By Don Jolly

Adult Books

It’s been a good couple of weeks for Hillary Clinton, if you read the papers.

“Papers,” in this usage, is a polite euphemism for television news, magazines, and the sometimes-unwieldy websites maintained by the surviving mass media of the last century. Since newspapers themselves are too weak to hold on to the title, I think it’s time for repurposing.

Here’s what they had to say:

According to journalist Jonathan Martin, writing in the New York Times last week, Clinton delivered a “commanding performance” at the first democratic debate of the season, offering “crisp answers to nearly every question” while demonstrating an “an aggressiveness her rivals did not seem ready for.” John Heilemann, writing for Bloomberg Politics, was less measured in his assessment. “The first Democratic presidential debate of the 2016 cycle was a complete and utter rout,” he said, in his first story on the subject. “[Clinton] didn’t just win or even win decisively. She kicked ass from here to Sunday.”

The good news kept coming. On Tuesday, October 20th, Clinton’s only serious correspondent for the democratic nomination, Vice President Joe Biden, announced he would be sitting out the race. And yesterday, in her appearance before the House select committee on Benghazi, Clinton offered eight hours of Teflon testimony to a roomful of irate and ineffective congressmen. She has emerged from these public tests not just unscathed — but stronger.

Biden, in his remarks from the Rose Garden, promised that he “will not be silent” in the months ahead, however. “I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully, to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”

Later in the speech, he did so — by swiping, “clearly and forcefully,” at Hillary Clinton. “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies,” he said, offering a clear retort to one of those “crisp” answers Clinton offered at the debate — when she named “Republicans” as the enemy she was proudest to have, scoring enthusiastic applause.

Barring an unforeseen disaster at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Des Moines this Saturday, this may be the week that Hillary Clinton locked up her party’s nomination — leaving Biden, and the rest of her critics, to snipe from the sidelines.

On Facebook and Twitter, aggrieved Bernie Sanders supporters have been registering their dismay at the Clinton victory narrative since the debate. In its immediate aftermath, online polls registered Sanders as the overwhelming winner — including a poll posted by the hosts of the event at CNN. Sanders did better on Twitter, too — after the debate, he gained over 40,000 new followers, around double the number gained by Clinton. To some of his supporters, ignoring this data reeked of conspiracy.

There were accusations that CNN deleted their own poll to hide the truth (they didn’t), and that their parent company, Time Warner, may have been behind it all… Intriguing stuff, but not exactly Satanism and spy satellites. Today’s conspiratorial world demands a more creative class of theory.

My attempt is as follows:

Americans have a lot of blind spots when it comes to politics. The biggest, and the most obvious, is the confusion of “events” as they are instantiated in media with “events” as they occur in the world. All media is an imperfect lens, shaped by both the internal rhetoric of its content and the method of its transmission. Popular political thought, as it appears in the papers, is a literary style with centuries of history and orthodoxy and accepted wisdom. Clinton, in both her debate performance and her subsequent triumphs, has performed within the expectations of this field — embodying its perfect, polysemous and unflappable political hero. She looks like a winner, in other words, because she is behaving like those who have won before.

In explaining why, precisely, Clinton “kicked ass from here to Sunday,” Bloomberg‘s John Heilemann made no effort to disguise the aesthetic basis of his argument. When Clinton said she was a “progressive who likes to get things done,” the commentator praised the line’s concision. It “captured her political philosophy accurately, authentically, and at bumper-sticker length,” he wrote. Its craft, not its content, was the recipient of praise.

Jonathan Martin, in the Times, focused on the thread of Clinton’s debate performance which drew her closer to the sitting President. “She portrayed herself as Mr. Obama’s partner,” the journalist reported, “the candidate who would perpetuate and enhance the president’s legacy.” It was a complex strategy, Martin implied. Not only did drawing close to Obama help Clinton align herself with a President still popular among democrats, it served as a veiled dismissal of Biden. The President, Martin implied, can only have one “partner” at a time.

In the aftermath of the debate, Martin explained, “many Democrats unaligned with Mrs. Clinton or her rivals began describing the closing, if not the slamming shut, of a door on Mr. Biden.” Whoever those “many Democrats” are, it’s a sure thing that Jonathan Martin — and maybe Joe Biden — agreed with them. In any case, the door did close.

There is a conspiracy at work here, of course — but it’s a conspiracy of taste, not finance. Bernie Sanders, at the debate, spoke the way his supporters expected him too — he railed against Wall Street, avoided political niceties (with one significant exception) and sketched, through aggravated tones, an image of the United States as a society on the brink of catastrophe. He spoke, in other words, to the internet — and on the internet, he won.

Clinton sharpened her one-liners, perfected her double meanings and played to the pundits — and she won, too, albeit in a different and more influential arena. The Democrats are, at the moment, a far more cohesive party than the Republicans, and much more responsive to the expectations of American political rhetoric. The democratic collations of constituents are largely settled, the mechanisms of their party politics adamantine. For now, at least, they gain nothing by embracing a new rhetoric – no matter how well it’s working for Donald Trump.

Fifteen million people watched the Democratic debate on CNN. About 2 million people read (or at least receive) the New York Times John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s “With All Due Respect,” an excellent political news program, is “ranking #4 in online video viewers among all political news outlets,” according to the head of Bloomberg Television, Al Mayer. Their show for the 22nd of October, posted on YouTube yesterday, has 1,134 views as of this writing. This video, by a videogame playing Swede, has over 200,000 – and it went up two-hours ago.

There are over three-hundred million people in the United States. Most of them have no idea what kind of week Hillary Clinton is having.

It’s only ignorance if you read the papers.

The post Dispatch #5 – October 17-25, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

“The Magic Circle” by John William Waterhouse, 1886.

Taking advantage of late October’s spike in eerie interests, Alex Mar’s Witches of America and Stacy Schiff’s The Witches explore the myths and the magic that have secured witchy women (and occasionally men) a permanent place in our collective imagination. While the former provides a view of contemporary witches and the mostly Mugglish lives they lead, and the latter digs deep into the dark arts of our frequently haunted past, together they suggest that the common caricatures of witches are much less interesting than the reality.

And Ruth Franklin takes up the problem of witch hunts in her article for Harpers: “Trial and Error: Three centuries of American Witch Hunts.

Why the events there transpired the way they did is an urgent historical question, for the simple reason that it is not merely a historical question. The most astonishing thing about the episode — and the reason why explanations that depend on its historical moment, like Schiff’s, ultimately feel insufficient — is that it was not an isolated incident. Minor witch panics took place in Philadelphia in 1787 and again in Salem in the late nineteenth century. More alarmingly, the menace, like a virus, has proved capable of evolving to suit its circumstances. In the 1950s, we had McCarthyism; the witch trials served so well as a natural allegory that key details of the events in Salem did not need to be altered in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible.

We also happen to quite like the work of Henry David Thoreau which is why we’ve following a debate in which Kathryn Schulz threw the first punch with “Pond Scum: Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia” in The New Yorker.

I am not aware of any theology which holds that the road to Hell is paved with doormats, but Thoreau, in fine Puritan fashion, saw the beginnings of evil everywhere. He contemplated gathering the wild herbs around Walden to sell in Concord but concluded that “I should probably be on my way to the devil.” He permitted himself to plant beans, but cautiously, calling it “a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation.” Only those with no sense of balance must live in so much fear of the slippery slope. Robert Louis Stevenson, writing about Thoreau in 1880, pointed out that when a man must “abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself.”

Which was answered with a rejoinder from Jedediah Purdy, “In Defense of Thoreau: He may have been a jerk, but he still matters” for The Atlantic.

But, contrary to Schulz’s conclusion, his “signature act” was not “to turn his back on the rest of us.” He did not sit by the pond and try to forget about South Carolina—which would have been easy enough to do; most people did, minus the pond. To imagine him retreating is to forget the most obvious fact, which is why we remember him at all: that he was, consummately, obsessively, a writer. He turned to his fellow citizens again and again, in essays, lectures, and books. He could not forget about them.

Followed by this excellent synthesis from Alda Balthrop-Lewis in Religion Dispatches: “Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him ‘Selfish.‘”

Henry David Thoreau

We’re always grateful for a chance to hear from Talal Asad, so we really appreciated Hasan Azad‘s new interview with him, “Being Human,” in The Islamic Monthly.

The notion of European civilization as the most progressive, the most ingenious, and the most productive civilization the world has ever known, already presumes a certain kind of hierarchy. And, to the extent that many people maintained in the past (and perhaps continue to do so in the present) that much of this is owed to Christianity, we have an imaginary construction and not one that is real. But this is certainly the way people thought of “humanity” in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as being represented by its best and most forward looking, the most moral part of that totality. That implies a hierarchical relationship. And there may be some kind of perverted logic to wanting to share with the whole of humanity the disasters that are threatening the world on the grounds that “we are all one.” The threat is indeed to all humans, regardless of their differences. Yet animal life too is threatened with annihilation so “humanity” is not an adequate category here. Nevertheless, the inclusion of non-human animals asobjects of annihilation underlines how absurd it is to make “humanity” the agent of global disaster.

Another favorite writer, Marilynne Robinson recently had a conversation with none other than President Barack Obama in the New York Review of Books.

Tell me a little bit about how your interest in Christianity converges with your concerns about democracy.

Robinson: Well, I believe that people are images of God. There’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding. What can I say? It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level. And it [applies] to everyone. It’s the human image. It’s not any loyalty or tradition or anything else; it’s being human that enlists the respect, the love of God being implied in it.

And we’ve long been interested in the past and future of the Parliament of World Religions (and strongly recommend reading The World’s Parliament of Religions by Richard Seager for background on the phenomenon). As for this year’s parliament, we suggest checking out these appraisals:

Kimberly Winston is happy to see the”Parliament of World Religions convenes in Mormon country at last.”

What a difference 122 years make. On Thursday (Oct. 15), when the Parliament of the World’s Religions — a slight adjustment of the name was made a century after the first meeting — convenes in Salt Lake City, it will not only feature a slate of Mormon voices, it will sit in the proverbial lap of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its global headquarters only a five-minute walk away.

Simran Jeet Singh reported on “What I Learned at the Parliament of the World’s Religions” for Faithstreet. 

Overall, attending the Parliament of the World’s Religions was an incredibly powerful experience. In a world where we spend so much time reflecting on how religion can be a dividing force, I was reminded of why religion is important to me personally and how it can serve as a force to bring people together. It is this message, more than anything else, that I am taking to heart as I walk away from the gathering this weekend.

And Brian Pennington asks”Peace, Love, and World Religions?” for Sacred Matters.

I came to the Parliament expecting some peacenikky sentimentality, the usual uncritical endorsements of neo-liberal tolerance, and a naïve embrace of the World Religions Paradigm that I wrote about in this space a few weeks ago. What I found instead was a carefully organized and well-funded movement with a truly global grassroots reach rapidly gathering steam (at the closing session it was announced that the Parliament will now meet every 2 years rather than every 5-6). I have been in the religion business too long to believe that any discursive formation that looks vaguely religious could be unproblematic or wholly benign, and I fear the internal contradictions and conflict that will boil over as the movement grows. But it’s been an awful year: the savage beatings of Muslims (falsely) accused of eating beef in India, beheadings and mass executions of Christians, Yazidis, and everyone else by ISIS, a vile Islamophobia machine flush with cash in the US, and now, Jerusalem…again. If the history of religion is just an extended story of one group imposing its version of a “true faith” on another, at this particular point in history, I’m pulling for these folks. Especially if there’s free lunch.

Photograph from the first Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893

And while we’re on the topic of world religions, you can listen to and read an interview with Oprah about her new TV series, “Belief” on NPR.

Winfrey’s network has been going through tough times as it struggles to find a broader audience.

“I assumed that the audience from the Oprah show would just automatically come to OWN, when in fact, most of them didn’t even have the channel, or have the cable package, or understood what that meant,” Winfrey says.

She hopes to change that with the Belief series.

We were pleased to see a couple of new articles out in the religion writing sphere by our writers this week, including “On Dreams and Disconnects: the Ambiguities of a Liberal Sage” by Suzanne Schneider on Michael Walzer’s The Paradox of Liberation 

From this fact, it may seem like The Paradox of Liberation is an unabashed liberal defense of the secular nation-state that chooses to double down on its foundational claims rather than re-examine them. In fact, Walzer’s prescriptions for combatting religious militancyare not those typically forwarded by his liberal peers. This brings us to one of the book’s central peculiarities and indeed frustrations: the fact that Walzer both dismisses the post-colonial position and then borrows from it heavily.

