French street art (Photo: AFP)

By Elayne Oliphant

This past year was my first as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at New York University. My degree is in anthropology, but my interests had long forced me to straddle these disciplines, an experience that was solidified during the two years I spent as a postdoc in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. Almost as soon as I received a place on the Religious Studies website at Brown, I began to notice an uptick in a certain type of email. In former positions as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, or as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Knox College and Sweet Briar College (always in Departments of Anthropology), I had received the occasional query from a member of the public who, through a Google search, had encountered my name. Some of these queries were straightforward; others were odd; not all of them did I commit the time to answering. However, as a member of a Religious Studies Department, I was intrigued to note that such queries significantly increased. And, rather than simply requests for my opinion or thoughts on a particular topic, many such emails endeavored to pass on information to me, often in the form of lengthy manuscripts (sometimes several hundred pages long), which the senders implored me to share with my students. Within these pages, the writers declared themselves to have discovered the secrets of the universe, the deep unconscious connections that brought the various religions together, or a new layer of truth about the life and gospel of Jesus. I confess to rarely having given more than a passing glance to such emails. The time commitments of teaching and research are significant, and while I was intrigued that professors of Religious Studies appear more likely to receive such emails (ask around—your friends and colleagues are likely sitting on quite the treasure trove) than those in other disciplines, I otherwise filed the messages away mostly unread.

Requests from the media to comment on current day events have also increased, particularly since I arrived in New York. Often, these emails are frustrating. Journalists tend to demand detailed responses, within hours, to a number of questions that lie far outside of our field of expertise. When Pope Francis came to the United States in September 2015, for example, I received a request to comment upon what effect his visit to prisons in Philadelphia would have on prison reform in the United States. As someone who studies Catholicism and secularism in France, I had little desire to offer my reflections on such a significant topic as prison reform in America, an issue about which I could offer no insights.

There was one query I received this year, however, that I could not ignore. When I received a request for my opinion from the New York Times, I must confess, I put aside my typical skepticism and took some delight in the idea of seeing my name quoted as an expert in the paper of record.This query was somewhat closer to my field of study, focused as it was on France. Compared to the horrific stories of violence that have dominated discussions about France in 2015-16, the story may appear rather banal: Air France had restarted its flights to Tehran and warned its female airline attendants that they would be required to dress according to local laws when in Tehran and cover their heads. The reporter seemed interested less in why Air France would make such a rule and more interested in why its guidelines had caused such an uproar in France. My research focuses on the production of the unseen norms that are mistaken for unmarked universals in France. I argue that such seemingly small controversies accomplish a great deal of the discipline and encouragement required to structure and reproduce a public sphere in which all religions are not treated equally.

Given the importance of the issue, I attempted to distill the various contexts that made the controversy surrounding “Air Burka” (as detractors insisted upon renaming the company) both unsurprising and deeply problematic. I asked the reporter to try to give space to three different issues. First, I demonstrated how, while laïcité appears to be a straightforward cultural and political ban on religious signs, it is, in fact, a complex social formation that is applied in flexible and diverse ways in France. I offered up the example of the region of Alsace-Moselle. Because the province was under German control in 1905 when many of the laws related to laïcité were formed, these laws never came to be applied here. Instead, the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801, which requires religious education in schools and the region pays the salaries of priests, pastors, and rabbis, applies exceptionally to this region. Second, I pointed out how fraught the conversation around signs of Islam has become in France. I explained that while the word “burqa” is often used, such a piece of clothing is, in fact, non-existent there. What is generally being referred to is the niqab, which itself is a negligible sight at best. At the time of the debates surrounding the ban on full-face veils in 2010-11, security services counted 367 niqabs in France. Finally, I directed the reporter toward an editorial that had been published in the now infamous satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, following the bombing at the airport in Brussels to point to the fact that it is not only extreme voices on the Right making xenophobic arguments. In the piece, the authors insist that there is no difference between a local owner of a boulangerie who refuses to serve ham sandwiches and prays five times a day and the men who strapped themselves with explosives and killed 30 people. Xenophobic positions mark the tenor of debates around Islam on both the Left and Right in France.

After carefully laying out these three issues, I mentioned as an aside that “it is in this context that reasonable suggestions, such as dressing in ways that accord with the local laws of a country, become threatening restrictions upon the ‘liberty of conscience’.” Looking over my efforts, it dawned on me how much information I had given this reporter and I worried that he might not know how to begin to incorporate it into his reporting. I sought out the opinion of The Revealer’s editor, Kali Handelman. Incorporating her suggestions, I offered a quick conclusion: “Laïcité and secularism are not monolithic, even in France. The situation since 2003 is one in which overreactions to inaccurate assumptions about overblown ‘threats’ have produced further overreactions that, are, in turn, creating a frighteningly inhospitable and hostile environment defended in the name of laïcité.” I hoped that, even if he couldn’t take the time to follow all of the links I had carefully sent him, or read up on the diversity of secularisms in France, he would be able to identify my overarching argument.

I was confident that I had made the right choice in not simply offering a one line blurb, but providing the reporter with a larger context that, while it may not end up in the article itself, would help to inform how he shaped his writing. In response to my page-long email, the reporter offered a quick and polite thank you and then I heard nothing more from him. I assumed that the article had been pushed, or he had decided not to quote me, but the next morning I punched my name and “New York Times” into Google just to make sure. My heart sank when I found the following midway down in an article entitled “Air France Faces Backlash Over Veil Policy on Route to Iran.”

Elayne Oliphant, a professor of religious studies at New York University, said larger anxieties over terrorism and the cultural assimilation of France’s Muslim minority have led some people see [sic] a threat in “reasonable suggestions, such as dressing in ways that accord with the local laws of a country.”

