“You don’t fuck with Coca-Cola.”

— Unnamed American Serviceman

The woods were deep, the crowd was tense, and there would be no concert.

The Lakeland Acres picnic ground was located a few miles outside of Peekskill, New York. Tensions between the east coast leftists who spent their summers there and the town’s conservative locals had been simmering for years. In 1948, the picnic grounds had played host to a concert by the singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. Two kids from Peekskill had pelted the stage with apples, and were quickly ejected from the show. About a year later, in the August of 1949, Robeson had returned, along with folk singers Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and the historical novelist Howard Fast. The would-be concert goers found themselves surrounded by a mob of small-town anti-communists, ostensibly a “patriotic parade” organized by Peekskill’s veterans association. The only trail leading in and out of Lakeland Acres was blocked by “about 300” protestors, Fast reported to the A.C.L.U., cutting off the majority of visitors from the stage. A “handful” – Howard Fast included – were trapped inside.

“There were twenty-five or thirty of us, I suppose,” he recalled in his 1991 autobiography, Being Red. “We ran up on the entrance, and as we appeared [the protesters] poured onto us from the road, at least a hundred of them with billies and brass knuckles and rocks and clenched fists.” The violence lasted for hours, with the concert-goers suffering most of the day’s injuries. In the chaos of the melee, Fast took command. “I had agreed to be chairman [of the concert],” he wrote, in his autobiography, “and it seemed that this was the kind of concert we would have, not with Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger singing their lovely tunes of America, but with a special music that had played its music out in Germany and Italy.” Chin music, in other words.

The confrontation lasted for hours. Books and chairs were burned. The police were dispatched. A wild concert usher, photographed just feet from Fast, sunk a knife into a young veteran on the protestor’s side. Soon after, Fast claimed that the stabbing was nothing but a frame-up – an attempt to discredit his virtuous side. In Being Red, he recalls the real tactic that stopped the men of Peekskill dead:

“We began to sing,” he wrote. “They saw a line of bloody, ragged men, standing with their arms locked, standing calmly and singing in a kind of inspired chorus, and they stopped. They couldn’t understand us.”

On September 11^th 1949, the communist newspaper The Daily Worker warned that Peekskill was proof of a “carefully organized effort to impose police state terrorism in the U.S.A.”

Fast agreed.

In the aftermath of the concert, signs were posted around the town: “Wake up America. Peekskill did!”

***

Accounts vary, of course. Our only memory of the event is a copy of a copy of a copy, a story transmitted by partisans and propagandists whose earliest accounts have long since vanished. By leaning the various interests against each other, however, a rough picture of the insurrection begins to emerge.

In the year 167 B.C.E., in ancient Judea, the Seleucid ruler of the land, Antiochus IV, decreed the religious tenants of then-contemporary Judaism illegal. In its place, he proposed an alternate system of observance. For years, Jewish life had been undergoing a process of Hellenization, adopting societal practices and social mores drawn from the culture of Greece and evangelized by Alexander the Great. These changes were either tolerated or embraced by the people of Judea, until that decisive year – 167.

Scholar Jonathan Goldstein has proposed that Antiochus’ denial of Torah may have been an attempt at social control modeled on the Roman suppression of Bacchanalia. Antiochus may have claimed that Biblical Judaism was an unnatural offshoot of a more agreeable theology – a protean, polytheistic cult with a significant military following.

Whatever the truth of his proposed reforms, the plan was a disaster. Important ritual observances were outlawed, holy writings burned. On December 6^th, according to Goldstein, the “abomination of desolation” was installed in the Temple at Jerusalem. This, he speculates, was “a framework containing three meteorites representing the three gods of the imposed cult.” Or it may have been a statue of Jupiter.

Around this time, a Jewish patriarch named Mattathias (who may or may not have been nicknamed “Maccabaeus”) whipped his family and other sympathetic Jews into open rebellion against the Seleucids. Using guerilla tactics (such as fighting on the Sabbath), Mattathias’ insurrection harried Judea’s rulers for years. In 165, Mattathias died, and leadership of his rebellion passed to his sons: Jonnan, Simon, Eleazer, Jonathan and Judas – whose surname was certainly “Maccabaeus.” It meant something roughly equivalent to “hammer.”

These brothers, the Hasmoneans, eventually won a degree of religious independence for Judea. For a short time, their family ruled as both priest and king.

Roughly fifty years later, a propagandistic account of the brothers’ rebellion and the establishment of their subsequent dynasty was composed to shore up the right of rulership possessed by the priest-king Alexander Jannaeus. It is this heroic, militaristic and pro-Hasmonean text which survives today as the apocryphal book of First Maccabees. By design, it casts Judas and his relatives in the best possible light – noting their skill in battle, their priestly background and, above all, their unshakeable piety. Whatever truth it contained failed to win security for the Hasmoneans. Rome conquered Judea, time passed. New messiahs came along.

Shortly after the composition of First Maccabees an alternate account was written, threaded through with miracles and predicated on a firm belief in the resurrection. It survives today as the book of Second Maccabees. In its rendering, Judas alone is treated as a figure of respect. His brothers are dismissed as untrustworthy or wicked.

There were other versions. The story survived.

***

Howard Fast released My Glorious Brothers, his thirteenth novel, in 1948. In it, he provided his own take on the story of the Maccabees. The revolt, Fast explained, was “the first modern struggle for freedom,” a conflict that “laid a pattern for [the] many movements that followed.” His book was well received.

“Whatever is good in the telling [of this story],” Fast explained, “I owe to the people who march through these pages, those wonderful people of old who, out of their religion, their way of life and their love for their land, forged that splendid maxim that resistance to tyranny is the truest obedience to God.”

In a letter to Daily Worker, quibbling with some points in their review of Brothers, Fast expanded on this point. “All who fought in freedom’s cause, since first man began, are our brothers,” he said. “All, whether they fought against slavery, serfdom or capitalism, lifted a brick for that eventual socialist structure which all of mankind will achieve.”

Howard Fast was, by the late 1940s, a highly visible and massively successful American writer. His books focused, for the most part, on dramatizing a liberalized version of American history. In 1943, he took this approach to one of his country’s founding fathers. Citizen Tom Paine remains one his most popular works – and one of his most reprinted. During the war, the state department even reprinted it in a number of foreign languages, distributing Fast’s novel as a propaganda tool.

In 1944, he tackled the narrative of an ex-slave named Gideon Jackson in Freedom Road. In 1947’s Clarkton, Fast described the various pressures at work in a labor strike (“To understand Clarkton is to understand the responsibility of the American dream,” said the dust jacket of its first edition). He was reviewed in Newsweek, the Atlantic, and the New York Times.

My Glorious Brothers earned more than his usual share of garlands. The book “outstrips anything Fast has ever done,” wrote Edmund Fuller, in the Saturday Review. “I have felt him to be guilty, usually, of oversimplification,” continued the critic. My Glorious Brothers, however, featured passages of real “complexity and penetration.”

Fast, in his autobiography, saw this reception as a political necessity. “To trash a novel about the Jewish struggle for freedom in 1948 was,” he wrote, “a little sticky.”

In less than a year, he would be in Peekskill.

***

It is no longer 1948. We can trash the book now.

My Glorious Brothers is a deeply credulous novel. From its central premise, equating the Maccabean revolt with Fast’s utopian ideals, the book proceeds to sketch a world divided between clear and definable absolutes of political morality. The Syrians and the Romans, in Fast’s conception, were slave societies, predicated on the bondage of the human spirit. His militant Jews, driven by a single, simple maxim (“once we were slaves in the land of Egypt”), represent the inverse – a classless society of infinite liberty, patience, and respect.

His Maccabees are, for the most part, idealized American revolutionaries equipped with smocks, sandals and pocket editions of the Communist Manifesto. In Brothers, the ambiguous title of “Maccabee” becomes a political designation, a Marxist modification of such Biblical “judges” as Samson and Samuel.

“There is only one Maccabee,” Fast wrote, in the voice of the Roman Legate Lentulus Silanus. Although this office is, in some respects, one of leadership and power, “the lowliest beggar can halt him, dispute with him and talk to him as an equal.” And why not? For Fast’s imagined Jews, God is so abstract a concept that readers come to understand it as less of a deity than an ideal of human liberation.

An early passage depicts Lentulus questioning Simon, the last surviving son of Mattathias, as to his peoples’ religious system:

“And is it true,” the Roman asked, “that in your Temple here on the hill, there is no God that a man can see?”

Simon answered in the affirmative. To the Roman, who Fast depicts as wholly concerned with the weight and measure of strength, this answer is beyond comprehension. He mistakes Simon’s intelligence for superiority. “What do you worship Simon Maccabeus, what do you respect?” he asks. “In all the world are there no other men of worth than the Jews?”

Simon’s answer is whispered. “All men are of worth,” he says. “Of equal worth.”

These brave pronouncements litter the novel, and again and again Fast depicts those who oppose them as too dense and evil to understand what they mean. The courage of his protagonists soon becomes a fraud – a papery approximation of idealism that never admits the reality of any view of things beyond itself. The human drama between Fast’s “glorious brothers” falls flat as well – collapsing into the kind of masculine voodoo and melodramatic Freudianism that Charlton Heston would have really sunk his teeth into had he been tapped for a film adaptation.

Fuller, in his Saturday Review notice, compliments Fast on his treatment of the origin of anti-Semitism – a historical evil that, the book implies, came about as a result of various oppressor classes’ inability to grasp the full-measure of Judaism’s commitment to liberty and the rights of men. It’s a complimentary idea – but nowhere near a legitimate theory of human behavior.

“So persistent and diabolical is this strange and flagrant Jewish democracy that one must look upon it as a disease from which no land is immune,” Lentulus concludes, in Brothers’ final section.

Alexander Jannaeus would be glad to hear it.

***

Fast was a Jew himself, although his family was never particularly observant. For him, the political was the ultimate expression of human life. My Glorious Brothers, then, freely substitutes the difficult zeal of its subjects with something that seemed more reasonable to Fast. Politics were, for him, a kind of religion – the ultimate arbiter determining a person’s relationship to humanity and each individual’s responsibilities to the universe at

Fast joined up, officially, with the Communist Party of the United States in 1943. He was living in New York, and the war was on. The whole town was painted red. Most of his comrades, however, drifted away from the party in less than a decade. Fast remained until 1956 – a decision that lead to his imprisonment for contempt of congress, forced him to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy and won him the Stalin Peace Prize for 1953.

“When, even for a moment, the tissue of lies and slander erected between this land of ours and the Soviet Union […] is brushed aside, we see […] a monumental force for the peace of mankind,” he said, in his acceptance speech. He amplified these comments in his first autobiographical book, The Naked God, published in 1957. To Fast, from 1943 to 1956, the Communist Party and the Soviet Union represented “an edifice dedicated singularly and irrevocably to the ending of all war, injustice, hunger and suffering – and to the goal of the brotherhood of man.” His commitment to the cause was beyond ardent – it was millennial.

Like his Maccabees, Fast seemed to exist in world where “good” and “right” were certainties. People either “understood” them, or they didn’t. To him, the whole world was either saved or doomed.

***

During the war, Fast was employed by the Office of War Information, or O.W.I.. Part of his job was scripting Voice of America broadcasts – multi-lingual propaganda transmissions intended for friendly ears across the lines. Fast “had something the no one else in America had,” he recalled, in Being Red. “A voice into that dark, sad land of occupied Europe, and each day as I tapped it out, my skin would prickle.”

“Even today, forty-eight years later, my eyes fill with tears at that wonderful line: This is the Voice of America,” he continued. “This is the voice of mankind’s hope and salvation, the voice of my wonderful, beautiful country, which will put an end to fascism and remake the world.”

Howard Fast may have been a communist for thirteen years, but he was an American for life. His literary output, from Citizen Tom Paine to the Immigrants series that defined his later years, sparkles with articulate patriotism. Before the end of the Second World War, it may be assumed, there were many American patriots who were communists as well – especially among the artistic and theatrical types staffing the O.W.I. Fast was just more vocal and intransigent than they were.

