“Here one is reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity.”

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

“It is not hatred that is wrong, it is hating the wrong thing that is wrong. It is not anger that is wrong, it is being angry at the wrong thing that is wrong. Tell me your enemy, and I will tell you what you are. Tell me your hatred, and I will tell you your character.”

Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Victory over Vice

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is currently poised to approve House Bill 953, which the State Senate approved 33-3 last Tuesday, following a 91-0 approval in the State House. Known as the “Blue Lives Matter” bill, HB953 will extend the list of “protected classes” recognized by existing Louisiana hate crimes legislation to include law enforcement professionals and firefighters. In other words, present or past employment as a cop (or a prison guard, a traffic officer, etcetera) will now stand alongside “race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry” as a category of identity awarded special protection against victimization under the law.

Although Louisiana, like most other states, already penalizes people for assaulting police or interfering with their activities, HB953 will mandate up to an additional five years of jail for felonies committed against police and their property, up to six months for misdemeanors, and escalated fines for both.

This is new territory, both in terms of the immediate legal consequences and political landscape, as well as in terms of the deeper ideological and even philosophical significance of this development.

The legal specifics of how enforcement of the law will cash out, if approved, remain more than a little unclear, and as such, disturbing. Charges of “resisting arrest” are already routinely abused to retroactively justify unlawful detentions and excessive force: might people charged with resisting arrest in Louisiana now expect to face superadded hate crimes assault charges if the arresting officer decides they got too physical? In addition to ordinary vandalism charges, will spray painting “All Cops Are Bastards” on a parked squad car or the side of a police station now have identical legal status as painting a swastika on a synagogue or lighting a cross on someone’s lawn? And, most trenchantly, will holding a Black Lives Matter protest or occupation be enough of a “threat” or “public disruption” and generate enough “fear” on the part of police officers to justify bringing hate crimes criminal trespassing or terrorizing charges?

This last question isn’t an idle one. If you read their statements on the subject, it certainly sounds like Louisiana police are fearful, and the “Blue Lives Matter” rhetoric none-too-subtly suggests what they’re afraid of: developments in our current political climate, and specifically Black Lives Matter. As the head of the National Fraternal Order of Police has told press: “Talking heads on television and inflammatory rhetoric on social media are inciting acts of hatred and violence toward our nation’s peace officers. Our members are increasingly under fire by individuals motivated by nothing more than a desire to kill or injure a cop.” Never mind that, according to FBI data, 2015 is tied for the second-safest year in history for US police, with forty-one officers killed in the line of duty. And never mind that we can compare current data with, say, the period from 1969-1980, when more than one hundred police were killed almost every year, to reveal a clear and stable trend of historic lows. What matters is that cops, like a majority of the American public in recent polling, believe that there is a “war on police,” and a great many of them blame Black Lives Matter activists. Louisiana isn’t alone, either: numerous other states are considering such legislation, and there is a proposal in Congress for a similar national-level bill.

But this isn’t just “politics” in the sense of the media churn where pundits and sensationalist outlets will insinuate, for example, that Black Lives Matter is a “terrorist group” with ties to Salafist Islamist fundamentalism (although, as we’ll see in a moment, this trope is suggestive). It’s political in a more radical sense – it’s about our basic understanding of how rights, identity, vulnerability, and violence should function in our society. And it’s all about how we understand those questions in the twenty-first century American security state.

Let’s start with the obvious: the rhetorical co-optation. Like “All Lives Matter,” “Blue Lives Matter” is an essentially reactionary formation: it depends upon the pre-existence of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose language and branding (so to speak) it transparently appropriates. But it doesn’t just react to and appropriate these things – it seeks to turn them back, weaponized, upon the movement that generated them in the first place. This is something other than the “argument” of the Internet troll who inevitably interjects, “By saying Black Lives Matter, aren’t you saying that other lives don’t?,” an argumentative derailment that is as obviously devoid from contextual nuance as it is syllogistically broken. Above and beyond tit-for-tat language policing, “Blue Lives Matter” advertises itself as the rallying cry of the people who will literally police Black Lives Matter protests – sanctioning their actions as they arrest, imprison, beat, and otherwise face off with unarmed private citizens on a decidedly uneven playing field. Given that the nucleus of the Black Lives Matter movement largely originated in reaction to the extrajudicial killings of black Americans by police in the first place, the implicit message couldn’t be clearer: by insisting that your lives have value, you devalue ours. The logical extension of this message – respect for “Blue Life” means supporting a status quo where black life can be taken with impunity – is so patently obscene that I hope even the most ardently unreflective supporter of our current policing system, whatever their race, would disavow it.

But just because that explicit formulation is socially unacceptable doesn’t mean the underlying structure isn’t tacitly accepted. And that underlying structure is a worldview whereby claiming rights to safety, visibility, and even life itself are understood as a zero-sum game, and whereby any change in the status quo represents a slippery slope towards existential threat. In a nation where nearly half of white poll respondents say that “reverse racism” is an equal or greater problem than discrimination against blacks, or that their “way of life” has “changed for the worse” since the 1950s, this perspective appears to be widely shared. Which is where another interesting feature of the Blue Lives Matter legislation comes in to play – the emphasis on gut over empirics, on police feeling unsafe over and above data to the contrary, and, most importantly, on the supposed moral and legal prerogatives of their perception of such vulnerability. American police killed 1,134 people last year alone, killing blacks at twice the rates at which they killed whites. Black civilians in the communities they police may understandably speak of living in an atmosphere of near-constant terror or trauma, but what the “Blue Lives Matter” slogan insists is that it’s the police whose victimization is most urgent. In the same breath as we mock “millennials” for their oversensitivity and supposedly unrealistic equation of their lived experience of vulnerability with the “reality” of the world, we then accord to police – who are not only safer but better armed than ever – unquestioning deference as to the primacy of their “fears” over and above actual data to the contrary.

The bitter paradox of comparatively powerful groups invoking the rhetoric of victimization in a bid for sympathy and (additional) special protection has all the features of what my friend, the poet Jennifer Nelson, brilliantly labels “fictimhood.” Fictimhood: the histrionic appropriation of victimization by the powerful that doubles down on their own security qua oppressors even as it robs those they victimize of the vocabulary they previously used to voice their own appeals for justice. “Our lives matter,” say the oppressed. “Well, actually,” reply their oppressors, “We suffer, too. In fact, we are the real victims. And now please stop resisting as we shove your pleas for recognition back down your throat.”

The specific claim to protected class status under hate crimes laws throws this dimension into sharp relief. Although reasonable people can disagree on the issue of hate crime legislation, one compelling critique of hate crime laws in general is that they single out particular kinds of violence as worthy of social condemnation while normalizing others, sidestepping what scholars Kay Whitlock and Michael Bronski have described as the “the interdependent nature of hate violence and broader systems of power.” By localizing “hate” in acts of extraordinary malice, quotidian violence, exploitation, and abuse are flattened out, erased, and otherwise made issues for which ordinary people do not have to feel responsible. “The sleight-of-hand of the hate frame is that it invites people to believe the problem of violence directed against marginalized groups exists anywhere else but in themselves,” write Whitlock and Bronski. But in the case of police, who are empowered by the state to inflict violence on us our and our neighbors, the stakes are rather different. Indeed, the privileging of the category of “police” as potential victims starkly contrasts with the track record of how individual police officers who commit what common sense would suggest are clearly “hate crimes” actually fare in our criminal justice system. Consider, for example, the case of former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, who was found guilty of stalking and raping at least thirteen black women. Holtzclaw never faced any hate crime charges, even though his methodical pattern of racial targeting was obvious (as the NAACP argued), and his misogyny was blatant (violence against women being one of those quotidian kinds of violence which is rarely, if ever, singled out as a “hate crime”). Yet now, in a truly perverse turn, we seem to be on the threshold of a topsy-turvy world where if someone were to punch Holtzclaw while yelling “Pig!” they might be charged not just with assault, but with a felony hate crime. Stipulating that police officers who are victimized for reasons other than their badge might well deserve redress under hate crimes laws (for example, if racially profiled out of uniform by their own colleagues), the idea that a group which has already enjoyed relative impunity can not only have their position protected, but sacralized on par with the defining characteristics of those whom it has traditionally victimized remains grotesque indeed.

And it is all the more grotesque because, at core, I think there is something else going on here. What I want to say is a delicate thing, perhaps an offensive thing, but something I think is true nonetheless. Not all identity categories are, as it were, created equal; or, rather, when we face the operations of power, not all appeals to rights based upon our constructions of identity carry the same weight. One of the justifications legal scholars invoke for hate crimes laws is that they are designed to protect victimization of people targeting them for “immutable” characteristics (race being the prime example). This logic is not without its own problems: Republican politicians, for example, have invoked the immutability criterion in efforts to block hate crimes laws from protecting victimization based upon sexual orientation, and when it comes to religious identity, the question of what immutability means grows even more thorny.