I couldn’t deny that the words the reporter had included in quotations were, indeed, words I had written to him. That they were the most insignificant of the words I had written was disappointing. That he attributed such words to the contexts of “larger anxieties over terrorism” and “the cultural assimilation of France’s Muslim minority,” however, was far more problematic and constituted a gross misreading of my argument. What is more, such a misreading ultimately forced me to publicly state an argument opposite to that which I have carefully concluded over many years of research in France. And while only a handful of people are likely to read the academic articles in which my argument is made, here I was making an argument I abhor in as public a venue as academics could hope for: the New York Times.

I took some solace when I distributed the article to members of my undergraduate advanced seminar on secularism. As they read it to themselves I knew when each of them had reached the unfortunate sentence by the sharp intakes of breath and sighs of embarrassment on my behalf. At least I had made my position on secularism clear enough to them over the past six weeks that they knew I would never make such a claim. One student did a quick search and reassured me that the article had “only been retweeted three times.” By one metric of readership, then, I could take comfort in knowing that this piece had not circulated much wider than my last article in an academic journal. I presented the article to my students as a problem I hoped they could help me to address. I distributed the original email I had sent to the reporter and asked them how I could have made myself clearer. I expressed my hesitation at reducing my responses to reporters to tweet-length sound bites. I felt it was my duty as someone who had spent years reading and researching on a particular set of topics to make my fields of expertise available to a broader public. My students looked at me as if I were quaint. In today’s media environment, they explained, one needed to control how one was tweeted. In the future, I should offer nothing more than a sentence or two that would protect me from being used to make arguments I despised.

Together we drafted an op-ed reply to the New York Times, but at that point it felt too long after the fact to effectively address the problem. Ultimately, the experience ended up feeding into the classroom more than contributing to any changes to the piece. The very kind and thoughtful reporter followed up with me after I wrote my concerns to him and we spoke on the phone for quite some time. Eventually I was able to make him see the difference between what I had written and what he had attributed to me, but he explained that there was really no way to correct the article. Had he mistakenly called me a professor at Columbia University, such an error would have instantly received a retraction. But, as my students had tried to explain to me, there was simply no space for the kind of nuanced correction I desired. And so I was left contributing to the very kinds of assumptions I had hoped to overturn.

When I recount the experience to colleagues, they typically respond with similar tales. Most have become convinced by these experiences that it is best for academics to avoid journalists entirely. No one had a story of a satisfying interaction with the press when it came to translating his or her research into a broader public realm. At best, they suggested – just as my students had – one can offer a sentence or two that leave no room for misinterpretation. I was deeply dissatisfied with this advice, but have little doubt that I will hesitate the next time I am approached by a reporter. Are there alternatives to this unfortunate conclusion? How can academics and journalists more effectively converse with one another? A quick glance at The Revealer and its round-ups of interesting writings on religion demonstrate that a great deal of progress has been made. Far more interesting claims and questions about religion are posed in non-academic writing than one was likely to find fifteen or twenty years ago. But such positions tend to be relegated to specialty publications, further exacerbating our segregated reading habits. And there is still good reason to worry about the dangers of simplistic accounts of religion that we can find in the daily presses. In a year in which France has suffered terrifying violence, it has been devastating to see such a complex context reduced to “Islamic extremism” in ways that help to buttress the most frightening of xenophobic voices. At such a time, it feels all the more irresponsible for me to throw up my hands and declare that there is nothing I can do to alter the situation because I fear more for my reputation than the tenor of the debate. My students were quick to blame the reporter for the misinterpretation. And while he certainly plays a role, my guess is that he knew that the New York Times expected a certain type of argument from his article. He merely had to implement it. One of the ways in which the arguments implicit in New York Times articles are validated, of course, is through a quick sentence or two from a professor associated with a respected university. Thus, I not only fretted that the misattribution would tarnish my reputation as a scholar. I also resented being used to validate an argument I hoped to dismantle.

This experience also forced me to reflect more on those manuscripts sent to professors of Religious Studies around the country. It is, in many ways, exciting that our discipline attracts such engagement. And yet, armchair philosophers seem to imagine that we study, research, and teach an object very different to the one we understand ourselves to be encountering. Where they see a single mystery to be unraveled, we explore the nuances, contradictions, and creative social and cultural expressions of often highly local religious experiences. And I think this also might be the crux of our challenges of engaging with the press. Public discourse about religion presumes to already know what it is; scholarly opinions are sought, not to nuance or expand understanding, but to confirm assumptions already circulating. And so, can scholars most effectively challenge this status quo by mastering the art of the tweet? Of the two-sentence sound bite that necessarily limits the kinds of discourses our expert opinions authorize? As a graduate student, I once joked that in order for our research and efforts not to go to waste, we should be required not only to produce a dissertation, but a Wikipedia page on our topic. If I had been able to refer the reporter to my Wikipedia page, would it have been easier for him to translate my argument into the paper of record? I continue to hesitate. After a summer of Trump and the burkini, however, figuring out how to translate our arguments into the broader public sphere has never felt more pressing.

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Elayne Oliphant‘s scholarship explores the privilege of Christianity in France and Europe. She rethinks the evolutionary tale of religious to secular by examining the ongoing (and ever-transforming) dominance of Christian signs and symbols in the public sphere. She has published essays exploring the privileged circulation of Christian signs in contemporary art exhibits, museum displays, and European Court of Human Rights rulings. She is currently completing her first book entitled Signs of an Unmarked Faith: Contemporary Art and Secular Catholicism in 21st Century Paris. Her current research projects include: an examination of the significant role played by real estate, insurance, and financial industries in maintaining the power and privilege of Christian heritage spaces throughout France; and a study of the effects of the closure of nine Catholic churches in Manhattan, both on the cityscape and for the city’s Catholic population.

The post Translating Scholarship: Can academics and the media work together? appeared first on The Revealer.

By Geoffrey Pollick

The Legend of Tarzan, a much-hyped reboot of the popular relic of Western colonialism, suffers from its attempt to build a conscience into a character who never had one.

