“She won’t utter the words, he won’t utter the words. Unless you know the words unless you know what’s going on, you’re never going to solve the problem.”

– Donald Trump, Fox & Friends, June 13

 

“Don’t hurt the person. Don’t hurt the person. Do not hurt the person. Don’t hurt’em. Get’em out!”

– Donald Trump, Rally in Bethpage, NY April 7 2016

Whatever his stances on policy, whatever he actually “believes,” one thing about Donald Trump is undeniable: his existence in the political limelight has thrown norms and expectations for what can be said into a shambles.

Trump is all about labeling, about handing out names, and about proudly daring (as he sees it) to speak what others cannot or will not say. In his wake, journalists and commentators struggle with Stylebooks, agonize over norms of “objectivity,” and reach doggedly for analogues in apparently never-ending meditations over what to name him. Is that statement “controversial”? Was it “racially tinged”? Can we call him a racist? How about “racialist”? Is it accurate (and by whose technical standards?) to call him a “Fascist”? These debates all seem underwritten by a desperate hope that, if only what Trump is can properly be named, then what he represents can be controlled, like knowing the True Name of a Demon might give an exorcist power to banish him. Inevitably, though, these exercises take on the feel of the Mother Superior’s song in The Sound of Music, only in a dirge-like minor key (“How do you solve a problem like Trump?”). Because while Trump may well be “a flibbertijibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown,” the struggle and failure to “pin him down” indexes something much more sinister than playful.

Trump, for his part, sails on, with no such hang-ups about naming, classifying, and pinning-down. “I have the best words,” he’s said, with typical modesty. But in fact it’s more accurate to say that he has the best devices. His stump speeches and pronouncements on Twitter display a practically Homeric mastery of the epithet. Where Homer had swift-footed Achilles, cunning Odysseus, ox-eyed Hera, rosey-fingered Dawn or the wine-dark sea, Trump offers a smorgasbord of sobriquets with which he repeatedly hammers those he deems contemptuous. To take but a small sample, for other politicians: Goofy Elizabeth Warren, Lying Ted Cruz, Crooked Hillary, Heartless Hillary, Crazy Bernie, Little Marco Rubio, Low-Energy Jeb, Failed Candidate Mitt Romney, Lowly Rand Paul, and Dummy John McCain. His stable of epithets also extends to media figures and critics: Crying Glenn Beck, Crazy Megyn Kelly, Total Fool Karl Rove, Sad Case Bill Kristol, Broken-Down Pundit George Will, Dope Frank Bruni, Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd, Warmonger Krauthammer, and Disgraceful David Brooks. Trump’s got epithets for institutions, too, from publications that displease him (Dying NRO, Failing NYT, Worthless Daily News, Money-Losing HuffPo, Dying Union Leader, Failing WSJ), to disfavored entities including the Little-Respected Club for Growth and (oddly) Disloyal Macy’s, with which he has maintained an oddly longstanding feud. Naturally, Trump doesn’t give himself an epithet – because his own name is one, a brand he’s litigated extensively to protect, which denotes his own consubstantiality with “success” and “winning.”

But the most distinctive device in Trump’s arsenal is something else. If you’ve heard Donald Trump speak, or read any of his pronouncements online, you’ve probably seen him do it. Here’s an example of him using it twice, back to back, in a single speech in May:

“But I won’t talk about Jeb Bush. I will not say — I will not say he’s low energy. I will not say it. I will not say it. And I won’t talk about Lindsey Graham, who had like one point, you ever see this guy on television? He is nasty. … He leaves a disgrace, he can’t represent the people of South Carolina well.”

This structure – where a speaker announces that they will not say something and then promptly goes own to say it – is a classic rhetorical device. The Greeks called it paraleipsis (a setting-aside), the Romans, praeteritio (a going-beyond). The feint of passing over something as unworthy of attention actually flags and underscores it, even as the speaker preserves the pretense of discretion and the position of taking the moral high road. Sly transgression is garbed in the appearance of probity; finger-pointing mixes with handwashing. Modern TV audiences may associate paralipsis with courtroom dramas, something right out of Law & Order (Prosecutor: “Without mentioning the Defendant’s previous affairs –” Defense Lawyer: “Objection!” Judge: “Sustained! The Jury is instructed to disregard that statement! McCoy, one more time, and you’re in contempt!”). The association of paralipsis with courtroom drama is accurate – its forensic pedigree is ancient. Cicero favored it heavily, and it features prominently in Sophocles’s Antigone (“Were you not my father, I would say you were perverse!”). Shakespeare hinges Mark Antony’s Brutus-is-an-honorable-man speech in Julius Caesar on the device (“Let but the commons hear this testament / Which, pardon me, I do not mean to read), and it recurs in Chaucer, Swift, Dickens, and beyond. Of all the ways to say #sorrynotsorry, paralipsis is, as it were, the classiest.

But as inevitably with Trump, “classy” implies all the subtle dignity and restraint of a bathroom with gilt fixtures and a leather toilet seat . “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct,” he’ll tweet. “Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!” Never mind that, in referring to Rubio, Trump may also observe that “I’m not going to call him a lightweight, because I think that’s a derogatory term” – when it comes to the derogatoriness of (not) calling Megyn Kelly a “bimbo,” Trump will go the extra mile to emphasize how such language would be terribly beneath him by promptly retweeting statements from several followers who call her a bimbo on his behalf. Which highlights a specific and troubling dimension of Trump’s use of paralipsis. Sure, some of his deployments of the device are more-or-less textbook political jibes: demurring to say anything negative about Carly Fiorina, like, for example, mentioning how “terrible” she was as a CEO; denying ever criticizing Rand Paul for his looks while simultaneous noting that doing so would be easy; or casually slamming Scott Walker: “His state is a disaster, but I won’t say that.” But many of Trump’s paralipses are something else. Connecting the dots of their unsubtle innuendos activates, legitimates, and encourages the worst racist, misogynistic, conspiratorial, and otherwise despicable conclusions. Trump accompanies such allusions by coyly disowning his obvious implications as he smiles upon those with ears to hear them and lets them know he’s in on the “joke.” Thus, in West Virginia this past May:

“Let me tell you something – the Clinton administration, of which Hillary was definitely a part.”

[CROWD BOOS]

“She was part of it almost everything. Almost. I say, not … everything.”

[CROWD LAUGHS]

“I didn’t think the people of West Virginia thought like that. That’s terrible! You should be ashamed of yourselves! Terrible, terrible people.”

Writing elegantly about the ostensibly contradictory bawdiness and religiosity at Trump’s campaign events, the comingling of appeals to imperial grandeur with violent vulgarity, Jeff Sharlet observes: “Nobody minded the contradiction, sex and the sacred, because it wasn’t a contradiction; it was like the completion of a thought they had all been thinking but hadn’t known how to say out loud: greatness, the end of shame.” Yes, you terrible people, with your dirty minds. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Wink.

Such gestures from Trump bring his audiences into a kind of pact. He acknowledges a taboo while breaking it, allowing them to simultaneously revel in his ersatz gravitas while savoring the thrill of transgression. As with the Megyn Kelly episode, the taboo par excellence for Trump is “political correctness.” Oftentimes, Trump invokes “political correctness” as a kind of Left-imposed mode of oppression that prevents people from saying what everybody’s just thinking already (read: misogyny and bigotry). Thus, in California, talking about Hillary Clinton, Trump will vow: “I’m not going to say it. I refuse to say that I cannot stand her screaming into the microphone all the time.” A moment later, describing watching her on TV, he’ll say he had to turn the set off because “I just couldn’t stand it…But I won’t say it because we’re not allowed to say it, right?”

But of course, Trump is saying it, there’s nothing to stop him, and the compliance of a humiliated Republican party and the ever-accommodating norms of an access-hungry, ratings-driven media mean he’s actively being rewarded for doing it. Mitt Romney remerging from obscurity to woodenly condemn Trump for his rhetoric was a definitive, pathetic milestone: when a 1%er plutocrat who notoriously wrote off nearly half the electorate as shiftless welfare-grubbing parasites critiques you for your “trickle-down racism,” that’s a sign that we’ve passed the point of no return. Romney, a gilded canary in the mineshaft, was protesting too much and too late: Trump’s racism isn’t so much trickling down as it is cascading in Niagara-esque torrents. For all Romney nostalgia for the good all days of more subtly divisive language, Trump’s willingness to speak the unspeakable effectively constitutes a final abandonment of dog whistle politics in favor of a Souza marching band of bagpipes, tubas, and twenty-one cannon salutes.

But “political correctness,” for Trump, is also synecdoche for everything restraining America from becoming great “again.” At no time has this been clearer than in the past month. To listen to Trump tell it, if only various politicians were to speak the right shibboleth, the problems posed by Salafi-Takfari jihadist violence and ISIS/ISIL would apparently be magically solved. Any reticence on the part of politicians to meet ISIS/ISIL on the rhetorical battleground it prefers – that of bloodthirsty cosmological war – is met with Trumpian innuendo at its most ugly. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” on Monday, June 13^th, less than 48 hours after the carnage in Orlando, Trump thus announced that President Barack Obama was not only morally culpable for the attack, but that his complicity might run deeper. Imparting deep significance to the fact that the President “can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said: “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands—it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.” Trump declined to expand upon the implications of this either/or proposition, other than to say “And the something else in mind, you know, people can’t believe it… There’s something going on, it’s inconceivable.”

This is more than paralipsis – it is an example of apophasis. Although the two words are occasionally used synonymously, paralipsis is, technically, a subspecies of apophasis, a Greek word for “denial.” In Aristotelian formal logic, apophasis simply implies negation: Not X, not Y. Or, for our – and Trump’s – purposes: Not American, not a Christian, not One Of Us. Speaking with the ever-helpful cast of “Fox & Friends,” who nodded and encouraged him to talk about “political correctness” instead of pressing him on his meaning, Trump didn’t even bother to offer the first half of a paralipsis (“Setting aside that the President might be a secret Muslim with an anti-American agenda…”). In some ways, it was unnecessary – it’s not as though Trump hasn’t more or less said exactly this in the past. In other ways, it feeds off the same suggestive mechanism of his conspiracy-friendly paralipses – his ominous refrain that “Something Is Going On.” And thus, when asked on the show about Hillary Clinton’s stance on terror, he suggested she was complicit too: “Because you know why.”

For scholars of religion, apophasis has a further significance. A phenomenon found in many religious traditions, apophasis involves juxtaposing affirmations with negations as part of mystical practice. Often termed “negative theology,” apophasis in this sense often takes the form of listing the many ways in which God cannot be contained by the categories of human thought. This approach thrives on paradox. For an example, an apophatic theologian might write that God is not good, not because they think God is actually bad, or lacks in goodness, but to indicate that the goodness of divinity is not simply a mere extension of the human idea of goodness; it is of a different order altogether, something beyond everyday language. Plotinus, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Maimonides, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Marguerite Porete, Dante, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and more all employ it. Writers, baroquely erudite and deceptively simple, who push theological and devotional language to its most poetic limits in attempts to somehow approach, however asymptotically, the ineffability of the Godhead, the Good-Beyond-Being, the Whole – whatever their tradition denotes as that Ultimate which human language and thought grasp at, but cannot narrowly predicate. “Go where you cannot go; see where you do not see,” writes the Christian mystic Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler, 1624-1677), “Hear where nothing sounds or rings, so you are where God speaks.” Although writers who employ apophasis do so in a variety of ways, and universalizing claims are inevitably reductive, a certain sensibility emerges as fairly common. Contradiction, beyond the senses and beyond sense itself, is the essence of apophatic speech; only through straining language to the outer limits of signification can we insinuate something that exceeds our all-too-human blinders.[1]

But contradiction and insinuation are defining tools of religious apophasis only inasmuch as they are deployed with the goal of bringing the seeker closer to something sublime, an exhaustion of language that leaves behind a glow that thinkers in many traditions unhesitatingly speak of as “love.” The contradictions and insinuations of Trump’s apophasis, however, are not deployed to quiet the chatter of language in favor of stillness and awe. They work to generate fetid speculation, slander, and libel. They leave behind not the glow of love and tolerance, but a kind of sickly residue that makes you want to take a shower. “Something is Going On.” “You Know Why.” What wonder, then, that so many succumb to the temptation to insist, despite constant evidence to the contrary, No, he can’t possibly have meant that! And Trump himself is the first to take umbrage – whether faux-chidingly (“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves”) or aggressively (revoking the offending media outlet’s press credentials). And, on another level, Trump’s very vision of the future, his appeal, is, in a certain sense, apophatic: “We can make this country so rich again.” “I will make our military so big, powerful & strong that no one will mess with us.” Trump’s sheer force of affirmation that America will be great obviates any need to explain how or why. All we need to do is accept him as a vessel for our fears, rage, and wants, to abandon “political correctness,” and to embrace his promise of a world where taboo can finally be done away with once and for all, where forbidden hatreds and desires will finally be celebrated, and where the previously unspeakable made sayable. Use the right words, his words, the best words, and when we get there, it’ll be so incredible, you just won’t believe it.