And “Let There be Light: Handwritten Draft of King James Bible Reveals Secrets of Its Creation” by Ed Simon for Religion Dispatches

And yet Miller’s discovery has reminded us of something crucial: no matter how immaculate it may be, writing is always a process of revising, cutting, and rewriting. Professor Miller emphasized this when he said that the find “really testifies to the human element of this kind of great undertaking.”

Lastly, just because: Elvis’ Chi and the Metaphysics of Martial Arts by Adam Park for Religion in American History. 

Chi power, however, was only available to the most mentally rigorous of martial arts practitioners. It took time, patience, and right mind. For help, understudies and colleagues looked to Elvis, who led karate seminars in meditations “before and after class.” As one participant claimed, “It was almost like a spiritual event for me. I heard him speak of Bible verses and parts of the Bible that just came to life when I heard him speak them.”

***

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

Bernie, Bagels, Buddhas, and more! (October 9, 2015)

Heaven, Human Rights, His Holiness, and more! (October 2, 2015)

Poetry, Puritans, Politicians, and more! (September 11, 2015)

Wax, Wits, William James, and more! (August 21, 2015)

Saints, Slavery, Celibacy, and more! (August 14, 2015)

Pundits, Prophets, Politics, and more! (August 7, 2015)

Senselessness, Stereotypes, Slayer, and more! (July 31, 2015)

Apps, Apologies, Apocalypse, and more! (July 15, 2015)

Heathens, Hymns, and Holy Men (July 8, 2015)

#LoveWins, #TakeItDown, #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches (July 2, 2015)

Racism, Ramadan, Romanian Witches, and more! (June 25, 2015)

Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! (June 19, 2015)

Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more! (June 11, 2015)

Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more! (June 5, 2015)

TLC, THC, OMG! (May 29, 2015)

Mad Men, Mormons, Monks, and more! (May 22, 2015)

Candles, Kombucha, Crocodiles, and more! (May 15, 2015)

Lindsey Graham, Garland, TX, God’s Plaintiff, and more! (May 8, 2015)

Pamela Geller, Prophesy, PEN, and more! (May 1, 2015)

Talal Asad, Taylor Swift, Turbans, and more! (April 2015)

Passover, Prison, Pop Music, and more! (March 2015)

The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and  more! (February 2015)

Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! (January 2015)

#black lives matter, #Illridewithyou, TL;DR Bible Stories, and more! (December 2014)

Hasidim, Mormons, Borges and more! (November 2014)

Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza, and more! (August 2014)

Prison Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby (July 2014)

***

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Elvis, Thoreau, Oprah, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

I’m a bad Buddhist. I don’t meditate every day, and some weeks, I feel lucky if I find the time to meditate at all. I go to zendo in rare spurts, a few weeks on, months off. I kill mosquitoes, flies, and moths. I drink, though no longer to excess. I’ve managed to rationalize continuing to eat meat. I’m often impatient and snarky with people, angry at them for blocking traffic, for being rude or thoughtless, for moving through the world in a haze, unconscious of the life flowing around them. Look out! Look up! Just look! I want to shout. I am suspicious and proud and sometimes cruel, inconstant in my compassion. I don’t steal and I don’t lie, but I’m vain about that; after all, honesty is one of my best qualities. And yet for all my vanity, I’m a hypocrite, too: I dissemble and misrepresent and omit.

And then there’s the whole “I” problem. Not only do I fail in all these all-too-human ways, fumble the Dharma, wander from the Buddha way, spread unnecessary suffering and sometimes even wallow in it, but I feel guilty and ashamed that I—marvelous “I,” wonderful “I,” oh-so-special “I”—have fallen so far below my image of myself, this ideal of a perfect Buddhist me, the beautiful butterfly “I” that will erupt when I become a Bodhisattva. So far below! And even more: I’m guilty about my lack of devotion. “I” have career plans, worldly ambitions, hopes for the future outside and beyond achieving spiritual enlightenment. I believe in this “I.” I won’t give it up. I want this “I” to succeed, in this world, in this particular cycle of pain and illusion, even if it means—as it does—making decisions that I know full well contradict the Dharma. The path is clear, but I do not take it. The light shines, but I turn my face away. I remain willful, ignorant, suffering, anxious, dissatisfied, every day tying myself to the wheel of Samsara. I know it. I keep doing it.

Another confession: I’m a bad environmentalist. I teach at Wesleyan, and I drive there from Brooklyn once a week, some two hours each way, adding my little bit to the mass of atmospheric carbon dioxide heating the planet. I’m flying all over, too, for academic conferences, journalism assignments, and a book tour: this year alone I’ve flown to Greenland, Russia, Canada, and Ireland, in addition to less polluting trips to the west coast, Miami, Texas, and so on. My partner composts her food scraps, dragging a bag of coffee grounds and onion skins to the park every week, but I don’t bother. I recycle only when it’s convenient. I buy coffee in cardboard cups and throw the cups away. Perhaps worst of all, I eat meat. Not just sometimes, not on rare occasions, not only expensive, “sustainable,” organic, but almost every day, and from the worst places: tuna and salmon from the corner sushi restaurant, turkey sandwiches from the bodega, beef in my Pad See Ew from the neighborhood Thai place, a whole roast chicken from the grocery store. As with my failure to be a Bodhisattva, I know it’s wrong, but I do it anyway. There is absolutely no way that eating industrial meat is ethical, whether from a standpoint of compassion toward our fellow sentient beings, a perspective concerned with minimizing greenhouse gases, a point of view concerned with environmental and economic justice, or even the bare hope of sustaining human life on Earth.

This all strikes me as pretty ironic, since I just published a book that tackles global warming as an ethical problem, and does so from a position that could be seen as more or less Buddhist (though I consider my position less Buddhist than pantheist, in the tradition of the heretical Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza). That book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, argues that we need to make a full ethical reckoning, in the deepest philosophical and existential sense, with the unavoidable fact of catastrophic climate change. “Anthropocene” is a term some scientists and thinkers have advanced suggesting that human beings have entered a new geological era, one characterized by the advent of human beings as a geological force. The problems we’ve created by transferring vast amounts of carbon transfer from underground into the sky are going to affect life on Earth for millennia.

Within a few generations we will face average temperatures 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today, rising seas at least three to ten feet higher than they are now, and worldwide shifts in crop belts, growing seasons, and population centers. Within a couple hundred years humans will be living in a climate the Earth hasn’t seen since the Pliocene, three million years ago, when oceans were 75 feet higher than they are now. Once the methane hydrates under the oceans and permafrost begin to melt, we may soon find ourselves living in a hothouse climate closer to that of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, approximately 56 million years ago, when the planet was ice free and tropical at the poles. We face the imminent collapse of the agricultural, shipping, and energy networks upon which the global economy depends, a large-scale die-off in the biosphere that’s already well underway, and our own possible extinction as a species.

What’s even more shocking is that it’s probably already too late to stop it, even if the world’s political and economic elites were willing and able to radically transform our global fossil-fueled economy, which they’re not. Scientists and environmental organizations have been working to alert politicians to the problem of global warming and to decrease carbon emissions for more than three decades, and emissions have only increased. According to the World Bank, 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming is now inevitable no matter what, even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide worldwide today. For reasons I discuss in Learning to Die, none of the political or technological solutions on the table—a carbon tax, cap-and-trade schemes, carbon capture and sequestration, decarbonizing the atmosphere, renewable energy, nuclear power, and geoengineering—are likely to work, and almost certainly not quickly enough to preserve global capitalist civilization as we know it. The next several decades are likely to be grim, brutish, and bloody, even nastier than the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been already.

The situation in which we find ourselves today is more dire than any other moment in human history, and we simply cannot wait until we become perfect Bodhisattvas or perfect environmentalists before we respond. We must act now, as flawed, failed, flailing selves. At the same time, the situation we find ourselves in is beyond our power to change. The planet will get warmer. The ice caps will melt. The seas will rise. The global, fossil-fueled, consumer capitalist civilization we live in will come to an end.

It’s precisely in recognizing this paradoxical situation that the insights of Buddhism can help us move forward. If the bad news we must confront is that we’re all gonna die, then the wisdom that might help us deal with that news arises from the realization that it was going to happen anyway. This self, this existence, this “I” was always already dying, always already dead, always already passing from moment to moment in the flux of consciousness, matter, and energy, nothing more than breath. And if I can understand my very own self as impermanent, transient, and insubstantial, how much more insubstantial is a civilization, a “way of life,” a set of habits and structures and prejudices built and believed in and sustained by oh so many insubstantial selves? Breathe in, breathe out. Watch it come. Watch it go.

Buddhism articulates the riddle posed by human mortality to human consciousness in a way that shows us that the riddle’s answer lies not in evading the great ending, the terrifying void, but in accepting the truth that our great ending is merely another iteration of the innumerable endings we live through each day. This insight is taught in the Four Noble Truths and in countless koans and Dharma talks, and it is experienced in the practice of meditation, whether you practice every day or once a week or once a month. Meditation interrupts the endless feedback loops between consciousness and language, between consciousness and being, not disrupting them as one might with a drug or madness, but opening a space, a pause, a higher order function of attentive compassion. In practice, one learns to accept finitude, mortality, and the great ending, and in practice, one learns to cultivate the patience, compassion, and peace that lead to freedom.

I’m a bad Buddhist and a bad environmentalist, stuck in a world that promises nothing but suffering and death, heat waves, resource wars, and rising seas. The odds that I have enough time to attain Buddhahood in this life, to become the perfect environmentally conscious Bodhisattva, are basically zero. The odds are also basically zero that I, personally, will ever be able to do anything to stop or even slow down global climate change. It’s almost certain that I will spend my life failing at the most important things I can imagine doing—failing my friends, my family, my society, and myself. Then I’ll die.

The question I face, the question we all face, the ethical question at the heart of human life and the ethical question Buddhism helps us see at the heart of any possible response to the global climate crisis, is not whether we will succeed or fail, but rather: how will we choose to live out our inevitable failure? Bad Buddhist, bad environmentalist, flawed person, struggling, mortal, confused human ape—now what?

The first thing I need to recognize is that this isn’t just my condition but the human condition, and the second is that having a choice at all is a privilege. Only very few of us have the freedom to choose how we fail. The rest have our failures forced on us, and so long as the freedom of the few requires the oppression of the many, freedom itself remains an illusion. When the exercise of my freedom demands my complicity in denying that same freedom to others, I am forced to take on behaviors and beliefs that support enslavement and oppression, and I lose my freedom in the very same moment I think I gain it. Thus we arrive at the paradoxical truth of the Buddha way: the only possible free choice we can make is to choose to work for the freedom of all humankind, indeed of all sentient beings. Failure may be inevitable, but recognizing that is the first step in becoming free.

***

Roy Scranton served in the United States Army from 2002 to 2006. He is a doctoral candidate in English at Princeton University, author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (City Lights, 2015), and co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War (Da Capo Press, 2013). He has written for The New York Times, Boston Review, Theory & Event and recently completed a novel about the Iraq War, WAR PORN, forthcoming from Soho Press in fall 2016. Twitter @RoyScranton.

The post Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure appeared first on The Revealer.

“I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!” – Frans de Waal, Our Inner Ape

A few years after its release, the cognitive scientist Armin W. Geertz published an essay on Daniel C. Dennett’s 2006 book Breaking the Spell. In the book, Dennett put forward some contemporary research in Geertz’s specific field of cognitive science of religion to make the case for a scientific approach to religion that he saw as amenable to atheism. Geertz’s response was entitled “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” He blasted Dennett not only for his careless treatment of religion—what he called “an inelegant, polemical attack”—but for his brittle depiction of brain-mind science, which he identified as “a catastrophe” and “a disservice to the entire neuroscientific community.”

Geertz’s essay was on my mind while I read Hector A. Garcia’s Alpha God. Some of Geertz’s criticisms might also apply to Garcia—though Garcia spends more time with evolutionary psychology of behavior (particularly the literature on sex and aggression) than he does with belief. Like Dennett, Garcia’s book tends to represent a fluctuating, contentious set of conversations—also known as science—as a settled body of fact. And like Dennett, he frequently presents religion in the form of a dismissive caricature. Though Garcia does not ultimately conclude that religion is inherently evil, he wants us to be “selective” in choosing which elements of religion we admit into civil discourse (like New Atheist Sam Harris, he is bullish on meditation). He insists that he is “skeptical” that so-called “Abrahamic faiths” can ever be separated from what he identifies as their sinister and destructive elements.