Deservedly neglected by audiences and panned by critics[1], Hollywood’s latest attempt to resurrect and redeem an outdated hero of racist imagination stumbles under the weight of its effort to introduce narrative complexity into the simplifying medium of the big-screen blockbuster. Aiming to align Tarzan with antiracism and environmentalism, director David Yates and writers Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer set out to re-narrate Tarzan as an agent of anticolonial activism. In doing so, however, they reinforce the antiquated trope of the white male savior.

Sprung from Chicago-born Edgar Rice Burroughs’s imagination in 1912, Tarzan first functioned as a distinctively U.S. American representation of European colonial exploitation. The cultural complex of literature, film, and consumer goods that proliferated around Tarzan throughout the twentieth century extended that representation into numerous cultural contexts around the globe. But wherever he has landed, Tarzan has carried the indelible mark of white privilege and prejudice. As literary scholars Michelle Ann Abate and Annette Wannamaker surmise, “Tarzan of the Apes—the novel, the character, and the cultural legend—embodies a powerful emblem of past white Western imperialism and, correspondingly, of the present colonization of the world by American culture.” This troubled inheritance remains in The Legend of Tarzan.

Despite its shortcomings, however, the film offers lessons on representing religion and culture in contexts of colonial exploitation.

In titles floated over a background that fades from black into a mist-shrouded Congolese scene, Tarzan’s opening sequence roots its premise in serious questions of history:

At the Berlin Conference of 1884 the world’s colonial powers took it upon themselves to divide up the African Congo. King Leopold of Belgium claimed the vast Congo Basin, rich in ivory and minerals. Five years later he had run up huge debts in his ambition to exploit his new colony. Desperate for funds and running out of money to pay his army, he sent his most trusted servant, Leon Rom, to the Congo to source the legendary diamonds of Opar.

Mixing fact and fiction, the filmmakers begin their tale with the fact of Rom’s work on behalf of Leopold, and his arrival in Burroughs’s fictional land of Opar. As the camera descends into a valley, Rom’s status as colonial agent is signaled with visual reference to his white fedora and matching suit. Striding through the valley, his right hand plucks an adjacent flower while the shot lingers in close-up to reveal a tightly gripped rosary dangling from Rom’s fist. Evidently, this Belgian envoy puts Christianity to use in implementing Belgium’s wealth-extraction program.

As the scene continues, Rom’s Belgian forces encounter hostile local soldiers, who kill all in the invading party except for Rom, played by Christoph Waltz. As the last man standing, he confronts a large-framed fighter who approaches to finish him off. In that instant, Rom unleashes his rosary, flinging it around the soldier’s neck, strangling him as he collapses. Leopold’s man survives to treat with Chief Mbonga, ruler of Opar (depicted by Djimon Hounsou). The two strike a deal that Tarzan, with whom Mbonga holds a grudge, will be delivered in exchange for diamonds, which will fund Leopold’s mercenary army.

Rom in the opening scene

In this initial sequence, the filmmakers bluntly proffer religion as an agent of domination. Through the device of the lethal rosary, Tarzan thrusts Christianity into its narrative foreground, though with minimal comment. The rosary-cum-garrote reference recurs throughout the film, a constant figuration of Rom’s villainy. He explains that, made of Madagascar spider silk, the object was retrieved for him from Jerusalem by his childhood priest. Thus, Rom’s rosary is marked as the consummate artifact of Christian colonialism, having circulated through multiple centers of imperial reach.

Through this ritual object, the film invokes Christianity’s role in European projects of African colonization. But it does more than this. Understood alongside Tarzan’s representations of local African cultures, the rosary prompts comparative reflections about religion in contexts of colonial exploitation.

In the film, John and Jane Clayton—as Tarzan and his spouse are known in England—return to a Kuba village where Jane was raised by her missionary parents. Yates portrays the village in warm yellow tones, matching grass-covered hills with the village’s thatched roofs. As the long-absent couple arrive, vibrant voices rise in songs of greeting and John and Jane (played by Alexander Skarsgård and Margot Robbie, respectively) exchange gestures of familiarity with the residents. This celebratory scene is soon matched with a mournful sequence, in which the village gathers to practice a ritual of remembrance after their leader is murdered and the village is burned by Rom’s mercenary forces. Women gather around the elder figure’s body, elevated on a low a platform, while men plot their revenge for the attack.

Here, Kuba culture is constructed in opposition to Rom’s Christianity. Centered in communal expressions of identity and belonging, the Kuba scenes stand in contradistinction to Rom’s rosary, which abets his infliction of violence and prejudice.

Viewed alongside a recent study by South African religion scholar David Chidester, these dynamics of comparison find greater significance. Chidester offers an account of the academic study of religion as it developed through encounters between European colonizers and local people in southern Africa. The colonial expansion of Great Britain during the nineteenth century, Chidester argues, presented opportunities through which “the human sciences [including the study of religions] could also reinforce imperial authority, particularly through the power of representation.”

The Kuba

European theorists of religion produced knowledge about local African religious expressions through comparison with familiar Christian expressions. “More than any other imperial science,” Chidester writes, “comparative religion dealt with the essential identities and differences entailed in the imperial encounter with the exotic East and savage [sic] Africa. Comparative religion, therefore, was a crucial index for imperial thinking about empire.” This imperial thinking most often reinforced white-supremacist and pro-Christian European perceptions. These perceptions impacted more than attitudes concerning religion by offering support to the particular brand of racism that festered in Western imperial projects. Chidester’s colonial theorists “speculated about an evolutionary trajectory…which left [African people] behind in the developmental advance of human progress.”

