Father James Martin, SJ.

By Becky Garrison

In James Martin, SJ’s bio, he describes himself as a “Jesuit priest, editor at large of America Magazine and author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage. What he didn’t put in this bio was his role as chaplain for The Colbert Report during its nine year run on Comedy Central. Now that fellow Catholic Steven Colbert’s satirical news show has left the airwaves and the character of Stephen Colbert patterned after Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is no more, we decided to email Martin for his insights into how this show engaged with the Roman Catholic Church and the larger religious landscape.

You’ve spoken before about the role of laughter and mirth in one’s faith journey. Can you tell us more about why you think this is so important?

It’s an essential part of anyone’s faith journey. In the Christian worldview, joy is the beginning and end of the story of Jesus. His birth was announced to Mary, who immediately runs with great joy to share the news with her cousin Elizabeth. And the response of the disciples to the Resurrection is one of unparalleled joy. Really, the whole point of the Christian message is joy. Jesus said, “I came to give you joy, and that your joy may be complete.” The people who are missing out on joy are missing the point.

For those not familiar with The Colbert Report, can you offer a brief synopsis of the differences between the character of “Stephen Colbert” and the person Stephen Colbert, with a particular focus on how they both approach the topic of religion.

The character of course was, in the words of the person Stephen Colbert, “an idiot.” And the guests were supposed to treat the character as such. So essentially you needed to be exceedingly patient with this particular character and do a lot of explaining. And my sense was that that character, that is, “Stephen Colbert” had not done much reading in theology, at least in contemporary theology. But the person Stephen Colbert has a very deep understanding of religion and is widely read. I would always smile at the people who came on his show thinking that he didn’t know anything about religion, only to be disabused of that notion pretty quickly.

When did you first come into contact with Stephen Colbert? 

Well, I came on the show for the first time in 2007 to speak about an op-ed I wrote for the New York Times on Mother Teresa. This was after her book Come, Be My Light, came out and she was talking about her “dark night,” a time of great spiritual darkness and even doubt.  After a few more appearances, he introduced me as “Chaplain to the Colbert Nation,” which made me smile. Needless to say, at that point, I had no idea what that meant! Basically, I came on whenever he asked, usually to talk about some religious or spiritual matter.  Often it was in response to some news about the Church, or something that a Pope had said or done. So my responsibilities were fairly flexible!  It wasn’t a terribly onerous ministry.

Why did you feel compelled to set Colbert straight about Mother Teresa?

The question that the character brought up was whether or not Mother Teresa was in hell as a punishment for her doubt, which was revealed in that book, a collection of her letters and diaries. Needless to say, doubt is not a sin. Some of the saints have doubted, and even the Apostle Thomas doubts before he sees the Risen Christ. So you have to draw a distinction between doubt and disbelief.

Why did you tell Colbert that you don’t need possessions to be happy?

Because it’s true! Simply having things does not make us happy. Look at all the examples of wealthy people who are miserable. You can read about the well-off and their miseries almost every day in the paper and on the web. We’re not supposed to be owned by our possessions. Of course, everyone needs a certain amount of possessions to live: you need a place to live, you need food, and you need clothing. And if you’re raising children you need even more. But the idea that buying more things will make you happy is demonstrably false. You’re trying to fill up an emptiness in your life that only God can fill. Spiritual writers call this the “God-shaped hole,” the space in our hearts only God can fill. Possessions simply cannot do that. Sometimes they make it worse.

When asked for your favorite clip, why did you cite your conversation with Colbert regarding Glenn Beck’s critique of “social justice?”

Because it was so much fun. As I recall, Glenn Beck had said that any Catholic who belonged to a church that preached social justice should leave. Which is insane. Because the Catholic Church has preached social justice universally since at least the late 19th century. More to the point, Jesus tells us that the litmus test for admission to heaven will be how we take care of the poor, the “least of these,” as he calls them. And we help the poor not only through charity, but by asking questions about the structures that keep them poor. As the great Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara once said, “When I feed the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.”

When commenting on the changes in the Catholic Mass, Colbert said “No way.” How did you respond?

Of course his character doesn’t want any changes. His character was a kind of caricature of a rock-ribbed conservative who resists change.  That was around the time that the new English-language translation to the Mass was coming out, as I recall. But change is part of the Church. The Church has been changing since the time of Saints Peter and Paul.

Father James Martin introducing Metallica on The Colbert Report

In a conversation with Colbert about God’s job performance, why did you use the word “shit?”

I slipped!

You’ve stirred up some bigger controversies yourself, for example, when Pope Benedict visited the US, you said that you wanted to step off the balcony as soon as he stepped onto it.

Well, I would want to retract that comment today. What I meant was that Cardinal Ratzinger was not my first choice for pope, because he had just fired my boss, the editor of America magazine. But, as I said, I would retract that, because it was ungracious and said off the cuff. In fact, I was greatly edified by Pope Benedict’s humility in resigning the papacy. It takes a great man to do that.

You seem to have a much higher opinion of Pope Francis, a fellow Jesuit who by all appearances is in sync with your values.

I’m happy to talk about my brother Jesuit and how happy he makes me as a Catholic.

Colbert, on the other hand, critiqued Pope Francis’ comment that redemption is available for all, including atheists.

Once again, the character is a bit addle-brained. But what the Pope is saying is that Christ offers redemption for everyone. And God’s mercy is much larger than we can understand

How do you think your bosses (NY Archbishop Dolan, Pope Benedict, and Pope Francis) rated The Colbert Report’s commentary on the Roman Catholic Church? 

I don’t want to speak for them, needless to say.  But I do doubt that Pope Benedict and Pope Francis were watching The Colbert Report closely. Then again, who knows?  Cardinal Dolan, on the other hand, was happy to be guest on the show. So I would imagine he was happy with the show, even though he may not have agreed with the critiques on the church.  But, again, I can’t speak for them.

In one of your appearances on the show you discuss income inequality with Colbert. Do you see satire as a particularly valuable tool for discussing such a serious issue?

As I see it, the income inequality debate often reveals that some wealthy people are unwilling to see the effects of disparities of income. So a little satire, that is, poking fun at anyone who is affluent and out of touch with the reality of poverty, can be helpful. Remember, one of the aims of being a Christian is not only to comfort the afflicted but also to afflict the comfortable. Satire is a tool that helps us do that.

Is there any kind of historical tradition of Catholic satire, and, if so, how does Colbert fit into it?

Well, of course, there have been Catholic satirists for as long as there has been a Catholic church.  In modern times, I think that his most recent progenitor was someone like George Carlin, who had a lot of fun poking fun at the church.  The main difference is that I think most people knew that Stephen was a devout Catholic whereas Mr. Carlin’s religious leanings were kept more mysterious, perhaps on purpose by him.

What role do you think satire plays in holding up a mirror to the controversies plaguing the Catholic Church?

That’s a good question. There have been many controversies in the Catholic Church recently, and sometimes satire helps us to see things in a fresh light. It punctures our sense of self-importance. And that’s always a good thing, no matter who you are in the church.

Ok then do you think that Colbert has changed public opinion about Catholics and, if so, how and in what ways?

Yes, I do.  I think by virtue of his prominence, he reminded people that you could be Catholic and be: (a) intelligent; (b) witty and (c) a good guy.