But although they may differ from each other in meaningful ways, identity categories like race, gender, and religion all seem of a radically different class than professional affiliation. If the Louisiana law goes forward (and it almost certainly will – Governor Edwards is the son of a sheriff and has promised he will approve it), for the first time in American legal history, holding a job will have the same special protections as racial, gender, or religious identity. One might be tempted to see this as a particularly perverse outcome of debates over “identity politics” and the pressures of neoliberal capitalism, such that employment is now elevated to a status on par with more fundamental features of human life. But the truth is that we’re not just talking about jobs in the abstract. We’re talking about a very particular one. Being a cop, firefighter, or other public safety officer will be the only profession given status as a class protected against hate – not teachers, nurses, or even military veterans (all of whom have been targeted and discriminated against financially, rhetorically, and otherwise). And the cynical logic behind this special pleading couldn’t be more transparent. Police, whose job should revolve around protecting the vulnerable, are increasingly being held accountable for abusing them instead, and have thus come to feel “unsafe” and threatened. Accordingly, they want to claim special protection of their own – all as a way of threatening the vulnerable while simultaneously tearing out from under them the grounds for theirs pleas for safety and protection.

And this is all the more twisted because, in truth, there is no such thing as “Blue Life,” or, if there is, its moral claims are of an entirely different order than the claims of black lives, or trans lives, or any other “lives” where a predicate adjective denotes a lived experience of acute vulnerability to the vicissitudes of power, and specifically to the boots, batons, dogs, tear gas, handcuffs, and bullets of people who wear blue.

But all this is so hard to put to words. When our own vocabulary feels so exhausted, our reality so warped beyond the pale, I find myself reaching for the vernacular in which I was raised, and which, for various reasons, has left me exhausted: religion. Although at this point, I basically believe in nothing, this past weekend, I wound up poring, with a group of loved ones, over a passage from Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (3:28). Setting aside our various theological commitments to Christ (which ranged from devout to slim to none), we found ourselves wondering – what does this mean?

Certainly, some identity categories could ideally be seen as, if not entirely isomorphic with or indifferent to each other, then at least capable of mutual recognition and happy coexistence. I am a Greek, you are a Jew, let us respect each other, and abide together. I am a man, you are a woman, let us live together in egalitarian peace. But: you are my slave, I am your master – let us acknowledge each other’s unique ways of life, and then let the status quo remain? I am the murdered, you are my killer – let us embrace our identities, I, dead, you, alive and free? As countless other commentators have observed, these categories cannot “coexist” with any moral coherence, and “respecting” their relationship as a simple matter of “differences” and equivalent value erases asymmetry and ratifies injustice.

But such are precisely the zero-sum terms by which our twenty-first century security state tries to organize our lives. I am the police officer who beats you and then mocks you as you rot in a cell; you are my collar, my quota arrest, just another piece of trash – let us “recognize” each other, and then I will clock out as you are left to die begging for care. I am the drone pilot sitting in an air-conditioned room in a facility in Maryland; you are the humaniform heat signature somewhere in Baluchistan whom our predictive algorithm has identified as a probable militant – let us acknowledge our common humanity before I press a button, launch a $70,000 Hellfire missile at you, and turn you into so much gristle and dirt.

If anything should arouse our suspicions, it should be the toxic rhetoric of universal humanity and mutual respect for “life” and “differences” when uttered by powerful and complicit people in the service of inhuman and dehumanizing institutions. Such charitable universality-talk only serves the interests of chauvinist particularity; invoking humanity, it cheats.

And yet: the concept of common humanity seems as vital to our moral dealings as claims to particular human identities are foundational for our self-understandings and sense of community. Without gainsaying the value of identitarian categories and our various historical experiences of oppression, struggle, and liberation along those lines, how might terms of identity which pit us against each other (along the lines of race, nationality, class, gender, more) possibly be overcome, or at least transformed, from what they are into something else, not through a messianic, theological sublation, but rather into some other mode of solidarity?

The German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt – a Fascist, but a brilliant thinker all the same – dealt with this problem easily enough: by acknowledging its limits and then owning its shortcomings as a virtue, a feature, not a bug. Paraphrasing his perspective, the circle of our human compassion can only extend so far. Our capacity to identify with one another is predicated upon our ability to abject others as enemies against whom we can oppose ourselves. As Schmitt saw it, the ideological buzzwords of modern politics are really just transformed theological dogmas: our fellow Law Abiding Citizens are united as a blessed community of the Saved by virtue of our opposition against the permanently Lawless and Damned. Our solidarity depends on scapegoats; it’s Us versus Them, and our lives “matter” only insofar as theirs do not. And civil order depends on agents who act in the name of the rule of law but whom the law itself privileges and shields from legal accountability.

The “Blue Lives Matter” turn simply takes this essentially Schmittian perspective to its logical conclusion, and with a cynical perversity perfectly suited to our contemporary neoliberal security state. If police choose to identify as a persecuted minority qua police, as “just human being likes the rest of us,” how dare we – who say we care about minority rights, about human rights – begrudge them? How dare we question whether “Blue Life matters”? Aren’t we the ones who say that human rights matter, that Black Lives Matter? We are either with them, or against them – and, if the latter, against ourselves. There is no time for fine-grained niceties, for “unrealistic” nuances. We are at war, in perpetual Wars – Wars on Terror, Wars on Police, Wars on everything – and there is no room to formulate new choices, no time to accept the established order on terms other than what it demands. Be grateful for what you possess and enjoy what luxuries you are given to identify as what you wish as best you can, says the State. This is the price you must pay to Be Safe and not be cast out amongst the undifferentiated, exterminable Enemy – abroad or at home. And if your feeling of safety is another human’s prison, or their grave, well, look the other way and move along. There for the grace of the State and the whims of its tragically persecuted agents go you.

There must be another way. Some way to preserve what is good in our investments in identity that does not ratify a domineering structure of inherited forced choices that mortgage our souls with each transaction.

I do not know what this way is; the best I can offer is a story, an absurd parable, if you will. Here it is:

The little boy plays. In his game, he is a soldier, a cop, a gangster. His toy looks much like a real gun, but the material on the original packaging scrupulously identifies that it is not one, and that the manufacturer disclaims all responsibility. Or perhaps it is not a toy gun at all. Perhaps it is a silver-colored candy bar.

A neighbor calls the authorities. She identifies him as possibly armed, and as a child. The first headlines will identify him as a grown man; after that, and until the next little boy, other headlines will use yet other labels.

An officer arrives, adrenaline surging. Perhaps they are in uniform, perhaps they are not. Perhaps they identify themselves, perhaps they do not. The officer yells, draws, fires.

“Fuck the police,” says the child.

The bullets hang mid-air.

“That’s hate speech, and has no place in civil society,” replies the officer. “I am mortally offended by your deeply wounding words.”

“I identify as not being in your crosshairs,” answers the child.

The bullets zoom back into the barrel, taking the powder with them. The spent brass cases fly into the chamber, reconnect with the lead rounds, and slide back down into the magazine, its spring gently pressing backwards to receive them.

The officer vanishes, and the little boy returns to play. There will be no headlines, and his games now have different heroes entirely.

Would that this were so.

***

This piece was prompted by conversations with Tressie McMillan Cottom, Adia Benton, Zoé Samudzi, SI Rosenbaum, Mark Wallace, and others; any infelicities, however, are my responsibility alone.

***

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.

The post Special Pleading: On the Identity Politics of “Blue Lives Matter” appeared first on The Revealer.

The following is a series of my translations of verses of Sanskrit poetry culled from medieval anthologies. The authors of these poems lived between the sixth and sixteenth centuries CE. Sometimes anthologists provided their names, sometimes they were lost to the vagaries of time and manuscript transmission. For some two years, I have taken my hand at both translating these poems and juxtaposing them with images, songs, and/or news stories from the present day. In addition, some poems are of my own composition. They are labeled “Abhinavasubhāṣita,” or “All New Verse.” For the purposes of inclusion in The Revealer, most of the poems I have chosen are religiously inflected. In good Hindu form, they oscillate between the pietistic and playful. At the same time, it is difficult to maintain a hard and fast distinction between secular and religious in this literary world. The poems that we would read as secular were constitutive elements of South Asian religious cultures, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain alike. The ability to read and relish poetry that was not explicitly devotional was as culturally significant as any other identity within the Sanskrit cosmopolis.