From this vantage, the anticolonial imagination of The Legend of Tarzan seeks to invert the priorities of such imperial thinking. In Tarzan, European Christianity carries the stains of slavery and environmental destruction, while Kuba cultural practices are marked as authentic sources of irenic community life. Comparison runs in the opposite direction here, evaluating Christianity as falling short against the measure of Kuba culture. In this, the film employs religious comparison in order to elaborate its fantasy of cultural and environmental revenge against Rom’s Belgian invasion. Even so, both representations fall flat, remaining too simplistic to offer any substantial critique. The film’s principal dynamics revolve around John Clayton’s plight, forcing these cultural assertions to the far narrative periphery.

Perhaps the filmmakers shouldn’t be slighted for prioritizing high-energy plot elements over thickly described cultural critiques. Audiences expect blockbusters to dazzle their imaginations and move their emotions, not to preach from a social-justice soapbox. Yates, Cozad, and Brewer, however, promised more than they delivered when they introduced half-baked representations of religion’s complicity in the colonialism that forms the core of Tarzan’s cultural legend.

But the villainizing of imperial Christianity and idealizing of Kuba culture comprise only part of Tarzan’s narrative revamp.

Notably, the filmmakers innovate in the Tarzan genre by introducing the character of George Washington Williams. An African-American veteran of the Civil War, Baptist minister, journalist, and historian, Williams traveled to the Congo Free State in 1890, in order to observe the mistreatment of local people by Leopold’s hired army. In The Legend of Tarzan, Williams, depicted by Samuel L. Jackson, accompanies John Clayton to the Congo, hoping to observe local conditions on Tarzan’s tour through his former home.

The introduction of an African American supporting character acknowledges the American origin of Burroughs’s tale. But more importantly, Williams allows the filmmakers to draw direct associations between the exploitations of European colonization and American slavery. Ostensibly, this plot twist intends to capture the interest of U.S. audiences that might possess limited understanding of African colonialism.

Williams’s inclusion, however, poses problems for the film’s activist and narrative priorities. Rather than serving as a principal agent in the story, Williams plays second fiddle to Tarzan’s central role. Clayton, initially hesitant to confront his African past, finds himself persuaded to undertake the journey only through Williams’s consciousness-raising references to persistent practices of enslavement. Even more, the screenwriters essentially graft their plot onto the historical account of Williams’s visit to the Congo, superimposing Clayton in the protagonist position. In The Legend of Tarzan, George Washington Williams supplies both the hero’s conscience and his plotline.

In all, the lessons of the film’s morality tale are too subtle, and its heroes and villains too ineptly identified for its intended anticolonial critique to shine through. In Tarzan’s moral imagination, Williams is the hero and Rom the villain. Slavery, cultural violence, and natural destruction are Rom’s sins, and Williams sees them for what they are. Clayton, at least initially, couldn’t care less. The film’s explicit plot, however, displaces these dynamics, centralizing the dispute between John Clayton and Chief Mbonga. The larger colonial tale takes a back seat to Tarzan’s white masculinity.

Clayton and Williams

In this, Clayton acts as a figment of white guilt, creating a problem of agency for the film’s intended redemption of the Tarzan legend. He executes vicarious revenge against the colonial forces of capitalist exploitation and Christian imposition on behalf of local African people and the natural environment. The preservation of a white European protagonist cannot escape the dynamics of racist oppression and natural exploitation that drove Europe’s colonial projects. In the film, Tarzan possesses agency above all others. As reviewer Sam Adams explains, the film presents “a story inextricably entwined with Europe’s relationship to ‘the dark continent’, and yet actual Africans keep getting pushed to the side.” Yates’s Tarzan may have better manners than Burroughs’s, but he never learns to step aside and allow others to determine their own futures.

The screenplay’s interest in current political affairs is explicit, made evident to Yates from his first reading. “This old-fashioned, iconic character was somehow connecting with present-day values that were very relevant and very important, and very ‘now.’” Though Yates never names those values, the film’s overriding interests address colonialism and environmental destruction. Despite this strenuous presentism, the film falters in attempting to resolve the Tarzan myth’s socio-cultural baggage with representations of progressive antiracism and environmentalism.

Through its critiques of religion and race, The Legend of Tarzan aims to rehabilitate its subject matter. But the blockbuster genre has proven not to be up to the challenge.

It may be impossible to resurrect figures such as the famed ape-man without reiterating the prejudice from which they were born. As Aaron Bady argues concerning the film, “the more seriously you take him [Tarzan], the more impossible it becomes to ignore the fundamental racism and sexism of the story.” Questioning the plausibility of Tarzan’s most basic premise, Bady asks, “[c]ould a white baby conquer Africa, were he deprived of the guns, germs, and steel that Europe had actually employed?” Systematic exploitation stands at the center of the Tarzan myth, and without it, The Legend of Tarzan has no story to tell. This should prompt us to ask whether or not the story should be told at all.

Tarzan concludes, as it began, with reference to its historical subject matter. In voiceover, Williams reads a paraphrase of excerpts from an open letter that he sent to King Leopold on July 18, 1890, exposing the violent and unjust treatment of residents of the Congo. In its penultimate scene, the film returns to the Kuba village, now rebuilt, and to its displacement of colonialism in service of glorifying its leading man. Surrounding John, the villagers rejoice as he welcomes a newborn child. As Jane explains in voiceover, they sing “the legend of Tarzan: for many moons he was thought to be an evil spirit, a ghost in the trees. They speak of his power over the animals of the jungle. Because his spirit came from them, he understood them, and learned to be as one with them.” The Legend of Tarzan’s last images reveal the hero swinging through the jungle alongside his ape siblings, effacing all other characters in a final invocation of the white savior motif.

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[1] Opening during the first weekend of July, and encumbered by a $180 million production budget, the film hoped for success with large summer audiences. Its high-end special effects and familiar subject matter seemed an easy bet for studio executives. But the film grossed a mere $38.5 million during its opening weekend, and chilly critical reception isn’t helping its future prospects.

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Geoffrey Pollick, Visiting 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.

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

The post Of Rosaries and Revenge: Anticolonial Imaginations of The Legend of Tarzan appeared first on The Revealer.