Colbert’s closest contemporary and collaborator is Jon Stewart, who speaks a lot about how he and his comedy relate to Jewishness. Do you have any thoughts on how Colbert’s act relates to Catholic-ness as such? Are any of the tropes of the show (pomp and ceremony, wordplay, etc.) things that register as in some way or especially Catholic to him?

Oh I wouldn’t say so.  I think the show mainly relied on Stephen’s inventiveness, and brilliance is both ecumenical and interfaith.  The show itself, I think, wasn’t specifically “Catholic.”

Any thoughts about how Colbert’s private religious beliefs seem to impact his public persona?

Probably best not to break confidences here.

***

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

The post Catholicism and The Colbert Report: An Interview with the Colbert Chaplain appeared first on The Revealer.

PARIS

If you read only one article about the attacks in Paris, please make it Teju Cole‘s New Yorker piece, “Unmournable Bodies.”

But it is possible to defend the right to obscene and racist speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. It is possible to approve of sacrilege without endorsing racism. And it is possible to consider Islamophobia immoral without wishing it illegal. Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions. …

The scale, intensity, and manner of the solidarity that we are seeing for the victims of the Paris killings, encouraging as it may be, indicates how easy it is in Western societies to focus on radical Islamism as the real, or the only, enemy. This focus is part of the consensus about mournable bodies, and it often keeps us from paying proper attention to other, ongoing, instances of horrific carnage around the world: abductions and killings in Mexico, hundreds of children (and more than a dozen journalists) killed in Gaza by Israel last year, internecine massacres in the Central African Republic, and so on. And even when we rightly condemn criminals who claim to act in the name of Islam, little of our grief is extended to the numerous Muslim victims of their attacks, whether in Yemen or Nigeria—in both of which there were deadly massacres this week—or in Saudi Arabia, where, among many violations of human rights, the punishment for journalists who “insult Islam” is flogging. We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.”

Excerpt of a cartoon by Joe Sacco

If you’d like to read what cartoonists have to say, we’d suggest:

First, you can see and hear the murdered cartoonists themselves in this short documentary, “Charlie Hebdo, Before the Massacre,” about Charlie Hebdo made in 2006 by Jérôme Lambert, from The New York Times. 

Then you might want to check out the opinions and cartoons of:

Art Spiegelman

Robert Crumb

Joe Sacco

Albert Uderzo (Asterix)

Olivier Cyran (worked at Charlie Hebdo from 1992-2001)

Lastly,  Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept published a serious of “blasphemous and otherwise offensive” cartoons in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo.

If you are interested in the history and present of satire, we recommend: 

In The New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler, interviews cartoonists such as Joe Sacco  and Marjane Satrapi and reports that the “Charlie Hebdo Attack Chills Satirists and Prompts a Debate.”

Such debates unfold differently in different countries. But the conversation could be especially acute in the United States, where sensitivities to racially tinged caricatures may run higher than in places like France, where historically tighter restrictions on speech have given rise to a strong desire to flout the rules.

At NPR, Neda Ulaby explains that “Satire in the Muslim World [is] a Centuries Long Tradition.”

“Can’t they take a joke?” That’s the question that came up after the 2005 Danish cartoon controversy and now, again, after the massacre at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The suspected killers obviously reflect a tiny minority of extreme religious fanatics, but the question made us wonder: What is the role of satire in the Muslim world

Former features editor at The Onion, Joe Garden,”In Defense of Offense” in Vice. 

Obviously, no one should die over such images, even if reasonable people might doubt that they need to be put out into the world. And in fact, if someone wants to publish images like that, it’s important—vitally important—that they do so.

In The Atlantic, Debra Kamin, shares the story of “Fake News from the Holy Land.”

But the way Israel’s new web satirists describe it, their goal is less to lampoon fundamentalists than to get their friends and neighbors to lighten up. The subjects in the news here—terrorism, extremism, and the endless replay of the same grinding war—are deadly serious. The specter of loss follows everyone. That’s precisely why it’s important to keep laughing, the editors say.

Are you Charlie?

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, “I Might be Charlie.“

Scott Long, “Why I Am Not Charlie“ on his blog, Paper Bird. 

Umut Ozkirimli and Spyros A. Sofos‘ “#QuiSommesNouse? A Socratic dialogue on ‘L’Affaire Charlie Hebdo“ on Open Democracy.

And more from:

Mehran Kasana‘s “Dubout and Hebdo”

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub at Vox, “Vox got not threats for posting Charlie Hebdo cartoons, dozens for covering Islamophobia.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams in n+1, “Equal in Paris?”

Juan Cole, “Charlie Hebdo: A Clash of Extremisms, not Civilizations” on his website, Informed Comment.

Jon Canfield, “In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom from Criticism” on his blog, Hooded Utilitarian.

Leshu Torchin, “Why Context Matters.” in Soucient.

Mark LeVine argues “Why Charlie Hebdo attack is not about Islam“ in Al Jazeera.

Jackie Rowler has Marine Le Pen weighing in: “Q&A: Marine Le Pen on France and Islam,” also on Al Jazeera.

And, bien sur, Monsieur Zizek has a question to contribute, “Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?” in The New Statesman.

Aussi bien sur, Michel Houellebecq, “Before Paris Shooting, Authors Tapped Into Mood of a France ‘Homesick at Home” by Rachel Donadio for The New York Times. 

And, lastly, Religion Dispatches‘ “Interview With a Muslim,” by Haroon Moghul.

OUT THERE IN THE REST OF THE WORLD

Meanwhile, “Tens of thousands of Muslims flee Christian militias in Central African Republic,” by Sudarsan Raghavan in The Washington Post. 

Tens of thousands of Muslims are fleeing to neighboring countries by plane and truck as Christian militias stage brutal attacks, shattering the social fabric of this war-ravaged nation.

Carole McGranahan writes “For Tsepey Who Self-Immolated in TIbet Six Hours From Now” in Savage Minds.

It is 8:00 in the morning in Colorado. On the other side of the world a young Tibetan woman self-immolated at 2:00 pm today, Monday the 22^nd of December 2014. Her name was Tsering Dolma (and her nickname was Tsepey). She was twenty years old. She was the 141^stTibetan to self-immolate in recent years.

“China has just banned the burqa in its biggest Muslim City“ reports Lily Kuo in Quartz.

A blogger posts a photo of a sign in Kashgar discouraging Uighur from wearing Islamic dress. (Weibo)

Chinese authorities have banned women in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang—an autonomous western region where Muslims account for almost half of the population—from wearing burqas in public, according to a brief article on a government-run website, Tianshan News. Local legislators for Urumqi proposed the ban in December, and now the regional legislature has approved it.

For more about Xianjiang, its worth a look back into the recent past for Umar Farooq‘s “Turning the Uyghur East” which ran in the October 2014 issue of The Revealer. 

Fortunately, “No, Argentina’s president did not adopt a Jewish child to stop him turning into a werewolf” reassures Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner in The Guardian.

Nope. Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has not become godmother of a Jewish baby to stop him from becoming a werewolf – despite what you may have read in multiple news reports.

And, The Guardian reports that “Muslim Drag Queens: ‘the clubs are busier than ever” in this video.