On the context of translation: One of the anthologies from which I have drawn, the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa (SRK), or “Treasury of Well-Turned Verse,” was translated in full by the eminent Sanskrit scholar Daniel H.H. Ingalls, in An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). However, Ingalls possessed an aesthetic and political sensibility very different from the ones offered here—and, indeed, from the Indian editor of the SRK, the Marxist historian D.D. Kosambi. My translations, for their part, are mostly in American free verse, and my juxtapositions often place the poems in a different context from their composition. In doing so, I don’t mean either to strip them of temporal specificity or try to make them relevant to a modern audience. More often than not it works the other way around: I see an image, or hear a song, and am reminded of a medieval poem. Indeed, my own compositions are more often than not ways to articulate new sensibilities in an old language. Why not think of the juxtaposed theme, and the translational idiom, as a potentiality in the poem itself? Why not consider the “high” cosmopolitan registers of the classical as attentive and responsive to the local, the everyday? Why does time have to be linear when it comes to art?

***

Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59

svārthārambhapraṇataśirasāṃ pakṣapātāt surāṇāṃ
dṛptātmānaṃ karajakuliśair dānavendraṃ nihantum |
siṃhībhūtas tribhuvanaguruḥ so ‘pi nārāyaṇo ‘smin
rāgadveṣapratihatamateḥ kasya na syāt paśutvam ||

When the gods (to whom he was partial)
started bowing to him
to save their own heads,
even Nārāyaṇa, the guru of all,
turned into a lion
to slay the proud demon-king
with his pointy fingernails.

I mean, if you were so
swayed by love and hate,
you’d become an animal too.

Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa of Vidyākara 1729 (50.32)

vahati na puraḥ kaścit paścān na ko ‘py anuyāti māṃ
na ca navapadakṣuṇṇo mārgaḥ kathaṃ nv aham ekakaḥ |
bhavatu viditaṃ pūrvavyūḍho ‘dhunā khilatāṃ gataḥ
sa khalu bahalo vāmaḥ panthā mayā sphuṭam ūrjitaḥ || (dharmakīrteḥ)

No one walks before me,
no one follows behind,
no fresh footprints on the way.
Could it be that I’m alone?

So be it, I understand.
The road that was wide
has now narrowed.
It’s that crooked,
crowded path,
that I’ve left for good.

–by Dharmakīrti

Saduktikarṇāmṛta of Śrīdharadāsa 2347 (70.2)

adhvaśramāya caraṇau virahāya dārā
abhyarthanāya vacanaṃ ca vapur jarāyai |
etāni me vidadhatas tava sarvadaiva
dhātas trapā na yadi kiṃ na pariśramo ‘pi || (rājaśekharasya)

Feet to trudge along the road,
wife who’ll one day leave me,
words that only know to beg,
aging, aching body.

Creator, if you have no shame
for blessing me with these,
then can’t you at least deign to put
some goddam effort into it?

–by Rājaśekhara

Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa of Vidyākara 1614 (48.21)

taḍinmālālolaṃ prativiratidattāndhatamasaṃ
bhavatsaukhyaṃ hitvā śamasukham upādeyam anagham |
iti vyaktodgāraṃ caṭulavacasaḥ śūnyamanaso
vayaṃ vītavrīḍāḥ śuka iva paṭhāmaḥ param amī || (śilhaṇasya)

“Fickle and furtive as flashes of lightning,
they blind you with darkness each time they depart.
So we should give up the joys of the world
and hold on instead to a perfect quiescence.”

Clearly and coolly we belch out these words,
a shameless contingent of vacuous parrots,
reciting, reciting, reciting, reciting…

–by Śilhaṇa

Abhinavasubhāṣita of Ānanda 1.21

ekākī yatacittātmā nirāśīr aparigrahaḥ |
sukhīti gītayā proktaṃ tatkathaṃ hṛdi vedanā ||

Alone,
re-centered,
no yearnings,
no trinkets.
The Gītā* said
now I’d be happy.
So why’s the ache still there?

* Cf. Bhagavad Gītā 6.10.

Abhinavasubhāṣita of Ānanda 1.22

kvāhaṃ jaḍīkṛtamatiḥ stutikīrtanāya
dambhāndhalocanagatā kva ca me didṛkṣā |
yadbhāti sarvam idam apy anubhāti tasmin*
tvayy eva magna iti kasya vidūṣaṇaṃ syāt ||

Who am I, of muddled mind,
to sing your holy praise?
Why do these insolent eyes
yearn for a single glimpse?
It’s your bright glow that makes it seem
like everything here shines.
Would anyone think it abuse
to be called lost in you?

* Cf. Kaṭha Upaniṣad 2.2.15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbSXsrsvHR0

Uttararāmacarita of Bhavabhūti 3.28*

ayi kaṭhora yaśaḥ kila te priyaṃ
kim ayaśo nanu ghoram ataḥ param |
kim abhavad vipine hariṇīdṛśaḥ
kathaya nātha kathaṃ bata manyase ||

You merciless man,
you only love your reputation.
But is there any infamy
more terrible than this?
What happened in the forest
to that doe-eyed woman?
Tell me, tyrant:
What exactly do you think?

* In the final book of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma abandons his wife Sītā in the forest, after rumors surrounding her possible infidelity in captivity spread through the kingdom. Bhavabhūti’s play, the Uttararāmacarita, deals with, among other things, the tensions of love and justice.

It Is Sita’s Story, Not Rama’s, Told By Women in Karnataka’s Villages

Bodhicaryāvatāra of Śāntideva 6.123

ādīptakāyasya yathā samantāt
na sarvakāmair api saumanasyam |
sattvavyathāyām api tadvad eva
na prītyupāyo ‘sti dayāmayānām ||

Just like when a body’s engulfed in flames,
all the world’s pleasures can provide no relief,
so too does it happen that when people are in pain,
there’s no way to placate one with
compassion in her bones.

bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats, and Loving Blackness

Godāstuti of Vedānta Deśika 25*

gode guṇair apanayan praṇatāparādhān
bhrūkṣepa eva tava bhogarasānukūlaḥ |
karmānubandhiphaladānaratasya bhartuḥ
svātantryadurvyasanamarmabhidānidānam ||

The threads of grace your eyebrows cast,
tying up into a perfect posy of love,
toss away your supplicants’ sins.
Your partner might like dispensing
sentences that fit the crime,
but a glance from you busts up
that bad habit he has:
free will.

* This poem encodes a theological problem: that of God’s essential independence, impartiality, and dispassion with respect to the workings of karma, versus the whims of grace that break down that mechanistic system. Here the Goddess’ eyebrow twitch is simultaneously compassionate and flirtatious: the former for her devotees, the latter toward her consort. This nexus of the erotic and devotional is expressed in the compound bhogarasa, found almost precisely in the middle of the poem, on which it turns; on the one hand, her loving look is conducive to her bhaktas’ welfare (bhoga), and on the other, to her divine lover’s sexual excitement (bhoga). The latter causes him to drop the pretense of free will (svātantrya), for he becomes totally dependent on her caprice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8Qo-2hexKU&list=PLjxVM5nhygyS67xbpF-hA3CSGjntqe48O

Abhinavasubhāṣita of Ānanda 1.29

(Śṛṅgārātmaka-Ardhanārīśvara):*

ādau tv ananyabhaktā sā vibhaktā ca tataḥ param |
śanaiḥ śanaiḥ samāyātā matsvabhāvāvibhaktatām ||

(The Androgynous God, In Love):

At first she just loved me alone,
Then prayed in isolation,
And slowly, slowly, found herself
My literal better half.

* Sanskrit anthologies organize poems under sub-headings. Gods and heroes have multiple moods. This is a specific form of the god Śiva: half-man, half-woman. This alliterative poem refers to the story of Śiva and his wife Pārvatī as depicted in Kālidāsa’s Kumārasambhava.

***

Anand Venkatkrishnan was raised on the West Coast and spent the last few years completing his PhD in South Asian Religion at Columbia University. As an undergraduate he received a degree in Classics from Stanford University, studying Greek and Latin and Sanskrit literature. His research interests include the intersection between religious movements and scholarly pedagogy, Indian intellectual history, and the early modern world. His personal interests are in the literature and poetry of the non-Western world, which he is grateful not to be condemned to study professionally. More translations can be found on the blog he curates at: http://apurvaracana.tumblr.com.

The post Remembrance of Songs Past: Sanskrit Poetry in Translation appeared first on The Revealer.

By Geoffrey Pollick

Review of Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016) edited by Elijah Siegler, and Hail, Caesar! (Universal Pictures, 2016) directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen.

In February 2016, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, noted filmmaking siblings, released their latest project, Hail, Caesar! Close on its heels, in March 2016, Baylor University Press brought out Elijah Siegler’s edited volume, Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order, a collection of essays that uncover religion’s role in the Coen corpus. Together, this book and film raise the question of what happens when religion “shows up” in the movies.