We took a August off from publishing, but not from the Internet, so we’ve got quite the stash of links saved up for you this month. 

First up, a couple of great new pieces from some familiar voices: 

‘They’re Coming for the Ones You Love’: My Weekend of Gun Training in the Desert by Patrick Blanchfield in The Nation.

Carol starts pacing, repeating a sentence like a prayer: “Aim to hit the hostage taker, don’t aim to miss the hostage—otherwise you miss everything.”

I draw and feel myself going somewhere, the mechanical unthinking somewhere I went after Carol yelled behind me earlier. I aim at the hostage taker on the left and squeeze off three rounds. Each lands true, right where the eye socket would be, as far away from the hostage as I can get while still landing in the head box. I turn my attention to the other bad guy and put one in his eye, too.

And then, suddenly, I snap out of it and realize what’s happening. This is a scripted, psychologically engineered “come to Jesus” moment. Between the heat, the exhaustion, and the constant invocation of horrifying scenes, we may as well be at the apogee of a revival or vision quest, the desert one giant sweltering tent or sweat lodge. It’s ingenious, but contrived. My next shot grazes the hostage’s ear, and my last goes totally wide. “It’s OK, she’ll be fine!” one of the trainers says.

The Ministry of Fun: The Feel-Good Gospel of the Pastor Made Famous by Kimye and Bieber by Jeff Sharlet in Esquire.

Every few years, the secular press produces an astonished report of a preacher who embraces pop culture. But this is an old story: Each era of American Christendom gives rise to competitive strains of faith, one that curses the culture, one that coddles it. Sometimes the latter is liberal, but more often it reveals the shallowness of liberalism’s aesthetic trappings, the ease with which secular music and fashion and art can be repurposed to serve a religion of control—over sex, over emotion implicitly political. We live in the age of hipster Christianity, a time of multiplying ministries with one-word names, such as Status, Mosaic, Reality, and, most famously, Hillsong, an Australian Pentecostal megachurch whose New York City branch is led by Rich’s friend and fellow pastor to the stars Carl Lentz. Most leave untouched fundamentalism’s core convictions—opposition to abortion and sex outside of marriage (which is between a man and a woman) and also to false gods (meaning all of them but their own)—but they rebrand the presentation. Rich is only the most mediagenic of whatComplex has described as this “new wave of stylish pastors,” just as a young Billy Graham was before him and Billy Sunday before him, stripping away the Bible’s subtler teachings to draw the masses. Rich is the latest avatar of a tradition common to Christianity and capitalism, the so-called new-and-improved. His new is burnished with vestiges of the artisanal; “vintage,” Rich likes to say, meaning that which is artfully rendered to reference an idea of the old. It’s like he’s sampling from a song he’s never actually heard.

Next, a beautiful piece from a much newer voice: Breaking the Horse by Kerry Cullen in Catapult.

I had a public online journal, like so many teenagers of the early aughts. I wanted to write books, to create something as beautiful as the man who made model horses in his basement. In the meantime, I wrote about my daily life, my friends and my crushes, in shoddily veiled terms. I wrote, too, about my confusion and pain regarding the church, my faith, and my mother’s sexuality. Adults from the church read and commented—sometimes anonymously, sometimes not. Satan is tempting you, they said. He is using your love for your mother to poison your mind. We love you, they said. Be strong.

And then some last words from and about some very old and controversial figures: Tim LaHaye Dies at 90: Fundamentalist Leader’s Grisley Novels Sold Millions by Robert D McFadden.

The series — 16 volumes that appeared between 1995 and 2007, including sequels, prequels, children’s versions and translations into many languages, as well as spinoff movies, DVDs, audio dramatizations, video games and clothing — sold more than 65 million copies and was perhaps the most commercially successful Christian fiction in publishing history.

Phyllis Schlafly, Conservative Leader and Foe of E.R.A., Dies at 92 by Douglas Martin for The New York Times. You can read more about Schafly in Phyllis Schafly’s Urology by Ann Neumann. 

Not that either LaHaye or Schafly could claim the kind of years this place can: 

Inside the World’s Only Surviving Tattoo Shop for Medieval Pilgrims by Anna Felicity Friedman in Atlas Obscura.

In the 21st century, tattoos have emerged as popular travel souvenirs, but Razzouk Ink offers a truly unique experience—a link to hundreds of years of history through a visceral transaction of bloodletting and pain. While in that fuzzy zone that emerges from endorphins as a tattoo progresses, I channeled the many travelers who have endured a similar fate. And later, post healing, as the ink began to settle into my skin, a glance at the enduring mark conjured a heavy mix of memory and tradition.

And reaching even further back in time, there’s The Obsession With Biblical Literalism by Carmine Grimaldi in The Atlantic. 

Of all the biblical episodes, Voltaire thought none required more faith than the story of Noah’s Ark: “The history of the deluge being that of the most miraculous event of which the world ever heard, it must be the height of folly and madness to attempt an explanation of it.” If only he had visited Ark Encounter—a Christian theme park that opened this summer in Kentucky and boasts a “life-sized” reconstruction of Noah’s Ark. Seemingly impossible details have been fanatically researched and naturalistically explained by Answers in Genesis (AiG), a literalist Christian organization that’s also responsible for the nearby Creation Museum. With roughly 40 percent of Americans believing in creationism, the park shouldn’t be dismissed as mere Christian kitsch. Rather, it represents a recent and powerful trend in evangelical thought, a kind of fundamentalist realism. To visit the park is to see how conservative Christianity of the 21st century finds strength not simply in miracles, scripture and sermon, but in timber, mannequins, blueprints, and feasibility studies.

Back in the pretty much present, but always already nostalgic, moment: Changing of the Guard on the Front Lawn by Francis X. Clines in The New York Times.