Fast’s rhetoric may be high-flown, but his actions were largely practical. In 1953, for instance, Fast was called to appear before a senate subcommittee investigating communist infiltration at the Voice of America. Face to jowl with Wisconsin’s honorable Joseph McCarthy, Fast found himself afflicted with an acute amnesia. He forgot practically everything – except the text of the Fifth Amendment.

“Did you do any work for the Voice of America, the VOA?” McCarthy asked at one point.

“You mean the OWI?” Fast inquired.

“No, the Voice of America, the VOA?”

“I can’t seem to remember any,” the author said.

***

In the 1950s, when his communism became scandalous, Fast found himself blacklisted from his usual publishing houses. The situation didn’t keep him out of the game for long. His most famous novel, Spartacus, was written in 1951 and, initially, self-published. Like My Glorious Brothers, it was a tale of ancient warfare preoccupied with the struggle between “freedom” and bondage. Unlike Brothers, it was made into a highly successful Kirk Douglas vehicle.

“Howard Fast is rich,” wrote Ken Gross in a profile for People Weekly in 1991. But “not filthy rich, like the plutocrats he has denounced in such left-leaning novels as Freedom Road and Spartacus,” he clarified. “[Fast] just has a portfolio of a million or two.”

“Government bonds,” the old author told him. “Not a penny in unearned wealth. Just the sweat of my own labor and some Treasury notes.” His ideal life, Fast continued, would have been spent “on the third floor of a tenement in a run-down neighborhood, surrounded by left-wing lunatics.” Sadly, his exit from the communist party – and his considerable financial success – made such a dream impossible. A life of affluence and minor celebrity was, he concluded, a “form of exile,” the pain of which was eased by the occasional visit from William F. Buckley Jr. They were neighbors.

My Glorious Brothers was, in many ways, the perfect successor to the ancient text that served as its model and inspiration. In it, Fast reconfigured some version of the past to fit a millennial model of the future – proposing a world where redemption can be won by the proper skirmishes in the proper order. His recollection of Peekskill is practically a sequel. And so it goes, on and on – violence becomes righteousness becomes history, then violence again.

Fast may have seen himself as a revolutionary, or an artist, or a public intellectual. But a significant portion of his output is propaganda, pure and unconscious – the writing of a man whose political commitments are deep, bold, and uncomplicated by nuance. America may never have a more honest voice.

An elderly woman, who saw him in action at the picnic ground that night in 1949, provides us with perhaps the clearest portrait of the author. “Don’t you go and say anything bad about Howard Fast,” she demanded. He’d been in thick of it – and he’d done more than sing. According to his witness:

“I saw him … with a Coke bottle in each hand, fighting back.”

***

You can read earlier installments of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club here:

Jazz Goes to Church

Area 51: The Alien Interview

Hell on Earth

Helps for the Scrupulous

Religion in H.P. Lovecraft

Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ

Dark Dungeons (Dungeons & Dragons, Part II)

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

Sulamith Ish-Kishor

Salem Kirban, Part 2

Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post Our Glorious Brothers appeared first on The Revealer.

Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law by David Freidenreich. University of California Press, 2011.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/…Good fences make good neighbors.” — Robert Frost, from “Mending Wall ”

David Freidenreich, a professor of Jewish Studies at Colby College, begins his book, Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law with the well known Robert Frost poem “Mending Wall.” It begins a book that spans an historical and geographic range all the way from ancient Israel and Hellenistic Alexandria to medieval Europe and Fatimid Egypt. Freidenreich is interested in how food has been used as a neighborly wall between religious Others. His project is both comparative and historical. It is an expansive study of how restrictions on foreign food have been used to mark and create both similarities and differences. Freidenreich looks at what Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts say about the consumption of food prepared by foreigners. Are we allowed to eat it—and if not, how come? Is it the preparer? The food itself? Or something else entirely? Freidenreich explores all of these restrictions and more, showing, to some degree, both the historical circumstances out of which they arose, and the ways in which they are different and similar to each other.

Because food is common across all of humanity—because its preparation, consumption, and sharing is one of the few sets of practices that scholars can rightly call “basic”—Freidenreich calls it a “powerful medium for the transmission and expression of culture.” He believes it is intimately related to identity. Who eats what, who they eat it with, and conversely, what they don’t eat, and who they don’t eat with, create a compelling representation of a how a group conceives of its own selfhood. This locates the book in traditions of scholarship that links food and identity, and the study of identity through the construction of the other.

Frost’s “something that doesn’t love a wall,” the elusive quality or entity that gives these practices their similarity, remains undefined throughout both the poem and Freidenreich’s book, and perhaps even defies definition altogether (though I’m happy to call it “religion,” or even “culture”).

For Freidenrich, food restrictions are like a set of walls built over a landscape of seemingly similar practices. The figures building these walls—writing the restrictions—are often concerned that one set of practices not be mistaken for another, and that those who participate in one set not become involved in another, even though they might look the same, or even simply be appealing to a broader spectrum of the population. Take an example commonly cited from late antiquity, when John Chrysostom, in fourth century Antioch, instructs his congregation to keep away from Jewish festivals. Whether or not Jewish and Christian festivals were so similar as to be mistaken for each other didn’t matter—each belongs to a specific group. These walls are the codes written in order to cordon off a community’s customs as its own and transform them into a singular tradition that belongs to one group and not another. Judaism and not Christianity. Christianity and not Islam. Otherness itself needs to be defined, and it is in these ancient acts of defining it where Freidenreich locates the importance of food restrictions. “Good fences make good neighbors,” remember?

Foreigners and Their Food contains a section each on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, before turning to case studies that highlight each respective religion’s attitude toward the other two. Within each section, Freidenreich gives a brief history of the scriptural, then legal traditions that develop into the specific foreign food restrictions that are the ultimate object of his study. This means that said histories are succinct, but comprehensive, a necessary balancing act, as the book is aimed at an audience of both educated lay readers and academics. Sometimes, he sacrifices more contemporary scholarship (the account of the beginnings of Christianity in chapter 6, for example) for the sake of brevity.

Each of the middle three sections focuses on a set of legal restrictions that was developed in a religious context distinct from the other two traditions that Freidenreich examines. He then compares that set of laws to those of the other two. Each comparison makes use of three different types of comparative axes. He calls these “horizontal,” “vertical,” and diagonal.” In brief, a horizontal comparison is performed within a single time period or cultural milieu; vertical, in a single intellectual tradition, but across time. A diagonal comparison is between two fields that share neither a common tradition nor a common milieu. This practice of diagonal comparison, Freidenreich claims, is especially informative.

As some readers may know, works of religious comparison have become controversial in recent years. And yet, by laying out this tripartite approach in the introduction, Freidenreich attempts to mitigate many of the critiques that might otherwise be leveled against him (for example, that comparing different traditions to one another should be replaced by studying each tradition on its own terms).

Following in the tradition of Jonathan Z. Smith, he reminds us that no comparison is “natural”: therefore, the practice of diagonal comparison is just as valid as horizontal or vertical. Smith has famously advocated for the study of religion as a work of comparisons. By eschewing any idea that there are natural or fundamental affinities between certain traditions or religions, he has used comparative method to bring to light aspects of religious history that might otherwise have remained unnoticed. This is Freidenreich’s goal as well, and while he does make concessions for the historical connections between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he does so only within the broader context of comparing things that are not automatically assumed to be alike.

Freidenreich’s historical and comparative projects come together when he makes the important claim that that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam each construct otherness differently. Frost comes to mind yet again: “We keep the wall between us as we go./To each the boulders that have fallen to each.” Perhaps the wall looks different on either side, the boulders necessitating different strategies of construction—but it is still a wall. After comparing foreign food restrictions from these three traditions, and recognizing the many ways that Otherness is created, Freidenreich claims that we can understand the historical causes that have created these other forms of Otherness. This is perhaps where the book is at its weakest: the comparisons, which have led Freidenreich to this conclusion, are clear, but the historical evidence in support of why these differences came about is harder to grasp.

Still, though, the differences are tantalizing. Freidenreich even gives his readers a pithy shorthand with which to conceptualize them. His commitment to clarity is paramount. If each group in question conceives of themselves as “Us,” or a value of “one,” “+1,” or “positive,” Jews conceive of Others as “zero,” “nothing,” or “0” (not-Us), Christians construct Others as “negative,” or “-1” (anti-Us), and Muslim law vacillates between the poles. For rabbinic Jews, the food of gentiles is simply banned; for Christians, it is blasphemous, and therefore the food of idolatry, and various Muslim authors fall all along the spectrum.

Perhaps this is clearest when Freidenreich discusses various restrictions on the creation and consumption of cheese. The Tosefta, for example, a Palestinian rabbinic text from around the early third century, is very concerned with the level of involvement a gentile might have in the production of cheese. If a gentile is involved in making it, a Jew is permitted to eat it, as long as it is a Jew who performs the action that makes it into cheese (setting the mold), even if a gentile does most of the rest of the work. The Other is not anathema here: they are simply “not Us.” This requires, of course, that the Jew know just who made the cheese. A later Shi’i Muslim commentator, however, says that all cheese sold in a Muslim market is permissible. Even if it was made using improper ingredients, and set by a non-Muslim, factors which would normally render it unclean, as long as the consumer does not know that is was prepared improperly, they cannot be held accountable, and is therefore allowed to eat it. On why this approach is justified, Freidenreich tells us that one commentator simply states, “I like cheese!” The Other here is neither a “zero” nor a “negative one,” “not-Us” or “anti-Us”: they are willfully non-existent.

Jews, Christians, and Muslims each build their fences, and Freidenreich shows us how those fences traverse the landscape of food and eating practices. “Good fences make good neighbors” seems to have been standard knowledge amongst the legal writers of each of the three traditions, although whether it was inherited, transmitted, or simply inherent in the idea of culture itself is a question the reader is ultimately left to grapple with on her own.

The strategies that are used to construct these fences, however, while distinct to each “intellectual tradition” (to use Freidenreich’s term), and sometimes even distinct to each author, reveal more similarities than they do differences. Between the rabbinic academies of late ancient Babylonia, the Muslim courts of the middle ages, and the monasteries of early Christian Europe and the Middle East, strategies of differentiation are used, rejected, reused, and transformed. An anxiety about remaining distinct leads to numerous practices of restriction—practices that, when taken on the whole, look more alike than they look different. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, indeed.

***

Daniel Picus is a Ph.D. student in Brown University’s Department of Religious Studies. His research focuses on religion in late antiquity, particularly rabbinic Judaism, although his interests extend to Latin, Greek, and Syriac sources.  He served as the Resident Instructor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome during the 2014-15 school year. He is currently writing a dissertation on late ancient reading practices.

The post Review: Foreigners and Their Food appeared first on The Revealer.

Gold is an essential part of Roma culture, especially for the queen of the witches, Maria Câmpina. Photo by Lucia Sekerkova

REVEALERS

Maurice Chammah has done a ton of really great reporting for Vice on “How Germany Does Prisons”

And S. Brent Plate wrote beautifully about “Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) and the Rise of Extreme Evangelicalism” in Religion Dispatches. 

In the evangelical world in which I was born and raised, Elisabeth Elliot (who died on June 15) and her husband Jim Elliot were modern day saints. Being of the Protestant persuasion, we didn’t believe in saints the ways those Catholics did, and though we believed in supernatural power we didn’t ever expect humans to be the performers of miracles.

MOTHER EMANUEL

Here is a selection of the best commentary we’ve seen in the wake of the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. in Charleston, SC last week.

“Black Bodies in Motion and in Pain” by Edwidge Danticat for The New Yorker.

Black bodies are increasingly becoming battlefields upon which horrors are routinely executed, each one so close to the last that we barely have the time to fully grieve and mourn. The massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the racist rant that preceded it highlight the hyper-vigilance required to live and love, work and play, travel and pray in a black body. These killings, and the potential mass expulsions from the Dominican Republic, remind us, as Baby Suggs reminds her out-of-doors congregation in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” that, both yonder and here, some do not love our flesh and are unwilling to acknowledge our humanity, much less our nationality or citizenship.

“The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” by Claudia Rankine for the New York Times.

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

“What This Cruel War Was Over” by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic. 