Introducing the essays in Coen, Siegler declares that interpreters of the Coens’ films—whether viewers, reviewers, or scholars—“want answers.” And the principal question they ask is, simply: “Are the Coen brothers religious filmmakers in the first place?” In order to gain a handle on this query, Siegler draws together elements of film theory to propose a large-scale frame that situates religion and the Coens in relation. He suggests that their films manipulate a “mythological landscape of America” in which “the moral hero” and amoral antiheroes together negotiate the good and the bad in a “morally bleak universe.” This scheme opens a sufficiently broad thematic palette to unite the fourteen essays that follow, while suggesting some limiting contours for their categories.

Coen compiles essays authored by established interpreters of film and American religion as well as new scholarly voices. One sees in the table of contents that the book itself is structured in three “acts” divided by a pair of “intermissions,” the volume performs its analysis across thematic and topical variants.

Moving from “morality,” to “theology,” “world creation,” and “community,” the opening series of essays proposes various modes in which religion can be “read” in the Coens’ earliest films, which, as Siegler informs, “the critical consensus had not yet labeled as ‘religious.’” Asking where religion might be found in these purportedly religionless films affords the essayists opportunity for reflection on the nature of religion as a category itself. Interpreting Raising Arizona (1987), Eric Michael Mazur proposes that the film constitutes “a critique of the charade of moral certitude” that suffused the cultural politics of the 1980s Christian Right. Read here as “morality,” religion in the mode of the Coens thus comes under scrutiny for harmonizing hypocrisies. The three essays that follow in this section present similar manipulations of religion’s configuration.

Richard Amesbury, in the first of two intermission–essays, suggests an alternative imagination of religion and morality in Fargo (1996). Rather than seeing an innate moral message or an expression of ironic amorality in the film, Amesbury finds Fargo to be “a work of grotesque” that points to an “ultimately…hopeful” reality beyond its specific narrative. Placing Fargo in the genre of grotesque allows Amesbury to identify distortions and displacements figured through the Coens’ characters. As a result, he perceives the film’s content as engaged in conversation with moral concepts that “stand off-stage, as it were in the projection booth.” Here, Amesbury reads religion in Fargo as larger than the film itself. Consequently, Fargo’s implications and displacements prompt its viewers to contemplate the gaps between “bleakness” and “new possibilities.”

Taken as a whole, the essays in Coen offer a lively conversation (indeed, the contributors edited one another’s essays, and several of the published texts contain helpful intertextual comments) about the ways in which filmmakers, audiences, and scholars all imagine interactions between film and religion. As a compilation of criticism on the Coen filmography, the collection organizes and reframes an expansive bibliography. As works of scholarship on religion, its essays imaginatively connect critical theory of religion with cinema studies scholarship, applied in clever and illuminating readings of the Coens’ oeuvre.

The value of their collective insight is borne out by interpretations of the newest Coen film, Hail, Caesar!, released by Universal Pictures 39 days before the publication of Coen. If these essayists reveal the Coens as filmic theorists of religion, in Hail, Caesar!, these brothers reveal themselves as theorists of filmic religion. In other words, Caesar advances the proposition that, in the modern United States, cinema is sacred.

Chronicling the daily routines of Eddie Mannix (played by Josh Brolin), a corporate functionary of the fictional 1950s Capitol Pictures studio in Hollywood, Caesar contemplates the picture business’s position in American society. The film’s thesis develops in a series of visual parallels that structure the film’s opening and closing sequences, substantiated by intermediate scenes that query the oppositions of truth and fiction. These parallels open and close Hail, Caesar!, and suggest associations between the perspectives produced by religious systems and those set forth by cinematic productions.

The Coens establish these connections in a pair of initial sequences, the first set in a Roman Catholic sanctuary, and the second in a studio screening room. They recapitulate these associations in a concluding camera shot that establishes the Capitol Pictures studio lot in heavenly scale, aligning the filmmaking industry with the manufacture of transcendence.

Hail, Caesar!’s first three images crossfade from one to another in steady sequence. Set to layered sounds of monastic chant and rumbling thunder, a crucifix suspended over an altar gives way to a close-up shot of the bloodied Christ form, which fades to a crucifix in miniature, dangling as a pendant from Eddie Mannix’s tightly gripped rosary. After a brief glimpse of Mannix’s bowed posture inside a confessional booth, the audience sees his wristwatch in close-up, set to an ungodly hour of the late night or early morning.

In this sequence, the Coens almost imperceptibly associate Christian belief and practice with Mannix’s everyday routines of work that prompt spiritual reflection. These images draw the transcendent reference made in liturgical decoration downward to the scale of an everyday devotional object. This pocket-sized cruciform image is then associated with another object of quotidian utility—that of time-telling, strapped to the protagonist’s wrist. In his pocket and on his arm, Eddie Mannix carries a Christian—that is, religious—perspective.

Following soon after the confession-booth sequence, the audience finds Mannix busy at work, seated in a darkened screening room, reviewing dailies from work on production of a passion-play film, entitled Hail, Caesar! A Tale of The Christ. The sequence begins, however, with a full-frame image of a mosaic-tiled Roman aquila, moving quickly to depict a military legion marching home to Rome along the Appian Way. Without indication, the Coens have disrupted the film’s time scale, its imagery shifting jarringly from midcentury Los Angeles to first-century Rome. Slowly, the frame zooms out, revealing that the Roman scene is projected on a movie screen, and is viewed by Eddie Mannix. As the footage plays, the audience meets Baird Whitlock (George Clooney), star of the film, and observes the conversion of Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road. Titles are slated in for an image of the deity, yet to be filmed, “DIVINE PRESENCE TO BE SHOT.”

The unannounced shift of perspective to a film within the film prompts a momentary chronological slippage. Has the setting of Hail, Caesar! shifted backwards in time? In this interruption, the Coens imply a question about filmic representation and verisimilitude. Are the alternate worlds constructed through film real? Do they convey truth?

As Mannix sits before the illuminated screen, ostensibly with that rosary–crucifix in his pocket, he witnesses the work of world-creation and contemplates a conjectural reality in which divine presences require manufacture. The intimate space of Mannix’s private screening evokes the close quarters of the confessional booth. Which space claims reality?

Returning to such quandaries at the film’s end, Hail, Caesar!’s concluding image is constituted by kinetic camera work. The frame moves in a shot that cranes upward from the roofline of Capitol Pictures’ studio lot towards the sky and, in a special-effects flash, displays the names of Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning the closing credits. The camera reveals the tops of palm trees and terra-cotta roof tiles, evoking the ancient landscape recreated on sound stages below, under Mannix’s supervision. There is something special about this site of movie-making. And if the camera movement fails to signal Hollywood’s apotheosis, the Coen brothers plaster “BEHOLD” on the studio water tower depicted at left-center, until the shot’s upward swing hits its lofty target.

These sequences bookend the film’s exposition. Cruciform transcendence narrows to fit in Mannix’s pocket, which he carries into the screening-room-cum-confessional. Inversely, in the concluding sequence, Mannix’s narrowed perspective—by the end of the film squarely aligned with Hollywood and its industry—expands to encompass the heavens. In the plot that advances between these moments of visual comment, the Coens blur boundaries between religion and cinema.

In its principal action, the film unfolds a prolonged meditation on the distinction between reality and fiction, the serious and the frivolous. The juxtaposition comes in almost cloyingly obvious terms. Throughout Caesar, Mannix suffers the insults and travails of catering to starlets and fanning flimsy egos, all the while, a recruiter from Lockheed Corporation pursues him for a lucrative job. Will Eddie choose to persist in underwriting Hollywood fictions, or will he accept a position that deals in the realest realities of commercial flight and hydrogen-bomb testing? This simple contrast—cinema is frivolous, aviation is serious—underscores the dualism contemplated in Caesar. Do films deal in reality and proffer authentic means of reflection, or are they mere entertainments, lulling the masses through studio-spun false consciousness?

By suggesting the filmic medium as a site of religious thought and practice, the Coens stumble onto—or perhaps even intentionally signal—one of the main insights of early twentieth-century worldview-theorist Karl Mannheim. Reflecting on the German term for worldview, Mannheim reasoned that “[i]f…we define Weltanschauung as something a-theoretical with philosophy merely as one of its manifestations, and not the only one, we can widen our field of cultural studies in a twofold way.” Writing in his essay, “On the Interpretation of ‘Weltanschauung’” (1923), Mannheim explained further:

For one thing our search for a synthesis will then be in a position to encompass every single cultural field. The plastic arts, music, costumes, mores and customs, the tempo of living, expressive gestures and demeanor—all these no less than theoretical communications will become a decipherable language, adumbrating the underlying unitary whole of Weltanschauung.

In short, Mannheim saw “worldview” as a concept flexible enough to envelop all of human experience and expression. It provides a useful shorthand, a “synthesis” of meaning and meaning-production. If not a one-to-one comparand for “religion,” “worldview” furnishes at least a close cognate for it, designating ideas and practices that together comprise worlds for their beholders.