Meet Ali, a gay Pakistani asylum-seeker preparing for his first performance as a drag queen. Ali fled Pakistan, where he was persecuted for being gay, but now faces abuse from his neighbours in London. Mentored by Asifa Lahore, the UK’s first Muslim drag queen, Ali is determined to overcome his fears and express himself in a dance performance at the UK’s biggest ‘gaysian’ club night

WHILE IN ISRAEL…

Liam Hoare of The Forward, reminds us that once upon a time, (okay, 1973), Susan Sontag made a documentary about Israel. It’s worth watching. “Susan Sontag’s Panned and Banned Israel Documentary.”

 “‘Promised Lands’ hardly tells all the truths there are about the conflicts in the Middle East, about the October War, about the mood of Israel right now, about war and loss and memory and survival,” Sontag said in a 1974 article for Vogue published about the making of the movie. “[B]ut what the film does tell is true. It was like that. To tell the truth (even some of it) is already a marvelous privilege, responsibility, gift.”

Ishaan Tharoor explains how “This image sums up the U.S.-Israeli relationship.”

Dan Shapiro, the U.S. ambassador to Israel

According to Ali Abunimah“Islamophobia bankroller behind organizer of Israel junket for US ‘Muslim Leaders”  at Electronic Intifada. 

The Shalom Hartman Institute bills itself as “a center of transformative thinking … that addresses the major challenges facing the Jewish people and elevates the quality of Jewish life in Israel.” In practice, it is a major contractor for the Israeli military and works closely with the Israeli government’s efforts to combat the Palestine solidarity movement.

For the perspective of one of the Muslims who attended this convention, check out “What a Muslim American Learned from Zionists” by Rabia Chaudry (of recent Serial fame) in Time.

And finally, “Let’s Make 2015 the Year of the Arab Jew” calls Sigal Samuel in The Forward.

Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it.

AND IN INDIA…

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi

Tanya Basu asks “Who Owns Yoga?” in The Atlantic.

Nailing a headstand in yoga class is already pretty difficult—it’s a balancing act that takes many people years to master. But if one of India’s recent initiatives is realized, perfecting the pose might become that much harder: The nation’s government is quietly wondering if someday it will be able to dictate what can be called “yoga” and what can’t.

Rhitu Chatterjee at NPR tells the story of “India’s New Comic Book Hero Fights Rape, Rides on the Back of a Tiger“

We are playing with the metaphor of Parvati riding the tiger. But in our comic book, the tiger represents Priya’s shakti, her power. And she travels on the tiger, back to her community that threw her out and ostracized her, and starts challenging those patriarchal views. Like Gandhi [did on his] Salt March, she travels around India and starts gaining momentum.

WHAT’S NEW IN CATHOLICISM, YOU ASK?

In “The Carnival of Confession” in which Kyle Gautrea, “An ex-Jesuit asks: can this sacrament be liberated?”

He asks, “When’s the first time you spoke to God?” I recoil at the question. When have I spoken to God? What sort of question is that? Who answers such a question? Yet I answer the question, in a moment of guttural anxiety detached from previous mental gymnastics. “When I came out to God.” The confession startles me. I shudder a little in the chair, my feet firmly secured on the floor.

Nathan Schneider announces “A Global Catholic Climate Movement, None Too Soon,” in America Magazine.

Today marks the beginning of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, a coalition of Catholic organizations determined to work together to confront the climate crisis. It includes groups like the Franciscan Action Network, the USCCB’s Catholic Climate Covenant, the U.S. branch of Catholic Charities, and the Jesuit European Social Center. On the occasion of Pope Francis’s visit to the Philippines, the group will be presenting a statement today to Cardinal Tagle of Manila.

Over on The New Emangelization,  you can read “Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke on the Catholic ‘Man-crisis’ and what to do about it“ 

Unfortunately, the radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church, leading the Church to constantly address women’s issues at the expense of addressing critical issues important to men; the importance of the father, whether in the union of marriage or not; the importance of a father to children; the importance of fatherhood for priests; the critical impact of a manly character; the emphasis on the particular gifts that God gives to men for the good of the whole society.

The goodness and importance of men became very obscured, and for all practical purposes, were not emphasized at all. This is despite the fact that it was a long tradition in the Church, especially through the devotion of St. Joseph, to stress the manly character of the man who sacrifices his life for the sake of the home, who prepares with chivalry to defend his wife and his children and who works to provide the livelihood for the family. So much of this tradition of heralding the heroic nature of manhood has been lost in the Church today.

Then you might want to check out Kaya Oakes asking, “Does Catholicism have a ‘man crisis,’ or is Cardinal Burke paranoid?“

The problem with Burke’s idea of manhood is that it is oversimplified and based on antiquated notions of gender. Men, according to Burke, have “particular gifts,” they “make sacrifices” and defend their families with “chivalry.” They are “heroic” and should demonstrate a “manly identity” and “manly virtues.”

Women are “wonderful,” but that’s just about the only compliment Burke manages to pay them before he trashes the presence of altar girls in favor of Knights of the Altar who will “defend Christ” with their “chivalrous service.”

Not done reading about gender and the Church? Check out Mary E. Hunt‘s “American Nuns and the Vatican: More Pain Than Promise” in Religion Dispatches.

I would have hoped, naively to be sure, for a robust apology on the part of the Vatican officials, a gracious but cautious acceptance of it on the part of the women religious, offer of restitution by the men, and a common plan to make sure that no such egregious act is ever perpetrated again. Nunca mas, or so I dream. Nevertheless, this formula—used so effectively in dealing with abusers and abused—is the most relevant parallel I can find to understand what occurred in this case.

Instead, the two prelates delivered themselves of sonorous but largely vapid discourses. The Prefect acknowledged that some institutes chose “not to collaborate fully in the process” (maybe more than you will ever know, Cardinal Braz de Aviz), but called for the whole church to engage in “full reconciliation, which will offer a radiant and attractive witness of fraternal communion to all.”

SOME SIKH NEWS

You may already be familiar with one Sikh super-hero, but Eileen Alden has started to campaign to create a “Kids comic book featuring Super Sikh aka Secret Agent Deep Singh.” You can check out her Kickstarter here.

Secret Agent Deep Singh

Reddit did something good! “Reddit User Needs Hot Meal – Finds Sikh Generosity” Alison Lesley Reports in World Religion News.

Reddit has been known for its heartless trolls and comments that can be downright cruel. However, a surprising thing happened when Tommy Castelli of Vancouver asked the users of the social media giant for help. A heartwarming response poured out and people began to drop off sacks of groceries, a few home-cooked meals and other miscellaneous items to help him get by. Castelli was impressed and humbled by the response, but he was perhaps most surprised by a conversation about Sikhism spawned by his request for a safe place to find a hot meal.

AS FOR NEW YORK…

Mark Oppenheimer on “The Zen Predator of the Upper East Side” in The Atlantic.

In this country, we have learned the hard way that religiosity is no guarantor of morality. But many Americans still imagine that Buddhists are the good kind of religious people—or that they are not religious at all, just “spiritual.” … It can be especially hard to face demons in a tradition that promises that there are none.

