part of it,” he said. “I don’t view it as black magic in any way. It’s binding. It’s protection.”

For more on the current political situation in the US check out the following work:

“Betsy DeVos’ Holy War: A Profile of America’s new education secretary” by Janet Reitman at Rolling Stone.

A staple in modern evangelical teachings is the concept of Christian spheres of influence – or what the evangelical business guru Lance Wallnau dubbed the “Seven Mountains” of society: business, media, religion, arts and entertainment, family, government, and education – all of which urge the faithful to engage in secular culture in order to “transform” it. The goal is a sweeping overhaul of society and a merging of church and state: elevating private charity over state-run social services, returning prayer to school and turning the clock back on women’s and LGBTQ rights. It would also be a system without a progressive income tax, collective bargaining, environmental regulation, publicly funded health care, welfare, a minimum wage – a United States guided by a rigorously laissez-faire system of “values” rather than laws.

And this remarkable piece by Kathryn Joyce for Fusion“She Was an Ultraconservative Texas Christian. Then Kai Was Born and Everything Changed.”

Still, the social fallout for Kimberly was swift. Trans advocates often say “everyone loses someone” when they transition; Kimberly’s family lost almost everyone. While one of Kai’s uncles helped his niece pick out new outfits, most of her extended family distanced themselves. One aunt threatened to call CPS on Kimberly. Other relatives shared a Facebook post from a Houston-area preacher, proposing a training day where the church would teach children how to spot and report trans kids at their schools. A cousin sent Kimberly a Facebook message warning if he ever saw Kai in a bathroom with his 22-year-old daughter, Kai would “need a stretcher.”

William Blake’s Satan Exulting Over Eve. John Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost was a different kind of Devil—a conflicted and brooding self-mythologizer

As for our pop culture, Ed Simon, works his critical literary and historical magic in “What’s So ‘American’ About John Milton’s Lucifer” for The Atlantic

Further south and back in time, Elizabeth King has the story of “How Argentina’s Baked Goods Reveal Its Political Past” Atlas Obscura

Monk’s balls, a sweet bun often filled with dulce de leche, can be taken literally as jabbing at the church by offering up a friar’s testicle in pastry form. The nun’s sigh, to put a fine a point on it, can be considered a reference to an orgasm. The other goods are targeted toward the state and the police: vigilantes are made in the shape of a police officer’s baton; the cannons are long, hollow, and filled with a sweet filling; bombas are a choux puff pastry.

Let’s end on a (belated) celebratory note with this “Tiny Desk Special Edition: Red Baraat’s Holi Celebration” from NPR Music. 

Until next month!
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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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

The post In the News: Protests, Polemics, and Pastries appeared first on The Revealer.