What are these destructive elements? Garcia argues that God is modeled on a particular figure from our evolutionary heritage: the alpha male who dominated our pre-human ancestors through tyranny, taking power, territory, and sexual access to females as his sole prerogative. For Garcia, this is the blueprint of every God and god across all the religions of the world. Moreover, we can see the effects of this mentality reverberating through all of the projects and creations of religion, from patriarchy and oppression to territorial war and terrorism. Much of the work of Garcia’s book lies in linking horror-movie vignettes from the history of human religion to evolutionary psychological accounts of the origins of certain unsavory behaviors. Rather than seeing religions as ideological constructs or antiquated explanations of reality (as other atheist critics of religion might), he sees them as a chrysalis that captures a figment of our evolutionary past and replays it again and again in the history of our species, to disastrous effect.

But more than the obvious overlap between Garcia’s and Dennett’s books in terms of topic and method, I was thinking about Geertz’s fierce response to Breaking the Spell in a more general way. Why is it that the genre of popular writing that applies scientific frameworks to humanistic topics—perhaps especially religion—has such a strong tendency to go shooting off the rails? Like Geertz, I am heavily invested in the notion that we need broad, durable platforms connecting science and the humanities. For exactly that reason, I share his frustration with books like Dennett’s and Garcia’s that undermine the credibility of this project by wheeling out iffy methods and overhasty conclusions. From the early attempts to graft Darwinism onto anthropology to the sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s (of which this book is an echo), why does this project—which starts from the best intentions and attracts the best minds of academia (of which Garcia is no doubt one)—so often end in “catastrophe,” in Geertz’s word?

Maybe we can detect a clue in Garcia’s method. Early in Alpha God, Garcia notes that one of his data sets for the case he is making against religion is “world history.” In noting that religion has been spotted skulking around the scenes of the crimes of patriarchy, genocide, and imperialism, he turns to a dizzying and impressive range of historical and textual case studies, from the lust and violence of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an to the sexual exploits of Pope John XII and the god Krishna to the bloody Spanish conquest of the Americas to the 30 Years War to the tit-for-tat Muslim-Hindu purges in Gujarat to Aztec penis modification.

But there is a serious liability in this approach. In mobilizing such a massive data set, we can tell any story we want, precisely because religion is a background figure almost everywhere in human history. A case for religion’s involvement in oppression is as plausible as a conspiracy theory that notices that every human society with a monetary system eventually goes to war: it takes two broadly identifiable features of human societies (religion + oppression; currency + aggressive expansion) and assumes that they must have a causal relationship. And it arranges the data in such a way that historical moments that don’t share those features recede into the dark. Hence the long history of religious concern with the welfare of members of other groups, such as the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, religious alliances with workers, and the recent surge in environmental activism on the part of religious believers, are almost invisible in Alpha God. These categories of religious activity aggressively contradict the alpha god thesis—even to the point of overruling the claim that religious morality is usually in-group directed at the expense of the out-group. In bringing every dimension of human history and culture into its purview, Alpha God has enough material to justify any accusation, even after carefully paring away the innumerable data that don’t fit its narrative.

One could say the same about Garcia’s treatment of evolutionary biology as he attempts to produce an interdisciplinary account of human religious and political behavior. Evolutionary biology taps the entire animal domain as its material to think with. But Garcia does not present us with the productive and interesting debates taking place among researchers in evolutionary theory about, say, comparative behavior across species lines, or the relative power of natural selection (compared to other forms of selection, such as sexual selection) to shape human and animal minds, or the divergence between gene-centric and multi-level models of evolutionary analysis, or the ongoing mapping of the multi-dimensional continuum linking “nature” and “nurture” in human and animal behavior. Instead, Garcia hunkers down in the massively reductive early version of Richard Dawkins’s model of gene selfishness, trotting out the usual examples of gorilla harems and infanticide to insist on a one-track account of human behavior: that the male priority will always be, whether overtly or covertly, to seize power, sex, and territory and maximize his offspring, and that women will always be subtly hypnotized by these shenanigans. This is the core of Garcia’s alpha god theory.

However, as critics of the gene selfishness model such as Stephen Jay Gould (who calls it “Ultra-Darwinism”), Niles Eldredge, Steven Rose, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, and Frans de Waal have pointed out, these examples make up only one facet of the massively complex story of sex, reproduction, and child-rearing among animals. The gene-selfishness approach replicates the flaw in Garcia’s approach to religion: by putting every species on earth at his disposal, Garcia can tell any story he chooses about sex, violence, and power among animals—in this case, the classic “males pursue quantity and females pursue quality” myth. Animal species in which males exercise more selective mate choice or take on child-rearing responsibilities—not to mention species in which male and female roles and desires are simply not so clear-cut (see, for instance, Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow for a massive catalog of the sexual diversity of animal species)—are unmentioned. As de Waal has noted, we have been led astray by allowing our conversational agenda to be set by chimpanzees rather than, say, bonobos, which are far more focused on sex (in various queer, frequently non-generative configurations) than the acquisition of power. Nor does the observation that primate species tend to stratify into dominance hierarchies shed any special light on our own political and religious dynamics. Gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and baboons—our closest living primate relatives—create societies, form families, and have sex in very different ways. The practices of one species have no necessary programmatic force for other species, even in the same genus.

As Geertz notes in his complaint against Dennett’s characterization of the cognitive science of religion, “[c]ognition is not just about the brain. It is more precisely and more correctly about interacting brains. It is about brains that cannot even use their highly evolved capacities without supportive cultural symbolic systems—language for one thing, but also the myriads of other symbolic systems, among them religious symbolic systems.” To identify a tendency in a population is a far cry from locating an essence: it shows only that some brains, under some circumstances, tend toward certain behaviors. Data points such as these are interesting, and Alpha God is full of them. But to make meaningful analysis out of them requires judicious consideration of what they can and can’t do.

Throughout Alpha God, Garcia suggests that we need to raise the correlation between religion and our ancestral impulses to the surface so that we can move beyond our “primate motivations for violence.” This reflects another flaw in the selfish gene paradigm, going back to Dawkins’s 1976 book: it talks as if the way to build better societies is to cease to be animal. But as de Waal writes, “[s]ocial animals relate to each other at a level far more basic than scientists previously suspected. We are hardwired to connect with those around us and to resonate with them, also emotionally. It’s a fully automated process.” We need to recognize that this “rational” departure from animality is itself deeply inscribed within our animal blueprints. At the same time as we note that primate (and other animal) societies are marked by moments of domination and violence, we must give other primates ample credit for their ability to form complex societies in which social goods like nurturance, altruism, care, and affection form the structuring bonds. If our selfish genes really predispose us to optimum reproductive strategies like murdering the children of our rivals, why do only a slim minority of species present this behavior? Far more often we see social animals aiding, nurturing, cooperating, and accompanying each other. Our efforts to steer our societies away from war and oppression are not a renunciation of our animality, but an amplification of certain aspects of our animality. The values that we use to guide these processes are themselves eminently animal. Religion raises them up no less than it spotlights the aggressive and the domineering facets of our animal being.

Alpha God tries to unwrap one of the puzzles of our time—the link between religion and violence—using productive scientific tools. It’s important to keep Garcia’s background as a psychiatrist specializing in trauma—especially combat PTSD—in the foreground here. One cannot doubt that Garcia’s work healing combat veterans and other PTSD patients motivates his effort to try to root out the sources of war.

At its heart, Alpha God puts forward a worthy argument that we need to see the features of religious belief and practice as meaningfully connected to our evolutionary history. In this, Garcia is absolutely correct and is mounting an important defense against popular and scholarly claims that religion is somehow transcendent of our bodies. Even our brains are, distinctly, artifacts of evolution that are tuned to resonate with any number of stories in the phylogenetic history of our species. There are—without question—moments where divine beings and religious people exhibit characteristics of some alpha males in some other species. Inasmuch as insisting on the link between religion and our evolved bodies is the spine of Garcia’s book, his point is well-taken. A lean reading of Dennett’s book shows that it makes the same case: the “spell” of Dennett’s title is not religion per se, but the notion that religion is somehow beyond the remit of scientific exploration.

That said, in making a bolder argument about the specific cast of God’s temperament, this book ultimately overlooks the extravagant complexity of its subject matter. The question with popular academic books always comes down to whether the necessary flattening of a subject that takes place when it is treated for depiction to non-specialists—especially if the work draws on an interdisciplinary spectrum of source material—justifies dropping the usual academic modesty. I think it does. But the example of Alpha God is instructive in the way that an argument that is built on a broad base of worthy scholarship (which is about the accumulation of perspectives, not the accumulation of facts per se, let alone the accumulation of truth) can ultimately ramify, at the macro level, into a massive betrayal of its subject matter. It overlooks the extraordinary complexity of religion—a category that is not only world-encompassingly broad, but that has been constituted in many different ways at many different times (see The Territories of Science and Religion by Peter Harrison) —and also undermines the dynamism and rigor of evolutionary science.

To Dennett’s argument that religion carries with it the side effects of war, oppression, and obscurantism, Geertz rightly points out that these are, in fact, “the time-proven side effects of being human.” Garcia’s error is the same. Even more than Breaking the Spell, Alpha God takes the entire data set of human history and pulls out a narrative that makes religion the perpetrator of a long list of horrors and atrocities. And he’s right—religion happens to be in the vicinity of all of those crimes. The problem is that religion is in the background of almost everything we do and have done, bad and good. To blame the evil acts of our history on religion is as absurd as blaming them on politics, sex, food, or any other constant of the chronicle of our species. And it’s as absurd as the claim by wide-eyed champions of religion that we can award religion exclusive credit for morality, science, art, or civilization. We could splice together a Zapruder-film narrative that shows religion lurking in the crowd by the grassy knoll for any of these, too. Fundamentally, the semi-scientific criticism of religion creates a reed-thin account of religious history, correlating religion only to its searingly negative aspects and ignoring everything else that what-gets-called-religion has going on, from the admirable and the glorious to the banal, the boring, and the irrelevant.

***

References

de Waal, Frans. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.

Geertz, Armin W. “How Not to Do the Cognitive Science of Religion Today.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008): 7-21.

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Darwinian Fundamentalism.” The New York Review of Books. June 12, 1997.

Harrison, Peter. The Territories of Science and Religion. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004.

The post How Not To Do What We Always Do appeared first on The Revealer.

“…he and his wife have determined that it is in the best interest of the Infant Doe and the two children who are at home and their family entity as a whole, that the course of treatment prescribed by Doctor Owens should be followed…” —Circuit court for the County of Monroe, State of Indiana, “In the Matter of the Treatment and Care of Infant Doe,” 1982

Kurt Kondrich was 40, a 20-year veteran of the police force in Upper St. Clair township ten miles south of Pittsburgh, when his second child, Chloe, was born. As she took her first breaths, the doctor diagnosed that she had Down syndrome, one of the most common genetic disorders in the country.

Chloe’s diagnosis was a blow to Kondrich and his wife, Margie, who had a four year-old son at the time. “When Chloe was born, the doctors told us all the things Chloe couldn’t do,” Kurt told a Pittsburgh area newspaper last year, “Then we saw the specialists, and they started telling us all the things that Chloe will do: She’s going to play Frisbee, she’s going to run. They were a light in the darkness. It’s so important for parents to hear that.”

To help other families with Down syndrome, Kurt spearheaded a new bill that would require the Pennsylvania Department of Health to provide parents with more adequate information about Down syndrome. Known as the Down Syndrome Prenatal Education Act, it was passed in Pennsylvania last year (50-0 vote in the Senate; 196-4 in the House). The bill may seem innocuous, even a great achievement—certainly it did to most regional reporters at the time, who billed Kondrich’s effort a “labor of love.” Then you catch that Prenatal in the bill’s title. Kurt, whose brother is a Roman Catholic deacon, has been vocal about why he took up activism: to prevent abortions.