Len Berk

Paul Berger at The Forward made a great video called “Lox Me Tender” which profiles Len Berk, “Zabar’s 84-Year-Old Lox Cutter [Who] Says He’s Still Trying for the ‘Perfect Slice.'” Here is one of Berk’s poems:

Me and My Salmon

Chaos surrounds me.
The world is in turmoil.
Palestinians and Israelis can’t negotiate peace though they have sought it for 100 years.
(Or have they?)
My friends inhabit the various stages of dying from Alzheimer’s, from Parkinson’s, dementia, cancer and other forms of impending death.
Between me and my salmon there is peace.
I gaze down on it, I slice it and nothing else exists.
Nothing but me and my salmon.

NEWS FROM ICELAND?!

Yeah, Iceland! Big news from Iceland. Okay, no, not news so much as Björk, but shouldn’t anything and everything Björk does be news? We think so.

Bjork, age 11.

“Watch an 11-Year-Old Björk Read the Nativity Story” invites Fact Mag. Thanks, Fact Mag!

Back in 1976, an 11-year-old Björk read the nativity story in a Christmas special for Icelandic TV station RUV, accompanied by music students from the Reykjavík Children’s Music School

Also, Pagans! Pagans and Björk! I wonder if that Groupon is still available…

“Construction of a pagan temple to begin in Reykjavik next month” reports the staff of Iceland magazine.

Plans to begin construction of a heathen temple in Öskjuhlíð hill, Reykjavík, have been set in motion. This will be the first heathen temple to be built in the Nordic countries in nearly a thousand years, said the alsherjargoði Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, head priest of the Icelandic Ásatrúarfélag, in an interview with RÚV. 

WITCHES.

“An ordinary girl born into a family of witches” from Diana Wagman in Salon.

I’m not a witch.  I’m not crazy either.  But the fear of being ordinary wakes me in the middle of the night.  

Read too many articles about witches and now you’ve been accused of witchcraft? No worries, Lapham’s Quarterly has you covered with this chart.

OF GENERAL INTEREST

Ronit Y. Stahl considers “The privilege of spirit: The liberal concern with religious liberty claims” for The Immanent Frame. 

When liberals object to the use of the profit-making corporation to pursue religious ends, they are recognizing the ways in which doing so reflects privilege and bespeaks power. If, as scholars of religion, we can see how religion infuses daily life far beyond the institutional structure of the church (or synagogue, or mosque, or gurdwara, etc.), we can also recognize the ways in which infusing arenas that are not obviously religious with religion can be exclusionary, discomfiting, and discriminatory—to believers and non-believers alike.

According to Esther Inglis-Arkell at I09, “This Early Computer Was a Christianity Conversion Machine.”

One of the most unlikely harbingers of the computer age was a Christian mystic. After getting his ass kicked by Muslim scholars, he thought up a device that would let him win any argument, answer any question, and convert all people to the one true faith.

George Pendle has the story of “The Last of the Magicians” for Motherboard.

Just think about that for a second: one of the top minds driving America’s early rocket program, a program that helped fuel the space race and the Cold War, was at the same time a leading figure in the world of the occult. By day he built rockets for the government, by night he emerged from a coffin to perform sex magic with his followers.

Revelation Rock Opera! Last January, singer-songwriter Mike Doughty wrote a creative New Year’s resolution: to write a rock opera based on the Book of Revelation.  “It is an absolutely terrifying, monster-movie, psychedelic tale of destruction, and the language is so beautiful, it is so bizarre and wonderful,” Doughty told Kurt Andersen. Studio 360 held Doughty to his promise and the result is Revelation. You can see the show at at the Jerome L. Greene Performance Space in New York for its world premiere:

Over at Jezebel, Anna Merlan wants you to know about some”Manly Christian Bros” who ” ‘Apologize” for Letting Their Women Get Abortions.“

A pro-life media group has released a new video called “The Apology,” in which square-jawed, manly Christian bros apologize somberly to the camera for allowing women they were sleeping with to have an abortion. “I should have manned up and fought for you,” one says, referring to the fetus.

Michael Balaban  at Jalopnik has done all of us the favor of unearthing the “TURNER DOOMSDAY VIDEO,” a video produced in 1980 to be played if/when the apocalypse struck.

So when Ted Turner said that CNN was going to be playing “Nearer My God To Thee”—the song the band supposedly played when the Titanic went down—as the heavens opened up, as the fiery finger of God rained salt and brimstone from the sky, as the Earth beneath our feet opened from below and swallowed everything above, as the last CNN employee, in the last surviving CNN studio in the world, witnessed the end of existence before them, he meant it.

Meredith Haggerty works more Internet magic over at “TL;DR” with a podcast profile of Will Rogers, a non-believer who ventured into GodTube with the best of intentions. Here‘s her show and here is Will Rogers telling his story himself over at The Kernel, “Confessions of a  Former GodTube.com Star.”

Like my Facebook friends who watched the video and commented, I thought this whole Godtube.com thing was ridiculous—literally, worthy of ridicule. We LOL’d together. “Isn’t it hilarious what the Christians are doing now? Oh man…”

Unlike my Facebook friends, though, this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort video. I grew up in a church that subscribed to Comfort’s ideas, that non-Christians are lost and eternally doomed, and that Jesus — and only Jesus — can save a non-Christian from a life of utter meaninglessness.

SOME IMPORTANT REMEMBRANCES

Upon the death of Maria Cuomo, Sam Roberts wrote in the New York Times that the, “Former Governor Spoke Willingly of his Religion and Politics.”

“It’s always been safer not to talk about religious beliefs because religious beliefs are so personal that they tend to antagonize,” Mario M. Cuomo once cautioned. Never one to dodge a debate, though, he predictably, and dramatically, rejected his own advice and tackled the issue.

Julie Bindel remembers theologian and feminist philosopher Mary Daly in The Guardian. 

The phrase that sums Daly up most succinctly is probably this, written by her in 1995: “There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.”

Also being remembered recently was “Dr. Maher Hathout: ‘Father of American Muslim Identity.”

Born in Egypt in 1936, Hathout moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s after having lived in New York and quickly became involved in the city’s religious landscape. He began volunteering at the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC) as Chairman and Spokesperson and went on to work with the center’s founders on several initiatives, including the first-ever co-ed Muslim Youth Group, the Islamic Information Service, The Minaret magazine and the New Horizon School system

LASTLY, A BIT OF WORK BY FRIENDS OF THE REVEALER

Longreads interviewed Kiera Feldman about her work as a journalist on the religion beat: “Kiera Feldman on Oral Roberts, God, and Journalism.“

I’m drawn to stories about places that are worlds unto their own. I’m fascinated by institutions and the things that happen behind closed doors, especially within a cultural context that requires some translation for outsiders. I’m a bit of a moralist at heart: I suppose I like feeling like I’m going into the belly of the beast to serve some greater good. 

Have you been keeping up with our friends over at Killing the Buddha? If not, here’s a handy and enticing year-end round-up of their work in 2014: “New Year’s Horn Tooting.”

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry edited by Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, Yale University Press, 2013.

“To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover/what one suspected, that the only word in it/is nothing.” – Mark Strand, Poem After the Seven Last Words (2006)

Much like its close relatives the prayer and the hymn, devotional poetry is by its definition interrogative; and by the nature of its presumed audience a devotional poem must always in some sense remain unanswered. As one of the great genres that are primarily written in the second person, the devotional poem is an exercise in addressing the ineffable.