***

[1] Perhaps the most beautiful of all apophatic literature is found in the Muslim tradition, in Sufi poetry, the Persian of Rumi (1207-1273), the Arabic of Ibn`Arabi (1165-1240). To modern eyes, especially ones jaded by a decade-and-a-half-long-running of a cosmological War on Terror, their radically iconoclastic character can be shocking. Thus, writes Ibn`Arabi:

My heart has become able

To take on all forms.

It is a pasture for gazelles,

For monks an abbey.

 

It is a temple for idols

And for whoever circumambulates it, the Kaaba.

It is the tablets of the Torah

And also the leaves of the Koran.

 

I believe in the religion

Of Love

Whatever direction its caravans may take,

For love is my religion and my faith.

The human limitations such apophasis undermines are not just those of our bodily senses or language – they are the divisions that pit peoples and traditions against each other, hatreds that undo us even now.

Patrick Blanchfield is Visiting Assistant Professor in Religion at Swarthmore College. 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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Ann Neumann argues that “WHO advice that women at Zika risk delay pregnancy isn’t an abortion debate” in The Guardian.

Claims that the abortion of microcephaly fetuses amounts to eugenics have muted and complicated the debate over how to address the Zika epidemic. They shouldn’t. Women know best what their capabilities are, what children they are able to raise, what resources they can commit to parenting. In countries, including the US, where those who have limited access to reproductive services are predominantly minorities and the poor, concerns for the morality of selective abortion are overwrought. And they are used to further an ideology of reproductive control that should never trump the rights of women.

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymous Bosch.

Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet analyze “Hillary’s Prayer: Hillary Clinton’s Religion and Politics” in Mother Jones. 

Clinton’s God talk is more complicated—and more deeply rooted—than either fans or foes would have it, a revelation not just of her determination to out-Jesus the gop, but of the powerful religious strand in her own politics. Over the past year, we’ve interviewed dozens of Clinton’s friends, mentors, and pastors about her faith, her politics, and how each shapes the other. And while media reports tend to characterize Clinton’s subtle recalibration of tone and style as part of the Democrats’ broader move to recapture the terrain of “moral values,” those who know her say there’s far more to it than that.

Brent Plate explores “The horrors and hells of Hieronymus Bosch” for Religion News Service.

Horror has become part of our moral landscape. As Susan Sontag put it, “Wars are now also living room sights and sounds.” The worlds that were so fantastically other in Bosch’s age have become intertwined with images of our everyday lives. Perhaps we go to the museum to remember a time when the worlds could be kept separate.

Speaking of apocalypse (as Plate does) Ed Simon argues that “Apocalypse is the Mother of Beauty” in the Marginalia Review of Books.

If science’s role in all of this is to try and save the world, the humanists’ is in part to preserve it. If there are future historians, they may be as befuddled with our “culture wars” as we are with the scholastic abstractions of ancient church councils. This is not to say that our “culture wars” are unimportant — or indeed that what those church councils debated was unimportant either. But perhaps it’s time for a détente, or a treaty of some sort. These arguments will seem less significant once the West Antarctic ice-sheet has collapsed into the ocean. 

Quoted in Simon’s piece is Roy Scranton, who happens to have written another piece we want to recommend this week. Scranton writes about “‘Star Wars’ and the Fantasy of American Violence” in The New York Times.

The real gap is between the fantasy of American heroism and the reality of what the American military does, between the myth of violence and the truth of war. The real gap is between our subconscious belief that righteous violence can redeem us, even ennoble us, and the chastening truth that violence debases and corrupts.

Meanwhile, but perhaps not unrelatedly, Peter Manseau asks “Is Trumpism its own religion?” in the Los Angeles Times.

This is not about Trump’s alleged Christianity. It’s no revelation that he knows little about the religious tradition he calls his own. His attempts to present himself as godly in “Crippled America” were laughable. (“In business, I don’t actively make decisions based on my religious beliefs, but those beliefs are there — big time.”) And he has apparently barely read the family Bible he uses as a campaign prop.

The religiosity of Trumpism, however, is not dependent on his level of religious literacy. The Church of Trump draws from a deeper well — specifically from what the sociologist Emile Durkheim called the “elementary forms of religious life.”

Speaking (as, regrettably, we must) of Trump, Jeremy Biles on “Capain America: Civil Religion (And Why Donald Trump Thinks He’s Batman” in Religion Dispatches. 

This image of vulnerability speaks to (and against) the presence of another pop-cultural figure, one who is producing terribly real effects within and beyond the American political landscape: Donald Trump. The GOP candidate’s rhetoric of dominance; his pernicious promise to build a wall along the Mexican border; his pledge to “bomb the shit out of ISIS”; his self-celebrating proclamations of wealth; his sexist and racist flourishes: all these are points of bombastic but dangerous asininity underscoring a quasi-fascist authoritarianism, propagated via “popular culture.”

The civil religion thereby championed and intensified by Trump presumes the violent “goodness” and essential sacrality of American empire, here understood according to Jon Pahl’s characterization of empire as “the centralization of material resources around ‘American’ nationalism and its corporate extensions,” and upheld through military might.

Aziz Ansari shares “Why Trump Makes Me Scared for My Family” in The New York Times.

ORLANDO

There were many beautiful essays, pleas, and meditations written after the massacre at the Pulse night club in Orlando last month. Here are a few we thought particularly called to be shared. 

“Please Don’t Stop the Music” by Richard Kim for The Nation.

Gay bars are therapy for people who can’t afford therapy; temples for people who lost their religion, or whose religion lost them; vacations for people who can’t go on vacation; homes for folk without families; sanctuaries against aggression. They take sound and fabric and flesh from the ordinary world, and under cover of darkness and the influence of alcohol or drugs, transform it all into something that scrapes up against utopia.

Black Lives Matter‘s statement “In Honor of Our Dead: Latinx, Queer, Trans, Muslim, Black — We Will Be Free.”

Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of  the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest. Those who seek to profit from our deaths hope we will forget who our real enemy is, and blame Muslim communities instead.

But we will never forget.

Mehammed Amadeus Mack answers the question “What does the Koran Say About Being Gay?” for Newsweek.

And yet the perception of Islamic homophobia persists. This would have to do, in my argument, with a double standard in our perception of the great monotheistic religions and the degree to which we must literally follow them: We expect that Muslims will obey the literal word of the Koran and especially the ahadith, while Christians and Jews are free to interpret their holy texts figuratively, take it or leave it.

Philip L. Tite writes about “Scripting Acts of Violence: Intersectionality and the Orlando Shooting” in The Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

To apply this model of intersectionality to violence, including of course religious violence, would lead us to recognize and explore some of the dynamics being played out within initial reactions to the Orlando shooting. We should ask how the various scripts “fit” together and, perhaps  just as important, how do these scripts contest each other? The focus of such an analysis is not just on the shooter and his motivations or the influences that brought him to commit such a horrific act. Intersectionality certainly comes into play here, but it also plays a role in our analysis of the “secondary impact” scripting and counter-scripting that we see (and even participate in) through news outlets, political statements, online social forums, and in general conversations over this shooting.

“Gimme Shelter: Queer Space is Sanctuary” by Kaya Oakes for Religion Dispatches.

Sanctuaries have a long history in the often bloody struggle for equality in the United States. Gay bars, lesbian bookstores, trans performance spaces, queer owned coffee houses, and yes, even churches, synagogues and mosques. These have been shelter, ritual, habit. But bars were the first sanctuaries for queers. Here under colored lights with the soundtrack that couldn’t be played at home, the garb of the outside world falls away. Here the true self can emerge, if only for a few hours, before the cops come in, the shooter, the good old boys with a confederate flag on their pickup, enraged bigots with hands full of flame.

ARTS & CULTURES

Candice Benbow writes about “Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and Black Christian Women’s Spirituality” for Religion & Politics.

Beyoncé is doing everything she has been taught to do but something remains insufficient. The praying and the fasting are unable to keep her husband faithful. The pleas for divine intervention are unable to keep her from spiraling. Her next movements can be read as destructive, not only to the people around her but also to herself. She has invested so much of herself into a love that has harmed her. She reacts out of her own humanity. It is in this moment we begin to see how Beyoncé’s generation of Black churched women will make their own lemonade out of lemons in ways that will contradict Black Church teachings.

Joshua Rothman shares a clip from “Bacon & God’s Wrath” in The New Yorker.

Bacon, atheism, the Internet, Julia Child, and Christopher Hitchens converge in
the intellectual awakening of a Canadian nonagenarian.

“Mecca Goes Mega” photo essay by Luca Locatelli for The New York Times.

The Italian photographer Luca Locatelli, visiting Mecca this year during the umrah period, captured how radically the city has changed to accommodate this growing influx of pilgrims. Until the first half of the 20th century, this was a small city of spacious stone houses famed for their mashrabiyah, or latticed windows and balconies. Five hills known as the rim of Mecca encircled the Grand Mosque and the Kaaba, or House of God, located in the city center. Today, all a visitor would recognize from older images of Mecca are the Ottoman domes of the Grand Mosque, its minarets and the Kaaba. The ancient hills, the old stone homes and many of the sites linked to the life of the Prophet Muhammad have been obliterated by towering shopping malls, hotels and apartment blocks.

The Saudi Broadcasting Corporation transmits live from the Grand Mosque all day, every day. The CCTV cameras also add an extra level of security. (Luca Locatelli/Institute, for The New York Times)

Hamid Dabashi in Al Jazeera “The Hollywood bull enters Rumi’s china shop: If Hollywood wants to turn to Rumi, may Rumi’s blessings be on Hollywood”

Rumi was the single most towering moral intellect at the crosscurrent of that world-historic moment. His universe of imagination, the God he praised, the heavens he fathomed, the Persian poetry he perfected to the pitch of that divine presence are all at fundamental odds with the fragmentary attention span of a world in which Hollywood has turned its attention to Rumi.

This cultural treasure trove seems nearly endless: “Angels in America: The Complete Oral History: How Tony Kushner’s play became the defining work of American art of the past 25 years” by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois for Slate.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: a pandrogenous devotee of sex magick. Photograph: Peter Dibdin/Publicity image

The new issue of Critical Inquiry is out and will definitely be next to our theoretical beach chair this summer. We’re especially excited about our friend Jeremy Stolow‘s “Mediumnic Lights, X^x Rays, and the Spirit Who Photographed Herself.”