This mythology of manners is adopted in lieu of the mythology of the Lost Cause. But it still has the great drawback of being rooted in a lie. The Confederate flag should not come down because it is offensive to African Americans. The Confederate flag should come down because it is embarrassing to all Americans. The embarrassment is not limited to the flag, itself. The fact that it still flies, that one must debate its meaning in 2015, reflects an incredible ignorance. A century and a half after Lincoln was killed, after 750,000 of our ancestors died, Americans still aren’t quite sure why.

“Church of God” by Jacob Lawrence

“Enlightenment Values Aren’t Just the Solution to Racism, They’re Also the Problem” by Hussein Rashid for Religion Dispatches.

If we believe that there are Enlightenment values that have meaning, we need to live up to those in practice, stop being shocked at everyday violence inside our borders, and do something that puts an end to it. Our number one export has to stop being weapons, because that too demonstrates where our values lie.

Michael Eric Dyson writes of “Love and Terror in the Black Church” for the New York Times. 

In a country where black death is normal, even fiendishly familiar, black love is an unavoidably political gesture. And that is what happens in our churches: The act of black love, which seems to make our houses of worship a target of hate. It is a political act in this culture that must remind the nation, once again, as hate and terror level our community, that black lives matter.

“The decision to forgive is rootedin faith. the Desire to forget is rooted in racism” by Anthea Butler for The Guardian. 

How long will forgiveness and the subsequent forgetting be a means to derail sustained efforts to confront racism in America? For black people, there is no forgetting of the history of American racism, or the complicity of Christians in that history.  When a white man walks into a black church, sits for an hour, and then allegedly shoots nine black people dead, no amount of forgiveness given for his murderous act by the families of the dead can absolve America of its violent history of racism, no matter how much those complicit in that racism might hope for it.

“After Charleston, Black pastors weigh in on gun rights, control” reports Massoud Hayoun for Al Jazeera.

The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church of Washington, D.C., spoke out for greater gun control. “When America makes violence, it begets more violence,” Lamar told Al Jazeera on Friday.

“America is locked in that narrative,” he said. “You cannot help but call this a continuation of the violence against black bodies that started that beginning. This is the destruction of Rosewood, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the lynchings all recapitulated.

CHRISTIANITY

First up, Mormons:

James Ross Gardner invites you to “Meet the Gay Mormon Men (and Their Wives) Beseeching SCOTUS to Save ‘Traditional’ Marriage” in Talking Points Memo‘s The Slice.

Danny, a therapist, and Erin, a part-time pediatric nurse, had invited me into their home in Orem, Utah one Sunday after church so I could learn more about that marriage. So I could ask the obvious questions: Why would an openly gay man marry a woman, and why would he so vociferously oppose the rights of other gay men to marry? And of course, an even more obvious question, to which Erin’s conspicuous show of affection was the perfect segue.

“Mormons head up effort to make available records of 4 million former black slaves” reports Lee Davidson for The Salt Lake Tribune.

Hollis Gentry, genealogy specialist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said, “These are the earliest of recordings of people who were formerly enslaved. We get a sense of their voice. We get a sense of their desires, their goals, their dreams, their hopes.”

…

Christofferson said the church is involved in genealogy because it believes families are linked forever, and that knowing the sacrifices of ancestors helps those living now. Mormons also perform ordinances, such as baptism, on behalf of ancestors in LDS temples with the belief that those forebears can accept or reject them in the next life.

Speaking of baptisms, Hillary White writes about “Baptism for the Dead,” “a stitched-together conversation between four siblings who have participated in these baptisms—three who have left the LDS church and one who has stayed, providing a fragmented insider’s perspective on the practice” in Killing the Buddha. 

But what’s funny about baptisms for the dead as a concept is assuming that dead people in an afterlife wished they had been Mormon. It is an enormous assumption, thinking that this person would have wanted that done. I think, “I wonder if it is okay with their relatives that this person’s name is being used in a ritual.”

And then, of course, your weekly papal update:

“The Mood of ‘Laudato Si”: A Reply” from Nathan Schneider in America.

One expects a debate about Pope Francis’ new encyclical to form around the details of climate science, or the efficacy of carbon credits, or the theological merits of ecology. But a stranger, subtler difference of opinion has emerged, one that I suspect has more political consequence than it lets on: the interpretation of mood.

“Pope Francis: The Cry of the Earth” by Bill McKibben for the New York Review of Books.

My own sense, after spending the day reading this remarkable document, was of great relief. I’ve been working on climate change for a quarter century, and for much of that time it felt like enduring one of those nightmarish dreams where no one can hear your warnings. In recent years a broad-based movement has arisen to take up the challenge, but this marks the first time that a person of great authority in our global culture has fully recognized the scale and depth of our crisis, and the consequent necessary rethinking of what it means to be human.

And one last pope story: “Pope Francis suggests those in weapons industry can’t call themselves Christian” reports Reuters.

Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.

“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a longcommentary about war, trust and politics, after putting aside his prepared address.

“It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit of distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.

ISLAM

“Politics of gender and religion surface in Women’s World Cup” writes Graham Parker for Al Jazeera America. 

The young woman is wearing a black hoodie fashioned from one of the recognizable smart fabricspopular with sportswear manufacturers. The familiar Nike Swoosh is emblazoned on her chest, and she wears a black “veil” redolent of goal netting over her face. The hoodie is tightly stretched around her head. It’s impossible not to see it as signifying the hijab.

The young woman is Jessica Houara-d’Hommeaux, and she was posing for a Surface Football magazine feature in her native France. The image was ostensibly to help preview the Women’s World Cup in Canada, now underway, but it also served as a provocative response to a debate in France over the role of Muslim women in sports — and society.

Jessica Houara-D’Hommeaux in a photograph for Surface Football Magazine

“In Ramadan, Saudi Families Break Bread and Watch TV Dramas” reports Deborah Amos for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

The holy month of Ramadan is prime time for television dramas and soap operas across the Arab world. TV shows get the highest ratings of the year as families gather to break their fast at sunset. In Saudi Arabia, a drama that was a YouTube hit has crossed over to the mainstream broadcast TV for Ramadan viewing. And this show reflects the youth culture in the kingdom, as NPR’s Deborah Amos reports from Riyadh.

The show is called “Takki,” chill in English. When it played on the Internet in 2012, it was an instant hit with more than 3 million views per episode. This year, a private television channel has backed production of a second season. Mohammed Makki is the 26-year-old writer and director. He explains the first season was about a group of friends trying to make a film in the city of Jeddah and their entanglement with women. Makki says he aimed the series for Saudis under the age of 25.

Speaking of fashion and Ramadan, here’s this week’s installment of the New York Times Thursday style section being unsure of what to do with women who “dress for other women“: “For Ramadan, Courting the Muslim Shopper” by Ruth La Ferla.

Indeed, the retail courtship of free-spending Muslims is being greeted skeptically in some quarters. The thing about corporations, said Fareeha Molvi, a young Muslim-American, in an essay on the Racked website, “is that they rarely do things out of sheer human goodwill.” For stores, Ms. Molvi observed, “Financial gains are a far greater motivator.”

But profiling, to some minds, is just another word for canny marketing, the strategic, and progressive, attempt to identify consumers, women in particular, who have traditionally greeted Ramadan in their most lavish finery.

And lastly, please do read Morwari Zafar astounding, “A Thousand Splendid Stuns” for Granta. It’s amazing.

Contrary to assumptions about Afghan men and secular activity, my father never beat us (or my mom) for having Western or non-Islamic inclinations. Dad did not wield an iron fist, choosing instead a zen-like state of patience and reason to deal with the three women in the household. Not blessed with sons (something of a curse among more conservative Afghans), my dad never faltered in his open affection and his mastery of psychological warfare when it came to negating our appeals to his pathos. He rarely flat-out denied us anything, but disguised refusal as a question that challenged the integrity of our moral core – ‘you can wear that dress, but do you think it best reflects the person you know you are?’ Basically, he guilt-tripped the hell out of us and it worked like a charm almost every time. But he changed my life with music.

JUDAISM

Meanwhile, in Egypt: Sigal Samuel asks “Will ‘Jewish Quarter’ Win Over Egyptians — or Backfire?” in The Forward.

A scene from the Egyptian television series “The Jewish Quarter,” which follows a Jewish family living in Cairo in 1948. The series has astonished Egyptians with its compassionate treatment of Egypt’s Jews and its depiction of their fierce anti-Zionism. Credit El-Adl Group (via the New York Times)

And David D. Kirkpatrick says in the New York Times that “For Egypt, TV Show’s Shocking Twist Is Its Sympathetic Jews.”

It is a stark turn from the overt anti-Semitism that has dominated Egyptian television for decades. The Israeli Embassy in Cairo commended the first episodes, commenting on an embassy-run Facebook page that for the first time, “it shows Jews in their real human state, as a human being before anything, and we bless this.”

Oh, and Ross Arbes explains “How the Talmud Became a Best Seller in South Korea” in The New Yorker. 

In 2011, the South Korean Ambassador to Israel at the time, Young-sam Ma, was interviewed on the Israeli public-television show “Culture Today.” “I wanted to show you this,” he told the host, straying briefly from the topic at hand, a Korean film showing in Tel Aviv. It was a white paperback book with “Talmud” written in Korean and English on the cover, along with a cartoon sketch of a Biblical character with a robe and staff. “Each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud. Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses.” Looking up at the surprised host, he added, “Twenty-three per cent of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish people. Korean women want to know the secret. They found the secret in this book.”

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUND-UP

Juan Vidal writes for NPR Books about “Words Made Flesh: Literature and the Language of Prayer.”

Lately, my prayers have become a form of artistic expression: Carefully chosen words, praise reports like songs, and sometimes pissed-off pronouncements entwined with polite requests that I please not screw something up. This season of life has required thoughtful consideration of even my private devotional time — and that makes me think of the conviction of Flannery O’Connor.

No other writer in the history of American letters has been able to pin down the intersection of faith, prayer, and art as evocatively as O’Connor.

“Escaping Colonialism, Rescuing Religion: on Alicia Turner’s Saving Buddhism” by Alexandra Kaloyanides for the Marginalia Review of Books.

By attending to sāsana and religion in colonial Burma, Saving Buddhism shows how Burmese communities were able to draw on traditional Buddhist resources and newly available colonial technologies to renegotiate the conditions of life under the British crown. Rather than yield to Western ideas about religion, these Burmese communities creatively combined long-established Buddhist techniques of reform and preservation with modern innovations such as such as the printing press, subscription associations, and modern schools. Turner describes these colonial Burmese communities as “active and adept bricoleurs” who recast ideas about Buddhism and their community’s role in its history.

“Satanic Temple Will File Federal Lawsuit Against Missouri Abortion Laws” reports Anna Merlan for Jezebel.

The Satanic Temple, God bless and keep them, is filing a federal lawsuit today against Missouri’s abortion restrictions, where one of their members, known as “Mary Doe,” recently terminated a pregnancy. The Satanic Temple is arguing that Missouri’s abortion laws, specifically its 72-hour waiting period and an “informed consent” booklet given to Doe, violate her free exercise of religion.

William Dalrymple tells the story of “The Great Divide: The Violent Legacy of Indian Partition” by for The New Yorker.

The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture unravelled so quickly has spawned a vast literature. The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together peacefully. Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy years of nationalist mythmaking. There has also been a widespread attempt to record oral memories of Partition before the dwindling generation that experienced it takes its memories to the grave.

And lastly, the story of that magnificent woman from the top of the page: Robert Alexe (words) and Lucia Sekerkova (photographs) take us “Inside the Gaudy World of Romania’s Wealthiest Witches” for Vice.

I’ve been both fascinated and scared by the occult ever since I was a child. I decided to come to Romania through the Erasmus student exchange program because I thought the country was quite mysterious and rich in folklore. I was searching the internet for information about the villages, the people, and their traditions when I came across a YouTube video of one of these fortune tellers. I knew right away that I needed to meet them in person.