It is the act of speaking to a haunted absence. This attempt at speaking towards the infinite is apparent on every page of Yale University Press’ new anthology Before the Door of God, which charts the genre from its pre-Christian classical and Hebrew origins up to the contemporary. This volume demonstrates the continuities and ruptures in human expressions of a paradoxical and indefinable divinity. But, in a more personal and at times excruciating way, these poems address their own interiority to this mysterious and impossible-to-define thing that some have called “God.”

Even more importantly, this anthology begins to identify and classify broadly contemporary poets working within a new tradition of devotional poetry that could be called the “New Liturgy,” devotional poetry which takes the fragments of past verse and concepts from antique theologies to fashion new questions about what it means to live with faith and in the absence of belief in our moment.

In the early seventeenth-century, George Herbert asked, “Who says that fictions only and false hair/Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty? Is all good structure in a winding stair? /May no lines pass, except they do their duty/Not to a true, but painted chair?” Hopler and Johnson use Herbert’s poem “Jordan (III)” as an epigram in Before the Door of God and it’s an appropriate choice. The poets of Herbert’s day (and perhaps ours as well) had to defend their works against the accusation that they obscured the truths of doctrine and faith.

Indeed, poetry has often generated an anxiety in the minds of all stripes of believers. It was Plato who first exiled the poet from his Republic, and from the classical Greeks to our own time there has often been an antagonism between the two cultures of those who believe that the truth should be clearly stated, and those who feel that the possibilities of language could be a tad more malleable. For those that warned about poetry, such writing was, for them, an adept form of lying, a borderline magical ability to construct entire worlds from mere words and to potentially lead people astray. For this reason, there has always been a central tension in devotional poetry: how can such an ambiguous and thus dangerous form express the truths of God? Plato’s influence is long, and poets of the past centuries have found themselves defending the usefulness of rhetoric and poetry as instruments for the religious.

Herbert’s distant relation Phillip Sidney defended poetry in his ars poetica a generation earlier, arguing that one of the great strengths of literature is that it “affirmith nothing.” Indeed one of the pleasures of reading through this anthology is that, whether or not you are a believer, you discover that the best religious verse is free of the chains of doctrine, and, rather records the singular subjectivities of experience.

As a type of lyric poetry, devotional poetry at its best is an individual’s plea to God – not simply a recounting of dry scholasticisms. Before the Door of God is in many ways its own ars poetica, assembling over 2,500 years of poetry to demonstrate precisely how varied and powerful devotional poetry can be. It is by necessity (though perhaps a bit disappointingly) an overwhelmingly Christian collection. Yet the editors are prudent and helpful enough to trace the geneology of devotional lyric back to its classical and Jewish origins, beginning the collection with several psalms, biblical sections including portions of Jeremiah and Job, as well as classical precedents such as Sappho and Lucretius. It’s refreshingly ecumenical to see something like Anacreon’s hymn to Dionysius in a collection alongside more traditional devotional verse, and it would have been a stronger statement if this nod to religious pluralism had been maintained in the later sections of the book.

More importantly though, the inclusion of such material lets you know what Before the Door of God is not. Make no mistake, this is no Chicken Soup for the MFA Poet’s Soul. This is a sober, serious, and well-edited scholarly edition suitable for use in the classroom just as much as it is for private perusal (this is not to say that many of the poems aren’t hilarious – many are). There is no stench of the New Age about this collection, it doesn’t reflect a simple feel-good American “spirituality.”

Hopler and Johnson have made sure to include selections from almost any major devotional poet you can think of. In chronological order (this is a small percentage of the overall) one finds Donne, Herbert, John Milton, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Gerrard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg. Lest this sampling look a little-too dead, white, and male, the editors have made a conscious effort to include women poets across the time periods into which the anthology is divided. Increasingly canonical women poets from the Renaissance like Amelia Lanyer and Mary Cary, or the early American poets Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatly are sampled from liberally. And in the more contemporary (and frankly more provocative) sections there is a conscious effort to try and balance male and female writers. Still, more inclusions from writers of color and especially more from non-Christian poets would have been welcome.

By its very nature the strongest poetic section of the anthology is the chapter on “The Flourishing of the Devotional Lyric in the Post-Reformation Era.” It was in this era that the traumas of reform and the new controversies of religion lent themselves to what is inarguably the pinnacle of the devotional lyric as genre in the English language. An era that includes Donne, Herbert, and Milton presents an almost insurmountable achievement for the writing of religious verse. Ironically, it’s because of that fact, that this is one of the least enlightening sections of the anthology. The editors of course would have been almost ethically remiss to not include these poets, but excluding a few authors from outside of the canon almost everything on these particular pages could be found in any halfway decent anthology of Renaissance verse.

What’s more interesting is seeing the devotional lyric thrive in eras where convention has it that religious expression should be moribund. For example, the collection makes a good argument as to the continuing importance of the devotional poem even among modernists. That W.B. Yeats with his occultism and his Celtic nationalism would gravitate towards the mysticisms of the devotional lyrics is not surprising, or that T.S. Elliot with his Anglo-Catholic royalism would embrace the form isn’t shocking. What may be more surprising are the devotional lyrics of poets like William Carlos Williams or e.e. cummings. A bizarre exclusion is the poet Hilda “H.D.” Doolittle, who is arguably the greatest devotional poet of the entire modernist movement (an omission all the stranger given that she is mentioned in the editors’ introduction).

Though the earlier sections covering the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries are a sort of “Greatest Hits” collection of religious poetry filled with familiar names, the post-modernist section is where the editors do their more creative work. What emerges in those later chapters is a contemporary cannon of devotional poetry that is illuminating when placed in its historical context. I would argue that the greatest contribution the anthology makes is not in store housing the brilliance of the past, but rather in beginning to identify the members of and the contours of “The New Liturgy.” These are the poets who have taken the religious anxieties particular to our own era and have begun to discover the language necessary to talk about divinity today. They have helped to invent the language that is much needed in an era where the certainties of the old faith are impossible.

For instance, in his poem “Kneeling,” the Welsh minister R.S. Thomas echoes Augustine, writing “Prompt me, God; /But not yet. When I speak, /Though it be you who speak/Through me, something is lost. The meaning is in the waiting.” His poem “Praise” is a perfect example of devotional verse at its best, he “affirmith nothing” yet expresses the ineffable qualities of a personal interaction with the infinite. He writes “I praise you because/you are artist and scientist/in one…..I hear you murmuring to yourself/in a notation Beethoven/dreamed of but never achieved….You speak all languages and none.” This faith is flexible yet iconoclastic. We see it in the construction of new ways of religious being as motivated not by ham-handed and crude pluralism, but by the acknowledgment of blasphemy’s divine possibilities and the profane’s sacred potential. John Berryman writes “Now, brooding thro’ a history of the early Church, /I identify with everybody, even the heresiarchs.”

The very ineffability of God gives the incarnational language of devotional verse its power, and if faith has become a more ambiguous thing in our modern era, it has in many ways if not strengthened the possibilities for devotional poetry at least revivified it and pointed it in new directions that would have been hard to imagine in the past.