In Hail, Caesar! the Coens offer a similar gesture concerning filmic media. Eddie Mannix functions as both a producer and a consumer of movie magic, what the Coens—through voiceover—term a “weave of gossamer.” Mannix facilitates the manufacture of big-budget cinema, but he also enters into the worlds of suspended disbelief at play on screen. In Caesar, the spaces of church and studio remain separate. But the artifice of the altar and the conceit of the cinema overlap. Both produce plausible narrative worlds.

By advancing this claim, Hail, Caesar! exemplifies what, in the edited volume Coen, S. Brent Plate and Elijah Siegler term “filmmaking as an act of world re-creation.” Indeed, in a review published shortly before the release of Coen, Siegler posits “revelation” as the principal category explicated by Hail, Caesar! He finds that the film offers an extended metaphoric passion play, reflecting on “the hybrid natures of film and religion, and perhaps life itself.” If Siegler’s volume asks questions about how the Coens relate religion and film, then Caesar offers a key to unlock their answers.

As Hail, Caesar! draws to its conclusion, the audience sees Mannix confidently stride down the studio-lot alley, no longer overwhelmed by the limitless worlds posited on the soundstages that surround him. Whatever confusion he formerly suffered, Eddie now stands assured of the value and purpose of the movie business.

In voiceover, a narrator intones: “The stories begin, the stories end. So it has been. But the story of Eddie Mannix will never end, for his is a tale written in light everlasting!” Not the mysterious light of logos in the Gospel of John, Mannix’s tale has been told by the Coens in the literal light of filmic projection. But through Hail, Caesar!, these filmmaking brothers project a broader point: in modern American culture, religious and secular worlds slide amorphously between the serious and the frivolous, constructing meaning in confessional booths and screening rooms alike.

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Geoffrey Pollick, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies at New York University, teaches and researches the history of religion in the United States. His work emphasizes religion’s entanglements with political radicalism, the role and dimensions of religious liberalism, critical theory of religion, and the cultural history and historiography of religion. In July 2016, he will join the faculty of Sweet Briar College as Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion.

The post Hail, Coen! Finding Religion in the Films of Joel & Ethan Coen appeared first on The Revealer.

Artwork by Nathan Green

By Ann Neumann

It happened again last month. Yet another journalist, working on yet another article about doctors’ religious sensitivity contacted me. Yet again, I gave my “You’re asking the wrong questions,” response. The journalists invariably deflate mid-call. They think they have an assignment with a solid, irrefutable frame, something like: the work of doctors will improve when they are better versed in a multiplicity of religious beliefs. The journalists have what they think is a practical, tolerant, liberal-minded call for reform, one very much in keeping with the post-9/11 emphasis on “interfaith dialogue.” What could be wrong with more dialogue, more sensitivity? It’s as though they’re looking to expand the collection of uplifting stories Gustav Niebuhr recounted in his 2008 book, Beyond Tolerance: How People Across America Are Building Bridges Between Faiths: Get people of different faiths together, let them discover how much they have in common, and, in this case, health care delivery will improve.

Kenneth L. Woodward wrote in his review of Beyond Tolerance for the New York Times in November 2008 that:

What gives Niebuhr’s book… its few bursts of energy, is the addition of Muslims to the conversation. Indeed, my guess is his search for interfaith understanding could not have found a publisher before 9/11. Since then, inviting Muslims to talk has become an act of mutual protection as much as one of respect for all parties to the conversation.

And so it is with much of the push for religious sensitivity among doctors. The movement for interfaith dialogue that we began as a country after September 11, 2001—for “mutual protection”—has become a tool for addressing a host of social ills, from economic disparity to unequal opportunity. Born out of an effort to dispel the (ignorant and malicious) conflation of all Muslims with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, the new benevolent emphasis on religious tolerance worked much like a blind; if a representative from each of “the three Abrahamic faiths” could be brought to the table, all systemic inequality, racial prejudice, political maneuvering, economic disparity, and historic details could be obscured. “Look! We’re all talking,” became the message. “These Muslims right here at the table with us are rational and sane, so there’s hope!” Those advising interfaith dialogue, or tolerance*, get points for effort and visibility, for their intention to stabilize communication between disparate communities, but the inherent labeling, stratification, and distortion of world politics that can come from interfaith dialogue hasn’t realized true protection and equality.

And it’s certainly not always the right tool for such important tasks. In the case of medicine, it’s very much the wrong one. Here’s why:

Medicine has a diversity problem that won’t be solved by religious (or cultural) sensitivity training. African Americans and Hispanics, to take two minority groups, currently make up more than 25 percent of the population (a number that is rising fast) but only 6 percent of practicing doctors are African American or Hispanic. Which means that a vast majority of doctors are white (upwards of 70 percent).* Studies show that white doctors, for instance, don’t properly treat African Americans for pain. Greater diversity in medical schools would provide huge benefits to the diverse general population, not only by making the education experience broader and richer, but by better serving the needs of patients. Minority patients would have improved access to doctors with similar racial—and perhaps cultural—backgrounds and they would report better satisfaction with care. And here’s the kicker: medical students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds say they intend to work in underserved areas (51 percent of African Americans; 41 percent of Native Americans; 33 percent of Hispanics), but only 18 percent of white students intend to do the same. As the shortage of general practitioners continues, the need for more doctors who abstain from pursuing specialty areas is vital. More general practitioners, more continuity of care. But more importantly, increasing the field’s diversity goes a long way toward solving sensitivity issues, which means that the larger problem at the medical school level is not sensitivity training but diversity. When doctors are more like their patients, the need to teach them what their patients’ lives are like dissipates; patients lives are no longer othered and generalized… because diverse doctors also understand that diversity is infinite, not of describable (and limited) varieties.

That looks like I’m fudging; what does racial and ethnic diversity have to do with religious diversity? Many of the issues that religious sensitivity proponents wish to address are not just religious, they’re cultural as well. Do we really want our doctors to weigh their patient’s values and decide which ones are more important than others? I don’t.

Artwork by Nathan Greene

It is not a doctor’s role to decide what patient preferences are cultural, religious or simply preferences. In the abstract for her paper, “Doctors and Diversity: Using Interfaith Literacy and Interfaith Dialogue to Improve Patient Care,” Concordia College’s Interfaith Scholar, Leslie Bellwood, uses this example: “What if a doctor who is ignorant of Islam’s prohibition of the consumption of pork prescribes a Muslim patient Heparin, a porcine product? Would the patient unknowingly defile themselves, become noncompliant, or even pursue litigation?” Bellwood assumes that any Muslim patient would oppose using Heparin, or any porcine product, because they are Muslim, and therefor jeopardize either themselves or their doctor (litigation) by prescribing it. While patients’ non-religious objections to ingesting certain products may carry less weight for Interfaith scholars, they well may not for patients. The argument for religious sensitivity then is not for full disclosure of prescribed medications’ contents but for doctors to make assumptions about particular patients based on their faith’s doctrines. Neither she nor other advocates are telling doctors to make patients’ decisions for them, but giving doctors a shorthand—faith is a series of categories—lifts the responsibility for full disclosure and places the emphasis on only some.

Bellwood concludes that “interfaith dialogue” works best in educating doctors about religious diversity, “because it is non-conversional at its core and allows for patients to describe their own experiences and expectations, both of which may have a substantive impact on the care that they need or are willing to accept.” But even this statement, that patients and doctors must better discuss “experiences and expectations,” should hold true for all doctor-patient relationships, not just among those with different faiths. By placing the emphasis on a doctor’s understanding (gathered during medical school in what I would assume is a unit or semester-length course that includes an instructor’s summary of the doctrine of primary faiths?) of religious tenants, the patient’s preferences are blurred, subsumed by a survey of their beliefs and practices that may well have little to do with how they live their lives or what they want.

Every faith is riddled with compromise, every believer’s life is an exercise in interpretation, accommodation and choice. By empowering doctors to make assumptions based on broad strokes, we risk the chance that patients’ decisions will be further compromised.

Doctors, according to informed consent and general medical practice, have an obligation to tell patients what all their options are. It’s the role of the patient to decide accordingly. The movement for informed consent in medicine grew out of the 60s and 70s, an era when doctors’ paternalism left limited or no choice to the patient about what treatments they were willing to undergo. Women particularly led the charge to take control over their medical decisions; they were horrified by stories from women who were scheduled for biopsies and came out of anesthesia will full mastectomies, no questions asked, no options given. But medical paternalism will only be eliminated when doctors are required to fully inform patients of what their options are, without bias, without profiling, without assumption. If the movement for religious sensitivity training were to rather focus on a more robust version of today’s informed consent, I would be all for it. But simply pushing doctors to tailor information according to their understanding of their patient’s beliefs is a recipe for less information, not more.