***

Past links round-ups can be found here:

Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! (June 19, 20

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: Racism, Ramadan, Romanian Witches and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

This is the fourth in an ongoing series of articles that Laura McTighe is writing for The Revealer about issues at the intersection of race and religion. She will be writing about incarceration, activism and organizing, reproductive justice, and more, with an eye to questions of history, violence, and justice. You can find the previous three articles in this series here. 

 ***

Author’s Note: In the last two weeks, our national conversation about race has moved from the absurd interrogation of Black womanhood because a white woman donned blackface, to the calculated massacre of Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Clementa Pinckney, Tywanza Sanders, Cynthia Hurd, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depyane Middleton Doctor, Daniel Simmons and Myra Thompson under the guise of protecting white women’s purity. The #NotInOurNames hashtag has emerged as an affirmation that white people will not be complicit in racist terrorism any longer. Black women started us chanting and tweeting #BlackLivesMatter. If we are going to realize their vision, we must learn to embrace the leadership they have been providing for centuries – and we must confront the ways in which when we have unwittingly and willfully erased their work. 

***

#SayHerName vigil in Union Square, New York on May 20, 2015. Photo: Andy Katz/ Corbis via For Harriet

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.” In the Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler breathed to life a new religion – Earthseed – based not in the sacred scriptures of elders and prophetic pasts, but in the presents and possible futures of the living. In accepting that God Is Change, believers were called to stand in their own power, to shape themselves, to shape the universe, to shape God. “Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.”

My reintroduction to Octavia Butler came from Walidah Imarisha at a conference I co-organized with Josef Sorett last Fall, Are the Gods Afraid of Black Sexuality?: Religion and the Burdens of Black Sexual Politics. At the conference, Imarisha introduced us to the idea of “visionary fiction” that she and her co-editor, adrienne maree brown, had employed in their newly published anthology, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. As Imarisha explained, “Visionary fiction is not neutral. It does not purport to be neutral. The goal of visionary fiction is to create social change. All organizing is science fiction.”

It’s a jarring idea to bend your mind around. Every organizer, every change maker, every visionary is writing science fiction. Envisioning a world in which every person has the full freedom to be their full self is science fiction. Affirming that #BlackLivesMatter when nine Black people are gunned down in one of the oldest Black sacred spaces in the country is science fiction. As any organizer will tell you, vision is essential to social change. It’s the end that every protest held, every call made, every sign flown is pointing towards . It’s the hope for dreaming the impossible into existence.

As we struggle to realize the vision that Black lives matter, we have had to swallow yet another bitter truth. Amid the everyday terror of anti-Black violence in the United States, some Black lives matter more than others. We called out for Michael Brown, but could not remember Tanisha Anderson’s name. We set Baltimore ablaze for Freddie Gray, but forgot to light a candle for Rekia Boyd. Activists and scholars alike have pointed out the irony of this occlusion given that the #BlackLivesMatter movement was started by Black women, and that Black women’s leadership has defined what it means to defend the dead. Just as this violence has a history, so to does this occlusion. In the long and unbroken state of emergency in the United States, it is impossible to understand the contours of anti-Black violence and Black people’s resistance without reckoning with the history of how Black womanhood has been produced as a category of non-being – of how Black women’s very humanity has been made illegible.

Signs made by the Octavia’s Brood Letterpress for a book release party at the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. Photo by Walidah Imarisha

That work of exclusion and erasure is also science fiction, albeit of a different sort than what Octavia’s Brood is writing. When Imarisha calls all organizing science fiction, she implores us to think about the gap between what is and what could be, and about how organizers strive to prefigure the future society they are working towards in their everyday political lives. I am calling Black women’s “paradox of non-being” science fiction because it is not reflective of Black women’s actual lives and work; it bespeaks a debased society that totally and completely erases Black women’s lives. The truth is, Black women face real and horrific state, structural, and interpersonal violence every single day. And it is also true that Black women are leading the movements to end this violence. They’ve been doing so for generations. To not speak this truth, to not #SayHerName, is science fiction. When we do not speak this truth, when we do not Trust Black Women, we become part of bringing to life this sick and twisted universe; we help write a future that looks far too much like our present and past.

***

“THE REVOLUTION WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WON’T BE MY REVOLUTION.” These words united a crowd of New Orleanians on May 21, 2015, a national day of action to highlight state and structural violence that Black women face. Not only does local and mainstream media tend to treat this violence as invisible, but it also consistently ignores Black women’s protests against it. The small photo gallery uploaded to Nola.com after the May 2015 event did not name a single organizer or speaker. It was a sick sort of poetic justice. On a national day to #SayHerName, the local media would not. There was not even a mention of the significance of the location of the action: Miss Penny Proud, a transgender Black youth leader at BreakOUT, had been murdered on that site just three months prior. The press did such a poor job of covering the action that one of the co-organizers, Mwende Katwiwa (aka FreeQuency), had to pen her own story about it.

This is certainly not the first time the media has left us with an effaced portrait of Black women’s resistance. On August 14^th 2014, people nationally took to the streets to mourn and protest the murder of Michael Brown. Hundreds of people gathered in New Orleans’ Lafayette Park as part of this National Moment of Silence (NMOS). The local news station WGNO ran a simple image-free story covering only the short, scripted portion of the vigil in which Chanelle Batiste read aloud the names of Black people who had been killed by the police, and called all to raise their hands in the now iconic “Don’t Shoot” pose.

What the news omitted was that there were several Black feminist visionaries in front row of that protest crowd. Among them were Mwende Katwiwa and Desiree Evans, both members of Wildseeds: The New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective and staff of Women With A Vision (WWAV), a quarter-century old Black women’s health and social justice collective. They completely failed to mention that when the August 14^th 2014 vigil crowd began to disperse, Katwiwa asked those next to her, “Really? Is that it?” Then she pushed to the front and called: “EXCUSE ME! Is that all? I know too many busy people here who could be somewhere else but chose to be here. For Mike and others. There is too much collective energy here to waste. If we took to the streets, would you join us?” They did. And people joined. The vigil-turned-march grew to 400-strong before occupying the French Quarter police station – grievances were hurled by a community already well-organized against the everyday racism and terror of its local police force. It took The New Orleans Advocate more than a month to upload a small photo gallery of the action. As with the #SayHerName action, the real coverage of this vigil-turned-march had to be penned by Mwende Katwiwa herself.

National Moment of Silence march on August 14, 2014 in New Orleans. PIctured left to right are Anita Dee, Samai Lalani, and Mwende Katwiwa. Photo by @Small_Affair

There are so many stories like this. For instance, we could go back a few years prior to March 29^th 2012. WWAV, under the leadership of Executive Director Deon Haywood had just secured a massive victory. With a carefully selected team of civil rights attorneys, WWAV brought a federal suit against the state of Louisiana for criminalizing Black cisgender and transgender women working in the city’s underground economies. WWAV leadership and strategy created a climate in which a federal judge could, and did, rule that a Louisiana statute for prosecuting sex work as a “crime against nature” was unconstitutional, thereby securing the removal of more than 800 Black women from the Louisiana sex offender registry.

However, the media coverage the next day featured a large picture of the judge, celebrating his courage to rule in the case. WWAV was not mentioned in the article; they had been written out of the story of their own win. Deon Haywood had to write the story of this monumental victory by and for Black women. Resisting media portraits that exceptionalized the “crime against nature” statute as an arcane relic of old South justice, Haywood connected the law and its enforcement to the broader climate of injustice Black women moved through daily in the post-Katrina neoliberal deluge. She claimed WWAV’s victory for everyone who had ever been criminalized and named it as the continuation of the long Black Freedom Struggle. When WWAV’s offices were firebombed and destroyed by unknown arsonists just two months later, Haywood again explained how the attack (and the government’s refusal to investigate) should be interpreted: Fire has long been used as a tool of terror in the South, but it can also be a powerful force for rebirth.

***

The history written by New Orleans organizers like Haywood and Katwiwa refuses to script their work as reactionary, episodic, or somehow secondarily reactive to the oppressions they resist. Nonetheless, no matter how contextual, no matter how historically informed, no matter how deep its roots, Black women’s work is too often treated as though it is an eruption or a reaction, not the continuation of a centuries-long legacy.

Deon Haywood speaking at a July 13, 2013 Solidarity Rally in New Orleans organized in the wake of George Zimmerman acquittal in the murder of Trayvon Martin. Photo by Sasha Matthews.

The denial of coevalness is one of the oldest colonialist tricks for constructing the “Other” as spatially and temporally different from themself. We might recognize this denial in its more overt manifestations: the descriptions of peopled lands as “empty” or as “blank canvasses;” the minimization of indigenous social and cultural work as “primitive” or “backwards.” However, the scripting of Black women’s resistance as always already reactive is a no less powerful way of naturalizing the time and space of white heteropatriarchy.

To be clear: The strategies, forms, and histories of Black women’s resistance were not created by the oppressive forces with which their work has engaged. Black women created these strategies, forms of resistance, and histories. This work is Octavia Butler’s science fiction. It is Imarisha’s, and Katwiwa’s, and Haywood’s visionary organizing in which God is Change. It is the creation of a world in which Black women write their own stories and their own futures.

To say, think, or write otherwise is no less sci-fi. Ignoring Black women’s work, writing their stories for or without them, can only bring to life a sick and twisted universe in which Black womanhood continues to be produced as a category of non-being – in which we still do not #SayHerName.

***

“The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”

When we speak the truth of Black women’s lives and work, we become part of changing the universe into ones in which ALL Black lives matter. We also learn a very different way of analyzing our current social order. Human life is deeply and radically connective – in the clutch of an arresting officer’s hand, in the cut of a judge’s tongue, in the grimace of a store clerk; and also in the scarce resources nonetheless shared within each community, in the cascades of laughter that fill the darkest of institutions. This relationality gives everyday Black feminist resistance a vital elasticity. It’s possible to “hunker down” in times of crisis and gather loved ones close; just as it is possible to stretch out and re-form the severed threads of community and thus unravel those of the American empire. In each case, the strategy is the same: Counter social death with a defiance of living. Organize into a world in which it is possible to realize these collective visions together.

We all live history every day. But is that history writing us? Or are we writing it? Octavia Butler asks us to recognize Black women’s writing and organizing as powerful, sacred work – as a collective force that spins the present and future into existence. When we #SayHerName, we are participating in the visionary fiction demanded and crafted by Black women. When we affirm #NotInOurNames, we are participating in the visionary fiction demanded and crafted by Black women. This participation touches us. It changes us. And through the leadership of Black Women, it changes the universe.

“Why is the universe? To shape God. Why is God? To shape the universe.”

Zina Mitchell photographed at the offices of WWAV on May 29, 2012, days after the arson attack. Photo by Laura McTighe

***

Previous articles in Laura McTighe‘s series on race and religion are:

Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, with Hakim ‘Ali

Haunted Passages: On Carrying the Past and Envisioning Justice

To Take Place and Have a Place: On Religion, White Supremacy & the People’s Movement in Ferguson

***

Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Through her dissertation project, “Born In Flames,” she is working with leading Black feminist organizations in Louisiana to explore how reckoning with the richness of southern Black women’s intellectual and organizing traditions will help us to understand (and do) American religious history differently. Laura comes to her doctoral studies through more than seventeen years of direct work to challenge the punitive climate of criminalization in the United States and support communities’ everyday practices of transformation. Currently, she serves on the boards of Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia. Laura’s writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications.

The post Trust Black Women: God is Change appeared first on The Revealer.

By Ann Neumann

“Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” Genesis 9:3–4

In our global cosmologies, blood is sacred, repulsive, a sign of both salvation and damnation. It is the carrier of life, disease and even personal characteristics, like pride or sophistication or criminal behavior. We are guilty when we have blood on our hands, our feats or failures are in our blood, enemies have bad blood between them. “Blood impresses the imagination,” wrote Dennis J. McCarthy in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 1969. Blood’s attending powers are something we may or may not believe in, but blood is also a medical science. The Jehovah’s Witnesses faith, in particular, has caused both conflict and pioneering advancements in medicine’s use of blood.