Denise Levertov is at home with this new ambiguity. In her poem “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus” she writes, “I believe and/interrupt my belief with doubt. I doubt and interrupt my doubt with belief.” It’s a profoundly truthful representation of how the mind works. In our contemporary moment what evangelical doesn’t have their moments of doubt? And what atheist, no matter how strident, isn’t occasionally haunted by a God of disbelief?

The new liturgy understands what all devotional poets have understood – affirming nothing does not mean that poetry lies. The great blasphemy is the attempt of the exegete and the theologian to define God, they are the ones in the business of forcing the infinite into the procrustean bed of limited language.

Galway Kinnell in his poem “First Communion” writes of church that “Jesus, it is a disappointing shed/Where they hang your picture/And drink juice, and conjure/Your person into inferior bread – /I would speak of injustice, /I would not go again into that place.” The language of the fundamentalist – which by its very definition lacks poetry – attempts to force God into this “inferior bread.” The best of devotional poets understand that it’s in the ambiguity, the cracks and fissures of the certainty of faith, where God dwells. And indeed the new liturgy allows for what the critic Bernard Schweizer calls “misotheism,” that is the hatred of God. Charles Simic writes “Doesn’t it give you the creeps/To hear them begging to you on their knees, /Sputtering endearments, /As if you were an inflatable, life-size doll?” And the new liturgy knows that atheism is a type of belief in God just as much as it is a repudiation of Him. Charles Wright reminds us “Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back” and Simic prays to “You in whom I do not believe.” Indeed accounts of God’s death may be overstated, and more importantly we may find that it’s irrelevant. After all, the earliest Christians already knew that there was great sacredness in an empty tomb.

This is the most important continuity between the New Liturgy and the devotional poetry of the past millennia. The Russian critic Roman Jakobson argued that for language to be poetry it must draw attention to its own artificiality. Poetry is first and foremost about poetry, which is precisely what makes it the perfect medium in which to express feelings about the transcendent. Prose affirms, poetry does not. That is why it is a vehicle by which to approach a realm where language cannot positively express any literal truth. The poet – by always drawing attention to the artificiality of language – does less of a disservice to God than the crude literalist.

The power of devotional poetry cannot even be neutered by disbelief. One can read through any number of literal minded religious tracts and easily disagree for any number of rational and provable reasons, but the devotional poem is not a religious tract. Its power is great, it allows us to be atheists in prose yet believers in poetry. Across the Abrahamic traditions there has existed a shadow theology that defines God by what He is not, the so-called via negativa method of understanding the divine. It is by its nature extra-linguistic, pointing beyond the surface world or words which can so easily become mental idols. And yet, humans are by necessity linguistic creatures. If God’s reality must exist beyond words then human reality can only exist through them. In this way the ambiguity of the devotional poem can express closer emotional truths about the experience of God than the theological tract or the work of exegesis ever can. The purpose of the devotional poem is to convert, and not just the penitent but in many ways God as well. It was in number 14 of his immaculate and perfect Holy Sonnets that John Donne asked God to “break, blow, burn & make me new.” As it ever was, this is still what the devotional poem at its best is supposed to do.

***

Ed Simon is a PhD Candidate in the English department of Lehigh University. His research focuses on religion and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He has been previously published in The Revealer, the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, and the Public Domain Review among others. Currently he is the assistant editor of the Journal of Heresy Studies, and one of the founding members of the International Society for Heresy Studies. He can be followed on Twitter @WithEdSimon.

The post The New Liturgy: Devotional Poetry of the Past & Present appeared first on The Revealer.

By Don Jolly

By Don Jolly

Originally published in the August 21, 2013 issue of The Revealer, reposting now as the latest installment of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club. 

Tomorrow, August 22nd, Providence, Rhode Island will play host to this year’s Necronomicon, the “largest gathering of Lovecraft devotees ever,” according to its website, with amusements in proportion to its population. There will be games, parties, scholarly papers, panel discussions: all in the ill-fitting and antique name of Lovecraft, Howard Phillips — author of “weird fiction.” It might be suggested that Lovecraft himself, now 123, grace the event with a personal appearance — a back table at McCormick and Schmick’s, perhaps — just for the chance to raise a glass of chilled water (he was a lifelong teetotaler) with a roomful of appreciative readers, and reflect on a life well lived.

It is an unlikely scenario. Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer and malnutrition in 1937, after a year of constant pain. More importantly, however, the scene of a grave-ghoul disturbing a living revel has already been used by Lovecraft, in one of his first finished tales, 1921’s “The Outsider.” At the age of 125 or 150, such repetition might be taken as chiasmus. At 123 it just seems desperate.

Desperation is a word that comes to mind in discussing the “religion” of Lovecraft. It’s a tempting topic, given that the tales which have won his enduring fame are, essentially, concerned with invented divinities, “holy” texts, and the complications of ritual. Yet their author was a vocal and argumentative atheist. Popular wisdom has it that Lovecraft’s philosophy of religion, to the extent that it existed, was an uncomplicated negative, and the “religious” features of his stories function as a kind of burlesque.

I agree with this position up to a point. In Lovecraft’s most popular stories, the religious element is often shallow. However, “religion,” as a category was, for Lovecraft, a constant source of speculation and concern. This is well attested by his essays and correspondence on the topic (many of which have been helpfully collected in S.T. Johsi’s 2010 volume Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft) as well as in elements of his poetry. Taking these sources together, it is possible to sketch Lovecraft’s personal religious philosophy with some nuance. Doing so, one discovers the unexpected: a hint of melancholy longing. Lovecraft may have been “against” religion, but his opposition was neither painless nor uncomplicated.

Lovecraft’s most complete articulation of his religious philosophy comes in his 1922 “Confession of Unfaith,” first published in the amateur paper The Liberal, in which his work made numerous appearances. In his “Confession,” Lovecraft traces the development of his atheism and defines it, somewhat thornily, as a valid philosophical position. Sunday school, Lovecraft reflects, had no more validity for him than Santa Claus. His exposure to the myths and legends of antiquity, however, had a far more profound effect. According to Lovecraft:

When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half- sincere belief in the old gods and Nature-spirits… Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks; a kind of “religious experience” as true in its way as the subjective ecstasies of any Christian. If a Christian tells me he has felt the reality of his Jesus or Jahveh, I can reply that I have seen the hoofed Pan and the sisters of the Hesperian Phaëthusa.

This passage reveals a great deal about Lovecraft’s concept of religion – the use of “religious experience,” and “subjective ecstasies,” gives away the game. Whether he was a direct reader of William James or not, Lovecraft inherited a number of assumptions from the phenomenology of religion – most notably, the elevation of private experience as religion’s principle building block. Lovecraft’s experience is, however, more guardedly sensual, hence his dismissal of Christian “feelings” in favor of his own pagan “sight.” Ultimately, Lovecraft rejects his visions of Pan as the work of imagination – a kind of waking dream.

Dreaming is perhaps the most prominent theme in Lovecraft’s writing, threading easily through his philosophical investigations, his correspondence and his fiction. It is no accident that a large percentage of his weird tales are categorized as “dreamland” tales, taking place in a strange and fantastic slumberland sketched most clearly by his 1927 private novel The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Too, it is also no accident that the divide between Lovecraft’s dreamlands and the “reality” of his fiction is so porous. Place names are transposed between one world and the other, characters are shared, and, often, stories originally presented as occurring in the “waking” world (albeit in the distant past) are often recast by Lovecraft, in later works, as part of his dream cycle. The line between real and dream, in Lovecraft’s weird fiction, is blurred. As, indeed, it was for the author himself. As Lovecraft expresses in a 1918 letter to his longtime correspondent Maurice Winter Moe:

I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me— the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar,and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system.