The threat of racial or religious profiling is real and dangerous. In today’s medical delivery environment, doctors’ visits are shorter because of time and financial constraints. Gone are the days of long-term doctor-patient relationships, wiped out by the complications of health insurance, a more transient population, and increased use of hospital emergency rooms and clinics. These shifts in contact between doctors and their patients mean that doctors have little time to parse the intricacies (and idiosyncrasies) of individual belief. Nor should they have to. Their role is to diagnose a problem, recommend and explain all the available treatments, and work with the patient to find a suitable solution.

Yes, patient narratives are lost in today’s examination room hustle. Yes, patient care suffers because doctors don’t have long-term knowledge of conditions and causes. Yes, patients’ stories about seemingly unrelated things can enlighten doctors about underlying ailments. But giving doctors the burden of doing this work from survey-like data on religious beliefs won’t change the dialogue problems that the medical field currently suffers from. Only rebuilding an unbiased doctor-patient dialogue can do that. And it must include much more than sensitivity to varying need, beliefs and viewpoints or we’re simply providing doctors with crib notes on what really matters.

***

* Listen to this fantastic, 14-minute interview with Wendy Brown, talking about her 2006 book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire: http://ec.libsyn.com/p/0/4/8/0480036f3ef28a33/Wendy_Brown_on_Tolerance.mp3?d13a76d516d9dec20c3d276ce028ed5089ab1ce3dae902ea1d06ce873ed9cf5adadf&c_id=1779543

** A minority percent are also Asian. Socioeconomic class of medical school applicants is also a problem, but one that I’ll leave to another day. You can read more here.

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

***

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 Expl

The post Doctors and Religious Sensitivity appeared first on The Revealer.

CHRISTIANITY

Really only because we wanted this amazing GIF front and center, we’re going to start off this month with some stories about Christianity.

One of our most beloved and inspiring heroes, peaceful troublemaker and poet the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, S.J. died this weekend at the age of 94. The New York Times published a long and well told story: “Antiwar Priest Preached and Defiance” and WNYC shared this portrait.

The catalyzing episode occurred on May 17, 1968, six weeks after the murder of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the outbreak of new riots in dozens of cities. Nine Catholic activists, led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a Knights of Columbus building in Catonsville and went up to the second floor, where

Daniel Berrigan

the local draft board had offices. In front of astonished clerks, they seized hundreds of draft records, carried them down to the parking lot and set them on fire with homemade napalm. … In a year sick with images of destruction, from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the murder of Dr. King, a scene was recorded that had been contrived to shock people to attention, and did so. When the police came, the trespassers were praying in the parking lot, led by two middle-aged men in clerical collars: the big, craggy Philip, a decorated hero of World War II, and the ascetic Daniel, waiting peacefully to be led into the van.

“Ammon Bundy’s Right-Wing Crusaders Will Liberate the West or Die Trying” reports James Pogue in Vice.

Two generations of Mormons were raised in the belief that service to the holy mission of the church was synonymous with defiance of federal authority. Statehood finally came, in 1896, but the Mormon duality between mistrust of federal authority and a deep belief in the divine mission of the United States is something church officials have had to deal with ever since. After the fight over polygamy, Mormon leaders reversed their approach, and have since worked determinedly to build an unobjectionable, mainstream church. The Bundy style of spiritual defiance is now a fringe element, but it’s part of a history that no Western Mormons have forgotten, and that a few continued to embrace long after the church moved into the American mainstream. “There are some citizens whose patriotism is so intense and so all-consuming that it seems to override every other responsibility, including family and church,” Dallin Oaks, one of the church’s senior apostles, told a Brigham Young University audience at the start of a wave of anti-federal militia activity in the 1990s. “I caution those patriots who are participating in or provisioning private armies and making private preparations for armed conflict. Their excessive zeal for one aspect of patriotism is causing them to risk spiritual downfall as they withdraw from the society of the church.”

Tara Isabella Burton writes about “Spare the rod: Christian Domestic Discipline and the erotics of religious submission raise the possibility of a new concept of God” for Aeon.

Women I interviewed describe a hunger for submission that blends the spiritual with the profane. They are careful to distinguish their lifestyle from BDSM, whose strictly sadomasochistic elements they reject. In her CDD handbook, Kelley admonishes husbands in order to reassure their wives: ‘You will never gain pleasure from causing her pain.’ Yet in the same guidebook, she writes how a typical CDD husband is nonetheless ‘aroused by her submissive and trusting gesture by placing herself into a position to receive discipline’. The rationale here is predictable: ‘It seems natural that we would be aroused by [gender] roles in their most basic form. There are probably few things that punctuate our most basic roles in marriage more than the dominance and submission of a discipline session.’

Catherine Woodiwiss interviews “The Toast’s Mallory Ortberg on Death, Faith, and Why It’s So Easy to Make Fun of Christians” in Sojourners. 

Woodiwiss: Why do you think it’s so easy to satirize Christians?

Ortberg: You know, I think it’s easy to satirize any in-group you’ve been a part of. I was obviously raised in a very Christian environment, and my first publication for money was actually at the Wittenberg Door — do you remember that? It was the first Christian satire magazine, that very 70s “we’re Christians but we’re funny,” and I did worship music mad libs. Which is like lowest common denominator parody.

In mainstream Christianity in America today there’s this really funny combination where it’s incredibly dominant, it dominates the culture, and also many people within it feel somehow persecuted. Which is a sort of fascinating paradox to watch people engage in. So that’s something that lends itself to humor.

And Mark Hulsether asks “What Happened to the Jesus People” in Religion & Politics.

Whether or we believe such prognostications about the trajectories of young Protestants—and likewise whether or not sex abuse crises will bring down JPUSA—the case of JPUSA is highly interesting to explore and ponder in relation to common wisdom about where the “one way” path of evangelical hippies led them in the long run. Were they really swallowed by the conservatism of leading evangelicals and a fatal decline of Protestant liberalism? Although one book on an idiosyncratic commune cannot settle this question, it can unsettle these assumptions in a fascinating way. In the process it highlights the ongoing promise of various progressive, emergent, and mainline variations on left-of-center Protestantism.

Omri Elisha reviews Anna Strhan’s new book, Aliens and Strangers? The Struggle for Coherence in the Everyday Lives of Evangelicals (Oxford University Press, 2015) in the Marginalia Review of Books: “Onward Christian Strangers.”

The conflicts Strhan unpacks are not the usual mass-mediated controversies like abortion, but everyday ethical and existential conflicts that arise for churchgoers in situations where doing what God wants and doing what seems like the right thing at the time are not necessarily one and the same. This is apparent, for example, in moments when the desire to be a strong Christian “witness” to the world comes up against metropolitan ethics of tolerance, propriety, and non-intervention.

HINDUISM & THE ACADEMY

Elizabeth Redden provides some useful background on”The Religious War Against American Scholars of India” for Inside Higher Ed.

These disputes about the history of Hinduism and India have frequently pitted Hindu believers against non-Hindu scholars — though some Hindu scholars have also been targets of criticism — and outsiders to the academy against insiders. They have tapped into postcolonial anxieties and puritanical attitudes toward sex. Many see the continuing rise of the Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, movement — a right-wing ideology that views India as a Hindu nation — as providing ideas and fuel for the struggle, but not everyone who shares in the suspicion of academe is an ideologue. … 

At the heart of all this is a widely shared sense that Hinduism and the integrity of India are under assault by Western academics. In turn scholars might say they’re the ones under attack. Academics who have written controversial things about Hinduism have reported receiving death threats and hate mail, and the overall level of vitriol in the social media sphere where many of these debates play out is high.

While Wendy Doniger herself one of the subjects in this “war” writes about “The Repression of Religious Studies” for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The argument that only Hindus have the right to write or teach about Hinduism — or, for that matter, that only Muslims should teach about Islam, or Jews about Judaism — threatens to move the academic study of religion backwards. In particular, it blurs the important distinction between interreligious dialogue (in which each faith is represented by the testimony of a member of that faith) and religious studies (in which the faith stance of a scholar of any religion — or no religion at all — is, in principle, irrelevant). Both are valuable; each has its place. But we must take care not to confuse or conflate them.

Lastly, this isn’t necessarily an academic question, but “Is Bushwick’s Holi festival a harmless hippie celebration or cultural appropriation?” asks Sam Corbin at Brokelyn. 

Langerman told us that his idea to celebrate Holi in New York was inspired by watching videos of the celebration in India that he’d seen on YouTube. The event’s first incarnation was, in his words, a “ratchet” indoor party thrown together in nine days and with a modest attendance of a few hundred people. In this fifth year, Langerman’s festival drew a crowd of almost 4,000 revelers over the course of its eight hours.

As far as addressing accusations of cultural appropriation, Langerman was sheepish but unapologetic.