Charles T. Russell, a young pastor prone to a full beard and unwaivering trust in his own interpretation of the Bible, founded the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the late 1800s near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He and a collection of students devised their faith out of a comparison of prominent church teachings at the time with “what the Bible really teaches.” Russell went on to establish The Watchtower Society and magazine, drawing on what Carlo Petrini, the Head of the Bioethics Unit at the National Institute of Health in Rome, Italy, has called a “literal millennialist interpretation of the Bible.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses are broadly (and reductively) known for two things: knocking on your door when you least want or expect it; and refusing blood transfusions that could otherwise save their lives. While the medical technology for transfusions has existed for centuries, and the Jehovah’s Witness faith has too, their conflict is fairly recent. British physician Richard Lower is broadly credited with performing the first successful blood transfusion between two dogs in 1665. Nearly three hundred years later, in 1945, Jehovah’s Witnesses first stated their opposition to transfusions. Citing various verses in the Bible, including Genesis 9:3-4 (above), Leviticus 17: 10, 12, and others, Witnesses declared that “consuming” blood, either while eating (vegetarianism is part of church doctrine) or via transfusion, is not permissible for believers.

The refusal of blood is not a matter of the soul’s loss, but of violation of the body, according to Witnesses. Medicine has been grappling with how to understand the refusal of blood ever since. One such medical body, the Belgian Advisory Committee on Bioethics, sought clarification of the consequences of blood transfusions from the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses of Belgium in 2001. The Congregation responded:

“the problem is unlikely to be seen in terms of resurrection and life eternal. He or she would more likely be devastated by the feeling that someone had taken advantage of a moment of weakness due, for example, to illness or unconsciousness, to impose a form of treatment totally at odds with his or her wishes and consent.”

Petrini writes in a 2014 article for Blood Transfus (linked above) that reconciling the Jehovah’s Witness patient’s desires with what a doctor may deem standard, makes necessary care “extremely problematic.”

“Failure to act may lead to criminal charges of negligence or even, should the patient die, of culpable homicide; intervention, on the other hand, could lead to criminal charges of trespass against physical integrity or to claims for damages by the patient for violation of the right to self-determination.”

However, from the Congregation’s clarification (which focuses on consent) and Petrini’s above concerns (doctors are potentially damned if they do or don’t), it’s clear that refusal of any kind can be a challenge for patients and doctors who have differing ideas of how to proceed with treatment, whether they’re stated or not, whether they’re religious in nature or not: a cancer patient who chooses not to undergo routine and largely effective chemotherapy; a pregnant woman who chooses to carry a terminal fetus to term even though her life will be endangered by doing so; an ALS patient who chooses to stop eating and drinking in order to avoid the end stages of the degenerative disease.

The hamstring in all this patient choice, however, is when a patient is not able to give consent (if they are either incompetent or unconscious), or when the patient is a minor or a fetus. Internationally, the courts have intervened in the case of minors, almost uniformly ordering treatment because the child is not yet of the age to make such medical decisions. In the case of fetuses, particularly in the US where politically and socially influential groups perceive a fetus to be a life worthy of protection, courts often override the consent of the pregnant patient.

***

Three primary examples come to mind when you consider conflicts between religion and medicine: abortion, euthanasia, and (strangely, fascinatingly) Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal of blood transfusions. Although Jehovah’s Witnesses number only about 8 million worldwide and cases of conflict are rare, their belief that the bible prohibits blood transfusions is a classic media attention-grabber. A number of recent cases highlight this.

In the UK in December 2014, a judge was asked to intervene on behalf of a young boy who had received extensive burns and required an infusion of blood for survival. The boy’s parents refused the blood transfusion on religious grounds. “I have no doubt at all that they love their son dearly. I also have no doubt that they object to the receipt by [their son] of a blood transfusion because of their devout beliefs. I hope they will understand why I have reached the decision which I have,” Justice Moylan told The Guardian at the time.

Because the child was too young to make his own medical decisions and because his parents were seen as endangering his life, the judge was asked to intervene. In countries with modern medical systems, this tends to be the pattern: caregivers become concerned when Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse treatment for their children and ask the courts to step in. Adults, however, are generally permitted to deny any medical treatment for themselves they wish, and the courts have a long history of jurisprudence that enforces such decision-making.

Even in a contested case in Michigan, courts ruled in January 2014 that doctors were correct to follow a woman’s advanced directive. After the death of Gwendolyn Rozier at St. John Hospital in 2007, her estate sued the physicians who had attended her, claiming malpractice. Rozier received a donated kidney from her daughter. She requested not to be given a blood transfusion during the transplant procedure. When her body rejected the kidney it was removed and she died less than two weeks later. Her husband and family supported Rozier’s wishes and the judge concluded, “The choice was hers to make, whether for reasons of religion, or for altogether different reasons entirely, or in fact for no reason at all.”

But a case in Australia shows that medical, legal and perhaps social support for patients’ autonomous decision-making can fall apart. Reported in the April 2015 issue of Internal Medicine Journal and picked up by both the Sydney Herald Tribune and The Daily Mail, is an account of a 28 year-old Australian woman who was diagnosed with Leukemia when nearly seven months pregnant. The hospital recommended that she undergo a caesarean section to deliver the fetus and then begin chemotherapy but, because the delivery and cancer treatment would likely have required a blood transfusion, the woman refused on account of her Jehovah’s Witness faith.

Both she and the fetus died—despite an 80% cure rate for women and “reasonable” outcomes for fetuses when Leukemia is diagnosed in the second or third trimester. “Staff were distressed, grappling with what was perceived as two ‘avoidable’ deaths,” doctors Biscoe and Kidson-Gerber wrote at Internal Medicine Journal. “Circumstances where foetal and maternal autonomy conflict, or where foetal beneficence conflicts with maternal autonomy, create challenges,” the doctors write, “All decisions should be strictly within the parameters of informed consent – disclosure, comprehension and free consent – and place patient autonomy at the forefront.”

Biscoe and Kidson-Gerber also explain why they decided to write about this woman’s case: “There is little published information to assist physicians to manage their own anxieties, doubts and potential moral disagreement with the patient, and to help them maintain respect for a patient and continue to deliver good medical care.”

Their words are a profound reminder that doctors are people too, and not merely representatives of a consensus on general medical ethics. They come to their patients with their own ethics, faiths, prejudices, politics and opinions. Biscoe and Kidson-Gerber state that understanding the root of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ opposition to blood transfusions is helpful to a better relationship between doctor and patient and for a more robust respect for patients’ autonomy. While I grant that this statement is probably true, it’s worth asking if the reason for refusal of treatment, particularly when it is connected to faith, plays a role in public policy regarding patient consent.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article, journalist Amy Corderoy uses the Biscoe and Kidson-Gerber case to point to what she perceives as a growing area for conflict. New medical technologies that can be performed on fetuses in utero (with a patient’s consent) are colliding with a recent Australian bill that would make it a crime to harm or kill a fetus (a “pro-life” law that would thwart a patient’s consent). Operating on a fetus that has, say, a faulty heart valve should, according to established rules of patient autonomy, require a woman’s consent. But the bill would override that consent if the woman makes an informed medical decision that contradicts broader (Christian) religious ideas.

Corderoy reminds us that medical advancement often challenges faith-based ideas and that new technologies can not only save lives but also change our ideas of what life is. Our assumption—and Corderoy’s—is that faith and medicine are always in conflict. But that’s not the case. Sometimes they work in tandem, sometimes one ultimately catches up with the other. Laws can then reflect what shakes out between the two. The issue of Jehovah’s Witnesses and denial of blood transfusions is held up as a worthy case study because it pushes us to consider how society and the law decide what is more important: faith or medicine.

But we are entrenched, in Europe and the US, in a culture that is dominated by a form of religion that persistently fails to acknowledge the autonomy of some patients, regardless of their religion: women. In essence, Jehovah’s Witness cases are “cleaner” arguments because they can work with that religion-medicine dichotomy without getting messed up in the gender stuff that with which abortion is wrought with. Which is why the Biscoe and Kidson-Gerber case is so fascinating. It pulls in the autonomy of a pregnant woman, and sets itself up as an example of what autonomy should be. I am sure it’s not a best-practices example for many in the “pro-life” movement. Yet, as faith and ethics wrestle for jurisdiction over these vital questions, sometimes we encounter beliefs that direct medicine in new life-saving directions.

***

In “Medicine Without Blood,” an article at The Atlantic this month, Alex Ashley examines new medical technologies that, with a push from the Jehovah’s Witness community, are pioneering ways to practice medicine without transfusions. Some methods include capture of a patient’s blood during surgery so it can be reintroduced into the patient afterward, or hemodilution, a means of extending the circulatory system to store blood outside the body until after treatment.

Ashley writes that after the AIDS epidemic, many people were focused on how to make blood safer, but even type-matched transfusions can cause debilitating or lethal outcomes such as a build-up of iron and allergic reaction. Over the past fifteen years, he writes, many have started asking, “If doctors can avoid transfusions, why wouldn’t they?” Proponents argue that the benefits of bloodless medicine, or blood management, are universal. Ashley writes:

According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bloodless Medicine and Surgery, blood-management programs help hospitals cut down on unnecessary blood draws and the amount they spend acquiring and storing blood. Blood management has also been linked to shorter patient recovery times and reduced risk of infection.

In this light, the Biblical interpretations of Charles T. Russell, the founder of Jehovah’s Witnesses, appear prescient. Jehovah’s Witnesses have established a global network of Hospital Liaison Committees (HLCs) that mediate communication between patients and doctors. Ashley notes that there are some 140 HLCs in the US and their work has coincided with the recognition among hospitals and medical providers that managing blood use has broader benefits.

Writing as I do so often in this column about the conflicts surrounding faith and medicine, it’s refreshing—even edifying—to see religious beliefs as the source of medical advancement. Theoretically, if blood management is adopted across the globe, a pregnant Jehovah’s Witness with a Leukemia diagnosis won’t have to die. Nor will her fetus. But medically side-stepping transfusions doesn’t resolve the issues of consent that we see in places like Australia and the United States where constant challenges are made to a patient’s autonomy because she is pregnant. These challenges don’t come from Jehovah’s Witnesses, but rather from a dominant and politicized form of Christianity that has elevated fetal life above female consent. Medical advancements have given women the ability to determine the number of children they have and when, but these new technologies can’t—or yet haven’t—convinced bishops, pastors and social conservatives that a woman is trustworthy.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns:

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 In the Blood appeared first on The Revealer.

CHARLESTON

Black lives matter. And language matters. Last week we shared Al Jazeera‘s video about why they never use the word “terrorist” in their reporting. There have been debates over what kind of violence gets marked as terrorism for a long time. The argument that the term is so loaded with a particular kind of bigotry and politics has compelled outlets like Al Jazeera to ban it all together. A move we understand well. On the other hand, many are arguing that, in the wake of the Charleston shooting, it’s time to start calling violence committed by white people the same name we call violence committed by non-white people. It’s an important conversation and almost all of the responses to the Emanuel A.M.E. church massacre have touched on the “terrorism” question in some way. Selected below is some of the best writing we’ve seen on this issue and the others, including the history of the American Black Church, gun laws, blackness itself, and Fox News.

Jelani Cobb‘s Thursday morning New Yorker missive, “Murders in Charleston,” was by far one of the smartest and most moving we read.

A week that began with public grappling with race as absurdity has concluded with shock, yet again, with race as the catalyst for tragedy. The existential question of who is black has been answered in the most concussive way possible: the nine men and women slain as they prayed last night at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were black. The people for whom this new tableau of horror is most rooted in American history are black as well. The people whose grief and outrage over this will inevitably be diminished with irrelevant references to intra-racial homicide are black people.

…

For black Christians, the word “sanctuary” had a second set of implications. The spiritual aims of worship were paired with the distinctly secular necessity of a place in which not just common faith but common humanity could be taken for granted. No matter the coming details about the shooting in Charleston, it seems almost inescapable that the assault on a single black church is an inadvertent affirmation of the need for an entire denomination of them.

As always, Patrick Blanchfield wrote with nuance and passion in “A Sick and Broken People” on his site, Carte Blanchfield.

Because how many more places of worship need to be desecrated with the tears and blood of other human beings before White America shows at least some bit of spine and confronts what it has wrought, what it will not stop wreaking, and what is consuming what we have left of a soul from within? If we do not confront this, then we are a sick and broken people, and if the judgment of history shows us any mercy, we will not have deserved it.