In the spirit of such a leveling of the playing field, I propose that it is in our collective interest to try to rescue Ochorowicz’s research and his photographic discoveries from the retroactive gaze of a purified techno-scientific practice that imagines itself as having been liberated from the shackles of metaphysical speculation and pseudoscientific practice. Taken on its own terms, Ochorowicz’s visual language of X^x-rays and mediumnic lights points to a startling and unsettling intersection of competing assumptions about experimental procedure and diverging conceptions of what counts as evidence regarding the invisible and the terms on which it can be made visible

Best known as a musical dissident with the proto-industrial band Throbbing Gristle and later Psychic TV, Breyer P-Orridge has made visual art for decades as part of a ritualistic practice in which boundaries tend to blur. The first transmissions of musical noise started in the 1970s, but art has been part of the project from several years before then to the present day. Work of the more recent vintage makes up the bulk of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything, an exhibition on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.

The Rubin show focuses on correspondences between global contemporaneity and historic cultures from areas around the Himalayas and India, and the show surveys, in an expansive fashion, Breyer P-Orridge’s engagement with ideas from Hindu mythology and Nepal. Nepal is a favored haven away from the artist’s home in New York, but – as with most matters in Breyer P-Orridge’s realm – worldly matters turn otherworldly fast.

Lastly, if otherworldy art shows aren’t really your speed, maybe check out: “Hotdogs in Zion: A day of revelations at Orlando’s Christian theme park” by Jacob Silverman for The Baffler.

Miracles are the stock-in-trade of this Christian theme park, which welcomes about a quarter-million people per year. They might come to the Holy Land Experience (HLE for short) out of faith or fascination or a misplaced sense of irony, but they all pay fifty dollars for entry, and some will spend a little extra for a “My Cup Overflows Refillable Souvenir Cup.” In return, they get a curious kind of history lesson, plus a dose of American prosperity theology, which turns spending into a higher calling and spiritual pathos into gaudy pageantry.

*And, as is fast becoming our habit, a GIF. We’ll keep these coming as long as the Internet provides, but if you have a favorite to share, please do leave it in the comments. 

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Some of our favorite writers have published new work lately that we’d very much like to recommend.

One of our favorite scholars of religion, Elizabeth Castelli, published two excellent new articles last month.

First, a review of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion by Anthony Petro in Emisérica from the Hemispheric Institute.

For those who lived the history that Petro narrates with such texture and detail, certain moments are seared into memory: AIDS framed as an apocalyptic scenario of just deserts, foretold by the apostle Paul in the first chapter of his letter to the Romans, translated into medieval theology’s theorization of sodomy, and ferried into the contemporary world; people with AIDS stigmatized by their infection and their marginal sexual, social, economic, or racial/ethnic status; the deployment of the language of guilt and innocence to separate the “bad” victims from the “good”; the theologization of governmental responses to the epidemic; the fierce political contests between religious leaders (especially those of the Catholic church) and AIDS activists and their allies (especially women’s health activists).

And second, Castelli writes about Elizabeth Shakman Hurd‘s new book Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion in the “Paradoxes of international religious freedom” in The Immanent Frame.

During the same two decades since the passage of the IRFA [International Religious Freedom Act], the academic study of religion has produced a small library of works that document the complex history of “religion” as a category, a history that intertwines with a range of other histories—most importantly, those of European colonialism and the political compromises that produced the modern notion of the “secular.” All of these histories emphasize that “religion” is never a self-evident term, and that its use to demarcate certain elements of human experience and social life does not merely describe an objective reality but instead creates the lenses by which certain people, groups, practices, and institutions become legible for particular purposes. The academic study of religion pursues these histories in order to understand the epistemological and theoretical underpinnings of its own enterprise, but the insights that emerge out of this work also resonate in real-world contexts where what counts as religion determines policy, even as political frameworks and decisions, as Hurd shows, paradoxically determine what counts as religion.

ACT UP protest at St.Patrick’s Cathedral, December of 1989.

Marking the 160th anniversary of Sigmund Freud’s birth early last month, Patrick Blanchfield wrote about “Freud and the American Death Drive” for the Marginalia Review of Books.

Above all else, Freud had a special contempt for the trite pabulum of American nationalism: our self-righteous commingling of religion with politics, our politics-as-religion, our religion-as-politics. “Pious America laid claim to being ‘God’s own Country’; and, as regards one of the shapes in which men worship the deity, the claim is undoubtedly valid.” Freud saw American Manifest Destiny for what it was: just another family romance told by a precocious child to justify its specialness. Except this precocious child could field an army of two million men on Europe’s shores, and, just over five years after Freud’s death, realized one of his most abiding nightmares: “gain[ing] control over the forces nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.” Today, perhaps even more than after 1945, his premonitions seem justified. Human civilization may well wind up obliterating itself, if not with a bang, thanks to America’s 5000-odd nuclear warheads, then with a cough and gurgle, thanks to its tens of millions of air conditioners and fossil-fuel vehicles.

While, also in Marginalia, Ed Simon was thinking about death too in: “The Death of God, Again.”

Death of God theology raises questions that are important to many of us for whom the massive poetic, metaphorical, literary, and cultural edifice which constitutes religion is still a narrative vocabulary for expressing these questions, but for whom modern orthodox faith can seem hollow. It is the “better atheism” we have needed, since the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not as profound as his followers may think. It is a movement that recognizes both the ontological realities of modernity, but also the profound beauty and power of religious mythopoesis, it is a way of pouring new wine into old skins.

We very much enjoyed Donovan Schaefer‘s article about”Smelling the Sacred: Better (Lived) Religion Through Chemistry” for Religion Dispatches.

As this new research suggests, to understand effervescence, we may have to go beyond the familiar markers of excitement (sounds, phrases, etc.) and consider dimensions of experience, such as the chemical, that are usually invisible to social analysis. What if, in a truly Durkheimian move, the smell of the sacred turned out to be the smell of ourselves? Rituals, congregations, and sacred spaces may be much more than just a shared hallucination, as Freud thought: they may be tinged with a chemical force that binds bodies to each other in important ways—or with other vectors of experience that can be hard to see at first glance.

Religion Dispatches is also where you should go to check out Brook Wilensky-Lanford explaining “How to Talk to ‘Nones’ and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience.”

At some point some provocateur did ask Bell “the race question,” that is: “Why is everyone in this room white?” People shifted in their folding chairs. If these ideas about how to create your life and inhabit transrational spaces are so powerful, so world-changing, why are they only being shared with people who by definition already have the (white) privilege to hear them?

Bell took the question seriously. He acknowledged that the disproportionately non-white poor and disenfranchised may not have the luxury to “create their lives,” and that that is not okay. “Politically, people are starting to realize this doesn’t work.” But then he made a sort of trickle-down argument: when traveling to a new city, he doesn’t make efforts to recruit people from populations that wouldn’t ordinarily know or care about Rob Bell. He was fully aware that his audience consisted of people “high up on the pyramid,” and it was exactly by “changing the hearts of the people who run the system” that he hoped his work would begin to effect unspecified larger change.

“But I’m not going to apologize for the people in this room,” he concluded. And the people in the room applauded.

And Harper’s shared an excerpt from Peter Manseau‘s new book Melancholy Accidents.

June 4, 1770, Massachusetts Gazette

Some young men, who had been a-gunning, went to Beaman’s Tavern, where one of their guns accidentally went off and killed the landlord’s daughter on the spot; she was at that time suckling her child, who was providentially preserved.

Speaking of friends, James Carroll wrote about “Daniel Berrigan, My Dangerous Friend” for The New Yorker.

As Daniel Berrigan, in a simpler time, had embodied my new priestly ideal, braced by the sacredness of expression itself—Man of the Word—now his relentless pacifist expression both in language and in deed pushed further. I was soon to be ordained to the priesthood, and all at once my ambition was redefined once again. The Berrigans demonstrated the acute relevancy of an expressly Catholic sensibility—ritual protest as a kind of sacrament. The brothers’ brave willingness to take great risks for peace seemed to justify, in a way that traditional piety no longer could, a lifelong vow of celibacy and the radical renunciations it entailed. The gospel of peace and justice would define my priesthood, even if, as tradition and family ties required, I still said my first Mass at the chapel at Bolling Air Force Base—a perfect symbol of the ever-divided heart that would keep me one of the more timid members of the Berrigan wing of Catholic resistance.

File-This July 25, 1973, file photo shows Rev. Fr. Daniel Berrigan and some friends participating in a fast and vigil to protest the bombing in Cambodia, on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. The Roman Catholic priest and Vietnam war protester, Berrigan has died. He was 94. Michael Benigno, a spokesman for the Jesuits USA Northeast Province, says Berrigan died Saturday, April 30, 2016, at a Jesuit infirmary at Fordham University. (AP Photo/Ron Frehm)

Meanwhile, we wouldn’t mind being friends with some of these folks:

“In conversation: Kathryn Lofton on the 2016 elections from a humanist’s point of view” in YaleNews by Bess Connolly Martell.

What is so great about any election for a scholar of religion is that elections offer the opportunity to pose the question: What is religion? It is a question that is critically important in a campaign. There is always a moment in the campaign where questions of proper respectability on the part of the candidates is raised strongly and then tied often to a concept of tradition or denomination. So where is the respectability and where is the civil society in this election? I think that is not just a social question; it is also a foundationally religious question about how we think our leaders ought to represent some idea of social community. We see in the two most popular meme-making candidates a real disinterest in maintaining respectability at a time of very high professionalization and bureaucratization. When we look at the steadiness of Barack Obama and the kind of undifferentiated steeliness of Hillary Clinton, I think many people see their boss: They see corporate actors who are assembled and polite and correct in ways overly ceding the economic givens. I think there is something about both Sanders and Trump that allows an inner Id to rise up. It is a sort of ritual articulation of the idea: “Can I just be against everything that organizes my daily repression?”

Hillary Kaell interviews Birgit Meyer about “Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana” for The New Books Network.

Anthropologist Birgit Meyer‘s most recent book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (University of California Press, 2015), explores the dynamic process of popular video filmmaking in Ghana as a new medium for the imagination that interweaves technological, economic, social, cultural, and religious aspects. Stepping into the void left by the defunct state film industry, video movies negotiate the imaginaries deployed by state cinema on the one hand and Pentecostal Christianity on the other.

More specifically, Sensational Movies shows the affinity between cinematic and Christian modes of looking and showcases the transgressive potential haunting figurations of the occult. In this in depth account, more than two decades in the making, Meyer takes us into the nexus of imagination, imaginaries, and images in contemporary Ghana.

Yolanda Pierce writes about “Black Women and the Sacred: With ‘Lemonade,’ Beyoncé Takes Us to Church” for Religion Dispatches. 

Art is always a resource for spiritual reflection, and “Lemonade” is an aural and visual feast for black women who cannot find reflections of themselves in the liturgy, sacred texts, icons, and stained glass of their own traditions. It is a work that is particular and specific: it is a love letter and an ode to black women, deeply rooted in African-American history.

We’re hoping to get a chance to read Onaje X.O. Woodbine‘s new book Black Gods of the Asphalt: Religion, Hip-Hop, and Street Basketball very soon, in the meantime, we were pleased to get a chance to read this adapted version published in Killing the Buddha, “Asphalt Altar.”

In the ritual space of the asphalt, the experience of being on the court and moving one’s body with others to the rhythms of ball and sound gives black men and their communities access to a communal sense of freedom that counters the effects of this dehumanization. This was one of the contradictions of being a black ballplayer that led me to quit playing, that I longed to understand.

We know you have visual albums to watch and spoiler-sotted newsfeeds to peek at through your fingers, so want to keep you here too much longer.  But before we go, here are few more bits of news and analysis here we couldn’t resist sharing and will simply leave here for you to click through at your leisure. 

Kevin Randall reports: “Inner Peace? The Dalai Lama Made a Website for That” at the New York Times.

The Dalai Lama, who tirelessly preaches inner peace while chiding people for their selfish, materialistic ways, has commissioned scientists for a lofty mission: to help turn secular audiences into more self-aware, compassionate humans.

That is, of course, no easy task. So the Dalai Lama ordered up something with a grand name to go with his grand ambitions: a comprehensive Atlas of Emotions to help the more than seven billion people on the planet navigate the morass of their feelings to attain peace and happiness.

“It is my duty to publish such work,” the Dalai Lama said.