Chloe Kondrich meets with Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik

“When my daughter was born, I was deeply disturbed by the fact that they kill off these kids. Chloe is nothing but joy, and she has already brought more good to this world in 11 years than most people do in 80 or 90 years,” he told the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh website. Bishop David Zubik told the site, ”People with Down syndrome have a special place in my heart. They don’t hide their feelings. People with Down syndrome are a gift to society. They teach us the finer things in life. They teach us that, as Antoine de Saint-Euxpery [sic] wrote in ‘The Little Prince,’ it is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

Kondrich and his allies have employed a rhetorical dichotomy that doesn’t actually exist. By claiming that one either cares about the lives of the disabled, or wishes them dead, gives cover to anti-abortion activists who ideologically oppose women’s constitutional right to make the best decisions for their health and families. It immediately characterizes women and doctors as corrupt, immoral, deadly. It asserts that laws must be passed to protect society from them.

***

On Good Friday in 1982, at Bloomington Hospital in Indiana, a woman, forever known in court documents as Jane Doe, was giving birth. Her husband, her doctor, Walter Owens, and a nurse were with her. It was a routine birth. Baby Doe was born at 8:19 pm and Owens placed him on his mother’s stomach. Immediately “Owens saw he had a catastrophe on his hands,” wrote The Chicago Tribune’s Jeff Lyon two years later. “You look beautiful,” Mrs. Doe told her newborn, according to Lyon. “You look different from my other two, but I love you anyway.” Dr. Owen recognized the signs of Down syndrome. While he delivered the placenta, a nurse cleaned the child and attempted to clear his esophagus of amniotic fluid but was unable to insert the catheter. The child had what’s called an esophageal artesia, a physical deformity that complicated eating and breathing.

Owens consulted with two other doctors. All three met with the husband and wife to explain the child’s defects. One suggested Baby Doe be transferred to a nearby hospital for surgery. The second concurred, saying that the baby would die without surgery. Owens, who knew that the procedure would be painful and that subsequent operations would likely be required, all of which would not address the child’s Down syndrome, suggested that they had an alternative: they could refuse consent for the surgery and let the child die. At 10 pm the parents told the three doctors that they had decided not to treat the child. One doctor threatened a court order and called the inaction of the parents infanticide. Owens and the parents decided that the child should be kept comfortable. The Does got a lawyer. The hospital’s attorney, who feared prosecution, decided to consult a judge, who could order treatment and take custody away from the parents. The judge, lawyers, doctors, and parents all met in a storage room on the hospital’s sixth floor that night. Writes Lyon:

The questions to be resolved were of a significance strangely out of proportion to the surroundings–the makeshift conference room with its ring of chairs. At issue was nothing less than whether parents ever have the right to refuse live-saving treatment for their children and whether a life of handicap is so abysmal as to warrant its termination at birth.

Only rarely in American jurisprudence had such questions been raised. On the few occasions on which they had, the courts had almost invariably ruled against the parents and in favor of life. But in those instances the doctors had always been lined up against the parents.

 In Bloomington, however, it was a different matter. There existed a strong–one might say vehement–difference of clinical opinion as to what the best course of treatment was. An experienced and much-esteemed physician, Dr. Walter Owens, was willing to go on record with the medical judgment that the child was better off dead.

The judge ruled that Mr. and Mrs. Doe could let the child die.

The nurses revolted. The Does, who had two other children at home, hired private nurses. Catholics, they had the child blessed and they named him Walter after Dr. Owens. Under pressure from local right-to-life organizations, the judge asked the County Department of Public Welfare to review his decision. The committee agreed with his ruling. Owens, made uneasy by phone calls from the hospital, decided to sit with the child to prevent intervention. As he did, two doctors attempted to intubate and kidnap the child. Baby Doe died six days after he was born. Writes Lyon, “Cause of death: chemical pneumonia, due to the regurgitation of his own stomach acid,” a result of the esophageal artesia.

On October 9, 1984, the Baby Doe Amendment to the federal Child Abuse Law was passed, making it illegal to withhold fluids, food, and medically indicated treatment from a newborn. Instead of establishing the initial plan for anonymous hotlines in every hospital that could be used to report neglect, the law ultimately placed the responsibility for reporting on hospital ethics boards, with the threat that hospitals lose federal funding if they don’t comply.

“Currently, if a case involves parents or their doctors choosing to withhold treatment,” writes Jack Resnick at The Embryo Project Encyclopedia at Arizona State University, “the review boards are obligated to report the case to child services as an instance of medical neglect. Under the rules, withholding treatment is only permissible if the newborn is irreversibly comatose, if treatment would only prolong its death, or if treatment would be inhumane. Furthermore, the law also holds that a physician’s decision for neonatal care cannot be based on quality of life, or other abstract concepts.”

Two years after the death of Baby Doe, Mrs. Doe gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

***

Down syndrome, also known as trisomy 21, occurs when patients have a whole or partial third copy of chromosome 21. Those with Down syndrome experience delayed development of physical abilities, permanent intellectual disabilities, and exhibit distinct physical features. John Langdon Down, who first described Down syndrome in 1866, “referred to his subjects as Mongoloids or Mongoloid idiots on the basis that their faces, with slightly slanted eyes, resembled those of people from Mongolia,” writes Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree.” Those with Down syndrome once lived only to the age nine or ten, but over the decades, medical advancements have lengthened life expectancy to fifty or sixty years. Yet Down syndrome is a disorder with a broad outline; some patients are born with additional birth defects, epilepsy, or heart disease, some require extensive medical treatment throughout their lives. Others are able to live independently and hold jobs.

Currently, blood screening tests are used in the first or second trimester of a pregnancy to determine whether a fetus has Down syndrome or other defects, but they are not definitive and can be inaccurate. A positive screening for Down syndrome (particularly when a mother is over 35, there’s a history of disability in the family, or she has a previous child with a disability) often leads a doctor to recommend an invasive screening—amniocentesis, in which a large needle is inserted into the woman’s belly. This test carries risks like miscarriage (1%) and is used with caution. Yet many states have banned abortion after 20 weeks (second trimester); some allow exceptions for the mental and physical endangerment of the woman. Some states, motivated by anti-abortion sentiment, have even banned abortion 20 weeks after fertilization, a time that is well before infant viability and controversially outside Roe v Wade’s restrictions. But new testing procedures are quickly increasing the accuracy of early detection, without the invasiveness.

Even still, with a positive diagnosis of Down syndrome, it’s difficult for families to comprehend what life with a disabled child would be like. Amy Julia Becker wrote in a 2010 editorial for the New York Times’ Motherlode blog that it took her two years to potty train her daughter, Penny, who has Down syndrome. It took only one month to potty train her other child, who does not. She also notes that Penny required countless doctor visits, physical therapy sessions and independent exercises, services that she readily acknowledges she had the time and resources to take on.

In comments to Becker’s article, most parents of children with Down syndrome applaud her bravery. “We need to fully embrace diversity!” wrote Call me Mom. “This embryo is a unique human life in its earliest stage of development. This is a fact, not an opinion.” But some attest to the long-term challenges like the financial costs of life-long care, the horrors of institutionalization, fears of what will happen when they die before their disabled child, and the effect that such use of time and resources have on other children. Katz in Tennessee wrote: “For 10 years, in our home, that caregiver was my mother, and the incredible difficulties my brother’s care represented broke her spirit, resulted in a lengthy period of depression in middle age, and had lasting repercussion[s].” Katz ultimately calls her brother a blessing. Many posts express a deep distrust and disdain for doctors and the medical profession. Many comments shame women who make the decision to abort; faith in God’s plan (and our moral obligations) is a common refrain.

But there’s something else striking about the comments: many don’t consider this a woman’s decision, but society’s. As though one bright line—no abortions for Down syndrome, ever—works for all women and their families. Any concerns for financial and emotional challenge are swept under the pretty rug of sentimentality. It’s assumed that biology (something akin to God’s wisdom) is incontrovertible. That women are mothers first, that the standard is unconditional love, that the privacy of a decision only exists if that decision is the one for birth. So few commenters ask what quality of life means or acknowledge that it matters; no one considers what is wrong—or right—with eradicating a defect; accusations of infanticide go unquestioned and undefined.

The most compelling and prevalent ideas about Down syndrome are deeply entrenched in conservative norms: a mother’s unconditional love; women are incapable of making their own family planning decisions; hardship is a blessing; abortion is wrong. Every socially conservative assumption about women and their traditional roles is enforced by the claim that women who wish to decide for themselves are killers.

***

Tamar Lewin of The New York Times reported in August that between 60 and 90 percent of all fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. Kondrich, who consistently emphasizes the 90% statistic in his advocacy, has embedded his anti-abortion activism in the bodies of disabled children. And at the cost of women’s rights.

But the Pennsylvania bill, called Chloe’s Law, is not new or unique. Lewin notes that seven states (Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota) currently have laws that ban abortions based on gender selection; some also include race. And in 2013, North Dakota “made it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion because of fetal anomalies, including Down syndrome,” Lewin writes.

When seen against the backdrop of a glut of state-level bills that impose increasing restrictions and delays on abortion seekers and providers, Chloe’s bill is yet another attempt to curtail the constitutional right to abortion. This fall, the legislature in Ohio—where women are already required to receive an ultrasound and asked if they wish to view an image of the fetus before an abortion—is expected to pass a law like North Dakota’s. Two-thirds of the lawmakers in both houses are endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee. Abortion rights advocates say such laws are unconstitutional, both sides admit that they will be nearly impossible to enforce.

But it’s the use of disability that makes the laws in North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Ohio a new phase in anti-abortion legislation. In my research on end of life issues, I’ve documented that Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo and director of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, has long called himself a disability rights advocate, stating that his sister, who was in a persistent vegetative state with no chance of recovery, was “severely brain damaged.” For more than a decade, he’s been a regular speaker at “pro-life” events across the country.

Now anti-abortion organizations, both at the state and federal level, are bringing disability rights groups on board for their cause—a move that gives anti-choice legislators cover. To outside observers, this rhetorical and activist move may seem rights-focused and humane. What’s so bad about information? About raising awareness for the disabled?

To bioethicists, doctors and reproductive rights activists, however, it’s a new way to inject ideological laws into the patient-doctor relationship. Under the guise of disability rights, these laws target women with shame, distrust and intrusive restrictions. Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio told Lewin, “This is interference with a medical decision following a complicated diagnosis. For us, it comes down to who makes the decision and who’s going to have to live with it. Not knowing the family and the circumstances, the legislature can’t possibly take into account all the factors involved.” Arvind Suresh at the Genetic Literacy Project wrote in August, “Debate about what information must be given to patients was active even before these laws were passed–and they centered around one thing, abortion.” Other criticism of the bills is that the materials provided by the states are not standardized and that they fail to cover the spectrum of Down syndrome (thus painting a rosier picture for parents than may be expected), and that they upend the ethical standards for genetics counselors.

In an August article titled, “Chloe’s Law: A Powerful Legislative Movement Challenging a Core Ethical Norm of Genetic Testing,” for the journal PLOS Biology, bioethicist Arthur Caplan wrote that advocates are succeeding in “ending the nominal goal of value-neutral counseling and setting the stage for further normative shifts in clinical reproductive genetics as counseling expands because of cell-free testing.” Such laws are getting ahead of advanced genetic testing that is expected to detect defects in fetuses earlier and less invasively in the coming years.

As women continue to have children at older ages, the chance of Down syndrome increases. According to the National Down Syndrome Society, the rate of infants born with Down syndrome is 1 in 2,000 for mothers at the age of 20; 1 in 1,000 by age 28; 1 in 200 by age 38; and 1 in 100 by the age of 40. By getting ahead of more advanced testing and the increasing age of mothers, these laws escalate the discussion of a woman’s privacy rights to an all-out concern for what anti-abortion activists see as a eugenics-like effort to eliminate those with Down syndrome.

Articles have appeared at The New York Post and Huffington Post with titles like, “The end of Down syndrome,” and “In Defense of Down Syndrome Children…Like My Son,” claiming that soon children will no longer be born with the disease, a tragedy to many parents who fear that what little support and understanding society now provides will evaporate. “It’s no secret. People with Down syndrome have been targeted for extinction,” wrote Gabe Lyons at the Huffington Post in 2012.