Also very worth reading are, “Thugs and Terrorists Have Attached Black Churches for Generations” by Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic. 

And the attack on the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and its congregation also stoked memories of an additional burden borne by blacks: the hate crimes and terrorist attacks that have targeted their places of worship for generations, each incident signaling virulent animus toward the entire black community.

“Many Ask, Why Not Call Church Shooting Terrorism?” writes Rick Gladstone for the New York Times. 

Against the backdrop of rising worries about violent Muslim extremism in the United States, advocates see hypocrisy in the way the attack and the man under arrest in the shooting have been described by law enforcement officials and the news media.

“Shooters of color are called ‘terrorists’ and ‘thugs.’ Why are white shooters called ‘mentally ill’?“ asks Anthea Butler in The Washington Post. 

This time, I hope that reporters and newscasters will ask the questions that get to the root of acts of  racially motivated violence in America. Where did this man, who killed parishioners in their church during Bible study, learn to hate black people so much? Did he have an allegiance to the Confederate flag that continues to fly over the state house of South Carolina? Was he influenced by right-wing media’s endless portrayals of black Americans as lazy and violent?

I hope the media coverage won’t fall back on the typical narrative ascribed to white male shooters: a lone, disturbed or mentally ill young man failed by society. This is not an act of just “one hateful person.” It is a manifestation of the racial hatred and white supremacy that continues to pervade our society, 50 years after the Birmingham church bombing galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. It should be covered as such. And now that authorities have found their suspect, we should be calling him what he is: a terrorist.

and, “Why White Terrorists Attach Black Churches” by Matthew J. Cressler for Slate. 

The harsh truth is that this act of terrorism was not senseless. The language of “senselessness” implies lack of logic or purpose. The true terror of Dylann Roof’s attack on Emanuel AME is the fact that it fits neatly into an ongoing, blood-soaked history of white violence against black women, men, and children in religious institutions. Roof reportedly told a survivor, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.” Do not be mistaken. This attack embodied white supremacy at its most blunt and brutal. And it is neither inexplicable nor a coincidence that it happened in a “place of worship.

Jordan Weissman reports for Slate on “How Fox News Tried to Spin the Charleston Shooting as an Attack on Christianity This Morning”

As you may already know, Wednesday night’s shooting happened on the anniversary of a planned slave revolt in Charleston, SC in 1822. The Atlantic wisely dug into their archives on Thursday morning and republished this incredible story from 1861 by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “The Story of Denmark Vesey.”

Yoni Appelbaum followed up with an interview with historian Douglas Egerton on “The Fight for Equality in Charleston, From Denmark Vesey to Clementa Pinckney.”

Whites still refer to Vesey as a terrorist in Charleston; he was fighting for freedom. It looks like the terrorist was this young white man who shot up the church.

CLIMATE CHANGE

First, the very basics: David Gibson explains: “What is an encyclical?” for Religion News Service. 

And then, there are the basics of the document itself.

“Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change” by Jim Yardley and Laurie Goodstein for the New York Times.”

Then, some commentary: Did Pope Francis Just End the Religion and Science Conflict?” asks Donovan Schaefer in Religion Dispatches. 

Francis then takes it a step further by calling on Catholics to see science as a necessary tool for methodically tracking the health of the Earth and its inhabitants—a global stethoscope—and to see their own role in taking moral responsibility for following through on those diagnoses. In this vision, science and religion combine forces to defend domains of truth-telling that demand the right to be left untouched by the profit motive: science in terms of natural description, religion in terms of moral vision. Science and religion are not at odds; they’re both obstructed by rampaging capitalism.

“Religious climate activists energized by pope’s environment encyclical” writes Sarah Posner for Al Jazeera America.

Although care for the environment has long been a central tenet not just of Catholicism but also of Judaism, Islam and other faiths, the environmental movement has long been animated largely by secular activism. Religious activists working on climate issues at the grass-roots level are delighted that Francis’ encyclical is expected to support the scientific consensus on climate change, declare a moral imperative to address an urgent crisis and focus on the disproportionate impact of climate change on the world’s poor.

“Holy Ignorance” by Garry Wills for The New York Review of Books.

Now Pope Francis, with his encyclical on climate change, has introduced a concern for the poor into the environmental discussion. But conservative Catholics (including five actual or potential candidates for president) forgive him, since he knows nothing about science—if he did, he would realize its anti-biblical animus. He does not know, as the conservatives do, that the masked godless thing must be met by a holy resistance. This is what the French anthropologist Olivier Roy calls “holy ignorance.” It is not a failure of intelligence, but a proud refusal to know things tainted by the arrogance of inevitability. He writes: “There is a close link between secularization and religious revivalism, which is not a reaction against secularization, but the product of it. Secularism engenders religion.” The defenders of the lost cause feel persecuted, and the more support there is for their opponents, the grander they are in their lonely war.

“How Pope Francis Can Stop Leaks: Make Encyclicals Open-Source” advises Nathan Schneider in The New Republic. 

This gives a new meaning to the word “encyclical”; it would be not just a circular letter from the Holy Father, but the result of a shared effort by the church as a whole. The church would more truly be speaking “from the people.” This would require participation, of course, and it might make some of our lives a little more complicated—in a good way. Leaks can be a feature, not a bug.

And lastly, The Climate Change-Abortion Connection You Never Knew Existed” by Thomas J. Whitley for Marginalia.

So, while Francis is being championed for taking a stance on climate change and is being lambasted by conservative Catholics and Catholic Republican presidential hopefuls in America, he is still Catholic. He has repackaged some of the teachings of the Church in ways that are more acceptable to modern society, but he is not the progressive pope many hoped he would be or still think he is.

The Pope is, it seems, in fact still Catholic.

CHRISTIANITY

Religion Dispatches has initiated a new series on the “the changing face of American Christianities. Tripp Hudgins launched the project with: “The Accidental Worshiper: Following the Music.”

This is the first in a series—part of an ongoing RD initiative focused on the changing face of American Christianities—that will take a stage-dive into the crowded field of religion and popular music. “The Accidental Worshiper” will consider the experiences of both artists and fans as they re-imagine their relationship to church, to religious community, and to the culture of the coliseum (or to the festival, or the coffeehouse, or…).

“Franklin Graham Is Winning at Facebook” according to Patton Dodd‘s latest for Religion and Politics.

Think about the basic structure of a Facebook post on pages like Graham’s. Consider its potentiality as a cultural product. Graham shares his opinion. Maybe he asks a broad question or two, inviting response. That’s the full extent of his participation. He does not moderate the discussion. He does not try to win people over to his ideas. He certainly does not consider his interlocutor’s ideas and figure out how they might challenge his own, even for the purpose of improving his own position. His goal is not persuasion. It is not participation in a public discussion. The only goal is proclamation. Like all of the big media that preceded it, Facebook turns out to do proclamation very well. This is what a successful Facebook strategy looks like for anyone nurturing a bully pulpit: Post your opinion. Make it as provocative as possible. Encourage people to like and share if they agree. What if they disagree? Or what if they agree but have some questions? No room for that. Due consideration is not a viral strategy. Proclamation is. Promote yourself. Get as much attention as possible. Ignore dissent. Reject intellectual modesty. Refuse charity. Assume the worst of your opponents. Now, watch the likes roll in.

Franklin Graham is winning Facebook.

But winning this game does not seem like a very Christian thing to do.

Greg Carey asks, “Evangelicals and the LGBTQ Question: What’s Really Going On?” in Marginalia.

Evangelicals are indeed changing how they understand the Bible. This is happening in response not to a purported “gay agenda” but to deficits in evangelical theology.

JUDAISM

Lots of Yiddish in the news lately. This week, the question: “What Flag Should Yiddish Fly?” answered by Sebastian Schulman for The Forward.

Now thanks to the imminent launch of a Yiddish course on the popular site Duolingo , the so-called “Yiddish flag” may yet become the most readily visible representation of “Yiddish” itself on the internet. Before that happens, though, it behooves Duolingo and its users to understand the highly problematic symbolism behind this artificial banner.

Bernice Heilbrunn interviews Shulem Deen about his new book”All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir” for The New Books Network.

Shulem Deen’s popular memoir about his life in an insular Hassidic community breaks new ground, written as it is from a male perspective. Having left New Square, Deen founded and edits Unpious, Voices of the Hassidic Friend, an online journal. He is on the board of Footsteps, an important New York-based group that helps people who choose to transition out of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world. Shulem writes for The Forward, Tabletmag, and other publications. His memoir has been hailed in newspapers and magazines as diverse as The Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post. He speaks regularly to audiences in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and elsewhere about his life and memoir.

And Haaretz hosted a “Pinkwashing Debate” between James Kirchick and Aeyal Gross.

ISLAM

“ISIS, Poetry, and the Romance of Jihad; or How Reading The New Yorker Can Save Religious Studies From the Rhetoric of Authenticity” by Sam Houston for Marginalia. 

…a focus on the poetry of IS enables us to see that their project involves the creation of an ethos and character, or to use a more Islamic term, an ādab (way of comporting oneself). This is evident in the focus not only on the themes of justice, courage, solidarity, and martyrdom, but in the performative aspects of their poetry as well. As mentioned above, poetry in the Arab world is a social phenomenon, and as such, it fosters a sense of comradery and community amongst those observing and participating in its performance. Considered in this manner, poetry can be viewed as a shared speech act that cultivates a certain character and set of virtues which are valued by these movements and essential to their success.

Speaking of The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot wrote”The Story of a Hate Crime” for the magazine this week.

The Barakats and the Abu-Salhas found the “parking dispute” interpretation trivializing and implausible. In an interview with CNN, Mohammad Abu-Salha, Yusor’s father, said, “I am sure my daughter felt hated, and she said, literally, ‘Daddy, I think it is because of the way we look and the way we dress.’ ” At the funeral, which was held on a field in Raleigh, to accommodate the more than five thousand people—many of them non-Muslims—who showed up, Mohammad told the crowd, “We have no doubt why they died.” He went on, “We are not seeking any revenge. Our children are much more valuable than any revenge. When we say that this was a hate crime, it’s all about protecting all other children in the U.S.A.—it is all about making this country that they loved and where they lived and died peaceful for everybody else. We need to identify things as they really are.” The victims had been killed “execution style.” He spoke of them as martyrs.

Lastly, “Ramadan on the Road” from PBS’ Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.

During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims who are able are expected to fast from sun up to sun down. This can pose special challenges for Muslims in many professions. We talk with members of the Muslim hip-hop group Native Deen about how they observe Ramadan’s strict requirements while on musical tours.

Which reminds us, Ramadan Mubarak, dear readers.

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUND-UP

Lasers! Edward Delman announces “Afghanistan’s Buddhas Rise Again” in The Atlantic. 

Reproductions like Afghanistan’s laser Buddhas are inadequate substitutes for destroyed artifacts, but they can nevertheless defy that destruction and preserve some measure of cultural patrimony. In a report on the situation in ISIS-held Mosul this week, the BBC’s Ghadi Sary told a story about leaving a reproduced sculpture of a winged bull (ISIS had destroyed the original) in his hotel room, only to later find a note on it apparently written by someone on the hotel staff: “It said, ‘My greetings to you and to whoever sculpted this. It smells of our civilization. It smells of our lost heritage.’ Signed, ‘The son of Iraq.’”

“Etsy Bans The Sale of Spells and Hexes” reports Alice Lawton for Bust.

When eBay banned the selling of spells and other metaphysical objects in 2012, people turned to Etsy for their metaphysical products. It had fairly simple rules about the sale of these objects—as long as the seller provided some sort of tangible object, proof that the spell had been cast, and warned that spells may not work, everything was permissible. Now Etsy has revised its policy on the sale of services, saying, “Any metaphysical service that promises or suggests it will affect a physical change (e.g., weight loss) or other outcome (e.g., love, revenge) is not allowed, even if it delivers a tangible item.”

“Tongue in Cheek, Just in Case” by Jolyon Baraka Thomas for Sacred Matters. 