To create this “map of the mind,” as he called it, the Dalai Lama reached out to a source Hollywood had used to plumb the workings of the human psyche.

Specifically, he commissioned his good friend Paul Ekman — a psychologist who helped advise the creators of Pixar’s “Inside Out,” an animated film set inside a girl’s head — to map out the range of human sentiments. Dr. Ekman later distilled them into the five basic emotions depicted in the movie, from anger to enjoyment.

Crystal Bell published “The Game of Thrones Guide to Religion: Old Gods, New Gods, and Everything in Between” at MTV News.

The New York Times published a different sort of manual: “A Guide to Muslim Veils” which mostly consists of this stylish Gif.

Quite another thing altogether: “Philly Jesus Arrested at Apple Store” reports Dan McQuade for Philadelphia.

It’s not clear which Philly Judas set the cops on him. But according to a witness who was at the Apple Store this afternoon, Philly Jesus was asked to leave the store — possibly because of his cross. He reportedly refused to leave, which is when a plainclothes police officer handcuffed him.

And lastly, do take some time, if you can, for “Climbing the Eye of God” with Matt Donovan at The New York Review of Books.

Pantheon, we say, hauled in from the Greek and meaning all of the gods. More than anything else, this etymology is how we’ve come to agree that the building once served as a place to worship all Roman deities. Yet neither its name nor function is that simple. “Pantheon” seems to have been a kind of nickname, and no one really knows what it was originally called. Some recent theories have even questioned the building’s assumed religious purpose, suggesting that it could have been used primarily as a giant sundial to commemorate the equinox.

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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: Freud, Beyoncé, R’hllor, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

A short excerpt from Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2016) by Todd S. Berzon.

With an introduction by the author.

It would seem that there are heretics everywhere these days. Political positions are described as heretical. Dissenting scientists are deemed heretics. Theocratic governments charge citizens with the crime of heresy.

For example, in a post on New York Magazine’s website, Jonathan Chait, a political commentator and analyst, described the Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina with the following headline: “In Most Heretical Debate Yet, Trump Attacks George W. Bush on 9/11 and WMD.” What does Chait mean here by heretical?

Heresy’s unspoken counter-term is orthodoxy, derived from the Greek terms for “right belief or opinion.” Heresy, then, is a deviation from an accepted or expected opinion or idea. It is why, for instance, the New York Times called Freeman Dyson a heretic for his denial of climate change.

Whether or not there are any actual heretics is debatable, but accusations of heresy are definitely everywhere. And accusations are really what heresy is about.

Heresy in the contemporary vernacular—in science, politics, theology, culture, etc.— carries with it a distinctly Christian history. In Greek, the word hairesis designates a school of thought—a term that was used to describe philosophical movements such as Platonism or Cynicism. It was the early Christians who took this neutral, descriptive term and transformed it into a label of derision. Since at least the second century C.E., heresy has been an accusation. It was deployed to delegitimize groups and yet also organize them. Part of the Christian construction of an ideology of heresy worked to collect diverse groups and individuals under a single polemical catchall. To that end, students of antiquity, and early Christianity more specifically—have a familiarity with the term that can help illuminate some of the subtexts and threads that run through its current usage. We do not yet live in a post-heretic world.

Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity investigates late antique Christian heresiologies as ethnographies that catalogued and detailed the origins, rituals, doctrines, and customs of the heretics in explicitly polemical and theological terms. Oscillating between ancient ethnographic evidence and contemporary ethnographic writing, I argue that late antique heresiology shares an underlying logic with classical ethnography in the ancient Mediterranean world. By providing an account of heresiological writing from the second to fifth century, Classifying Christians embeds heresiology within the historical development of imperial forms of knowledge that have shaped western culture from antiquity to the present.

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For those who study the ancient world, ethnography is an absorbing yet elusive subject. In contrast to the modern concept, which denotes both the practice of fieldwork and a genre of writing, there were no established methods or a fixed generic form in the ancient Mediterranean world. Few ancient authors undertook anything approximating modern fieldwork. Greeks and Romans—from Homer to Pliny, and Herodotus to Tacitus—did write profusely about foreign dress, myths, dietary habits, histories, cosmologies, and religious customs. But they “wrote peoples” (ethno-graphy) primarily as a counterpoint, both positive and negative, to their own cultural conventions.[1] Building upon the work of classicists, scholars of religion, anthropologists, and literary critics, this book posits that ancient ethnography, specifically Christian ethnography, attests a complex set of negotiations between attempts to understand the surrounding world by inventorying its people, explaining their history and origins, and by establishing a position within it.[2] Ethnography in the ancient world functioned descriptively, though tendentiously, through the chronicling, stylizing, and essentializing of human customs, communities, and institutions. It operated as a discursive activity in which people were created as textual objects with discrete and precise characteristics, origins, histories, and customs. While ethnographers moved to study the changing world—not only to orient themselves within their evolving social and cultural surroundings but also to articulate the terms of these changes from their own cultural perspective—they supplied a certain fixity and predictability to the diversity of people who inhabited and would come to inhabit it. They sought not just to report information but also to organize and theorize it, to try to understand the root causes and implications of their knowledge about the world’s peoples.[3] Ethnography constituted a process of analysis about the possibilities, implications, and limits of comprehending the surrounding world and its people.

The chapters that follow aim to assess the conceptual paradigms and epistemological implications of ethnography for the construction of Christianity in late antiquity. I investigate how Christians harnessed the vernacular of ethnography, the process of describing and classifying peoples, to advance theories of human difference and the boundaries of human knowledge: how, in other words, late antique writers depicted and organized the world and its peoples in distinctly Christian terms and thus constructed the contours of Christianity itself. I concentrate on one particular set of Christian ethnographers, the heresiologists, who wrote the heretics via their customs, habits, beliefs, and dispositions.[4]

*

My interest is not in the truthfulness or historical accuracy of the heresiologists’ descriptions of the heretics but rather in how these polemical texts articulate their understanding of Christian and human diversity both in macroscopic and in microscopic terms. I analyze how the heresiologists built a literary language that theorizes heresy as a whole—a developmental theory of heretical error—and specific heretics as parts within and yet apart from that whole. As they scrutinized their world, the heresiologists translated the microscopic, the minutiae of the habits and customs of particular Christian peoples, into the macroscopic, broader extrapolations about human nature, human diversity, and human behavior. To that end, I focus on the paradigms and techniques that the late antique Christian heresiologists used to array, historicize, and characterize Christian ethnographic knowledge. The heretics were invaluable yet highly unstable theoretical playthings through which Christian authors navigated and systematized the diversity of the entire human world. The heresiologists used the heretics not only to define the borders of Christianity but also to create the Christian conditions for understanding the contents and diversity of the world. As the Christian ethnographic gaze contemplated the differences of the peoples of the world, the Christian turn toward ethnography signaled not just ethnography by Christians but also ethnography of Christians.[5] In so doing, this ethnographic discourse, at once aspirational and polemical, constructed the boundaries of late antique Christianity itself.

*

The expansive gaze of Christian authors and travelers infused their writings with ethnographical and geographical maps of piety and impiety, religion and irreligion: to travel in the world in texts was to construct Christianity, to deny expressions of Christianity, and to envision the potential for Christianity every- where.[6] The Christian narrative of sacred history encompassed the elaboration, both macroscopically and microscopically, of holy topographies and hallowed ethnographies. To watch the world become Christian—to see it materialize with respect to both place and people—was to watch the promise of scripture unfold. And to capture this transformation was to blend Christian missionary activity and ethnographic writing. Ethnography conveyed an ideology “employed by Christians to tell themselves a new story of religious Empire.”[7] Heresiological literature is thus deeply embedded in larger corpora of varying genres. In writing about the world they inhabited, their relationship to it, and their interpretation of it, Christian writers infused various genres of writing, including letters, sermons, commentaries, travelogues, monastic handbooks, and hagiographies, with an awareness of macroscopic paradigms and microscopic description. This study is, then, not meant to be exhaustive but rather aims to focus in on a particular textual endeavor, heresiology, that is simultaneously rhetorical, theological, geographic, ethnographic, and epistemological.

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As the heresiologists investigated the diversity of Christian sectarianism across the Mediterranean, they produced a textual world and worldview driven by the comparison of theologies and dispositions. To the extent that heresiological writers functioned as ethnographers, whether armchair or fieldworker, they did more than simply regurgitate stereotypes, provide moral warnings, and convey imperial propaganda. My focus is on heresiology as an illustration of Christian classification and organization of knowledge. I explore how Christian authors framed their texts ethnographically by amassing data, marshaling their discoveries, fashioning explanatory models, and theologizing and negotiating their own authorial abilities. The process of organizing knowledge by writing people constructed categorical and discursive binaries.

*

I am not arguing that the heresiologists, by demonstrating their detailed knowledge of and ability to refute the heretics, amassed for themselves some vague notion of scholastic or ecclesiastical authority. Instead, I am claiming that the heresiologists’ stated understanding of the heretics cut in precisely the opposite direction. Heresiologies were not texts of control and totalization but catalogues marked by vulnerability, hazard, and fissure. Even as polemically constructed caricatures, the heretics proved an enigmatic, elusive, and altogether destructive object of inquiry. To think with and through ethnography is to invite a scrutiny not simply of another or even oneself but to contemplate openly about the representative capacity of writers, language, and their texts. Ethnography encapsulates the tension between totality and partiality, comprehension and ignorance, and the insurmountable gap between human nature and the natural world. Ethnographic data hold the potential to inspire as much as puzzle and to fracture as much as unify. As Irenaeus succinctly put it, “it is not possible to name the number of those who have fallen away from the truth in various ways.”[8] The overarching aim of this study, then, is to trace how the ethnographic impulse, embedded within certain strands of early Christian discourse, informed theorizations of religious diversity and the classification of religious knowledge.

*

In Tomoko Masuzawa’s narrative of The Invention of World Religions, Victorian anthropologists were one of two primary investigators and collectors of the customs of various non-Christian religions scattered beyond Europe.[9] Masuzawa lists a few of their myriad ethnographic interests: natural religion, myths, rituals, cosmologies, metaphysical systems, and doctrines. They sought, in turn, to trans- late these habits and rituals, religious particulars, into coherent religious systems governed by transhistorical principles, religious universals. Anthropologists and Orientalists, the other primary investigators of non-Western religions, became the academics most devoted to the study of non-European, nonmodern peoples, especially their religions or superstitions, or both, as a direct result of shifting European attitudes toward the notion of religious society.[10] As European society presented itself as guided by logic and rationalism, it perceived the rest of the world to be in the grip of supernatural forces. The social sciences—political science, economics, and sociology—had emerged in the early nineteenth century as the academic-scientific site for the study of the human and social structures of modern European society. [11]

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In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, Samuel Purchas, the traveler and Anglican cleric, published three massive volumes—known collectively as Purchas His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered from the Creation unto This Present—in which he reconciled the experience of his travels and the biblical worldview of Christian truth.80 In one particularly famous passage, he justified his decision to describe various irreligious people—whose “absence of religion was an absence of Christian Truth”[12]—by appealing both to biblical precedent and to the writings of the heresiologists:[13]

Now if any man thinke, that it were better these rotten bones of the passed, and stinking bodies of the present Superstitions were buried, then thus raked out of their graves besides that which has been said I answere, That I have sufficient example in the Scriptures, which were written for our learning to the ends of the World, and yet depaint unto us the ugly face of Idolatry in so many Countries of the Heathens, with the Apostasies, Sects, and Heresies of the Jewes, as in our first and second booke is shewed: and the Ancient Fathers also, Justin, Tertullian, Clemens, Irenaeus, Origen, and more fully, Eusebius, Epiphanius, and Augustine have gone before us in their large Catalogues of Heresies and false opinions.

Here, as both Masuzawa and Schott have emphasized, Purchas situates himself as an empowered collector precisely because he writes from the position of Christian truth.83 In that regard, both he and the heresiologists shared a theological ambition: to catalogue the world in the vernacular of Christian and biblical orthodoxy.