Chloe’s father, Kurt Kondrich, who writes a column at the hyper-conservative website, RenewAmerica, wrote a post last year titled, “The case for a Prenatal Endangered Species Act (PESA).” It closed with, “As genetic testing rapidly advances isn’t it time we pass a Prenatal Endangered Species Act (PESA) to ensure the instrument of abortion does not cause the extinction of individuals our misguided world labels ‘defective’? One day soon the endangered species categories may include autism, ADHD, OCD, depression, dyslexia, shortness, brown eyes, and the list goes on and on.”

Even otherwise equality-driven advocates are susceptible to the claim that fewer Down syndrome babies means fewer rights and resources for the disabled population. Andrew Solomon, author of the award winning Far from the Tree, has reinforced this idea. In the book he writes, “The more such pregnancies are terminated, the greater the chance that more will be terminated. Accommodations are contingent on population; only the ubiquity of disability keeps the disability rights conversation alive at all.” It’s an uncomfortable logic—one that skips over the diversity of disability and the disturbing lack of available resources for the current population.

***

Sarah Palin and her son Trig.

The legacy of the Baby Doe case is vast and confounding, but it is durable. The assertion that eugenics-minded doctors and infanticidal parents, unwilling to raise
imperfect children, must be stopped has entranced many “pro-life” groups. It’s an assertion that caused the passage of the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act by President George W. Bush in 2002, against the protestations of doctors and reproductive rights advocates that it confers the coveted status of personhood on fetuses, in contravention of Roe v Wade. The legacy of Baby Doe can be seen in the slippage from a discussion of when life begins to an assertion that aborting fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome is anti-Down syndrome lives, an assertion that refutes the potentiality of a fetus and its current legislated status as not yet a living person. It can be seen in the whitewashing of Pennsylvania’s law as pro-disability when it’s really anti-women. About Pennsylvania’s new law, Kondrich said, “This isn’t a partisan law. It’s not a pro-choice or pro-life law. It’s a pro-information law.” Yet in other conservative or Catholic media, he rails against abortion.*

The legacy of Baby Doe can be seen in the parade of children with Down syndrome on political stages (see Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum**), like adorable and exonerating props, as their parents pursue policies that mean certain hardship for those with Down syndrome and their families. Instead of advocating for laws and services that enable the lives of the disabled, they turn disabled children into weapons against the rights of women. It’s a shameful advocacy that legislates one group’s autonomy against another’s, the lives of women against those of their fetuses. But our history of shaming women, their bodies and their decisions is hard to escape.

October is Down syndrome awareness month. It’s 25 years since the passage of the American with Disabilities Act and our social services—and social attitudes—regarding the disabled are still a gross disaster. Disability, particularly Down syndrome, may be the perfect new wedge issue in the eyes of some, but the lives of those families affected by Down syndrome would be better served in other ways. Ways that legitimately support the disabled community and don’t undermine women’s health and decisions.

***

*Journalists, do your research!

**Santorum’s child, Bella, has been diagnosed with Trisomy 18, not Down syndrome.

Past “The Patient Body” columns:

Memorials and Body Counts

How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine

Impossible Purity

In the Blood

Pathological Sex

Choosing Childlessness

Old Man in Winter

Oh Canada!

End-of-Life Books, 2014

The Great Organ Shortage

Tending to One Another

Moral Highs and Lows

Old Philosophical Certainties

On Suicide

Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.”

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

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‘s book, The Good Death, will be published by Beacon Press in February 2016.

The post Using Disability appeared first on The Revealer.

Edward George Ruddy Died Today

On Tuesday, the thirteenth of October, the Democratic party held their first primary debate of the season. It was, as Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley explained in his closing statement, “a very, very different debate from [the one] you heard from [the Republicans.]”

“On this stage,” he continued. “You didn’t hear anyone denigrate women, you didn’t hear anyone make racist comments […] and you didn’t hear anyone speak ill of another American because of their religious beliefs.”

He was right. The night was a performance of conspicuous civility. Bernie Sanders elected not to hit Hillary Clinton on the subject of her private e-mail server, speaking on behalf of “the American people” who are “sick and tired” of the scandal. O’Malley won some rare applause by describing the opposition’s frontrunner as a “carnival barker,” in contrast with the statesmen sharing his stage. Overall, the night focused on the issues as the candidates themselves choose to articulate them: Sanders railed against oligarchs on behalf of the middle class, Hillary Clinton attacked the National Rifle Association with poised intelligence and Jim Webb rambled in a low, gravely whisper about Vietnam.

After the debate, Sanders stuck around for a backstage interview with CNN, the network responsible for broadcasting the proceedings. He echoed O’Malley’s point. “I think the American people want substantive discussions of substantive issues,” he said. “Look: the middle class in this country is disappearing. We have twenty-seven million people living in poverty. We have a campaign finance system which is corrupt. The rich are getting richer, everybody else is getting poorer…

“I think the point needs to be made … while there are differences of opinion up here, this was a serious, substantive debate on the major crises facing our country — unlike the Republican debate, which was naming calling and which seemed like a food fight.”

CNN made out reasonably well regardless. According to Brian Stelter at CNN Money, the debate “averaged 15.3 million viewers,” making it “the highest-rated Democratic debate ever.”  Of course, the Republican debate broadcast by CNN last month “averaged more than 23 million viewers,” making them “the highest rated new ‘show’ of the Fall TV season,” but some drop off had been expected — after all, “Republican and Democratic debates [are] ‘apples and oranges,’” Stelter concluded.

I watched the debate with some neighbors in Brooklyn. Nancy, a stand-up comic and ardent Sanders supporter, agreed with Stelter and her candidate of choice — the democrats were for real, she said. “They’re classy and they respect each other. They’re on this other level — governors, senators, a secretary of state…

“The Republicans are all under qualified,” Nancy concluded grinning ear-to-ear, “and the Democrats are all overqualified!” Victory, it seems, was in the bag.

The sideshow is the sideshow. But the relevant authorities agree — our country will, most likely, remain in capable hands.

But That Was It, Fellas

In our last dispatch, I began talking about the basic rhetorical strategies of the internet underground — the anarchic dodge and weave that the users of massive message boards have employed for more than a decade to stay ahead of mass media’s grinding orthodoxies. This year, and this election cycle, have seen those techniques of rhetoric congeal into political positions stable enough to serve as the engine of a dissident alternative media.

For now, they shape the race.

On the morning of the 13th, hours before the Democratic debate, the New York Times ran a beautiful piece by journalist Jennifer Steinhauer about the impossibly task facing congressional Republicans in appointing a new Speaker of the House, to replace the disgraced John Boehner. The internet was frustrating the process, she said.

“House Republicans and their staff say millions of Republican primary voters have their opinions shaped by sites like Beitbart.com,” Steinhauer explained, citing a popular rightwing media platform. But Alex Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief, claimed to wield no control over his readers. “Our goal is not influence,” he told the Times. “It is reporting and highlighting stories important to grass roots conservatives… to those in Congress and on the national political stage who want to better understand the constituency’s interests and worldview, we feel Breitbart News is a good place to start.”

And it is – if you want to understand the “interests and worldview” of a diverse coalition of reactionary voices from both political and apolitical corners of the internet. Among this grouping, the internet natives posting on places like 4Chan are particularly well represented. Breitbart has, over the last few years, made common cause with the internet’s most deliberately perverse.

The loose alliance between “grassroots conservatives” and the internet underground announces itself clearly in Breitbart’s coverage of GamerGate — a shitstorm of internet drama so labyrinthine and hyperbolic that it has lasted for more than a year and grown to encompass multiple police investigations, a serious bomb threat at a Miami conference center and a United Nations report on the issue of “Cyber Violence Against Women And Girls.” Somewhere, in all that mess, some people are arguing about the cultural future of videogames. But that hardly matters anymore.

As with most ongoing Internet dramas, GamerGate is a deceptively broad term applied to many discrete arguments, incidents and brush fires that have been playing out on various platforms since August of last year. One side of the debate, speaking roughly, is composed of videogaming elites – journalists, players and developers who feel that the medium needs to “grow up,” and abandon the adolescent boorishness which became a defining aspect of its community in the wake of hyperviolent 1990s games like Quake and Doom.

Their opponents are, primarily, rank-and-file gamers — such as the active posters on 4Chan’s videogame board, /v/. To them, games without adolescent boorishness are hardly games at all, and the idea of moderating online discourse on any subject looks like a surrender to the mainstream.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart writer most publically identified with GamerGate, penned an admiring tribute to the internet underground on September 1st of this year. The crude gamers, he argued, were like the Hobbits from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — a subculture so far from the currents of power that their alienation has become an asset. “Despite the common stereotypes of gamers as losers, nerds and shut-ins,” wrote Yiannopoulos “[they have] proved to be the perfect opponents for cultural authoritarians” – his euphemism for the global left.

“The left relies on destroying the reputations of their opponents,” Yiannopoulos continued. But 4Chan posters, and those like them, have no reputation to destroy. The world — or at least the mass media — already thinks of them as socially stunted and potentially insane. Which makes them, in Breitbart’s complimentary view, invincible. “When you’re already hated by the left, the right, and the media, the only way to go is dank,” concluded Yiannapoulos.

“Dank,” is a common 4Chan term – a good word to describe powerful weed. “Dank memes” are posts or images that satisfy the people who consume them, and prove both popular and shareable, within limits. On 4Chan, if a meme gets too big it becomes regrettable — a mass idea in need of subversion, rather than one capable of being subversive in itself. Last week, for instance, I detailed the rash of posts that sprung up in the wake of the recent community college shooting in Oregon, imitating the shooter’s supposed warning. The pattern was simple – imitate the format of the original, but substitute pop-cultural, political or historical figures for the original maniac: “Some of you guys are alright, don’t go to [X] tomorrow.” On October 13^th, a variation on this was posted next to an image of Luke Skywalker – “some of you guys are alright, don’t go to the death star tomorrow.”

Response was tepid: “this meme is now completely out of gas,” read the first reply. It lasted longer than some, and went farther. But in the end, it died. It wasn’t the dankest meme, in the end – but it wasted some minutes on a brilliant fall.

If Yiannopoulos had been writing a similar tribute in 2002, he might have said “comedy gold” instead. That was the complimentary term favored by Something Awful when tribute.avi was posted. But it’s 2015, now, thank god… “Dank” sounds better – wetter, more earthy.

Comedy, it seems, has become an ancillary goal.

Is Dehumanization Such a Bad Word?

On Tuesday, hours before the Democratic program began, Donald Trump posted a drawing of himself as Pepe the Frog. Pepe, as I reported in the last dispatch, is 4Chan’s unofficial mascot — a sadsack amphibian used to illuminate the emotional state of those posting him. Different Pepes can connote anything from murderous rage to lonely resignation, but Trump’s image, which has over 5,000 “retweets” and “favorites” as of this writing, depicted Pepe smiling smugly, holding a hand contemplatively beneath his chin. Just as the Pepe posted before the Oregon shooting was equipped with a pistol, Trump’s frog came complete with a suit, an American flag lapel pin and the candidate’s signature swept-right hair. He was shown standing beside a podium, on which was reproduced the presidential seal. “SEAL of the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES,” it read, its seriffed font contrasting with the crudity of the frog.

In his attached message, Trump made his allegiance plain: “You Can’t Stump the Trump,” he wrote.

“Can’t Stump the Trump” has become, since August, a common phrase in internet discussions around the candidacy of the current Republican frontrunner. It’s funny, it makes him sound invincible — and it rhymes. It’s “I Like Ike” with fangs. What’s more, it speaks to the power of alienation gestured to by Yiannopoulos, and implicitly, sanctions the strength of the politically untouchable. With this tweet, Trump has announced himself as the presidential candidate equivalent of a shut-in dork, a raging skinhead and a morose mass shooter – someone so far out of the mainstream’s spectrum of acceptability that the disapproval of the powers that be means nothing to him.

Trump isn’t the first right-wing media figure to embrace this rhetoric. On September 2nd, a day after Milo Yiannopoulos compared arguing about videogames online to tossing the errant Ring of Power into Mount Doom, a celebrity of somewhat recent and controversial vintage, replied to a Twitter question in the negative, and received great acclaim across the underground. The question was: “Is it possible for you to be bamboozled? fooled? … Flim flammed?” Its questioner was referring another charismatic phrase born of Internet contrarianism: “Can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.”

The “zim-zam” is George Zimmerman, the Florida man who shot and killed a black seventeen year-old named Trayvon Martin in February of 2012. He earned the moniker in 2013, when the Internet underground was laughing at the perceived incompetence of the prosecutors seeking to convict him of the crime.