Few people would think that the essence of Japanese religion could be encapsulated in an advertisement for antivirus software, but then again few people outside of Japan have seen this:

The post In the News: Emanuel A.M.E., Encyclicals, Etsy, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

CHRISTIANITY

#Prayers: “Instapray app puts our best (and worst) prayer impulses on display“ according to Laura Turner for the Religion News Service.

An app can’t take the place of the church, and it can’t take the place of praying with someone in person. It feels a little goofy to claim that God gave you victory on your drivers’ test the sixth time through just because you prayed the right prayer. The logo is cheesy and Instapray will be impossible to monetize.

The impulse, though, is a lovely one — to connect people in need of something beyond what they can create for themselves. Our best and worst impulses are on display when we pray — and now they’re available to us all, with the press of a button.

Is there a problem with virtual communion? Joel J. Miller explains “The problem with virtual communion“ in Ancient Faith Blogs. 

Why does it take a sci-fi novelist to nail what so many Christian leaders miss? Who wants a simulation when you can have the real thing? It’s a question proponents of virtual communion should ask themselves more often. And if pastors and theologians find Ignatius, Ephraim, and Augustine inaccessible these days, they could do worse than start with Cline’s novel.

Erin White reflects on Catholicism, marriage, parenting, illness, and Goethe in “Faith Enough” by  for Killing the Buddha. 

We also read Goethe’s Wish. “I wish for you,” he writes, “faith enough to make real the things of God.” For years after I left the Catholic Church this was my prayer. I imagined Goethe meant faith enough to make real the hills and rivers, the climbing pea shoots, the hungry child. My plain New England church. I believed in the aggregation of such places and sights, hoping I could collect my own attic of holy moments, so many that I wouldn’t need the Catholic Church, wouldn’t need those five o’clock Masses, those candles, those saints’ days. Those tethers, now cut, which had once tied me to God. I gave up on the idea of being touched again, gave up on the possibility of visions, of voices.

But then Grace was in pain and my eyes were touched again, and the men did not look like trees. And I saw God everywhere. In the hospital waiting room I watched a father put a piece of pizza in front of his wheelchair-bound child and I saw the Eucharist. Grace floated in a gleaming steel hospital tub and fluttered her legs without pain, and I heard God say: Can you see the miracle of water? Can you see, once again, the bright curve of her future?

Daniel Bennett writes about “The Rise of Christian Conservative Legal Organizations” for Religion and Politics. 

Just as the Federalist Society spurred and lent credibility to the conservative legal movement, the Christian Right did the same for CCLOs. Specifically, elites in the Christian Right, sensing the promise of legal advocacy for their causes, lent organizational support and resources to new legal interest groups: Pat Robertson founded both the National Legal Foundation and the American Center for Law and Justice; James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, and Bill Bright (among others) were instrumental in organizing Alliance Defending Freedom; and Jerry Falwell lent Liberty Counsel institutional support. Without this early assistance from the Christian Right, many CCLOs would not exist as we now know them.

Dave Krueger interviews Kelly Brown Douglas about her new book Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God for Marginalia‘s “First Impressions” podcast.

And Bookforum has one of their great “Omnivore” round-ups titled, “Will Pope Francis Break the Church?” with all sorts of great recent Pope links.

Lastly, thinking of retiring soon? Or, you know, at least someday? Too bad! “Noah From The Bible [Ed.’s note: Is that like Jenny from the block?] Didn’t Retire, So This Likely GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Doesn’t See Why You Should” reports Samantha Lachman for The Huffington Post. 

There’s nothing in the Bible that talks about retirement. And yet it’s been an accepted concept in our culture today,” he said. “Nowhere does it say, ‘Well, he was a good and faithful servant, so he went to the beach.’ It doesn’t say that anywhere.”

“The example I think of is Noah,” he continued. “How old was Noah when he built the ark? 600. He wasn’t like, cashing Social Security checks, he wasn’t hanging out, he was working. So, I think we have an obligation to work. The role we have in work may change over time, but the concept of retirement is not biblical.”

JUDAISM

Phyllis Rose gives us a taste of “My Mother’s Yiddish” in The American Scholar. 

My mother’s Yiddish was the Yiddish of American Jews at a particular historical moment, when the experiences of immigration and assimilation to a new culture were not far in the past. A klug zu Columbus (a curse on Columbus, or, damn Columbus) expressed the immigrant’s exasperation with the land of opportunity. Mother said this when her children were being too American, as in:

“I have to have a new dress for graduation.”
“A new dress? What’s wrong with the old dresses?”
“Everyone is getting a new dress.”
“A klug zu Columbus!”

As for the next generation of American Jews, you can have a look at ’em in Meryl Meisler‘s photographs collected in “Seventies Long Island: The Whole Misphocha” for The New Yorker.

“The Meisler, Forkash, and Cash Clan Welcoming a Sweet New Year,” North Massapequa, New York. Rosh Hashanah, 1974.

“Butterfly Bedroom,” East Meadow, New York, 1975.

“Man in a Three-Piece Suit Dancing Within the Circle at a Wedding,” Rockville Centre, New York, 1976.

SOUTH ASIA

In grim historical news, Slate published “Separated at Birth: How a few days in 1947 turned India and Pakistan into sworn enemies” an excerpt from Nisid Hajari new book, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition.

This work ‘My neighbor is a Lama’ by Usagihime is licensed under CC BY-NC.

Also on Fresh Air, and on a lighter, but still historical, note: “Those Yoga Poses May Not Be Ancient After All, And Maybe That’s Okay” explains Michelle Goldberg.

And on an even lighter, and totally futuristic note: “What a ‘Mischievous Blonde Woman’ Dalai Lama Could Look Like” according to I-fan Lin for Global Voices.

BOOKS

Looking to add to your summer reading list?

Marion Holmes Katz talks about her new book “Women in the Mosque: A History of Legal Though and Social Practice” with Kristian Petersen for The New Books Network. 

And Anthony Petro (whom you may remember from this month’s edition of Ann Neumann‘s  column, “The Patient Body: Pathological Sex“) was interviewed by Samira K. Mehta for the Religion in American History blog: “After the Wrath of God: An Interview with Anthony Petro.”

Of course, when we get into the thick of this history, we see that the AIDS crisis was never a single issue. Christians across the political and theological spectrum understood it as an apocalyptic event or a wake-up call for the church to engage with the world. Many gay men — the population most closely associated with the disease in the 1980s — understood it variously as a government conspiracy, a sign of moral punishment, or a call to grow up into monogamous sexual adulthood. AIDS was a medical event, to be sure, but it was also a deeply moral epidemic. The medical and moral often overlapped. The chapters of my book take up different sites of moral engagement to unravel the ways Christian rhetoric gained traction, not merely by declaring AIDS a divine punishment, but more importantly by offering a moral prescription for sex.

NATURE

The Katskhi pillar on a clear evening.
Photo by Amos Chapple

Anna M. Gade  has written a series of four essays about “Islam and Prayers for The Environment in Java” for  Reverberations: New Directions in the Study of Prayer hosted by the Social Science Research Council.

Across the island of Java, devotions for environmental well-being introduced a new object of purpose (“the environment” itself), through forms of dhikr and salawat that nevertheless still conserved outward form. Esoteric theory and practice combined with modern patterns of ritual purpose to support the specificity of such explicitly “environmental” prayer. As I discusselsewhere, new stakeholders, such as Muslim and non-Muslim NGOs, now seek to extract from Islamic traditions such ritual resources in order to promote environmental care. The conditions that shift landscapes of prayer in this manner also form the contours for pluralistic religious norms of environmentalism that are committed to notions of the traditions of “world religions.” This renders Muslim prayers, now re-dedicated in their intent to be universally and instrumentally “environmental” as globalized performances in our shared era of the Anthropocene.

Steven Jackson writes about “A Mountain of Many Legends Draws Spiritual Seekers from Around The Globe” for NPR. 

Ashalyn (just Ashalyn — she doesn’t use a surname) is the founder of Shasta Vortex Adventures. Her company leads guided meditations, vision quests and hiking and driving tours of the mountain’s sacred sites.

“I get people from all over the world,” she says, pointing to a world map on the wall behind her desk. There’s a little pushpin for every client’s home country. The map is bursting with pins. “They come here for spiritual growth, healing, understanding more about themselves, figuring out what their life purpose is, and sometimes just to feel the energy.”

And a “Monk takes devotion to new heights” and is photographed by Amos Chapple for CNN Photos. 

Maxime the monk lives on a pillar. When he wants to step down out of the clouds, the 59-year-old scales a 131-foot ladder, which takes him about 20 minutes.

Maxime says he needs the silence. ÒIt is up here in the silence that you can feel God’s presence.”

ARTS & CULTURE

Scott MacDougall argues that “Faith in the Future is no Faith at All: Disney’s Weak Theology” by for Religion Dispatches.

It’s true that news and other media shape our attitudes, which in turn shape our realities. And it is true, as the character behind this scheme observes, that the more the media turns up the volume on our collective awfulness, the more the public appears to embrace it. But Tomorrowland never asks why this might be (except to posit a general unthematized, solipsistic nihilism infecting the vast majority of the global population), nor does it ask us to take a closer look at the consumerism, gross inequality, and ecological rapaciousness that lie behind those news stories—never mind asking us to take action against such conditions (or even simply to demand better journalism!).

Al Downham shares why “I Hid My Gender Dysphoria from My Christian Hardcore Band” in Vice.

If there’s a reason why I kept performing, preaching theology that attacked my sense of self, it’d be that I was scared of being a disappointment. I feared letting down my family, my band, the fans, a higher power. I’d never identified with anything more than I identified with the Christian community and I trusted its approach to my dysphoria.

Michael Serazio takes a Durkheimian approach and asks: “Just How Much is Sports Fandom Like Religion?” in The Atlantic. 

What totems, therefore, still survive in this culture of ours? The Red Sox. The Packers. The Lakers. And so on. The notion that sports remain our civic religionis truer than we often let on: In fandom, as in religious worship, our social connections are brought to life, in the stands as in the pews. It serves as a reminder of our interconnectedness and dependency; it materially indexes belonging. Like others, I indulge the royal “we” when speaking of my team, though there is little evidence they need me much beyond ticket sales, merchandise, and advertising impressions. Nonetheless, as Durkheim long ago noticed, “Members of each clan try to give themselves the external appearance of their totem … When the totem is a bird, the individuals wear feathers on their heads.” Ravens fans surely understand this.

In short, if you look hard at sports, you can’t help but see contours of religion.

Speaking of Durkheim, there’s more to be had in Lieke Wijnia‘s “Everything You Own in a Box to the Left: Reclaiming the Potential of the Sacred in Music” for Marginalia. 

According to Partridge, popular music is fundamentally transgressive. It operates in the margins, and its history is characterized by rejected behaviors and ideas. Because of this, music is able to challenge established sacred discourses, transform them, and establish new ones. The focus on transgression helps to understand popular music’s impure sacred potential in challenging the pure. A fine example is his analysis of bluesman Robert Johnson, who through his music criticized the American slavery system in the 1930s, while simultaneously offering a voice to those subjected to the system. While this system was celebrated by white America, Johnson gave voice to the taboo by challenging it.

One of our favorite “Man Men” post-mortems so far has been, “Mad men and the Enlightenment of Don Draper” by Matthew S. Hedstrom for Religion and Politics. 

And yet, as we all now know, this did not come to pass. Don Draper did not come to Jesus. He did something even better—if not better for himself, certainly something better for the show, something better to dramatize the spiritual allure and danger of advertising. Don meditated. As we watched the final episode last week, we witnessed showrunner Matthew Weiner find the only corner of American religious life more deeply entwined with consumerism, more fully a creature of advertisers’ dreams, than evangelical Christianity. Don, if only for a moment, joined the “spiritual but not religious.”

Writing about some shows that are, thankfully, still on the air, Kathryn Reklis discusses”Funny Girls” in The Christian Century.