*

The heresiologists, like the comparative theologians and missionaries of later centuries, described customs and habits through the contrast between orthodox center and heretical periphery, even when the two were located in the same exact space. In short, they elaborated an ethnographic foundation for the comparative Christian worldview. Heresiologists took great pains to define the heretics in the most effective terms for their own polemical purposes. It was their prerogative to define true Christianity from a place of knowledge about false Christianity, a knowledge they sought to control through their very descriptions of it.

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[1] See, for example, Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Greg Woolf, Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Joseph E. Skinner, The Invention of Greek Ethnography: From Homer to Herodotus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); François Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, trans. Janet Lloyd (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); and Christian Jacob, Géographie et ethnographie en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991).

[2] As Burridge, Encountering Aborigines, argues, “The heirs of Herodotus, traveler and recorder, and of St. Paul, prototypical Christian missionary, have provided the materials for the growth” of anthropology (39). Anthropology, he contends, “derives from the Graeco-Christian synthesis” (ibid. 38), a sense that the world can be studied as an objective reality and that the world’s people are fundamentally united.

[3] Although ethnographers in the ancient world occasionally drew upon their own experiences to write people—via travel and social exchange—they tended, more often than not, to recapitulate earlier sources. But these acts of recapitulation often worked in different ways: writers used the same data, stereotypes, and tropes to make different arguments about cultural, dispositional, phenotypical, and religious diversity.

[4] There is as yet no exhaustive, diachronic study of heresiology in the late antique world. There is a tendency among scholars either to focus on a particular heretic (such as Arius, Priscillian, Mar- cion) or heresiologist (Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian) rather than trace themes and styles across the centuries of the genre’s development. Three recent treatments of heresiology—Geoffrey S. Smith, Guilt by Association (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Kendra Eshleman, The Social World of Intel- lectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Christians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Royalty, The Origin of Heresy—focus only on the earliest heresiologists, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Justin (none discusses the works of Epiphanius, Filastrius, Augustine, or Theodoret). Eshelman’s study puts heresiology in dialogue with the literature of the Second Sophistic in order to think about the social and intellectual formation of Christian identity (how belonging was negotiated, more or less). Smith sees the development of the heresy catalogue as tied explicitly to its polemical quality, locating its origins in the pseudo-Pauline corpus and the discourse of false teachers, whereas Royalty focuses on the discourse of orthodoxy and heresy in the New Testament (and, to a lesser extent, Second Temple Judaism).

[5] To say the heresiologists are ethnographers is not dependent upon their use of the term ethnos to identify the heretics; ethnography and ethnicity are not one and the same. Ethnography is neither the study of ethnicities nor an effort to identify their fundamental criteria; it is the study of how population groups of religious, political, military, and ethnic orientation were written and categorized. Josephus’s description of the Essenes in Book 2 of his Jewish War is ethnographic not because it concerns Jews (an ethnos) but because it treats the Essenes as a collectivity of people with particular customs, habits, rituals, doctrines, rules, etc. Ethnic groups are surely one type of people subject to ethnographic analysis, but if ethnography is a heuristic category—which I think it is—it encompasses much more than writing ethnicities. Ethnography represents the writing of customs, habits, and practices of groups (and even individuals) while its author ponders how these habits reflect broader theoretical and classificatory exigencies. Such writings often work to fashion coherence out of diffuse intellectual knowledge. In the very act of arraying knowledge by school of thought, doxographies, for instance, evoke a sense of intellectual groupism, however false or misleading. Descriptions of religious professionals, rituals, armies, symposia, travels, triumphs, gladiatorial games, etc., all contain ethnographic elements. Pace David M. Olster, “Classical Ethnography and Early Christianity,” in The Formulation of Christianity by Conflict through the Ages, ed. Katherine B. Free (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 9–31; and Aaron P. Johnson, Religion and Identity in Porphyry of Tyre: The Limits of Hellenism in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

[6] See Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 103–38.

[7] Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 107. I share Keith Hopkins’s understanding of ideology in his “Christian Number and Its Implications,” JECS 6.2 (1998): 185–226, as “a system of ideas which seeks to justify the power and authority of a set of ethical prescriptions and metaphysical explanations, and also, of course, to justify the power and authority of a particular set of interpreters of these ideas” (217).

[8] Irenaeus, Adv. haer. 1.28 (SC 264:356–57). Throughout the chapters below, I have followed the translation, for Books 1–3 of Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses, of Dominic J. Unger et al., St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies, Books 1–3, 3 vols., ACW 55, 65, 64. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1992–2012). For Books 4 and 5, I have followed, with substantial modification, the translation in ANF 1:462–567.

[9] The pioneering figures include Max Müller, William Robertson Smith, James Frazer, Émile Durkheim, Edward Burnett Tylor, James Hunt, Thomas Huxley, and James Cowles Prichard. For an overview of Victorian anthropology, see Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, and his Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); see also James Buzard and Joseph Childers, eds., Victorian Ethnographies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998): special issue, Victorian Studies 41.3 (1998): 354–494; and Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Pa- rade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 2011).

[10] Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 17–21.

[11] At the end of the eighteenth century, the academy was divided between the natural scienc- es on the one hand and arts and letters on the other. In the nineteenth century, however, a series of disciplines arose that existed between these two fonts of knowledge. History, the great ideograph- ic discipline, as Masuzawa calls it, adopted the language of the natural sciences even as it turned to “matters human and social, rather than natural phenomena” (ibid. 14–15). And as history became increasingly dominated by scientific language and claims, three additional nomothetic disciplines emerged: political science, economics, and sociology. These were fields devoted to the social and human structures of modern European society. At the same time, however, two other dis- ciplines emerged in which the object of study was nonmodern and non-European: anthropology and Orientalism.

[12] Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages and Places Discovered, from the Creation unto This Present (London: William Stansby, 1617). On Purchas, see Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 203.

[13] The passage is from the preface, “To the Reader,” of the 1617 edition.

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Todd S. Berzon is Assistant Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. He is a specialist in the religions of late antiquity, the reception history of the Bible, and theory and method in the study of religion. His first book (excerpted below), Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, was published by the University of California Press in 2016. His essays have appeared in the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Early Christian Studies. He is also a regular contributor to the Marginalia Review of Books. He is currently working on a monograph entitled Holy Tongues: The Materiality of Language in the Religious World of Late Antiquity, which investigates how ancient Jews and Christians described and conceptualized language(s) in both material and bodily terms.   

The post Excerpt: Classifying Christians by Todd S. Berzon appeared first on The Revealer.

Activist Phyllis Schlafly campaigns against the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978. Bettmann/Corbis.

By Ann Neumann 

“So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.” I Samuel 25:22 KJV

It’s unhealthy to hold it. In a 2014 article for Reviews in Urology about the challenges New York City taxi drivers face because of lack of public bathrooms, lead author Alon Y. Mass notes that holding it can lead to “voiding dysfunction, infertility, urolithiasis [urinary tract calci or stones], bladder cancer, and urinary infections.” It’s called Taxi Driver Syndrome; all these problems are prevented or eliminated if taxi drivers have somewhere to, you know, eliminate.

From personal experience, most recently on a drive back from Bronxville, I can attest that “holding it” is also painful, even crazy-making. As I drove in circles, I fantasized about deserted alleys or bushy trees, both hard to come by in Mott Haven. I finally found relief in a (unisex) bathroom at a Shell gas station.

Regular urination isn’t just a natural body function—shameless, universal, necessary —but preventing someone from urinating can cause irreversible health problems. Which seems particularly worth noting right now, as states squabble with the Obama administration over who gets to use which bathrooms. So before we get too caught up in the political rhetoric— Totalitarianism! Sexual predators spying on our daughters!, The end of American culture as we know it!—of our most recent skirmish in the ongoing American bathroom wars, let’s just agree that having to pee and not being able to can be a health hazard.

As well, limiting the number of places where a person can pee results in a kind of social control. It limits one’s access to public places and one’s mobility within general society. If you can’t pee at a theater, shopping mall, school, or wherever you’re going, leaving your own bathroom becomes challenging. Blocking bathroom access limits access to public places, it limits mobility, and it controls the activities of those who are blocked. But we’ve always known this, which is why bathroom access has long been a powerful tool in America’s culture wars.

According to a brief bathroom history by Samantha Michaels at Mother Jones, gender segregation in bathrooms in the US began in 1887 when Massachusetts required that employers provide women with separate bathrooms in their places of work. The law, according to Michaels, was passed to “protect women and maintain ‘separate spheres’” in the workplace. By 1920, 43 states had passed similar laws.

Also in the late 1880s, Jim Crow laws in the South required that bathrooms be segregated into those for “whites only” and “blacks only,” the fear being that blacks would spread disease and danger if they peed where whites did. In 1941, women protested President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order prohibiting racial discrimination in hiring practices, fearing the spread of disease by their black colleagues if both races used the same bathroom. In the late 1940s, police were directed to patrol public bathrooms for gays, publicizing their names if caught. In the early 1950s, school girls in Little Rock, Arkansas, used sick notes to avoid sharing locker rooms with black classmates.

And in the 1970s, the STOP ERA movement, headed by the indomitable Phyllis Schlafly and her allies, asked, “Do you want the sexes fully integrated like the races?” Schlafly’s real issue with the Equal Rights Amendment, debated but not approved since the 1920s, was what she called government overreach. Savvy about such things, Schlafly knew she would have to make her opposing argument as emotional as possible. She employed an old rhetoric for her own purposes. Libbers, lesbians and sluts, made equal to men by the ERA, were going to endanger America’s real women and they would corrupt real men by bringing rapists into public bathrooms, upsetting civil society, putting girls and grandmothers in danger, and emasculating good men by taking away their social privileges.

Nevermind that Schlafly’s charges were illogical and unsubstantiated. She was effectively replaying fears of African Americans as dangerous, dirty, licentious, and diseased; and slandering women who in any way deviated from very strict ideas of how a woman should behave. Schlafly was explicit about her racism and misogyny, but not all her allies had to be—they could hide behind claims of health and safety, a rhetoric that deemed real women and children as inherently vulnerable and constantly in danger. Real American women were delicate flowers, subjects of chivalric protection and best suited to home and hearth, preferably with a squabble of children nestled in their skirts. Equality, in other words, was pathologized. It was a sickness that threatened not just these vulnerable members of society, but the entire social structure. Equality between the races and sexes, in Schlafy’s summation, was a health and moral risk for the entire country.

Schafly’s clout was her Christian morality, a particular brand of belief that adhered to male headship and a mythical “traditional family” model. She labeled any dissenters as “un-American” nonbelievers, a disease on the country. These narrow gender roles were as outdated at the time as their discriminatory racial pathologizing was—or so we’d like to think.

In the spring of 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification, allowing a seven-year period for two thirds of states to adopt it for the bill to achieve full passage. The ERA never passed, thanks to the efforts of Schlafly and her STOP ERA movement.

Schlafly, at age 91, is still alive today. And kicking, I imagine. As are the potent and regressive arguments she helped concoct to stop the passage of the ERA in the 1970s. Looking at the current rankle over allowing transgendered students to use the bathroom of their choosing, it’s hard to believe that the statement, often attributed to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” isn’t just an old wives’ tale. Maybe the arc of the moral universe just finds new ways to perpetuate injustice?

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It’s hard to believe that the same arguments for safety and health regarding bathroom use still have efficacy. But they sure do. In the past three years, six states have attempted to pass legislation that restricts transgender bathroom (and locker room) use—Arizona, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. North Carolina successfully passed a bill on March 23rd titled, The Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, or HB2.