Today, George Zimmerman has a respectable following on Twitter: over fifteen-thousand people receive his messages.

His response to the question on September 2nd was short, and to the point.

“Nope,” he said. The crowd went wild – comparatively. His tweet was linked far and wide, but earned few favorites.

George Zimmerman and Donald Trump (by Matthew H. James)

Trump’s Twitter resembles Zimmerman’s in style, although the candidate is markedly more restrained and, to best of my knowledge, has never murdered anyone. On July 25th, for instance, Trump made news by sniping at then-candidate Scott Walker. “@ScottWalker is a nice guy,” Trump wrote, “but not presidential material.” Zimmerman weighed in on the Walker on September 10th: “Scott Walker should be a spokesman for Downy, ’cause boy, is he SOFT!!!” Thirty retweets, sixty-four favorites.

On the Eighth of August, Trump won twenty-thousand favorites and over twelve thousand retweets by noting that there are “so many ‘politically correct’ fools in our country.

“We have to all get back to work and stop wasting time and energy on nonsense!” he concluded.

Zimmerman, too, is no fan of political correctness. “Thank you, Patriots for supporting the fight against political correctness,” he wrote, on August 31st, linking to a print of the Confederate Battle Flag he’s been selling online since summer. “Rebel flag print sales are going strong!”

All boats, it is said, benefit from a rising tide.

The Corporate Cosmography of Arthur Jensen

On Twitter, in the aftermath of Tuesday’s Democratic debate, Bernie Sanders gained just below fifty thousand new Twitter followers. Hilary Clinton, anointed as the night’s winner in much of the press, scored less than half that total.

But Trump beat them all — his drab and disengaged live commentary on the evening’s events won him more than 95,000 new followers.  For good or ill, all those people will now get their news of the world — at least partially — from Donald Trump.

Maybe the democrats, and CNN, are right. Maybe there are still adults in the room. Maybe civility will win out, in the end. Maybe “the American people want a substantive debate about substantive issues.”

But you still can’t flim-flam the zim-zam.

The post Dispatch #4 – October 11-October 16, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

Good. Now for some news. First up, some new work by some friends of ours:

REVEALERS

Peter Manseau writes about “The Pope’s Confounding Consistency” for The New York Times. 

It is tempting to see in the pope’s varied messages during his first visit to the United States the ploys of a seasoned political fighter who knows that a move left on the climate and the economy gives him the space he needs to jab right on social issues. That may be part of it. As the future pope counseled, one should not be naïve. The Vatican was an old hand at international politics before this country was born.

Yet another interpretation is far more unsettling to our bifurcated culture: that Pope Francis is a man who sees more similarities than differences between Kim Davis and Dorothy Day.

Ann Neumann explains that “California doctors can offer aid in dying, but many people won’t have access” in The Guardian.

The most obvious question is not how these laws get passed (with dogged grass-roots activism over decades) but why more states don’t have them. The answer: the Catholic Church opposes them.

NEW YORK, NY – APRIL 24: Stephen Colbert and Timothy Cardinal Dolan attend the TIME 100 Gala celebrating TIME’S 100 Most Infuential People In The World at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage for TIME)

And Ed Simon argues that “Stephen Colbert is America’s Holy Fool” in Tikkun.

Stephen Colbert is good for American Catholicism and he is good for America. For many secular Americans, many of whom are former Catholics, the face of the American Church has too often been the unsmiling visage of Bill Donahue of the Catholic League. Taking offense at everything, picketing, petitioning and seemingly always enraged about any difference in opinion or the appearance of mere irreverence. Colbert on the other hand is irreverence incarnate, first in his performance as a blowhard newscaster on Comedy Central and now on CBS’ The Late Show. And despite his “foolishness” his Catholic bona fides are not to be doubted (check out the Catholic trivia competition between him and rock virtuoso/former altar boy Jack White). But it is this “foolishness” that makes him such a potent voice.

JUDAISM

Margaret Talbot draws a biblical picture of Bernie Sanders in “The Populist Prophet” for The New Yorker.

Sanders’s close friend Richard Sugarman, an Orthodox Jew who teaches religious studies at the University of Vermont, said, “He’s not what you would call rule-observant.” But, Sugarman added, “if you talk about his Jewish identity, it’s strong. It’s certainly more ethnic and cultural than religious—except for his devotion to the ethical part of public life in Judaism, the moral part. He does have a prophetic sensibility.” Sugarman and Sanders were housemates for a while in the seventies, and Sugarman says that his friend would often greet him in the morning by saying, “We’re not crazy, you know,” referring to the anger they felt about social injustices. Sugarman would respond, “Could you say good morning first?”

“Daniel Thompson, Whose Bagel Machine Altered the American Diet, Dies at 94” reports Margalit Fox for The New York Times. 

What was more, Mr. Thompson’s machine proved to be a mirror of midcentury American history. For bound up in the story of its introduction is the story of Jewish assimilation, gastronomic homogenization, the decline of trade unionism, the rise of franchise retailing and the perennial tension between tradition and innovation.

Daniel Thompson, in apron, in 1968 with a machine that manufactured 4,800 bagels an hour. Credit Steve Thompson

ISLAM

Anwar Omeish critiques “Sam Harris, Maajid Nawas, and the Illusion of Knowlege” in the Harvard Political Review, with a shout-out to Suzanne Schneider and her stellar Revealer article, “The Reformation Will Be Televised: On ISIS, Religious Authority and the Allure of Textual Simplicity.”

It is not an unreasonable expectation of the Harvard Institute of Politics’ John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum that it host events that produce critical, informed, and productive dialogue. Unfortunately, an event hosted on September 14 titled, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance,” did anything but that. This panel discussion between Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and atheist activist, and Maajid Nawaz, a self-professed former radical and U.K. politician—moderated by Juliette Kayyem of the Kennedy School—was instead an echo chamber of conventional anti-Islamic and neoconservative thought, rife with the traditional claims that Islam is inherently violent and that the only way to remedy this is via Western-style religious reform.

And Rafia Zakaria discusses a new exhibition, “The Feminism of Resilience: Shirin Neshat at the Hirshhorn” in The Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Neshat’s women wield guns and supplicate at the same time; their veils do not stanch their sexuality; the female gaze looking back at its audience is bold and unflinching. Women in orthodox religious schools in Iran and beyond — in Islamabad, in Muslim ghettoes in France and Britain — now consume and sometimes adopt this alternative conception of the feminine, a premonition of which appeared in Neshat’s “Women of Allah” series decades ago in images such as Rebellious Silence andFaceless (both works, 1994). (The latter also features a woman in chador, but now her gun is pointed at the viewer.)

Shirin Neshat, Offered Eyes (Women of Allah), 1993, Ink on RC print 52 3/8 x 36 ¼ x 1 7/8 in. (133 x 92.1 x 4.8 cm), framed © Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels

“H&M Features Hijab-Wearing Model in New Campaign” reports Katie Rogers for The New York Times.

The company used plus-size models, Sikh men and amputees to illustrate its point and to promote a broader message calling for sustainable fashion through recycling. (Lots of their clothing is basically disposable.) But the story of Mariah Idrissi, a hijab-wearing model, has prompted a discussion about women who are reclaiming the head scarf as a form of stylish self expression.

And, “A Gay Muslim Filmmaker Goes Inside the Hajj by Gabrielle Glaser for The New York Times. 

“A Sinner in Mecca” opens with Mr. Sharma sitting at a laptop in his apartment, chatting online with Mohammed, a gay man in the Saudi city of Medina. Mohammed describes visiting a market to pick up some things for his mother, only to witness the beheading of a man rumored to be gay. “Please know you are not alone,” Mr. Sharma writes. The film then cuts to videotape footage of the scene, stopping just before the executioner’s ax strikes the man’s neck. It sets the stage for the anxious 79 minutes that follow.

CHRISTIANITY

A few articles about new books caught our attention this week.

First, “In Dialogue with Dogma: Women Doing Battle with Religion” by Miranda Kennedy for The Los Angeles Review of Books.  

Through 12 short essays, Fresh Courage Take looks at the experience of being a woman inside the Mormon faith. Many of the authors are writing about their faith for the first time, and it often seems as though they are writing for one another rather than for the rest of us. This is not a book that tries to explain The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS (as the main church of Mormonism is officially called) to outsiders. The newcomer to Mormonism will learn something about the faith, but only sidelong

Second, “Reforming Sodom: Prostestants and the Rise of Gay Rights an Interview with Heather Rachelle White” by Samira Mehta for Religion in American History. 

I show that Christians since the 1950s, roughly speaking, have interpreted their past prohibitions and the meanings of biblical texts through a medical lens that retroactively reconfigured sodomy. When you go back and trace out the change in late 19th and early 20th century biblical interpretation, you see something different than a shift from prohibition against behavior to discussion of a medical condition. Sodomy and the various biblical texts that are today associated with homosexuality actually had different common sense meanings. This is really interesting because we think of Christian traditions–and especially the bible–as the source for the medicalized category of homosexuality. But the remembered tradition and the seemingly stable bible meanings don’t match up with the preoccupations of even the relatively recent Christian past.

And lastly, “The Devil – Writ Large and in the Details” by Adam Kotsko for The Marginalia Review of Books.

In my view, in order to figure out how the devil might speak to the modern era, we first need to think through how he spoke to people of past eras — the concrete circumstances and convictions, quandaries and catastrophes that made the development of this increasingly baroque theological system appear plausible and even urgent. If we cannot recapture the existential pull the devil exercised on previous generations, if we cannot reopen the questions to which the demonic was the most credible answer, then we are fundamentally doing nothing more than taking inventory of the documents of a dead world. 

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUND-UP

At a time when even the most bumbling #brands can usually manage to cultivate a nonembarrassing social media presence, the church didn’t represent itself well. It came across as, well, a little intense.

Critics and former Scientologists suggest that’s because the church doesn’t really get the Internet. “Scientology is frozen in amber in the 1960s,” says Tony Ortega, a journalist and former Village Voice editor who’s reported on the church for two decades. When L. Ron Hubbard established the church, it was a strictly hierarchical, deeply secretive organization run by one man whose paranoia colored the entire proceedings. He imagined, consciously or not, its secrets could be kept, its hierarchy preserved, its paranoia channeled to productive ends. For decades, that worked; with stumbles and false starts along the way, Hubbard eventually became the wealthy prophet he wanted to be.

Buddha figurines on sale. Photo by Tantek Çelik, May 27, 2006. Available via Flickr.

Jolyon Baraka Thomas thinks about “Corporate Profit Through Buddhist Kitsch“ for Sacred Matters.

Just as some retail establishments will maintain their thermostats slightly above a comfortable temperature to encourage people to make impulse buys, and just as IKEA will wear down consumer resistance by making people physically walk past the entire store catalogue in a carefully scripted pilgrimage, this particular store lulled customers into a sense of complacent consumption by providing omnipresent physical reminders of non-acquisitiveness. The serene countenance of the Buddha blissfully absorbed in supreme unexcelled awakening said nothing at all, but his familiar visage nevertheless offered a hortatory message.

“Go ahead and buy it,” the silent statues seemed to say. “No materialism here.”

Oh, and another Quiz! This one is from Vanity Fair: Quiz: Oberlin College Newspaper or Pope Francis’s Anti-Capitalist Apostolic Exhortation?

Lastly, we can’t not tell you about Augustus Sol Invictus, Florida candidate for U.S. Senate admits to sacrificing goat, drinking its blood.” His law firm is called Imperium.

“I did sacrifice a goat. I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans,” he said. “I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness … Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”

Just look at all those flags.