From their special perch, the Campanellas are a welcome antidote to the anti-immigration rhetoric that spews from Donald Trump. They can speak firsthand about what is happening on the ground among new Americans choosing imaginative ways of marking their place. “The new immigrant,” said the older Mr. Campanella, celebrating his latest customers, is “the Chinese, the Arab, the Mexican. We’re seeing a recycling of what was. The Italians and Jews who built this neighborhood have moved on.”

Far from fearing change, he revels in the newcomers and their elephants, foo dogs and Buddhas.

Louis Campanella, 69, poses with a statue of the Virgin Mary that he painted at his workshop in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn. Credit Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Meanwhile, with a view towards archiving these migrations and shifts, A Former Janitor Collects and Photographs the Items Seized from Immigrants and Thrown Away by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol by Ellyn Kail in Feature Shoot.

It started with toothbrushes. Arizona-based photographer Thomas Kiefer had been working part-time as a janitor at the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in Ajo, some 40 miles from the Mexican border, for several years when he acted on his impulse to salvage— and to catalog—some of the hundreds of personal items thrown away in the facility. As hopeful American immigrants, many of them illegal, were apprehended and brought to the station, personal objects deemed “non-essential” were seized and disposed of during processing. With El Sueno Americano, or The American Dream, Kiefer tells the story of those who risked their freedom and their lives to cross the border through the many possessions they had to leave behind.

Similarly archive-minded, meet The Stewards of a Disappearing Faith – And 10,000 Songs by Susan Sharon on NPR.

In the mid-19th century, Shakers practiced their faith in farming communities from Maine to Kentucky. Numbering 6,000 at their peak, they gave up worldly possessions, marriage and sex, instead devoting themselves to prayer and work. They also wrote songs, thousands of them — including “Simple Gifts,” which endures in popular culture despite dating back to the 1840s.

The religion, however, has not been sustainable. There are just three followers left: two elderly women and one middle-aged man, who live at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Me. Stored away in their village library is a collection of 10,000 Shaker songs.

Or maybe you’re more into reenacting history than preserving it? Hill Cumorah: Scenes from the annual pageant of Mormon origins by Sam Kestenbaum in Killing the Buddha.

“When the sun sets,” a loudspeaker calls, “the Pageant will begin. Welcome to America’s Witness for Christ.”

I’ve come to upstate New York, south of Lake Ontario, to see the Hill Cumorah Pageant, an annual reenactment of the Mormons’ origin story that has been held here since the 1930s.

And then in just straight up heartfelt memorializing, Nathan Gelgud has made another great installment in his “Unconventional” series in The Paris Review, this one about Father Daniel Berrigan: Poet, Priest, Prophet.

Shifting gears a bit, a few new pieces on Islam in religious studies and in the world.

Two excellent academic forums, one, in Syndicate Theology, on Saba Mahmood‘s new book, Religious Difference in a Secular Age, with contributions from the likes of Elizabeth Castelli and John Modern and moderated by Michael Allen.

Part of what makes Mahmood’s book so compelling is the vantage it lends to considerations of secularism not solely as an abstracted concept, but a set of practices that come to articulate ways of living. The various chapters—which deal with gender, family law, Ottoman history, Egyptian government, and the nexus of literature and history—bespeak a scope and ambition to track secularism and secularity outside the confines of a single discipline. As Mahmood notes, “Secularism as a statist project exerts inordinate power on our political imagination, most evident in our inability to envision religious inequality without the agency of the state” (212). Mahmood’s book is an eye-opening inquiry to the limits of a political imagination framed as a matter of statecraft and governance. Her work provides a vision of what critical anthropology can bring to those of us working in the humanities, social sciences and religion—that is, ways of seeing the world anew.

The other, on Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam?: the Importance of Being Islamic, was edited by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Kristian Petersen for the Marginalia Review of Books.

Ahmed’s What is Islam? attempts to make clear histories of interpretation both within Islamic discourses and the Euro-American academy. He weaves theories within and about the study of religion with incredibly detailed, multilingual Islamic sources from a vast geographic area (what he terms the Balkans-to-Bengal complex) and an equally vast number of years. He attempts, in other words, to span academic discourses, disciplines, fields, and subfields that often do not talk to each other, that maintain their own definitional schemas, that have varying rationales for their own definitional schemas all while maintaining a balance between equally disparate Muslim interpretations that sometimes (though not always) fit into extant Euro-American academic categorizations. Ahmed tried to synthesize, order, and evaluate multiple conversations about, around, and with Islam and Muslims—without then collapsing the discourses into a monolithic, graspable whole. He both called for and maintained coherence and contradiction.

Amos Barshad profiles The Pop Star of Jihad in Fader.

Though he left rap, Cuspert never abandoned music. He began instead singing songs in praise of the international jihad, what jihadists refer to as nasheeds. Traditionally, nasheeds are songs of uplift, mostly a cappella, about Islam, its practices, and its history. But these were songs about fighters-in-arms, about explosions, about mass murder. In one, a German-language adaptation of a jihadist anthem called “Qariban Qariba,” Cuspert declared, Enemies of Allah, we want your blood/ It tastes so wonderful.

Aheda Zanetti explains: I created the burkini to give women freedom, not to take it away  in The Guardian.

I would love to be in France to say this: you have misunderstood. And there more problems in the world to worry about, why create more? You’ve taken a product that symbolised happiness and joyfulness and fitness, and turned it into a product of hatred.

Asma T. Uddin shared her own important take on When a Swimsuit Is a Security Threat by  in The New York Times.

The same twisted logic is at play in the French ordinances against the burkini. To an American spectator, such bans probably appear a blatant restriction on religious liberty, or liberty generally, but what is striking is that the European jurisprudence upholding them speaks in the language of human rights. By couching prejudice and fear in the language of Article 9 exceptions, the court in effect uses human rights laws to limit human rights.

Meanwhile, using quite different tactics but still making their point: New York City Firefighters Had A Very Effective Response To A Street Preacher’s Hateful Words by Steven Lerner in APlus. 