As Chloe Durkin wrote at Popsugar, North Carolina’s HB2 requires that students use the bathroom that corresponds with the gender on their birth certificate. But it goes further. HB2 also “imposes a strict definition of what forms of discrimination are prohibited under state law — namely discrimination based on race, religion, color, national origin, age, biological sex, or handicap. Sexual orientation is never explicitly protected by state law, and HB2 will now prevent any local-level LGBTQ protections from being passed in North Carolina.” Don’t miss that “biological” before “sex,” a parallel to gay rights opponents’ rhetoric about how non-heterosexual sex is a violation of biology, a grasp by typically anti-science groups at scientific substantiation for their moral values.

The White House called North Carolina’s law “meanspirited.” In response, on May 13, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice issued a national directive that requires schools to allow students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity. Conservatives across the country were outraged—for the same “government overreach” reasons that Schlafly and the STOP ERA movement were. And they employed the same emotional, fear-mongering language of the past. Immediately, eleven states sued the Obama administration.

When announcing its challenge to the directive, a Texas spokesperson said their lawsuit put the “safety of its students first.” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick stated contemptuously of Obama, “He says he’s going to withhold funding if schools do not follow the policy. Well in Texas, he can keep his 30 pieces of silver. We will not yield to blackmail from the president of the United States.” The conservative Family Research Council notes on their website that, “The government should never purposefully threaten the public safety of women and children by creating the legitimized access that sexual predators tend to seek,” a statement that once again wrongly conflates pedophilia with non-heterosexual sexuality or non biological gender identity.

Bathroom access is a public health issue, but not in the way that opponents of the directive claim. These rebellious legislators are using the powers of the state to impede public health, not by “protecting” precious children but by harming vulnerable ones. Every transgender child in the country is now a target; all attention turned to their need to pee. By making gender out to be their own God’s work, opponents are employing and deploying a natural, moral and biological version of gender that does not actually exist.

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In an article for the conservative news site Breitbart, John Hayward summarized the tone and history of support for HB2—and opposition to the Obama administration’s directive. Pulling together threads of anti-Communism, fears of totalitarianism, appeals to “common sense,” and a diminishment of the safety and rights of a minority group, Hayward gives away the real passion at the heart of bathroom restrictions—government overreach: “Welcome to life in totalitarian America, where even going to the bathroom and identifying the sex of an adult have now become intensely political acts.” As if these weren’t already politicized.

He claims that American society had already solved the problem of bathroom access, looking past bathroom users whose gender might not, in observers’ minds, add up to the sign on the door. “Decent-minded, live-and-let live” Americans simply looked the other way or called the cops when they felt threatened. As if discrimination weren’t already laden with feelings of threat, as if having the cops called on you while using a bathroom isn’t oppressive. He goes on to characterize transgender people as “utterly bizarre,” and defiers of what the rest of the population already knows with “their eyes and hearts.”

Hayward also resorts to Shlafly-like moral appeals. Those who find transgendered bathroom users unhealthy and unsafe are “publicly slandered as quasi-racist bigots if they murmur any objection.” The presence of minority groups, in other words, are a threat to the rest of us. “You will now be made to care about men who claim they “identify” as women, while pushing their way past you and into public restrooms that were once the preserve of wives, mothers, girlfriends, and daughters,” he writes.

Yet if we accept Phyllis Schlafly’s premise that violating any one person’s health and safety is a risk to the entire nation’s public health, a blight on the moral status of the country, the way to correct fears of trans persons in the “wrong” bathroom would be to accommodate their needs, not denigrate and further marginalize their existence. But that’s not how elections are won, that’s not how bills get passed, that’s not how self-righteous cultural stands shape surveillance and behavior. Public health and safety, after all, aren’t really a zero sum game—something Schlafy and even HB2s supporters know very well.

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

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

The post Phyllis Schlafly’s Urology appeared first on The Revealer.

By Suzanne Schneider

Last February, with the country still reeling from the mass shooting in San Bernadino, President Obama delivered an address before the Islamic Society of Baltimore that showcased his usual combination of nuance, sensitivity, and pragmatism in speaking about the threat posed by Islamic radicalism. Not that any of this mattered to his critics, whose prevailing custom has become to accuse the President of apologizing for Islamic terror.

As in his prior remarks on the subject, the President again tried to differentiate between genuine Islam and the perverted ideology that “misuses God’s name” and “draws selectively from Islamic texts” to justify acts of violence. In response, critics lampooned him for failing to understand the nature of the enemy or just how many of them (approximately 1.6 billion by the last count) exist. In the words of Frank Gaffney, the neo-nut political commentator turned foreign policy advisor for Ted Cruz, “If we are actually serious about defeating that ideology, we must be honest about its nature – and realistic about all its adherents.”

This analytic volley is old hat by now, and it is not getting any more intellectually satisfying. The President says the problem is not really Islam—“true” religion being peaceful, non-coercive, and pro-capitalist no doubt—while his critics claim that the Qur’an requires practicing Muslims to slaughter any infidels in sight. Religion either is or isn’t the problem. Is there an exit to this merry-go-round?

As I argued in the first installment of this three-part series on religious violence, most of our contemporary political and cultural discourse about Islam and violence seems to ricochet off of these poles. In order to unpack the assumptions that have been bundled within each position, I devoted the prior article to tracing a genealogy of “true religion” as it is commonly deployed in liberal circles and argued that its construction was closely tied to the larger transfer of political authority from the church to the early modern state. Religious freedom and religious violence are thus intricately related concepts, as only religions that abandon their right to coercive authority could be tolerated by a state seeking to guarantee its own monopoly on violence.

In this installment, I am going to take up the opposing view that—depending on the source—treats either religion in general or Islam in particular as inherently prone to fanaticism and violence. Granted, there are actually two quite distinct groups that take up residence on this side of the court: the New Atheists, for whom all religion is irrational and uniquely susceptible to violence, Islam being the most egregious variation on a general theme; and the Orientalist, neoconservative, or frankly Islamophobic camps within which Islam is viewed as fundamentally distinct from our peace-loving and recently discovered Judeo-Christian heritage.

Yet despite the significant differences between New Atheists figures like the late Christopher Hitchens and their counterparts on the Neocon-to-Loony Spectrum, they all seem to operate under the assumption that religions are remarkably uncomplicated and historically stable entities that exist as cultural essences rather than embodied practices. In what follows, I will explore how this theoretical frame manifests itself in the thought and policy suggestions of those who argue that the Western world is locked in an existential battle against Islam. This is, after all, not merely about theories but about the practices that they support, and we would be well served understanding the validity of these assumptions before we investigate whether sand can glow.

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Much like the liberal ideal of “true religion,” the genealogy of our current “Islam-is-the-problem” sentiment has much deeper, and more intellectually complex, roots than is commonly acknowledged. There is obviously the long and well-developed tradition of academic Orientalism in Europe and America, the practitioners of which often approached Islam as a coherent abstraction that was inherently fanatical, inferior, and threatening. In the more recent past, certain mile markers stand out, such as Bernard Lewis’s influential 1990 essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” In his estimation, the material and political factors to which his contemporaries frequently attributed anti-American sentiment—ranging from neo-imperial economic practices to American support for the Iranian Shah and other oppressive regimes—were merely red herrings. “Clearly, something deeper is involved than these specific grievances, numerous and important as they may be—something deeper that turns every disagreement into a problem and makes every problem insoluble.” Rather, Lewis argued that “Muslim rage” stemmed from a cultural and possibly even psychological incapacity to come to terms with subordination:

The Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat. The first was his loss of domination in the world, to the advancing power of Russia and the West. The second was the undermining of his authority in his own country, through an invasion of foreign ideas and laws and ways of life and sometimes even foreign rulers or settlers, and the enfranchisement of native non-Muslim elements. The third—the last straw—was the challenge to his mastery in his own house, from emancipated women and rebellious children. It was too much to endure, and the outbreak of rage against these alien, infidel, and incomprehensible forces that had subverted his dominance, disrupted his society, and finally violated the sanctuary of his home was inevitable.

Several well-seasoned Orientalist tropes surface here in Lewis’s attempt to attribute Muslim rage to some form of mental or cultural inadequacy: First, that it is even possible to speak of “the Muslim” as a unitary figure with defined attitudes toward modernity, women, secularism, etc.; second, that social, political or material circumstances are of relatively little importance in explaining this “mood and a movement” that transcends “the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them;” finally, that Muslims are naturally domineering and cannot psychically accommodate themselves to conditions of subordination or even equality. We should note the closeness of this notion to cruder formulations in which Islam—conceived in the same monolithic fashion as “the Muslim”— is always seeking to conquer and convert, never content to merely exist alongside its neighbors.

For Lewis’s arch-intellectual nemesis, Edward Said, this approach was both profoundly anti-empirical and dangerously divisive, resting upon the assumption of a fundamental difference in human material between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This assertion of difference is not, as we shall see, without its points of tension, but it is still crucial to propping up the science of Orientalism:

“For Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, ‘we’ lived in ours… A certain freedom of intercourse was always the Westerner’s privilege; because he was the stronger culture, he could penetrate, he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic mystery, as Disraeli once called it. Yet what has, I think, been previously overlooked is the constricted vocabulary of such a privilege, and the comparative limitations of such a vision.”[1]

As a body of theory that took pains to maintain its internal consistency in an almost guild-like manner, Orientalism acted like a grid that filtered all episodes of human behavior through a pre-existing screen that determined the range of acceptable truth. For Lewis, it was not unthinkable, but rather impossible given everything else he “knew” about “the Muslim,” to seriously consider that impoverishment or political oppression could be the source his anti-Americanism. That is, that unlike ourselves—who we assume to be complex beings driven by numerous forces, many of them rational and material, some of them unconscious or visceral—“the Muslim” is a remarkably simple figure whose agitation springs not from material realities, but from a bruised cultural ego.

Bernard Lewis

With its emphasis on religion as a cultural form that existed independently from larger historical processes, Lewis’s piece helped popularize the now common sentiment that Islam is hostile to both modernity and secularism. He argued, not incorrectly, that the epistemological division of human experience between “religious” and “civil” or secular affairs was a Christian creation with no clear parallel in the Islamic (or indeed, in any other) world. But when filtered through the Orientalist grid, this historical observation about early modern Europe is transformed into the root of Islam’s backwardness: We had a Reformation, they did not. We are modern; they are not. Here it is worth noting that adherents to this view claim it was the West’s capacity to free itself from the irrational chains of religion that justify its claims to cultural superiority. And correspondingly, it is Islam’s failure (or inability) to recognize a clear distinction between a secular realm—of the state and indeed, of violence—from a voluntary and private religious one that had led to the current crisis. Or in Lewis’s phrasing, ‘they’ have yet to either adopt or even respect “our Western perception of the proper relationship between religion and politics.”

I hope the reader can see that, as I described in the first installment, at the heart of this narrative lies a question about law and thus violence – the coercive power of religion, the proper arenas of state compulsion, the proper site of sovereignty – in short, over whom or what can monopolize the legitimate use of violence. Within such a scheme, the presence of a religious legal system like shari’a poses a definitive challenge to the state’s capacity to create a secular civic space within which it alone possesses authority over the minds and bodies of its subjects. Shari’a, according to most accounts, is by definition hostile to the democratic principle of equality and simply cannot tolerate the presence of anyone—liberated women, atheists, homosexuals—who departs from the straight path. Suggestions for “fixing” Islam have thus been mainly twofold: abandonment or reformation.

Operating with far fewer intellectual resources than Lewis, Frank Gaffney is among the many contemporary figures to seize upon the former approach. In “It’s Shariah, Stupid,” a piece written in response to President Obama’s Baltimore speech, Gaffney made Islam 101 professors everywhere shake their heads in collective bewilderment. As a national figure of some renown whose Center for Security Policy claims to be a leading intellectual resource for issues affecting American security, Gaffney demonstrates remarkably little understanding of what this root of all problems—this “shariah”—actually is. Here he is worth quoting at length:

In much of the Muslim world, the Islamic State’s ideology is known as ‘shariah.’ While IS [the Islamic State] has been particularly effective at branding itself as the world’s foremost enforcer of that brutally repressive, supremacist doctrine, the truth is that it animates every other jihadist group, as well – including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Boko Haram, the al Nusra Front, al Shabaab and the granddaddy of them all: the Muslim Brotherhood.