“I try to be as understanding and respectful of their views as possible,” he said. “I understand, given the fact that I’m not Hindu, I’m some white kid who grew up in New York. I understand why that’s bothersome. All I can say is, Hindus figured out the best way to celebrate spring. It brings people together in a really magical way. And the underlying values — breaking down social barriers, coming together, burying old hatchets — those are universal values. I love it so much and think it’s so good that I wanna share it. Maybe I’m not the right guy but I’m the guy who’s doing it.”

POP CULTURE

Kathryn Reklis reviews “The Witch” and writes about “Theological Horror” in The Christian Century.

The theology in a horror movie probably won’t ever be rich enough or nuanced enough to satisfy someone trained in the subject. But horror movies can show us how theological ideas escape the control of churches or theologians and take on a life of their own. The Witch depicts a world teeming with theological imagination. When we experience the power of its folktales, we better understand why they have such a formidable hold on our imagination. We realize that theology is at work in our imaginative cinematic fables.

With caveats for anyone hoping to avoid “The Witch” spoilers, we recommend reading Moze Halperin‘s exploration of “Feminism, Radicalization, and Injustice: The Enduring Power of the Witch Narrative” in Flavorwire.

In the two months following its wide release in American theaters, many people have interpreted Eggers’ The Witch (set 60 years before the trials) as an unquestionably feminist narrative — both because of the gender of The Witch’s oppressed protagonist and the historically gendered implications of witchcraft (and the witch’s reappropriation as a feminist symbol), and because the narrative involves 80 minutes of patriarchal dysfunction followed by an ecstatic post-patriarchal conclusion. However, in a recent interview with Flavorwire, Eggers emphasized that he looked first and foremost to actual period lore as his source — it’s just that past narratives about female shame and culpability now read, at least among non-misogynist pricks, as exactly the opposite. “I wouldn’t choose to be a hardcore Calvinist,” Eggers said, “but I can see how somehow that was a hopeful way of living for those people. But regardless of me trying to come into this without any intentions or messages, feminism is bursting out of all the primary source material, it burst out of the script and it bursts off the screen.”

Shifting gears, Sacred Matters has “Seven Questions for Lerone A. Martin” about his new book, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion, in response to which he explains that:

Preaching on Wax grew out of my own experience with mass media religion and my dissertation research. I was raised in a home where mass media religion and the accompanying spiritual commodities were a constant. African American and white televangelists occupied spaces of unquestioned authority in our household. I attended Oral Roberts University for my first year of college where this worldview was further affirmed. I grew up thinking mass media religion was the lifeline of authentic Christianity.

However, I discovered that my religious experience was very peculiar when I transferred to Anderson University and matriculated to Princeton Theological Seminary. Many of my peers were unfamiliar or worse disgusted with the spiritual commodities I cherished as essential and the religious broadcasters—icons I had always believed represented the pinnacle of Christian ministry—I viewed as religious authorities. As I entered graduate school, I was drawn away from said faith commitments, even as I remained very interested in learning more about the history of religious broadcasting in America. In particular, I was curious as to how religious broadcasting and commodification became so prominent and revered in some faith traditions and almost invisible and reviled in others. This, I decided, would be my dissertation project.

And Joseph Winters reviews Martin’s book Preaching on Wax in “For the Record” over at the Marginalia Review of Books.

Preaching on Wax seeks to understand “why a critical mass of African-American ministers, like Reverend [James] Gates teamed up with phonograph labels to record and sell their sermons and why black consumers eagerly purchased them.” By examining this partnership, Martin hopes to show how ‘phonograph religion’ re-shaped African-American Christian practice. While students and scholars of black religion have examined the importance of print, radio, and the Internet, there has been a paucity of scholarly engagements with the phonograph as a significant medium of black religious practice and identity.

Speaking of which, Anthea Butler tells the story of “”How Prince Set Fire to My Catholic Girlhood” in Religion Dispatches.

Prince is dead. Long live Prince.

The morning after Prince’s death was announced, I woke up, remembered he was dead, and buried myself under my duvet. I’m still in shock. How could that beautiful, complicated body be gone?

Prince, the demi-god of sexuality, lust, and yearning, seemed immortal. Watching him perform was like seeing a fusion of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and a black preacher with an anointing. Prince’s body was fused to his guitar, and his dancing was the uninhibited dance of possession—not by an evil spirit, but the spark of divinity. His moans, arcs, and cries in songs like “Darling Nikki” and “When Doves Cry” cut deep. His lyrics, even the most libidinous ones, pointed to a union of desire and the divine. No other artist tapped into spiritual truth and multiple orgasms at the same time the way Prince did. He didn’t even have to say the words—his moans said everything.

Listening to Prince made you all hot, bothered, and anxious. Especially anxious.

For a different gospel canon, check out “‘This Barren Land’: Bob Dylan’s Gospel Variations” by Max Nelson in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Starting with Time Out of Mind, you could argue, Dylan made a sustained effort to capture the peculiar morbid tone of the old spirituals: their obsession with fretting over, guessing, or confidently asserting what comes after death. At the start of what would become one of his most celebrated songs, Washington Phillips asked himself what “they” were “doing in Heaven today.” He gave himself a quick answer: “I don’t know, boys, but it’s my business to stay here and sing about it.”

ISLAMOPHOBIA

It’s not every day that a fashion blogger decides to address prejudice and bigotry, so we were pleased to see this feature from Leandra Medine on her popular blog, Man Repeller. “Real Talk: 7 Muslim Americans Open Up About Islamophobia.”

“I think that realistically if something’s going to change, it needs to come from the media. The media does what it needs to do to sell and they know that fear sells. And this is such an overarching statement but to make change, we can’t look for reasons to be afraid. If people were more willing to see the good – yes, there are bad Muslims but there are also good Muslims – and to focus on that, that would make our society stronger.”

We were proud to see our friend Simran Jeet Singh interviewed along with a number of other Sikh community leaders interviewed in this segment for The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: “Confused Islamophobes Target American Sikhs.”

Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books“How did we end up here?” in response to Charlie Hebdo’s malicious and malignant editorial by the same name.

It isn’t clear whether France’s values are being upheld or perverted by such a far-reaching defence. As Arun Kapil put it to me, ‘the laïcards are the new fundamentalists.’ The 1905 law on the separation of churches and the state, which established laïcité, was based on the neutrality of the state towards religious institutions; it not only stripped the Catholic Church of its powers, it also freed Jews and Protestants to practise their faith more freely. Today’s defenders of laïcité, on both the right and the centre left, have abandoned any pretence of neutrality. It’s no wonder that, for many Muslims in France, including the silent majority who seldom if ever set foot in a mosque – Charlie’s ‘very large iceberg’ – it seems like a code word for keeping them in their place.

JUDAISM

Maurice Chammah writes beautifully about “My Father’s Aleppo: A Syrian Jew’s exodus and return” in Guernica. 

Over the last few years, I have been constantly asked by other people how I feel about “what’s going on in Syria” (they always use that phrase), because of my heritage—because of my father. I never know how to answer. It doesn’t feel right to claim a particular sadness over what I know is saddening everyone, and the question forces me to confront the fact that I speak with the power bestowed by my father even as I wonder what he might have said.

At these moments, I wish I could see my father’s reaction. I want to know what he’d make of the footage of Aleppo crumbling, of the Great Mosque he once photographed now reduced to a heap of rubble; would he say, “Look what we have done?”—would he consider himself a Syrian, still? Or would he say, “Look what they have done?”

And we enjoyed “Sigal Samuel: The Mystics of Mile End” an interview with Claire Schwartz in Guernica, also.

Last week, a good friend said to me, “You don’t have any spiritual practice nowadays, right?” I just looked at him, “What do you mean? Of course I have a spiritual practice. It’s called reading and writing fiction.” I think the fiction of it is what I loved about spiritual texts all along, growing up in the orthodox Jewish world—although I didn’t realize it until much later. When I was little, I was taught that every word of these texts comes directly from the mouth of God. Even with medieval rabbinic commentators, like Maimonides—every word that he said was basically from the mouth of God.

Just as we liked following as Dan Barber asked “Why Is This Matzo Different From All Other Matzos” for the New York Times. 

Convinced that the matzo I’d tasted must be proof not just of a higher understanding of agriculture but also of a higher understanding of deliciousness, I asked the rabbi if he believed that any of the kosher laws ended up producing better-tasting food.

“No. Absolutely not,” he said. “It’s just kosher law.”

How do you argue with a rabbi? Consult another rabbi. I called Rabbi David Woznica, who had shepherded me through years of high-holiday observance, and asked the same question.

“No,” he told me. “I doubt it’s the primary thinking behind it. We don’t know the primary thinking behind it. And, truth be told, that is less important to me. I think the ultimate reason to observe kosher law is because God said so. When we say that the purpose of the law is to do X, Y and Z, then we’ve removed the holiness of God in that law.”