Before she could say anything else, the firefighters inside the station blasted their fire sirens. The loud sound of the alarms successfully drowned out her Islamaphobic message.

Arguing thoughtfully and compellingly, but without any bull-horns or sirens, a few articles on some important Jewish debates:

First, Todd Berzon, tries to find Identity, a Way Forward (Perhaps) in the Ancient Jew Review.

When I use the term identity in my own writing, I treat it as an indicator, an indicator that I’m not being as clear as I could or should be. In most cases, there is something more specific that undergirds my use of the term. Identity, in my own work, is really gesturing at ideas of classification, groupness, epistemology, subjectivity, ethnicity, empire, governmentality, etc. And so, I ask myself, if I had to rewrite a sentence or paragraph without the word identity, how would I do it? The re-worked sentence is always better for it.

While Yotam Marom works his way Toward the Next Jewish Rebellion: Facing Anti-Semitism and Assimilation in the Movement on Medium. 

This piece is a deep reflection on anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation in the movement. It is a glimpse at how those things hurt Jews and the movement as a whole, an invitation to hard but compassionate discussion, and a call to arms for all of us, but above all, to Jews in the movement. I imagine it not as the answer, but as a beginning, alongside many other beginnings that have come before. I invite you, then, into that beginning with me, and to the long road ahead toward collective liberation — toward the world we all deserve.

Oded Na’aman shares his thoughts on Choosing Violence in Boston Review.

Like the American wars in Vietnam and Iraq, Israeli wars are preceded by a widespread sense of necessity and followed by damning public criticism. What explains this cycling of perspectives, the ritual of affirmation and rejection that endlessly loops? Why are we so bad at learning from our past mistakes precisely when it is most important that we do so?

Daniel May argues that The Problem Isn’t Black Lives Matter. It’s the Occupation. in Tablet.

While American Jewish leaders will use the platform to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter, the movement provides a lesson for how we will eventually reconcile our commitments and rescue our moral integrity. For just as racial justice in this country is unimaginable without a more profound reckoning of the legacy of slavery than we have been able as a nation to summon, the conflict in Israel and Palestine will never advance so long as Jews deny the cost of Zionism. The Jewish nation’s independence was won only through the dispossession of another nation. Recognizing this does not require disavowing Israel any more than recognizing that America was founded upon white supremacy requires disavowing the United States. But it does require facing painful truths. The only choice more painful will be to continue to look away.

And Jen Taylor Friedman created an Intersectional Barbie Dream Minyan  on Facebook.

Intersectional Barbie Dream Minyan points to the Jews who are still excluded, not intentionally but effectively, from our communities. Barbies of many different ethnicities, wearing tallit and tefillin, are having a Torah reading.

Alas, as great as a dream minyan is, we really still can’t have nice social media things: After Nice attack, Internet trolls framed this Sikh man as a terrorist – again by Abby Olheiser in The Washington Post.

In November, Jubbal was forced to deny that he was connected to the terror attacks in Paris, after someone circulated a Photoshopped version of one of his recent selfies. The doctored selfie was passed off as that of an “Islamic State attacker” involved in the deadly bombings. In the circulated image, it appeared as if the writer were holding a Koran and wearing a suicide vest. But in the original picture, Jubbal held an iPad and wore a short-sleeved, plaid shirt.

Maybe we should stick to the old fashioned mail service instead? Holy Water for Pilgrims, via the Mail by Kaushik Swaminathan in The New York Times.

Every summer, hundreds of thousands of Indians, barefoot and draped in orange clothing, make a 100-mile pilgrimage on foot to fetch water from the sacred Ganges River that they then offer at their local temples to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.

This year, they have a less arduous option: The postal service is using its 155,000 offices across India to deliver holy water from the Ganges — for far less than $1 a bottle. As one postal official put it, “If Muhammad cannot go to the mountain, the mountain comes to him.”

Okay fine, we can have social media, but only because we think everyone should see the work being done by Adrita Das who was profiled by Mike Steyels in Checking Patriarchy and Dogma Through the Art of the GIF” for The Creators Project. Her fabulous Hanuman GIF is at the top of this post and “The Last Cupcake” is our featured image this month.

Wait, nope, we take it back. Someone wants to put a mall in the Grand Canyon. We definitely can’t have nice things. For more on this nice thing that we probably can’t have, check out: Are We Losing the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko in National Geographic.

We who study and teach religion in the United States should take responsibility for our own origin story; we need to leave off being Schempp-style creationists and we need to leave off being handmaidens to an imperialist politics and a now bankrupt jurisprudence. Religious studies in the United States is founded in a profoundly Christocentric set of assumptions, to be sure. We cannot and should not attempt to entirely escape entanglement with politics. In my view, the best and most interesting work in religious studies today engages pressing issues about what it means to be human across a very wide range of domains. The best work today challenges and is challenged by difficult epistemological—and perhaps metaphysical—questions, ones we share with other disciplines. The best work sees teaching religion and teaching about religion as deeply entangled. We serve our students best by inviting them into this struggle, not by circling the wagons.

Okay, dear readers, we’re in the links homestretch! Do stick with us, please, we promise there’s some really great stuff coming up.

Like Brook Wilsenky-Lanford reviewing four new books on Religion for The New York Times Book Review.

And Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft‘s Thinking, Public and Private: Intellectuals in the Time of the Public in The Lost Angeles Review of Books.

As professional thinkers come to understand “publicness” more and more as the permanent condition of our work, then, we might also come to better appreciate the specific ways in which politics and scholarship intersect, and the ways they remain fundamentally separate. This would mean recovering the disquiet within the term “public intellectual,” and treating that disquiet as an invitation to rethink the relationship between thought and action. And it would also mean recovering another question, namely the nature of ideas themselves, those entities inevitably pulled between certain impulses of mind we might call transcendental and the worldly swirl of human curiosity and purpose out of which ideas come.