For people who track the fate of religion in America, this should come as no surprise. These women, after all, would show up as “nothing in particular” on surveys of religious affiliation. But “nothing in particular” is not “nothing at all.” As observers have pointed out about the rise of the nones, survey data can mask the complex variety of spiritual practices that exist alongside widespread suspicion of traditional institutions. The same might be said for attitudes toward sex, romance, and commitment. Mocking older conventions might be a step toward forming new ones. Most mainstream comedies still assume that women are desperate to get married, men are scared to commit, and both women and men need to be tamed by the mundane trials of domesticity. Inside Amy Schumer, Broad City, and Girls all suggest that this narrative isn’t very funny anymore.

RELIGION OR MENTAL ILLNESS?

At least in our minds, these two articles did well being read together.

“Hallucination, or Divine Revelation?” by Emma Green for The Atlantic. 

As “madness” became “mental illness,” the role of religion in explaining out-of-the-ordinary behavior has faded significantly, and medicine has taken its place. It’s not that strange happenings have faded from importance in religious life; it’s that in the shadow of modern medicine, it’s more difficult to discern between the strange phenomena of the brain and the potentially stranger phenomena of the supernatural.

“Narcissism and terrorism: how the personality disorder leads to deadly violence” by Ann Manne for The Guardian.

Malignant narcissists, though devoured by envy and rage, can still idealise powerful figures whose beliefs conveniently justify the destruction of those they denigrate, says Kernberg. This makes them susceptible to taking an ideology such as jihadism to the point of violent extremism. In Terror in the Name of God; Why Religious Militants Kill, Jessica Stern interviewed many terrorists. She found a common theme: “They start out feeling humiliated, enraged that they are viewed by some ‘Other’ as second class. They take on a new identity on behalf of a purported spiritual cause. The weak become strong … rage turns to conviction.” As the world is simplified into good and evil, they feel “spiritually intoxicated”. The “apocalyptic violence” on behalf of their spiritual calling, committed as if in a trance, is addictive, the ultimate high.

Deciding who’s sick and who isn’t has always been pretty politically and historically contingent. Definitely something worth considering. Among those who are doing their best to work with the subjectiveness of these designations is Al Jazeera. Here, to that point, they explain why they never use the word “terrorist” in their reporting.

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUND-UP

Good news for our Kosher friends! “Italian Parmigiano Reggiano goes Kosher to Grab U.S. Market” by Chiara Vasarri and Flavia Rotondi for Bloomberg Business. 

The first Kosher parmesan cheese wheels produced by Bertinelli will be available on the market in October and will be presented at the ongoing World Expo in Milan, dedicated to food.

A degree in agriculture, a background in theological studies and four years in Canada eased his ability to make parmesan that complies with the kashrut, the set of Jewish religious dietary laws, and with an 800-year-old Italian Parmigiano Reggiano making tradition.

Signs are everywhere: “Man accused of Ponzi scheme allegedly believed Holy Spirit guided his investing” by Anthony Fay for WWLP Channel 22 News. 

“Erickson believed that the ‘Holy Spirit’ had given him a proprietary system for day trading of a particularly volatile type of futures contract,” the administrative report stated. He is accused of showing spreadsheets to clients showing returns of 4% per month; returns with which they would be able to recover 96% of their investment in only two years’ time.

And, “Stain Below Jesus Painting in Newport Church Seen as a Sign from God” by Mark Schieldrop for Newport Patch.

Humphrey said the church is not advertising it as a miracle, nor is he making any claim.

“The mark has been there for years–washed off from time to time, as I understand it, yet reappearing. People have noticed it and remarked upon it before. Some find it deeply moving, located as it is directly beneath the bleeding feet of Jesus. I know I do,” Humphrey said.

Ready for lots of pictures! First up, we really enjoyed looking at both of these sets of photos this week.

First, “Finding Female Spirituality with Poland’s Witches, Druids, and Whisperers” by David Rosenberg with photographs by Katarzyna Majak.

Left: Maria, a healer and a visionary. Right: Natalia LL, an artist.
Photograph by Katarzyna Maijak

And also this series of images from “Corpus Christi Celebrations” by Aland Taylor for The Atlantic. 

A moss man poses for a picture before the Corpus Christi procession in the small village of Bejar, Spain, on June 7, 2015.
Andres Kudacki / AP)

Ever wondered what hell sounds like? Well, good news: “Hieronymus Bosch painted sheet music on a man’s butt and now you can hear it.”

And finally, “Charlie, Charlie, are you there?” from Dan Piepenbring at The Paris Review. 

I like to root for the underdog, so I’m always comforted to find Satanism in the news. There are, after all, some two billion Christians in the world, and only about a hundred thousand Satanists; if the eternal war between good and evil is a numbers game, then it would seem the good guys have this one in the bag. And yet Satanism persists—pure evil’s got moxie.

The latest coup from the dark arts is Charlie Charlie Challenge, a Ouija Board-ish pursuit in which players—who tend to be, let’s face it, kids and teens—cross two pencils over a piece of paper and attempt to summon a Mexican demon. According to no less reliable a source than the Daily Mail, four Colombian high school students were hospitalized for “hysteria” after playing the game, which set off an international pandemic of DIY voodoo…

Pencils have always been among the finest weapons in a Satanist’s arsenal; problem is, these kids are stacking with them instead of drawing with them. It’s downright primitive. To behold the true power of an occultist with good draftsmanship, one need only look to an eighteenth-century grimoire called Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros, about which the Internet yields little. It’s written in Latin and German; the Wellcome Library, which published a high-resolution scan of the book in its entirety, suggests that it dates to 1775, though its unknown author apparently attempted to pass it off as a relic from 1057. The volume is labeled NOLI ME TANGERE: don’t touch.

Below are some of our favorites from the compendium, well, at least our favorites that are safe for work. When you have a chance for some NSFW perusing, we really, really recommend clicking through to see the rest.

L0076369 A compendium about demons and magic. MS 1766.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.
Watercolour
c. 1775 Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

L0076362 Illustration of Beelzebub, MS 1766
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Beelzebub – portrayed with rabbit ears, a tiger’s face, scaled body, clawed fingers and bird’s legs.
Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.
Watercolour
c. 1775 Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

L0076370 A compendium about demons and magic. MS 1766.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.
Watercolour
c. 1775 Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

And with that… We hope to see you all back here next week!

***

Past links round-ups can be found here:

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: Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

CHRISTIANITY

First of all, this New York Times website is becoming increasingly necessary: “Who Is Running for President (And Who’s Not?)”

Here are a few stories about those who are, at least sort-of, in the running:

Thomas J. Whitley of Marginalia asking “What Can We Learn From Christian Hip Hop That Supports Ted Cruz?”

The coupling of “religious” and “political” is even more obvious in “Set It on Fire,” which includes two shout-outs to Reagan and declares that We Are Watchmen is “all in for Ted Cruz” (Notice also that the ted Cruz for President logo is the background of the “Set It on Fire” video). “Set It on Fire” goes quite a bit further than “Stand” in its espousing of conservative political positions. A strong federal government is not just a different opinion about how government should be run, but a poison: “When power is concentrated centrally and federally, it creates dependency that’s medically like leprosy.” Since America is “the greatest nation that’s ever been implanted on the planet,” it must be saved and the only way to do that is by upholding the Constitution, pushing back evil liberal policies, and outing RINOs.

After the Phoenix rally, its organizer, Jon Ritzheimer, published a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money for his own protection. The campaign has been shut-down, but Addicting Info wrote about it first: “Guy Who Staged Anti-Muslim Hate Rally Now Wants You To Give Him $10 Million ‘For Protection.'”

Ritzheimer seems to be the latest in a growing number of conservatives who saw how much money an anti-gay pizza shop made by begging for money and took an opportunity to pull the same stunt. It’s not just that his GoFundMe campaign was a foregone conclusion, it was probably built into his anti-Muslim rally from the very start. In fact, even his interviews while at the rally were rife with mentions of how scared he was for his family and that he would “going into hiding” after it was over. (Note the irony of a group of men with assault rifles standing in front of women and children entering a mosque and claiming they are the ones who are being terrorized.)

We appreciated Jeremy F. Walton‘s analysis in Jadaliyya as a bit of antidote, “Beyond Blame: Troubling the Semiotic Ideology of Muslim Passion.”

 If we hope to move beyond a kneejerk reassertion of dominant moral orders, we must also interrogate the semiotic ideology that relentlessly depoliticizes Muslim sensitivities and passions, and thereby renders them devoid of political context. This resistance to depoliticization is an aspect of a broader project: the refusal to engage in essentialist “culture talk” about Muslim politics. Some will surely claim that this insistence against depoliticization risks blaming the victims, but blame is not the aspiration. Rather, beyond blame, we require an accounting of the dilemmas and pressures that shape all lives in European and North American liberal democracies, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. As of yet, it seems that the only lessons drawn from the recent attacks are that freedom of expression is under threat, and that Islam, yet again, constitutes this threat. Such hackneyed, predictable conclusions merely cater to dubious moral certitude, and foreclose the very questions that we must urgently pursue.

Speaking of Islamophobia, Haroon Moghul interviews “Aasif Mandvi on Islamophobia, Acting, and the Long Shadow of Jon Stewart” for Religion Dispatches. 

Wow. What is the line between free speech and bigotry? Look, there’s always going to be free speech, and it’s a fundamental right. We are allowed to speak our minds. But bigotry will always exist—there will always be a certain amount of prejudice, and I don’t think you can eradicate that. What I wanted to do was address some of that prejudice, the misinformation that gets put out there.

WASHINGTON, DC – FEBRUARY 25: Samantha Elauf (R) and her mother Majda Elauf of Tulsa, Oklahoma, pose for photographers outside the U.S. Supreme Court after the court heard oral arguments in EEOC v. Abercrombie & Fitch February 25, 2015 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Some good news! Simran Jeet Singh explains in the Washington Post “A Muslim woman beat Abercrombie & Fitch. Why her Supreme Court victory is a win for all Americans.”

This case illustrates how we see ourselves as a society. Current policies on workplace discrimination have gaping loopholes that allow employers to not hire applicants on the basis of their appearance. Therefore, the American workforce does not accurately reflect or leverage the proud diversity of this nation. Having a more diverse cross section represented in the workforce would cut against negative stereotypes that contribute to xenophobia and hate violence targeting minority communities.

ROUNDING OUT THE ROUND-UP

It’s June, and that means, it’s wedding season! (At least according to our matrimonially inclined Facebook feeds.) So, we enjoyed this chance to go “Behind the Veil With Kleinfeld’s Modest Bridal Consultant” thanks to Chavie Leber at Racked.

During her two decades at Kleinfeld, Katz has worked with women from a wide array of backgrounds. She’s learned the different set of modesty rules that come along with each one, but Katz says most of her clients are Orthodox Jewish. This is, of course, familiar territory for her. She can converse with brides in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish, and understands the guidelines of tzniut, or modesty according to Jewish customs, which translates to women covering their elbows, knees, and collar bones and not wearing anything too form-fitting in some traditions.

Speaking of orthodox fashion, we consistently enjoy hearing what Leandra Medine, aka The Man Repeller, has to say about the world. Medine, in case you do not also uncomfortably split your RSS feed between lifestyle blogs and religion news and are not yet familiar with her oeuvre, is a much admired fashion blogger who happens to have been raised as an Orthodox Jew. So, when fellow hip young person Lena Dunham has a frum fashion question, she knows just who to ask.

The Row, of course, being the cosmically expensive fashion line produced by the little known sect of Hasidic Stevie Nicks impersonators, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The Birkenstocks are a whole other story…

Now it’s time to cross over with Nathan Thornburgh‘s “The Root of All Things” in Roads and Kingdoms.

I saw my own ancestors, people I have never spared a thought for, line the circular hut and benedict me in warm Yiddish and Dutch and Middle English. I saw a jaguar walk through the room, and when Don Enrique blew smoke on me and sang to me, I surged along with his song and then the vine—the real vine this time—went through me like spiritual endoscopy, and deliberated and diagnosed my gut and the jaguar and a snake had a conversation with Don Enrique about how many leaves of this plant should be mixed with how many leaves of another, and how often I should take the medicine.

See you on the other side (i.e., next week)!

***

Past links round-ups can be found here:

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: Hip Hop, Hijabs, Hasidic Fashion, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.