***

Heaven, Human Rights, His Holiness, and more! (October 2, 2015)

Poetry, Puritans, Politicians, and more! (September 11, 2015)

Wax, Wits, William James, and more! (August 21, 2015)

Saints, Slavery, Celibacy, and more! (August 14, 2015)

Pundits, Prophets, Politics, and more! (August 7, 2015)

Senselessness, Stereotypes, Slayer, and more! (July 31, 2015)

Apps, Apologies, Apocalypse, and more! (July 15, 2015)

Heathens, Hymns, and Holy Men (July 8, 2015)

#LoveWins, #TakeItDown, #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches (July 2, 2015)

Racism, Ramadan, Romanian Witches, and more! (June 25, 2015)

Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! (June 19, 2015)

Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more! (June 11, 2015)

Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more! (June 5, 2015)

TLC, THC, OMG! (May 29, 2015)

Mad Men, Mormons, Monks, and more! (May 22, 2015)

Candles, Kombucha, Crocodiles, and more! (May 15, 2015)

Lindsey Graham, Garland, TX, God’s Plaintiff, and more! (May 8, 2015)

Pamela Geller, Prophesy, PEN, and more! (May 1, 2015)

Talal Asad, Taylor Swift, Turbans, and more! (April 2015)

Passover, Prison, Pop Music, and more! (March 2015)

The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and  more! (February 2015)

Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! (January 2015)

#black lives matter, #Illridewithyou, TL;DR Bible Stories, and more! (December 2014)

Hasidim, Mormons, Borges and more! (November 2014)

Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza, and more! (August 2014)

Prison Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby (July 2014)

***

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Bernie, Bagels, Buddahs, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

DogWelder was an Australian who, in later years, wrote short horror stories to some acclaim. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, he wrote a brief comment on the forums of the then-popular website Something Awful. The thread was titled: “the World Trade Center is on fire.”

“Oh my fucking god,” he wrote. “Another plane just hit the second tower, a 767 or something.” Line return.”This is fucking insane.” Below this lay his signature: a jpg image of Tyler Durden, from Fight Club, hunched above a cluttered desk, engaged with splicing together two lengths of film. With one hand he points upward, to a dark oval above his head. “In the industry we call these… cigarette burns,” read the text, attractively arranged in an acid-eaten font.

In Fight Club, both the film and the book, the “cigarette burns” line is one of many useful facts imparted to the viewer by Durden — a macho phantasm dedicated to the anarchic collapse of industrial civilization. Cigarette burns, he explains, signal film projectionists about approaching reel changes. They blip across the screen, barely noticeable, reminding the savvy among us that the illusion of film is not magic, but mechanism… Armed with this knowledge, and employed as a night projectionist, Tyler is free to explore “interesting opportunities… like splicing single frames of pornography into family films.” And why? Why not, basically… Tyler Durden, who became a guru for angry young men at the turn of the century, saw nothing in mainstream society worth respecting. It all needed to be subverted, insulted and, ultimately, destroyed.

The Something Awful people loved him, in 2001.

DarthVersace, who is now a respected author of comic books, chimed in several minutes after DogWelder. “The BBC World Service is pissin’ itself,” she wrote. “I’ve never heard the Brits so flustered. They don’t know anything. No one knows anything. And I don’t know anything. But if I had to hazard a guess, kiddies…”

She attached an image of Osama Bin Laden, smiling and self-satisfied.

“ROTFL Owned Great Satan.”

Her signature at the time was a piece of her artwork — a randy looking young man with horns and pointed ears. “THE DEMON LOVE ARMY,” read its caption. “Because jesus won’t give head, THAT’S WHY.”

In those days, new users were publically shamed. Their “avatar,” or representative image, was a baby wearing sunglasses, decorated with the rainbow caption “FORUM NEWBIE.” After making a certain number of posts, a user could trade up for a more advanced title, like “Attention Whore,” and a more humane image – like a close-up of a corpulent woman smiling through jpeg artifacts.

ToasterOven, who had registered that June, was not shocked by the attack on New York. “It was inevitable,” they wrote. “Thank God it wasn’t a nuke.”

Oxymoron, a more seasoned user, speculated as to the pilot’s motives. “This could only mean three things,” they said:

“a) both pilots were members of anti-capitalist terrorist groups or suicidal

b) some terrorist group hax0red* the planes to automatically crash into the towers

c) pilots are fucking idiots and rely on their navigation systems despite the fact that they’re on collision course with a freaking skyscraper.

This also kind of reminds me of SimCity 2000, where I used to build my arcologies as close as possible to the airport.”

A brief time passed. Then, Oxymoron altered the message: “Edit,” began the postscript. “I forgot about the hijacking possibility.”

“WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR,” wrote monkeu.

“If this was terrorism (which it appears to be) the smoking crater left over where Terrorist HQ once stood will be [its] start and the end,” added GPF.

“We need to turn the fucking desert into a sheet of glass,” wrote graedus.

DarthVersave followed up the thought with a jpg of a mushroom cloud. “I’ll open the bay door if you’ll ride it down, graedus. Time and place, just say when and I’m there. These fucking people are no goddam good to anyone.

“Of course, they probably say and think the exact same thing about us.”

Small Gods of Simi Valley… a big win for the Cable News Network…

Like many of those currently under thirty , I exist at pains to watch as little CNN as possible. Which is why last month’s republican primary debate, broadcast by the network from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California looked more like a three hour car accident than a policy discussion. I tuned in, and so did the rest of the country – but at what cost?

For those three hours, on September 16th, CNN commanded what Brian Stelter, writing for the network’s financial news offshoot, CNN Money, called “NFL-level ratings.” Twenty-three million people watched the event, on average… a total slightly below Fox News’ August debate, but far in excess of any previous CNN programming. The network’s 9/11 ratings are difficult to procure, but unlike the debates, that particular disaster was presented without commercial breaks. Simi Valley was, in a way, more real… You can sell those kinds of numbers to Pepsi Cola.

Donald Trump immediately took credit for the inflated viewership, in keeping with his usual strategy of taking credit for everything. “Just announced that in the history of @CNN, last night’s debate was its highest rated ever,” he wrote to twitter, on the day following the contest. “Will they send me flowers & a thank you note?” More than 10,000 people “favorited” the remark — whatever that means.

Trump didn’t score much in the debate itself. His biggest hits that night were both non-verbal: a disbelieving series of facial expressions and an enthusiastic low-five offered as a congratulation to Jeb Bush. Both have been memorialized in numerous gif files – a candidate in pantomime.

CNN might still owe him flowers, though. What Fox News did on accident in their August 6th program from Cleveland, CNN accomplished by design. Fox, eager to assert their position as the media gatekeeper of the Republican party, ran that first debate like a state firing squad… From their initial question (“is there anyone on stage … who is unwilling, tonight, to pledge their support to the eventual nominee … and pledge not to run an independent campaign against [them]?”) the machinery of the night was turned to singular purpose: embarrassing and destroying Donald Trump.

And it worked. For about forty-eight hours.

On Friday, August 7th, the day after the Fox debate, Trump lashed out at one of its moderators, the journalist Megyn Kelly, in an audio interview with CNN. “There was blood coming out of her eyes,” he said, recounting her approach. “Blood coming out of her wherever.” In response, Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of the right-wing website RedState, withdrew Trump’s invitation to a gathering of Atlanta conservatives. For Erickson, the “blood” remark was a clear allusion to menstruation, and a step too far outside of common decency. As the weekend arrived, Trump took to the air again and again. “Wherever,” he explained, was meant to refer to a few of Kelly’s socially acceptable orifices: her nose and ears. Anyone who thought different was a “degenerate.”

On Saturday, Roger Stone, Trump’s most experienced political adviser, resigned his position, citing dissatisfaction with the “high volume” of “provocative media fights” surrounding the candidate. Writing for the Washington Post, journalists Philip Rucker and Robert Costa reported that “Republican leaders who have watched Donald Trump’s summer surge … now believe that his presidential candidacy has been contained and may begin to collapse.”

Dark days, apparently. But Trump stayed on the offensive, calling in to practically every outlet that would have him. Every outlet, that is, but Fox. To the consternation of the network, messages from viewers grew increasingly hostile. They thought Donald Trump was in the right, and that Fox News hadn’t given him a fair shake. They also, apparently, sent death threats to Megyn Kelly.

On Monday morning, reported Gabriel Sherman for New York Magazine, “ [Roger ]Ailes called Trump ‘multiple’ times yesterday morning ‘begging’ him to tweet out that they had made peace.” Sherman’s source was, the journalist explained, “briefed on the negotiations.” Trump’s tweet was more direct: “Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews,” it read. “His word is always good!”

The firing squad had missed. Victory had been declared on Twitter.

An alien world reveals itself… a reality of degradation and shame… you wanna be safe? Buy a bomb shelter

In 2015, it appears, cable news can’t coronate anyone. It can, however, still attract ratings. The only thing the networks lost is their last vestige of prestige.

Almost every question asked at Simi Valley was constructed as a direct attack, quoting one candidate’s unfavorable remark about another and then demanding an address of the insult from both parties. As an example, take the night’s first query, which was directed at Carly Fiorina.

“Booby Jindal has suggested that your party’s frontrunner, Mr. Donald Trump, would be dangerous as president,” said Jake Tapper, one of the night’s moderators. “You as well have raised concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament …would you feel comfortable with Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear codes?”

Where do you go from there?

Jeb hits Trump, and yet survives… The great reptile revealed…

There was a curious Trump-Bush exchange that night. The original question was both fair and interesting — Hugh Hewitt, the former Reagan staffer and current right-wing radio host, pushed Jeb Bush on the familiarity of his foreign policy advisors. What, exactly, would he do to distinguish himself from his father and brother on the world stage?

Bush dithered, promising an unconvincing policy of “peace through strength.” At which point, Trump attempted to break in. Hewitt allowed him to, by pivoting his question to the frontrunner. When would he announce names for his foreign policy team?

“I’m meeting with people that are terrific people,” Trump said, before pivoting himself. “I am the only person on this dais,” he continued, “the only person who fought very, very hard against us … going into Iraq…”

He circled the point several times, swiping at Rand Paul in the process (this, alone among the nights indignities, prompted gasping in the crowd). Jeb, hitting back, accused Trump of poor judgment for calling Hillary Clinton a good negotiator. This got Trump riled.

“Your brother and your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama,” spat the mogul. “Because it was such a disaster those last three months that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected!”

“You know what?” said Bush, in a voice trying for steely. “As it relates to my brother, there’s one thing I know for sure. He kept us safe. I don’t know if you remember, Donald… You remember the — the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arm around it?”

The crowd — mostly establishment republicans — burst into thunderous applause. They remembered.

Neither candidate in the above exchange actually answered the question asked of them. Their foreign policy strategies, and the composition of Trump’s team, remain vague. Even “Peace Through Strength,” a good old-fashioned Orwellian buzzword, went over like a wet fart.

But there were cheers – long, sustained cheers, for “he kept us safe.” And they rose for the images: the “rubble,” the “firefighter,” the World Trade Center on fire.

Trump is right, in part. The Bush administration of the twenty-first century did give us Barack Obama –his success does owe much to his predecessor’s failures. But Obama isn’t the only thing we gained. The Bush years gave us everything.

Since this century began, we’ve been reacting and reacting and reacting… adding our jokes and our plans and our lies and our anger to a thread of human thinking that began fourteen years and twenty-some-odd days ago. We are not reacting to the event itself – some of us aren’t even sure what it was. We’re reacting to the images.

Those constructs of words and pixels and celluloid were chosen well, if arbitrarily. The rubble, the firefighter — the World Trade Center on Fire. We avoid them and enshrine them and worship at their secret altar. These images are CNN – proof of its value and prestige. They are Fox News – the unspoken paranoid drive behind their swirling flags and garishly patriotic sets. Their importance cannot be questioned in mass media, because doing so would mean questioning the utility of mass media itself.

In January of 1942, Tiffany Thayer, then the editor of the Fortean Society Magazine, a publication dedicated to radical doubt, proposed that the Second World War was really a sham. “We can shut off the radio, stop reading newspapers and stay away from the movies,” he wrote. “Their ‘war’ stops automatically as soon as you do these three things.”

It was heresy, of course. Thayer lost friends. But in much of America, I’m sure, his prescription was true.

Mass media presents us with a cosmography – a model of the universe that takes special care to delineate our place within it, and our responsibilities to the whole. As sure as Billy Sunday, it demands belief.

And people might tune into it. They might read it and watch it and share it. But they can’t be compelled to believe it – at least not wholesale.

The rubble, the firefighter, the World Trade Center on Fire – they’re not just images that orient us as Americans in the twenty-first century. They’re evidence of the mechanism by which that orientation is enacted.

Cigarette burns.

And now, the hero of our story…

In October of 2002, there was another thread posted to the Something Awful forums. This one was called “anything+benny hill theme = funny.” Its premise was layering the theme from Benny Hill, Boots Randolph’s swinging “Yakety Sax,” over incongruous video footage. At the beginning of page 2, a user named DrScorp posted a link to a video file: tribute.avi. It combined Randolph with footage of the towers falling from CNN, played back at faster than normal speed.