Our favorite photograph of one of our favorite public intellectuals.
Susan Sontag photographed by Annie Liebovitz.

Margaret Lyons and James Poniewozikaug on Oh, TV of Little Faith: Two Critics Find God on the Small Screen. Sometimes in The New York Times.

What does it even mean to incorporate faith into a TV story? I’m not sure it really counts as a treatment of faith simply to know that a character celebrates this holiday or that one. So prayer, at least, is one kind of external marker.

Why does this kind of representation matter? Because religious diversity is not getting any less important in public life. Because good stories are specific, and personal faith (or the conscious lack of it) is as specific as it gets. And because religion tries to answer some of the same questions that art does, about human frailties and emotion and dealing with the knowledge that you will die someday.

Which should definitely be read alongside Kathryn Reklis‘ Saving Annville: Violence and theology on “Preacher” in The Christian Century.

Preacher is based on a comic book series by Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon that has accumulated a cult following by pushing every boundary of sacrilege and violence. In the first two episodes of the television show, for example, bodies explode, people are set on fire, limbs are amputated by a chainsaw, and body parts are strewn across sun-drenched Texan cornfields. There are also angels, demon-angel hybrids, and hints of a dethroned deity wandering the earth.

The main characters besides Jesse are a drug-addled vampire and a foul-mouthed hit woman who builds bazookas out of coffee cans. There’s enough violence to satisfy a small planet of adolescent boys. But there are also church budget meetings, stolen communion wine, and worries about the megachurch that has a Starbucks in its lobby. These last details make Preacher one of the churchiest shows on television.

Speaking of violence, don’t miss this conversation between Philip Metres and Roy Scranton: No Blood for Beauty: Phil Metres and Roy Scranton on Torture, Art, and the Literature of Empire in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

The tragedy is that we have to get our hands dirty in order to make the world a better place. And the belief in that tragedy is a self-serving lie.

Tragedy, tragedos, the goat song, the ritual sacrifice, the scapegoat: tragedy is about defining a collective identity through sacrifice, and in the story of American war as tragedy there’s a complex way (as a I argue in my essay on “The Trauma Hero” and in the book that I’m writing that expands on that argument) in which the traumatized American soldier becomes a sacrificial surrogate, one who takes the place of the real blood sacrifice, the excluded enemy other, in this case the erased Iraqi.

Or this brilliant piece on The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker.

The more you try to put the Underground Railroad in context, in other words, the tinier it seems. Most runaways did not head north, and most slaves who sought their liberty did not run away. And then there is the largest and most important context, the one we least like to acknowledge: from the vast, vicious, legally permitted, fiercely defended enterprise that was American slavery, almost no one ever escaped at all.

…

It is to our credit if these are the Americans to whom we want to trace our moral genealogy. But we should not confuse the fact that they took extraordinary actions with the notion that they lived in extraordinary times. One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. The great virtue of a figurative railroad is that, when someone needs it—and someone always needs it—we don’t have to build it. We are it, if we choose.

Or this gorgeous and crushingly smart one by Ashon Crawley in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Noise. Church. Flesh.: Or, For Coltrain Church, For Pulse

Black flesh is its own kind of noise. Black flesh is a condition, a condition that before abstraction, is the material fact of existence. The flesh is the grounds for existence. What does that mean? It means that before being named by parents, before being gendered by doctors, before birth certificates and social security numbers, before birth rites of Christianity or Islam or other traditions, before being placed, we are flesh. And this is a fact that we should not seek to escape but to love, and love hard. Flesh, like noise, is difficult to capture and individuate, because indeterminacy is written into the way flesh behaves and finds relation in the world. Accepting the flesh, the fact of one’s flesh, is to accept noise as that from which life grows and that to which life returns.

Yet not everyone is pleased with noise, with the noise of flesh. Noise has the capacity to antagonize and exposes us to the vibration, the movement, the sound, that the Western theological and philosophical traditions seek to still. This theological and philosophical tradition has racialized and gendered and sexed and classed ideas about what is, who is and can be, normal. This normality is often produced in courtrooms and legal proceedings — proceedings that determine not only what normal looks like, but also how normal sounds.

…

I like a good noisy church. And sometimes, that church is a nightclub. A space of gathering, a space of intellectual practice, against the imposition of normative ways to be human. A place of movement and restive refuge, restive refuge against the imposition of a violent world. Some religionists tell us we queer and trans* identified people are sinful, are shameful. (This would be true, this projection of sinfulness: it would be true of even the Swedenborgian church where I discovered the love and necessity of noise.) So we find other places, other sanctuaries. So we gather together in the cause of noise, to find our noise against the religious, cultural demand for its being lost. The noise of held hands freely underground, outta the way, off and to the side. The noise of sweat and flesh gyrating and pulsating to the music. The noise of flirtations and hesitancies and desires held, desires felt, desires consummated.

Which is all a lot to take in. If you need a break, Christina is ready to welcome you into a whole other realm of reading: Hello. I am Witch Christina, welcome to my free Magic Library!

Sharing gives us power over our own lives. No person can control a thing when it is freely available to all. Sharing is a basic human impulse that binds people together. When we share knowledge, skills, experience, and wisdom, it costs us nothing but our time, and often leaves us richer than we were.

I’ve also started my own site darkbooks.org which I decided to share with other people my most favorite books on magic and occultism. My personal collection of books contains several thousands books, 2100+ of them located on this site (I am constantly adding new ones). These are the best books on magic and esotericism, which I have and I read. They are all in pdf format.

But if even that is too much, then we suggest you bear witness to this testament to the glory of Twitter riffing: How God Created Animals.

Thanks for joining us! We’ll be back next month with more links, gifs, and maybe a [God creating] joke or two of our own.

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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: Migration, Occupation, Representation & more! appeared first on The Revealer.