Our ability to acknowledge this reality, let alone act effectively upon that recognition, has been greatly hampered by another fact: Shariah is also regarded as the true practice of Islam by nations like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and by the religious authorities of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University…

To be clear, many millions of Muslims don’t practice their faith in accordance with shariah. Yet, many millions do. And the latter are obliged by shariah to engage in jihad or holy war.

Apparently Gaffney is confusing shariah, which sounds bloody awful, with shari’a, which is not a fixed body of law but rather a system of legal reasoning whose rulings—on jihad as well as countless other issues—are as diverse as the individuals issuing them. That is why the “shariah” of Iran or Saudi Arabia is different from that of Malaysia or the sheikhs of Al-Azhar – who, in truth, often don’t even agree with one another. Shari’a is not an ideology, unless you are among the few who are super ideologically committed to the hermeneutics of jurisprudence (in which case, Rabbi, I salute you). We can see the almost comic meaninglessness of the point by translating into English: it’s akin to saying that the United States, Cuba and Russia are all ruled by “the law,” and thus essentially the same, and that any countries governed by “the law” are liable to harbor extremism going forward. More pointedly, given ISIS’s disdain for classical modes of jurisprudence and the scholarly class in general—i.e. the chief things associated with shari’a as a legal system—the notion that the Islamic State’s “ideology is known as ‘shariah’” is deeply uninformed. Adherence to a certain form of shari’a can be ideological, and it is true that ISIS claims to practice a pure form of shari’a. But do lots of other practicing Muslims think they’re misguided fools? Yes, absolutely.

Edward Said

Gaffney’s “shariah” acknowledges none of this, as he is solely concerned with the question of violence. Yet living one’s life in accordance with shari’a, whatever that might mean, has implications for activities ranging from eating to signing contracts. Indeed, Gaffney either ignores or doesn’t know about the vast range of human activities that are regulated by shari’a and yet unrelated to warfare. Grouping the millions of individuals who, in various ways, try to live their lives in accordance to shari’a with those that support ISIS is both intellectually preposterous and politically divisive. Given this reality, the argument that Muslims who “practice their faith in accordance to shariah” are inherently threatening is akin to saying that Muslims can only be benign once they stop practicing Islam.

Yet abandonment is only one option, and a wide variety of commentators who concern themselves with Islam prefer to call for a Reformation instead. This tactic represents a perennial favorite among both neoconservatives—ranging from the “religion building” efforts of Paul Wolfowitz and Daniel Pipes to more recent attempts by the Clarion Project to provide “a platform for the voices of moderation”—and liberal figures including Thomas Friedman, Salman Rushdie, Ayyan Hirsi Ali, and Bill Maher, just to name a few. Despite their disparate positions on other pressing issues, there is a remarkably common impulse among mainstream thinkers to attribute the crises gripping contemporary Islamic societies to the failure of secularism to take root. While these critics often do assume an essential difference between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ they nonetheless can only propose a re-tracing of modern Euro-American history as a solution. In short, why can’t ‘they’ be more like ‘us’?

I have thoroughly dismantled the idea that a Reformation along Protestant lines would mitigate Islamic violence elsewhere, and it scarcely deserves any more of our attention. That said, in the context of identifying religion as the primary driver of violence (e.g. of ISIS, al-Shabaab, et al.), there is something of interest to note among voices that think Islam must either be reformed or transcended. Despite substantive disagreements about other issues, these figures still treat Islam, in the grand Orientalist tradition, as a coherent culture that is seemingly distinct from material life or historical processes. How else to explain the revolving door of pundits quoting verses from the Qur’an as if they are the direct causes of terror attacks, the intervening 1400 years of human history being largely beside the point? Or to account for the persistent insistence that Islamic violence is both wholly internal to the tradition and distinct from broader social currents, despite arguments from scholars like Oliver Roy that we might consider terrorism within the same analytic frame as other modern phenomena like mass shootings?

Yet, in the view of Lewis and his disciples, the struggle between fundamentalism and other, “more tolerant, more open” versions of Islam is one in which “we of the West can do little or nothing,” meaning that this is an internal cultural struggle that (unlike any other component of their modern lives), Muslims must work out alone. In such a scheme, culture—where religion supposedly resides—seems to exist utterly independently of the larger machinations of power. Translated into the present, this approach would suggest that the global spread of Salafi Islam, largely financed by one of America’s chief allies (and indeed, beneficiaries) in the Middle East, is just another thing that Muslims need to work out internally.

The politics of this position are not hard to derive. To identify Islam as the problem, is also to imply something of equal rhetorical and practical weight: that ‘we’, whether defined as Americans or other inhabitants of Earth during the period of late capitalist modernity, are not the problem, and that ‘we’ have nothing to do with the modern forms of Islamic violence, many of which arose historically in response to colonialism and occupation. To be clear, this is not to claim that Western colonialism, economic practices, or diplomatic maneuvers caused Islamic radicalism, which would just be the mirror image of the view I am disputing. But rather, quite as common sense would dictate, religions are embedded in the everyday life of their adherents and are subject to extreme fluctuation depending on the surrounding environment. Treating religions as coherent abstractions obviates what should be the most pressing question – why do religions get expressed in certain ways at certain times? Why do a number of Islamic radical groups arise at the turn of the twenty-first century and not in the early sixteenth or late nineteenth? Presumably they had Qur’ans back in those days. However, because this is a historical, rather than theological question, I’m afraid an analysis limited to the Islamic textual tradition won’t take us very far.

Finally, just as ‘we’ seem to have some global influence on the clothes people wear, the beverages they drink, and the types of schooling they seek, ‘we’ might also be more mixed up than we acknowledge in the history of others’ religious cultures. Moreover, if we think seriously about Islamic violence as a product of modernity—as linked to broader historical forces like social alienation, technological innovation, and challenges to traditional elites—the problem suddenly seems part of ‘our’ world as well, and one which no amount of carpet bombing can solve.

In the next and final installment in this series, I will make the case for a historical, rather than cultural, explanation for contemporary Islamic violence. Perhaps there is a way off this merry-go round after all.

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[1] Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 43-44.

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You can read part 1 of “Approaching Religious Violence” here.

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Suzanne Schneider is the author Politics of Denial: Religious Education and Colonial Rule in Palestine(forthcoming) and is currently working on a book about religious violence and the modern Middle East. She is the Director of Operations and a Core Faculty member of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a non-profit education and research center, and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media. Suzanne received her Ph.D. in 2014 from the Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

The post Problems with The Problem with Islam: Approaching Religious Violence, Part II appeared first on The Revealer.

Law and Grace painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1529

By Becky Garrison

The German National Tourist Board has been commemorating the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses with a Luther Decade. Beginning in 2008 and ending in 2017, the board has chosen an annual theme around which to organize events and, they hope, lure visitors. The theme for 2015 was “Image and the Bible.” The organizers timed this particular theme to mark the 500^th anniversary of the birthday of a painter named Lucas Cranach the Younger.

Though he is being feted now, while Lucas Cranach the Younger was living he remained in the shadows of his more famous father, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), also a painter, with whom he established the Cranach workshop based in Wittenberg. The duo played a major role in depicting and promoting the message and images of Martin Luther and his contemporaries, hence, their place in these anniversary celebrations. While Martin Luther and his fellow reformers took to the pulpit, the Cranach family workshops used their craft to support their theological and political cause. Their work included conventional (and less so) bible scenes, portraits of Luther throughout his life, and even the woodcuts that illustrated the reformers’ pamphlets and Luther’s German translations of the bible.

Lucas Cranach the Elder was a friend of Luther who began depicting the monk starting from his earliest days in the order. After Lucas Cranach the Younger developed his own skills as a painter and printmaker, he worked side-by-side with his father creating some of the most iconic portraits of Martin Luther. Their achievements include the Reformation Altar situated at St. Mary’s Church in Wittenberg, where, historians speculate, Lucas Cranach the Younger received the sacrament of baptism and first heard the sermons of the great reformers. There is even a monument inside this church marking a spot where Lucas Cranach the Younger’s body is thought to have been buried.

Lucas Cranach the Younger continued his father’s work beyond the Elder’s death and until Luther himself was dying, as one can see in “Portrait of Martin Luther on his Deathbed” (1546). He went on to expand his father’s workshop into an enterprise where students worked to reproduce the Cranachs’ famous paintings. The Cranach workshop used their printing press to mass-produce their works and distribute the pictorial messages of the Reformation throughout Europe.

These paintings of famous bible studies and serene portraits of Luther and other reformers may appear innocuous to contemporary viewers, but their political nature was not at all opaque to 16^th century viewers. Cranach paintings such as those of Jesus welcoming children to him or a

woman caught in adultery were viewed as scandalous in their time. Showing people actually touching the human form of Jesus ran counter to the infallible papal teaching that emphasized the otherworldly divine nature of Christ. Likewise, Cranach the Younger’s placement of the now famous pictures of Luther and his wife Katharina von Bora side-by-side sent a clear message to the Vatican that the marriage of a former priest and nun could be just as holy as the celibacy practiced by religious orders.

Other paintings with as the Weimar Altarpiece painted by Lucas Cranach the Younger, convey a more explicit theological message. In this painting, he places his father next to John the Baptist with a stream of blood from Christ’s side flowing directly on Lucas Cranach the Elder’s forehead. The implication here is that one can receive salvation directly without the need for intercession from a priest or a saint. Off to the far right, Luther points to a bible passage relating to Christ’s redemptive blood noting how all believers are freed from their sin.

The Cranachs’ most iconic piece “Law and Grace” (1529) painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder features the law on the left hand side and grace on the right. In it, the law is symbolized by Moses with the Ten Commandments, Satan forcing a man into hell by Death, and Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit and Christ sitting in judgment. Grace is depicted by the blood of Christ covering those near the cross with Christ’s cross crushing Satan and Death. The tree separating the two sections is dead on the left but alive on the right. This painting, deemed by many as the most influential painting of the Reformation, illuminates the decisive and at times deadly, differences between Luther’s followers and the Catholic Church.

Some of the Cranachs’ woodcuts drawings were used to illustrate flysheets and bible translations demonstrating an early use of “picture propaganda. The “September Testament” (1545), Luther’s seminal translation of the bible into the vernacular German language featured controversial illustrations such as one of the Whore of Babylon wearing the papal tiara. The comparison of the Roman Catholic Church with the whore of Babylon can be seen in Reformation writings such as Luther’s pamphlet “Babylonian Captivity of the Church” (1520). Images like these were deemed so scandalous that Luther’s “December Testament” printed several months later contained prints with the offending drawings removed.

“The Whore of Babylon”

Likewise, Luther’s “Depiction of the Papacy” (1545) pamphlet features a drawing by Cranach the Younger of Pope Paul II holding a papal bull full of fire and brimstone. In this drawing, German peasants greet the pope with farts fresh from their “belvedere.” (Belvedere references both ‘beautiful view’ and a building in the Vatican.) The pope is portrayed riding a sow and carrying a spiral of steaming dung in his open palm. Often Luther spoke of German as the “papal sow’ who was being force-fed papal lies that primarily benefited the Vatican.

In the same vein, a popular riddle appeared in print in 1541 that referenced pigs and excrement that reads as follows: “How do you ride a sow so that it does not bite? — Put dung on your hand, and when the sow smells it, it will chase it and not bite the rider.”

Those reading this pamphlet clearly picked up the message that while Germany could seek a council from the Pope, all they could expect from the Vatican were deception and lies. Furthermore, it’s been argued this image might have carried anti-Semitic undertones as it brings to mind other satirical depictions of Jews riding on pigs.