The reviews were unanimous:

“I think there are only a few times in my life when I’ve laughed so hard,” wrote Cutlass Supreme.

“I can’t help laughing,” said MDDevice. “I can’t STOP laughing.”

“I lost bladder control at the 40 second mark. I can’t believe it.”

“Words fail me. There is only laughter.”

Vorheese, a user registered that February, wrote a brief play about the video:

“50 years after watching tribute.avi

Satan: Hello

Me: Hello Satan

Satan: You know why you’re here, right?

Me: Oh yeh”

That was a catchphrase, at the time. In an awkward way, it was meant to convey victory – to laud a post that had succeeded in being funny. Since Something Awful was a comedy forum, at the time, “gold” was synonymous with their stated goal. The funnier something was, the more attention it generated.

CNN and Fox are playing a game for attention, too – but measured by different and less personal metrics. They move slowly, and hold on to the images and concepts which they broadcast for a long time, comparatively. For them, and for the audiences of their debates, the images of 9/11 are still sacred.

People like Vorheese recognize that they have crossed a line – but, in the end, they can’t bring themselves to care. Next to lols, damanation don’t mean shit.

See you space cowboy… grim chatter beneath the escutcheon…

4chan is an anonymous message board which began as an offshoot of Something Awful. The 4Chan culture, however, eschewed usernames and registration dates and the strange gradations of newbies and veterans in favor of total, democratic anonymity. Everyone has the same voice on 4Chan, and the same tools of broadcast. Posts succeed or fail based largely on popularity alone, regardless of their author’s pedigree. It’s been the Internet’s most accessible red-light district for years – a place to share bestiality videos, child pornography and, occasionally, jokes.

On the 30th of September, a warning appeared on 4chan. “Some of you guys are alright,” it read. “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest.

“happening thread will be posted tomorrow morning

so long space robots.”

On October 1st, an angry man named Chris Harper Mercer opened fire on Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killing ten and wounding seven. According to an eyewitness, he ordered his victims to stand and state their religion — then fired.

That same day Barack Obama, in grieved comment given from a White House briefing room, again made his case for gun control, advocating for the formation of a less intractable advocacy organization than the N.R.A. “And I would particularly ask America’s gun owners who are using those guns properly, safely…to think about whether your views are being properly represented by the organization that suggests it is speaking for you,” he said.

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking in a New Hampshire town hall on Monday, October 5th, took the line a step farther: “What I would love to see is … responsible gun owners, hunters, form a different organization and take back the Second Amendment from these extremists,” she suggested.

The N.R.A. has yet to make an official response.

4Chan, like all “new media” is more nimble.

The post on September 30th was clearly constructed by someone familiar with the cultural conventions of the board. “Happening” is a phrase commonly used on their political board, /pol/, to refer to a blooming scandal or disaster — and typically, a scandal or disaster that seems to portend some larger societal break down. “See you space robots” is a riff on the traditional closing line of Cowboy Bebop, a popular Japanese cartoon from the 1990s about bounty hunter astronauts with impeccable taste in jazz. Each episode ends with white italics in the bottom right of frame. Typically the sign off is “see you space cowboy…” but like The X-Files, special episodes mix it up a little. The show’s finale concludes: “You’re gonna carry that weight.”

The culture of 4Chan, speaking broadly, is one of shame and paranoia, bleeding into white-hot rage. Its most socially awkward posters, sometimes called “robots,” see themselves as fundamentally separated from the mainstream of human life. In post after post, these nameless and faceless young men complain about “chads” and “staceys,” the “normies” who have no trouble fitting in, going out and getting on with the activities of modern work and leisure. Part of this divide is sexual — “robots” and “betas” (short for “beta males”) can’t get laid, while the “chads” of the world can. But that’s only part of it. Despite what you may have read, 4Chan is not a “men’s rights” collective – or any other kind of organized hate group. They’re a disorganized hate group – and a far more unnerving thing by far.

Reading 4Chan can be melancholy. Many of its posts are focused on emptiness and alienation – adolescent paeans to the feelings of “robots” who feel hectored and bullied by a world that barely notices them.

On October 5th, while Hillary Clinton was grabbing headlines with her milquetoast position on the N.R.A., another post appeared on 4Chan. Like the pre-shooting post on the 30th, it ran beside an image of Pepe the Frog — a kind of unofficial mascot for the board and a visual stand-in for every nameless “beta,” “robot,” and “virgin” posting on it. In the warning, Pepe was depicted as scowling and brandishing a pistol: “Pepe_gun.jpg.” The post on the 5th was more downbeat. Its image, of Pepe sitting morosely on a couch, was “alone at party.png.”

“At parties all the time,” it read. “No one ever talks to me… they know I’m there but they never include me … I don’t know why I stay around … I can barely manage a squeak when I talk to people.

“Paralyzed by fear of losing ‘friends,” it concludes.

On Friday, October 2nd, another post appeared, this one beside a masked Pepe. “The first of our kind has struck fear into the hearts of America,” it began. “On October 5th, 2015 at 1:00 PM CT, a fellow robot will take up arms against a university near Philadelphia. His cries will be heard, his victims will cower in fear, and the strength of the Union will decay a little more…

“I plea to thee, brothers! We have only once chance, one spark, for our revolution. The United States will soon condemn us to the status quo forever …Don’t let our one chance at winning history slip away.”

There was no shooting in Philadelphia on October 5^th, thank God. But there was a slew of news stories about the post and, by the weekend, an official statement of caution was issued by the Philadelphia field office of the F.B.I. Gawker and Salon registered their disapproval, and images of the “beta uprising” threat spread far and wide.

It may not have pulled in NFL numbers, but it was, in the small manner of an internet post, a rousing success. It was seen and it was meant to be – and, in my estimation, it was about as tasteless a maneuver as CNN leading its bacchanal with the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Whadda you got — an Oreck?

As of today, on 4Chan, parodies of the September 30th post have become a trend.

A picture of Hitler running beside “some of you guys are alright, don’t go to Poland tomorrow.”

Gavrillo Pincip, the assassin of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, warning against going to Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. “Some you guys are alright,” he says.

Jim Carey’s version of the Grinch, masked and armed: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to Whoville tomorrow.”

George W. Bush, smiling and raising a glass: “Some of you guys are alright. Don’t go to the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.

“happening thread will be posted later

“so long space robots.”

***

* http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hax0red

The post Dispatch #3 – September 19-October 10, 2015 appeared first on The Revealer.

First, some recent work by Revealer Writers

Brook Wilensky-Lanford describes “Falling Asleep in the Afterlife” in The New Republic

What’s striking about the heaven movies and the books they are based on, discredited or not, is just how similar they are to each other, and to every other description of heaven you have ever heard or seen. The Southern Baptist Convention may worry that the accounts are not “unified” enough. But taken together, the heaven travelogues are a bland, whitewashed collage of today’s mass-market Christianity

Jared Malsin invites us to “Meet the Last Jews of Cairo” in Time.

Haroun sees the Egyptian Jewish community as an accidental victim of regional politics. “I myself am resentful to the state of Israel. Because is if we are like this today, it is part because of the establishment of the state of Israel, and part the politics of the Arab countries, which contributed to the idea of Israel.”

Egyptians gather inside Shaar Hashamayim synagogue as they wait to break their fast in Cairo, Egypt, Wednesday, July 9, 2014. The Jewish community in Egypt hosted for the first time an Iftar party, evening meal when Muslims break their fast during the Islamic month of Ramadan. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

You can read more about the Jews of Cairo in two pieces Maurice Chammah wrote for this magazine: “All Together? The legacy of Egypt’s Jews” and “Carmen Weinstein: Legacy and Nostalgia.” You can read more from Chammah below, as well.

Next, a few interviews of interest (including a few more Revealers)

Angela Yuen did “An Interview with Briallen Hopper” for Margins. 

I preach at the Yale Chapel several times a year, and this past year I kept having to preach after a racial tragedy or act of racial terror: the non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the killing of Walter Scott, the Charleston massacre. One of the congregants told me “you are our war-time preacher,” and I knew what he meant: being a preacher in modern race-riven America means preaching about racist violence. But before I preached a sermon on Ferguson, the pastor said “you need to explain to the congregation why you care about these issues.” In other words, it’s not self-evident why a white lady would be preaching about systemic racism—it requires an explanation in order not to seem random or self-righteous. On the one hand I thought, fair enough. At the same time I was like: how could anyone NOT care? THAT is what would require an explanation! I was raised in racist country, and now it is going up in flames and so many people are risking so much to fight for freedom. How could I preach about anything else?

© ROXANNA BIKADOROFF via The Baffler

Ann Neumann was interviewed about Amish romance novels on NHPR’s Word of Mouth.

…the spectacular commodification of Amish faith and Amish folkways that has sprouted up alongside the runaway success of the bonnet book also indicates that this particular dissident value system stops well shy of the sort of robust challenge to capitalist modernity that sent the Amish packing to their farms and buggies in the first place.

Cass Midgley & Dr. Bob Pondillo interview Becky Garrison on their “Everyone’s Agnostic” podcast.

Lastly, inevitably, The Pope (and even more Revealer friends) 

As previously mentioned, Samuel Moyn thinks that “Pope Francis has given up on human rights. That’s a good thing.”

No one interested in how human rights became the idea of our time can ignore how Christians learned to champion them. But they changed their meaning in the process. This is changing under Francis, and that might be a good thing.

“The American Pope” by Peter Manseau for The Atlantic

Through it all, the changing image of the pope in America has said as much about the nation’s shifting religious and political preoccupations as it has about the church for which he stands.

“A Letter to Pope Francis” by Maurice Chammah for The Marshall Project

You happen to be catching our country at a particularly rich moment of reassessment, and many — both jailers and jailed — hope you will contribute to that moment.

“How Pope Francis is Reviving Radical Catholic Economics” by Nathan Schneider The Nation

So does the pope’s assault on the economic order represent continuity, or an actual break? Has the content of faith changed, or just its emphases? And how much can (or will) Francis really do? These are ever-recurring questions for papists like me.

And some Papal fun.

You know we love quizzes, so we’re pretty grateful for this bit of Papal introspection from Abby Olheiser at The Washington Post: Which Pope Are You?

That said, we think that maybe she left out a few Popes. So, we included a few more options below:

Baby Pope?

Pizza Pope?

NEW YORK – September 21: PULSE – A portrait of Pope Francis on a pizza done in pizza toppings at BLEECKER STREET PIZZA, 69 7th Avenue South in Manhattan. September 21, 2015. (Photo by Gabi Porter)

or Pretzel Pope?

Thanks for reading and clicking! We’ll be back next week with lots more links!

***

Past links round-ups can be found here:

Poetry, Puritans, Politicians, and more! (September 11, 2015)

Wax, Wits, William James, and more! (August 21, 2015)

Saints, Slavery, Celibacy, and more! (August 14, 2015)

Pundits, Prophets, Politics, and more! (August 7, 2015)

Senselessness, Stereotypes, Slayer, and more! (July 31, 2015)

Apps, Apologies, Apocalypse, and more! (July 15, 2015)

Heathens, Hymns, and Holy Men (July 8, 2015)

#LoveWins, #TakeItDown, #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches (July 2, 2015)

Racism, Ramadan, Romanian Witches, and more! (June 25, 2015)

Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! (June 19, 2015)

Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more! (June 11, 2015)

Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more! (June 5, 2015)

TLC, THC, OMG! (May 29, 2015)

Mad Men, Mormons, Monks, and more! (May 22, 2015)

Candles, Kombucha, Crocodiles, and more! (May 15, 2015)

Lindsey Graham, Garland, TX, God’s Plaintiff, and more! (May 8, 2015)

Pamela Geller, Prophesy, PEN, and more! (May 1, 2015)

Talal Asad, Taylor Swift, Turbans, and more! (April 2015)

Passover, Prison, Pop Music, and more! (March 2015)

The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and  more! (February 2015)

Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! (January 2015)

#black lives matter, #Illridewithyou, TL;DR Bible Stories, and more! (December 2014)

Hasidim, Mormons, Borges and more! (November 2014)

Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza, and more! (August 2014)

Prison Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby (July 2014)

***

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Heaven, Human Rights, His Holiness, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.