For Lovecraft, there are two types of experience: the dream and the real, the appearance and the actual. One is externally generated, the other an internal or “subjective” fancy. Lovecraft’s desire to differentiate the two is overpowering – precisely because, for him, the categories are nearly impossible to differentiate.

Just as Lovecraft inherits his concept of internal, private experience from James and the phenomenologists, he adopts a position on the origin of religion directly drawn from early anthropologists of religion, most visibly E.B. Tylor, for whom religion was an attempt, by early man, to comprehend the experiential challenges of dreaming and the existential challenge of death. In Lovecraft’s seminal essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the author investigates the origin of his particular obsession: cosmic fear, or the fear of the unknown which rests at the heart of his preferred genre. This type of fear, is, according to Lovecraft, “coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it.” He goes on to explain that both cosmic fear and the essential religious feeling are generated as a response to “the phenomena of dreaming,” which “helped to build the notions of an unknown or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduct toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man’s very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.”

This placement of religion’s generative moment in dreaming specifically and, more generally in the psychological condition of “savage dawn-life,” reflects Tylor’s model plainly. Both hinge on, essentially, the misinterpretation of experience: dreams are taken for “reality,” because, for primitive man, the distinction between the two is non-existent and the phenomenological experience of them is, essentially, the same. It is this tension, in Tylor, which produces the dual worlds of the material and spiritual. So too for Lovecraft, although for him the contested nature of the real is not restricted to “primitive” man.

Distinguishing the dream from the real was an ongoing challenge for Lovecraft, a matter of vigilance and concern. As he explains it in his “Confession of Unfaith”:

The seeker of truth for its own sake is chained to no conventional system, but always shapes his philosophical opinions upon what seems to him the best evidence at hand. Changes, therefore, are constantly possible; and occur whenever new or revalued evidence makes them logical.

For Lovecraft there is an obligation to be current–to stay ahead of contested dream-reality with the most effective tools. The process is unsentimental, and most importantly, completely conditioned by its historical moment. As he later elucidated in a 1932 letter to his fellow writer Robert Ervin Howard, Lovecraft’s atheism is the result of the best evidence available to him.7 In the early 1930s Lovecraft saw no better supported position than atheism–which does not, it should be noted, preclude the idea that atheism may be supplanted in the future by an alternate system, or the notion that in a previous historical moment atheism may not have been inevitable.

The best evidenced argument was a central moral obligation for Lovecraft, and often, a disappointing one. For example, in a 1929 letter to his correspondent Woodburn Harris, Lovecraft expresses “a profound intellectual distaste” in adopting “the main points of relativity.” There is evidence that Lovecraft’s atheism may have been, in some ways, similarly distasteful for the author.

This is best demonstrated by Lovecraft’s sentimental association with the England of the 18th century, including its religion. This nostalgia permeated the author’s life to such a degree that he held it as one of the three central tenants of his character in his famous letter on the subject to Rheinhart Kleiner in March of 1920 (the other two were “love of the strange” and “love of scientific truth and abstract logic”). Lovecraft signed many letters as a subject of the Queen, and openly stated that the American Revolution was a mistake. He took long trips to seek out Georgian architecture, and spoke reverently of evening walks in the Massachusetts town of Marblehead, where the aging buildings allowed him to imagine himself back in glorious colonial New England. His longest poem, 1918’s “Old Christmas,” features an idyllic depiction of a Christmas night in 18th century England – including a reverent and inspiring Church scene⁴:

Within the church a fervent sermon rings,
and the full choir a pious anthem sings;
The rural choristers chant loud and strong,
And have in spirit what they lack in song.
The black-gowned chaplain, modest of wit,
Reads the wise precepts other parsons writ;
No laurels for himself he seeks to gain,
But gives his flock the best his books contain.

It is tempting, in this selection, to view the parson as a sarcastic jab at religious demagogues. However, this read ignores the basic structure of “Old Christmas,” where the failures of “ye modern throng” are answered with enviable achievements of Lovecraft’s preferred antiquity. In this context, the parson’s deference to the “wise precepts” of others is a positive — rather than grandstanding. This authority figure is content to trust “the best” information available to him. Just as Lovecraft followed the physicist of his age into relativity, so does Lovecraft’s parson follow his intellectual superiors. “Old Christmas,” then, may be taken as a nostalgic work with a specific valence: it mourns the loss of an earlier period when religious belief was possible.

Lovecraft never directly labels his atheism as transitory, and the matter is certainly not helped by his passionate defenses of atheism in letters Lovecraft wrote to his religious correspondents. However, adopting a view of Lovecraft’s atheism as historically constituted and, hence, conceivably changeable, explains several references, such as those in “Old Christmas,” which confound a purely adversarial reading.

Lovecraft’s concept of religion, in summary, is one founded on experience: the experience of the real, which originates outside of man, and the experience of dream, which has an internal point of origin. The navigation of these categories is, for Lovecraft, the central challenge of living–and a task which must be met with the most robust intellectual frames on hand, no matter what one’s sentimental preference. This view positions religion as doubly important to Lovecraft: first, it has importance as a sister field of inquiry to his beloved “cosmic horror.” Second, it has importance as a historical construction of reality: a potential “best response” from another era.

***

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 Religion in H.P. Lovecraft appeared first on The Revealer.

Caitlin Doughty, author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.
(image via The Order of the Good Death)

By Ann Neumann

Public interest in death and dying seems to be on an upswing; from the rapid legalization of aid in dying across the country to the media blitz surrounding Brittany Maynard (the 29 year-old woman who legally ended her own life last year in Oregon) end of life issues are becoming a common national interest. A number of books published in 2014, including a few bestsellers, have, in fresh and exciting ways, addressed how Americans are dying. And it’s about time! The national population is rapidly aging and it’s obvious that, while the Affordable Care Act has insured many, our health care system is inadequately suited to meet the needs of most citizens, particularly elders.