Perhaps surprisingly, despite the Cranach’s workshop involvement in promoting the reformation, they were still offered and accepted commissions from Catholic patrons. Unfortunately those Catholics who sat for them did not leave behind any writings that would explain where they would ask this workshop to portray their likenesses given the workshop’s controversial portrayals of the Pope. As the Cranach workshop never wrote about their decision to work for those who disagreed with the Protestant themed works they were publishing, one can surmise the Cranach Workshop’s reason for accepting these commissions was purely financial. Which makes sense given that, like his father, who served as mayor of Wittenberg and used his political clout to expand his influence, Lucas Cranach the Younger’s goal was to advance the family’s fortune and standing in the community. Hence both men demonstrated their business savvy in ensuring that while promoting the Reformation mission through their workshop, they did not give up opportunities to earn riches with which to expand their own empire.

Fortunately for the Cranachs, they had the financial means and political connections to prosper while other reformers faced exile and execution. In viewing displays of the Cranach’s more controversial works, I was struck by how, upon initial glance, Cranach’s depictions of the pope seemed to bear a strong resemblance the more recent Charlie Hedbo cartoons lambasting the prophet Mohammad. However, despite any similarities in style and tone between the Cranach woodcuts and the Hebdo pen and ink drawings, one cannot draw a direct parallel between these two works. The Hebdo cartoonists who depicted the Prophet Mohammad were atheists who were outsiders and not part of the tradition they were satirizing. However, the Cranachs and other reformers shared texts and histories with the Catholic Church, and as such, they functioned as insiders critiquing this schism within their tradition. Furthermore, the Hebdo cartoonists were, as many have said, “punching down” by going after a much maligned and marginalized group whereas the Cranachs were certainly “punching up,” attacking the major governmental and religious power and authority. Yet, both parties used the pen as their weapon of choice. So perhaps we could say that while the Cranach Workshop may have been one of the earliest originators of using picture propaganda, Charlie Hebdo seems to be trying to find a way to carry on into the 21^st century this European tradition of using art to criticize religion.

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You can read Becky Garrison‘s companion piece on the Luther Decade celebrations here.

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Becky Garrison contributes to a range of outlets including The Guardian, Religion Dispatches, The Humanist, Believe Out Loud, and American Atheist. Her seven books include Roger Williams’ Little Book of Virtues, and Red and Blue God, Black and Blue Church

The post The Medium of Reformation Messages: Celebrating Luther’s Legacy, Part II appeared first on The Revealer.

Bodies of Song: Kabir Oral Traditions and Performative Worlds in North India by Linda Hess, Oxford University Press, 2015

At the beginning of her wonderful new book, Bodies of Song, Linda Hess asks the following question: “How would our understanding of text, author, and reception change if we took cognizance of the nature and history of oral transmission, its interactions with written and recorded forms, and the paramount importance of context in creating the words and meanings of texts? How far can we go in treating texts as embodied?” Focusing in upon oral-performative traditions of songs attributed to the famous fifteenth-century north Indian poet-saint Kabir, Hess demonstrates that when we embrace “the study of oral tradition, we enrich our understanding of text and transmission, history and society” and “also enrich our own ways of learning and knowing ourselves.”

Linda Hess is Senior Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where she specializes in and has published widely on Hindu religious traditions. The product of over a decade of research, Hess’s new book, Bodies of Song, delves into India’s “living” Kabir tradition in order to shed important light on a number of topics such as the relationship of textuality and orality, the question of “authenticity,” the experience of hearing a performed song versus reading a poem, the potential conflicts and negotiations between inner/spiritual and outer/social orientations and life pursuits. But what really makes the book stand out is the great intimacy, sincerity, and readability of its style. Hess has long been a preeminent scholar of Kabir, but her previous publications—unlike this one—were generally works grounded in manuscript research and careful text-critical scholarship.   Bodies of Song is the result of a more embodied study of “literature that lives in performance.” It is, on one hand, an immersion into the lives of singers and listeners of Kabir and, on the other hand, a reflection upon Hess’s own personal experience imbibing Kabir over many years in the context of “live performance[s] where physical bodies are interacting, and where sound is produced by singers and heard by listeners who are present in the same place at the same time.”

One beloved Kabir poem states:

Gāyā bin pāyā nahi, anagāvan se dūr / jin gāyā vishvās se, sahib hāl hazūr

You won’t reach it without singing / if you don’t sing, it’s far.

But when you sing with deep feeling, / God is right where you are!

Kabir’s songs focus on finding the Divine—through sound—in the body. As Hess puts it, “The fundamental reality you are looking for is within you, right in your own body.” In Kabir’s works, the body is continually “held up as the precious container of the most precious reality, the place where we experience freedom, joy, the end of fear,” the place through which the Divine sound reverberates. Linda Hess seems to have thoroughly absorbed this teaching and in this book she makes the very Kabirian argument that it is in the body, and especially through sound/listening, that one really experiences the message of Kabir. Hess argues that, “to know Kabir, you should know people, places, and times. You should use your ears, voice, nose, and skin as well as more cerebral capacities. You should appreciate the local in performance, starting with the first location: your own body.” She wants us to know how central embodied experience is to fully appreciating the meaning of the poems attributed to Kabir and also how central performance is to the Kabir tradition as a whole. These songs were never meant to be read from a page. This is certainly not to say that there is not great value—and even emotional experience—to be taken from reading Kabir poetry in print, but at the most basic level, these poems are meant to be heard, and are meant to be heard as song. If you does not understand this, says Hess, you are bound to miss out on so very much about the tradition and the meanings and experiences of the songs themselves.

Bodies of Song succeeds admirably in making the reader understand, as viscerally as possible, the great difference between reading a poem—of Kabir’s, yes, but really of anyone’s—and experiencing it in live performance, hearing it and feeling it with one’s body in a social setting. Hess is able to achieve this by taking us into the personal lives of her subjects with excerpts of interviews and personal conversations, while also revealing to us (in stories, vignettes, and selections from her field notes) her own thoughts and emotions, which we see are those not of a detached scholarly observer so much as a self-reflexive and critical, yet emotionally involved and invested, active participant. Throughout the book, Hess prefers to let the scholars, activists, and performers that she discusses speak through their own words.

Perhaps the central figure in the work is Prahlad Singh Tipanya, the most famous Kabir singer in India’s Malwa region (located mostly in western Madhya Pradesh but also extending into southeastern Rajasthan and Gujarat). In Hess’s interactions with Prahlad, and her following of his life’s story, many of the book’s central themes are explored. Born into a poor, rural Dalit family, Prahlad became attracted to the bhajans (songs) of Kabir, was transformed by Kabir’s message and the singing of his poems, and eventually became an incredibly popular performer of Kabir in Malwa and well beyond. Indeed, Hess—who became a close friend of Prahlad and his family through her research—has brought him to the United States for performance tours on two separate occasions (and is currently planning a third). Here is a video of one of his performances of Kabir songs at Syracuse University in 2003 (Prahlad sits front and center, singing and playing the five-stringed folk instrument known as the tambura):

As the song performed in this video shows, Kabir asked his listeners to look deep within themselves for the answers to life’s most difficult, but essential questions. In the song we also get a taste of Kabir’s characteristic critiques of the petty quarrels between Hindus and Muslims of his day and the hypocrisy, greed, abuse of power, and arrogance of religious elites. Hess, (particularly in Chapter Four of the book), guides us masterfully through Kabir’s teachings on these topics, as well as other common themes in his composition such as love, the body (its impermanence and fragility, as well as the truth within it), death, the guru, the joy and intoxication of the Divine, and the preciousness of this life and attention to the here and now.

Interestingly, the songs that Hess analyzes in order to give us an understanding of Kabir are part of the living tradition of Kabir compositions that popularly performed in India today, but can not be found in any of the oldest manuscripts, if in any of the manuscripts containing Kabir’s poetry at all. Can we consider these compositions authentic? As Hess explains, in the living oral-performative tradition, the test of authenticity for singers and listeners is whether or not a song expresses Kabir’s “voice,” a certain content, language, and style that conveys his truth as opposed to his literal words. Hess shows great sympathy for this position, but is also unwilling to marginalize the real importance of historical, text-critical scholarship. For her, the study of Kabir must combine and juxtapose a variety of different approaches.

A major theme in Bodies of Song is the recurring motif of a polarity between the inward (religious-spiritual) and outward (social-political) dimensions of Kabir. Hess profiles a variety of Kabir singers, political activists, and NGO workers in order to show the perspective of (a) those interested in Kabir as social critic and ally in political struggle (ignoring or criticizing his spiritual teachings), (b) those who marginalize secular and social-activist readings of Kabir and place him at the center of institutional religiosity, and (c) those who see the ‘spiritual’ and ‘political’ Kabir as inseparable. This issue (addressed in Chapters Six and Eight) is clearly a very personal one for Hess. Do the demands of an authentic spiritual life necessitate, to at least some degree, a turning away from the social problems of the world? Does a life dedicated to transforming society—to alleviating poverty, oppression, and injustice—require a rejection of religion? We will probably want to quickly answer “No,” but Hess shows us how complicated the question is and how often, throughout history, dedication to one (the social/political or the religious/spiritual) often has meant the marginalization or alienation of the other. The book’s discussion of this tension is not dry and academic; Hess brings the issue to life by showing how it has played out in the lives of real people such as Prahlad Singh Tipanya, among others.

In addition to Prahlad, another key figure in Bodies of Song is Shabnam Virmani, a filmmaker, singer, and media artist from Bangalore who became Hess’s close friend and collaborator in her research on Kabir. Virmani heads The Kabir Project, which completed four feature length documentaries (that have been widely shown in India), and a rich collection of audio CDs of Kabir singers in different regions (accompanied by bi-lingual books with the original songs, and English translation and annotations) that inquire into the spiritual and socio-political resonances of Kabir’s poetry. (More information can be found here: www.kabirproject.org). These four films, referenced numerous times by Hess, serve as ideal companion pieces to her book.

Throughout her book, Hess reminds us repeatedly that throughout most of South Asian history Kabir’s compositions have not been read so much as heard—participated in—in live performance. One of the questions driving the book is this: “What is the difference in our experience when we receive or perform Kabir orally, as compared to when we read Kabir or receive the poetry through other media? How are we alive in different ways?” (203). In order to explain how very different the experience of a written text is from that of a musical text that is sung live in performance, Hess (particularly in Chapter Five) leads the reader in a fascinating discussion of the biological particularity of hearing, the neurological power of music, the social nature of live performance events, and the quality of embodied physical presence.

Every year I teach courses introducing undergraduate students to the religious life and history of South Asia and I always dedicate at least one class to Kabir. Students love to read his poetry, which is quite modern in many respects and resonates with many of their own sensibilities. After we have discussed Kabir and his poetry in class, I ask students to write their own poems “in the style and spirit of Kabir” and the results are always wonderful. (Here is a link to some of the Kabir-inspired poems students have written.) Despite the success of this assignment, for a while I struggled with how to give students a real sense of the performative nature of the Kabir tradition (and of Hindu devotional poetry more generally), how his compositions are meant to be sung and heard. I have found that by discussing key ideas from Hess’s book, and combining them with a showing of Shabnam Virmani’s film “Had-Anhad,” I have been able to largely solve this problem. Here is a clip from this fantastic film, which is full of live performances by Kabir singers in both India and Pakistan:

All in all, Bodies of Song is a special book; it is engaging, thought-provoking, insightful, and—at times—even emotionally moving. Those interested in Kabir and South Asian religious and cultural life will no doubt enjoy it, but it is also highly recommended for anyone interested in the embodied experience of oral-performative traditions and the tensions between “outer” socio-political struggles and “inner” spiritual pursuits.

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Patton E. Burchett is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at The College of William & Mary, where he teaches courses in South Asian religions. He completed his PhD at Columbia University. His research focuses on early modern devotional (bhakti) and tantric/yogic religiosity in north India and the interrelations of magic, science, and religion in the rise of Indian and Western modernities. He is currently at work on his first book, tentatively entitled Bhakti “Religion” and Tantric “Magic”: Yogis, Poets, Sufis, and Kings in Early Modern North India.

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