Was I getting caught up in my own mishegas? I sought out other rabbis and scholars on kosher law. No one, not even a Jewish grandmother, would connect kosher to flavor. (One person pointed out the opposite: Passover is about remembering suffering; the matzo is supposed to be flavorless.)

And appreciated Sandra Fox explaining “What Jews Kvetch About When They Kvetch About Bernie Sanders” in the Marginalia Review of Books.

Mr. Sanders will not appeal to all Jews, because they are a diverse group with wide-ranging views on both American and foreign policy. If American Jews are going to debate this presidential election in the press and in communal spaces, they would be better served focusing on policy rather than on policing Mr. Sanders’ expressions of Jewishness. But if the debate about Mr. Sanders’ Jewish identity must continue, it should translate into a self-aware process, in which Jews consider Mr. Sanders, and by extension Simone Zimmerman, in the broader scope of their experience in America. The boundaries of what being “Jewish enough” looks like continuously evolve. The historical precedent for these debates should remind Jews that their institutions and dialogues must evolve, too.

Speaking of Sanders, as a Jewish Vermonter herself, our editor was all too willing to click on the link for a story about “How the Back-to-the-Land Movement Paved the Way for Bernie Sanders” by Katie Daloz in Rolling Stone.

Far from being an eccentric anomaly, Bernie is in fact a classic example of a distinct, specific, historical phenomenon: the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. The quirky details of his early bio — buying 80 acres of Vermont forest in 1968 and renovating an old sugarhouse into living quarters — are in fact shared by thousands of ex-urbanites across the country during the same period. My own parents moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a northern Vermont hilltop in 1971 and, following advice from the residents of a local commune, began building the house in which I was raised, a geodesic dome.
…
Noticing so many of their peers rushing for the boondocks, two Yale Law students decided to explore the potential implications. In a 1970 article, they considered the feasibility of a large number of people migrating to a single state “for the express purpose of effecting the peaceful political take-over of that state through the elective process.”
…
In a “you can’t make this stuff up” twist of historical coincidence, an early draft of the original article published in the Yale Review of Law and Social Action was reviewed by the journal’s associate editor: Hillary Rodham. She reportedly dismissed the authors’ ideas as “mental masturbation.” If it seemed that way at the time, a little bit of distance lends the proposal a kind of eerie prescience.

For some more background on Daloz’s excellent-looking new books (we just got our copy in the mail) do check out her piece in Literary Hub: “The Other White Flight: When College Kids Went Back to the Land”

The height of the commune boom was brief but it had a tremendous lasting impact—not, as many assume, simply on American spirituality or communal organizations alone (though both of those are true), but more profoundly: on kicking off the biggest, most widespread urban-to-rural shift in American history. “Not since the fall of Babylon have so many city dwellers wanted to ‘return’ to the country without ever having been there in the first place,” wrote one observer in 1972.

And if you still haven’t had enough idealism, give a look at Ed Simon‘s story on “Five Hundred Years of Utopia” over at Jacobin.

This wide embrace can be disorienting. For those on the Left, what is to be done with Thomas More, the knighted communist, the canonized radical? To what More, and to what version of utopia, should we orient ourselves? Has “utopia” become at best an empty signifier, an outmoded concept in a time of legislative horse-trading? Or can it still be a universal homeland to which we set sail?

And his well-timed piece on “Mayday’s Demise and the Rise of Our Gloomy Empire” at Religion Dispatches. 

Fairly or not, the Calvinists of Plymouth and Massachusetts have often been conceptualized as the forefathers of our sexual conservatism, our xenophobia, and our break-neck work ethic. In this understanding Morton is seen as both alternative to, and forgotten promise of, what a different American utopia could have been. As literary critic Leslie Fiedler wondered, “what would have happened if it had survived, this beatnik colony in the seventeenth-century New England woods, presided over by university Bohemians?”

OTHERS & ELSEWHERE

The times we live in: “A Satanist Explains Why Ted Cruz Is Not, in Fact, Lucifer.” Slate‘s Mark Joseph Stern interviews Satanic Temple spokesman and co-founder Lucien Greaves.

I really think it’s indicative of a destructive, harmful, archaic way of thinking, in which you can demonize somebody for the symbolic religious structure that they maintain and hold dear. We have our own values, which we think are very humanistic and pro-social. Satan speaks clearly to our deeply held beliefs as the opposition, the rebel against tyranny. That, to us, is what Satan represents. So it’s not that we worship evil or cruelty or would look fondly upon a disgusting shithead like Ted Cruz.

Ann Neumann wisely asks, “Is aid in dying humane or sacrilegious?” in The Guardian. 

The idea that a patient’s last days are imbued with special meaning continues to resonate with many, both inside and outside the church. It’s an idea that has been fostered among end-of-life care workers and society at large, but one that many suffering patients reject as romanticization or sacralization of their pain.

Roy Scranton writes powerfully about”Choosing War” for Dissent.

“Moral injury” turns out to be an empty sophism, more useful for David Brooks-style cant than for serious thought about war or morality. With it, you can imply some airy recognition that something went wrong with America’s most recent military adventure but still advertise your support for “the troops,” all while dodging the indelicate question of who exactly might be responsible for injuring whom.

…

You don’t have to imagine: that’s the very conversation we’ve been having these last fourteen years about war. And as long as we continue having the same conversation, talking as if war were a fact of nature and not a political choice, we’re going to stay locked in the same wartime mentality. As long as our government keeps showing the world that Iraqi lives don’t matter, Afghan lives don’t matter, Muslim lives don’t matter, and Arab lives don’t matter, our police will keep drawing the same conclusion about black lives. Until we reckon with the things we’ve done, we will find no peace, because we will not have owned up to the fact that war is not “nature” but a choice, a choice we keep making again and again.

Ben Joffe takes us “Tripping On Good Vibrations: Cultural Commodification and Tibetan Singing Bowls” for Savage Minds.

As Tibetans continue to discuss the potential meanings and consequences of these sorts of cultural commodification pizza-effect-meets-cultural-appropriation scenarios, singing bowl enthusiasts continue to strongly resist acknowledging their own ‘off-label’ use of the bowls. As an anthropologist, rather than throw down some gauntlet and declare that singing bowls are or aren’t Tibetan, I would much rather focus on the complicated social and political lives of these deceptively mundane/deceptively sacred objects. If the anthropological literature on religious movements has taught us anything it’s that cognitive dissonance need not spell disillusionment and cosmological collapse. Rather, cognitive dissonance, epistemic ‘murk’, and excess themselves spur reformulation, and promote innovation, religious creativity, and change. Which totally feels like a vibe anthropologists can get into.

And Chris Bodenner brings us this excellent series,”Choosing My Religion: The changing experience of faith among young people in America, from The Atlantic. 

Over the next two weeks, we will be sharing stories about young Americans’ religious choices. These will be stories for people interested in politics, dating culture, legal battles, and the many rich textures of ritual observance, among other topics. Because religion stories are not just stories about religion. They are studies in how people understand and navigate their identities, and the conflicts that might ensue. They are ways of understanding communities, dissecting politics, and critiquing systems of power. Likewise, religious choices are not just choices about whether to be religious. They show how people try, or don’t try, to coexist, and how they grapple with the uncertainty of living. The way young Americans wrestle with these choices will not only shape their futures. It will shape the future of the country.

Master Xianfan sits next to robot Xian’er as he poses for photograph at Longquan Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Beijing, April 20, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

Reuters shares this one: “Robot monk blends science and Buddhism at Chinese Temple.”

Master Xianfan, Xian’er’s creator, said the robot monk was the perfect vessel for spreading the wisdom of Buddhism in China, through the fusion of science and Buddhism.

“Science and Buddhism are not opposing nor contradicting, and can be combined and mutually compatible,” said Xianfan.

Emily Byrd tells the story of “How the First Church of Cannabis Got Serious” for Narratively.

The inclusive group has been meeting since June 2015, when the doors of The First Church of Cannabis first opened, following the passage of a controversial statewide religious freedom law – though it is safe to say legislators did not intend for the new law to usher in a church like this.

Despite the creation and branding of the “Cannaterian” religion – which embraces the physical and spiritual nourishment gained from the cannabis plant – the people in the pews come from vastly different faith traditions, and TFCC is not simply a dispensary for those looking to get their buzz on, as no smoking is allowed within the church’s walls.TFCC’s main pillars of beliefs include such simple admonitions as “don’t be a troll on the Internet” and “don’t drink soda,” and its official seven pillars could be bootlegged from a generic wellness listicle: “Live-Love-Laugh-Create-Grow-Teach.”

And last of all, we couldn’t not tell you about this one: “Indiana woman claims ultrasound shows Christ on a cross: ‘His legs are crossed and everything’” reported by Tom Boggioni for Raw Story.

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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: Profiling, Prince, Peaceniks and more! appeared first on The Revealer.