In this installment of “The Patient Body,” our first of 2015, I look at four major books from 2014 that you should run out and read. In unique ways each examines death and dying, from how we care for the dead, to how we talk about end of life ethics, to how our medical system has overshot its own purposes. But, as I note throughout, good as these books are, none of them gives a serious eye to religion, despite the fact that it is one of the primary factors in how the dying and their families, consciously or unconsciously, form an ethics regarding end of life wishes and address the great and inescapable facts of how and why we die.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty (Norton)There’s no one quite like Caitlin Doughty. That may sound glib but it’s not. Her early fascination with death took her first to a job at a crematory in San Francisco and then on to mortuary school where she became a licensed mortician. In 2011, Doughty founded The Order of the Good Death, a “group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for their inevitable mortality.” She also has a popular YouTube series called “Ask a Mortician” where she answers all types of questions about the funeral industry and body preparation. Episodes have titles like, “Are These Really My Mother’s Ashes?” and “Composting Dead Bodies.” What Doughty does so well is upend the ideas that we have about those who work with dead bodies. She’s young and hellishly funny. She sports Betty Paige-style hair, lovely dresses, and she’s not afraid to make funny noises or faces on camera. This refreshing lightness, when applied to something we typically prefer to not think about—the dead bodies of our loved ones—is what makes Smoke Gets In Your Eyes a worthwhile read. “After whirling Mr. Martinez to ash in the Cremulator, I poured him into a plastic bag and sealed it with a bread bag twist tie,” she writes in a tone, sustained throughout the book, that is at the same time respectful, practical, and funny. But don’t let Doughty’s humor fool you. She knows what she’s talking about. (I once emailed Doughty—we have a mutual friend—to find out why exactly dead bodies are wrapped in plastic. “The purge,” she told me. I’ll let you look that one up.) An instant bestseller last year, the book is (like two other books on this list) a memoir. In some ways, it’s a coming-of-age story that chronicles how Doughty grew from a child fascinated with death to “Your Mortician,” an advocate for death acceptance and reform of the funeral industry.

I spend a lot of time with the dying and I’ve seen my share of corpses, but Smoke still managed to startle me. In one scene, Doughty cremates an obese woman in the Cremulator, newly refurbished, and liquid body fat pours out onto the floor. Mopping it up, Doughty ruins one of her dresses. Doughty’s point is that dead bodies—and their care—are a fact of life; their preparation is something that we should be more closely engaged with as a society. And not for sentimental reasons only. We grieve better, we care for our dying better, when we are unafraid of death.

I wish Doughty had spent more time with the history of funeral rites and practices, though. More  background would have helped to explain how we’ve come to treat our dead the way we do—and an emphasis on ritual, religious or not, would have informed her conversation about grief and bolstered her argument that approaching death with open eyes makes grieving easier.

Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate by Scott Cutler Shershow (Chicago University Press)

If you’ve been paying attention to the aid in dying debate the past few years, or bioethics in general, there are a few key words and phrases that seem vital to the conversation but are nonetheless very hard to pin down. Hope, pain, quality of life, autonomy, even aid in dying are terms that can appear to shift in meaning depending on who is using them. Shershow, a professor of English at University of California, Davis, picks up on one term that is particularly squishy—dignity—and gives it a full treatment. “The strange groundlessness of the concept of human dignity proves to be particularly pertinent in considering the modern debate about a ‘right to die,’” Shershow writes in the introduction.

The book is written for an academic audience and the first chapter, “Methological Introduction: A Strategy and Protocol of Deconstruction,” can be tough going. In it, Shershow frames his critique of dignity in deconstruction, a method of analysis first developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. Derrida’s work can be as fascinating as it is confounding, even when you’re reading a secondary source, but if you’re a layperson like I am, don’t let that stop you from picking up this book. Subsequent chapters chart the philosophical and historical use of terms like human dignity, suicide, sovereignty, sanctity and sacrifice to stunning and enlightening effect. And he’s aware and expansive about the religious origins and teachings regarding such terms, how they’ve been used throughout history and for what secular or theological purposes. His aim, though, is to debunk not employ the various contemporary uses of dignity. Therefore, while his argument is not specifically focused on religious meaning making, he doesn’t shy away from holy origins. That said, it is language’s use that Shershow is after.

Shershow writes, “Thus, even the ‘with’ of the crucial phrase ‘death with dignity’ can only mark a space of controversy and question: it names a condition in which a certain crucial yet indefinable form of value seems always at once, and in multiplying contradictory ways, both present and absent.” The death with dignity (or whatever you wish to call it) debate rages on—the bills that legalized aid in dying in Oregon, Washington and Vermont are titled “Death with Dignity”; this year, depending on how Governor Chris Christie approaches his likely presidential campaign, New Jersey could become the sixth state to legalize aid in dying since Oregon did so in 1994. We’ll all soon be asked to consider and reconsider what we mean when we say “dignity.”

Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death by Katy Butler (Scribner)

I’m not afraid to say that Katy Butler’s heartbreakingly beautiful—and beautifully written—book had me in tears. It broke my heart. But that was Butler’s intent; the book grew out of an article she wrote for The New York Times magazine titled, “What Broke My Father’s Heart,” and leads us slowly through an account of her father’s last years as Butler and her mother struggle with his decline, dementia, and their futile effort to turn off his pacemaker. “Sewn into a hump of skin and muscle below his right clavicle was the pacemaker that helped his heart outlive his brain,” Butler writes. Using a deeply personal account of her experience as an adult daughter and caregiver, minutely researched information on the costs of end of life treatment (most of which fail to do more than prolong death), and an almost theological exploration of her Buddhist faith, Butler delivers a scathing critique of end of life medical ethics. Her diagnosis: medicine is failing our elders by over treating them. Her cure is to change the way we talk to patients about dying, reform medical culture, and increase social awareness of the trauma and tragedy that dying patients and their families experience every day in our hospitals.

One prevalent critique of hospice culture, which, despite its roots in British Christianity, has absorbed a Western version of Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, is that it assumes we must all die in a particular way: in quiet comfort that allows for reflection. “Making peace” with the events and relationships and regrets of one’s life may be helpful to some, but not all. I appreciate Butler’s use of Buddhism to grapple with her parents’ death but don’t expect this book to offer a critique of general religious mores. Butler’s memoir is about her personal experience and the painful over treatment that surrounds death—a message that can make anyone facing the death of a parent feel less alone.

Today a neighbor texted to tell me that her grandmother has just been moved to a nursing home. “She has had no quality of life for a long time… She has a pacemaker that is keeping her alive,” she wrote. I slipped on my shoes and immediately walked my copy of Knocking on Heaven’s Door over to her. Even if an interest in end of life care and its personal toll doesn’t entice you to grab this book, you should read it for Butler’s incredible research and for her transcendent writing.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books)

Of course the end of life book that overtook them all last year was the bestseller by doctor and The New Yorker contributor, Atul Gawande. The book is a great place to start if you don’t yet grasp just how difficult it is to die painlessly in this country. Gawande’s writing is clean and thoughtful, his research is impeccable, and his compassion for the individuals we encounter in the book is moving. In short, it’s a good read.

Gawande is deeply familiar with medical practice and health care policy (he worked with Hillary Clinton on her failed health care reform bill in the ‘90s before going to medical school), so the book feels authoritative and necessary, but he’s not taking any leaps here. In fact, as Marcia Angell, doctor, Harvard Lecturer, and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, pointed out in her recent review of Being Mortal at The New York Review of Books, “A Better Way Out,” Gawande fails to get into the stickier economic or ethical points of health care for the dying. To me, his side-step of the controversial subject of aid in dying feels like a glaring hole in the book, exposing Gawande’s political position as relatively conservative. He’s a doctor and writer who supposes the solutions to our end of life care crisis lies within the current system—and unimaginatively fails to note that it’s the system itself that is entrenching and exacerbating it.

The son of Indian parents (“My parents tried to raise me Hindu,” Gawande told Grace Bello in an interview in which he discusses spreading his father’s ashes on the Ganges River in India), it’s possible that Gawande might have a position from which to analyze how a non-Western religious culture could challenge and support those who are dying—and propel us to make particular kinds of decisions. Yet, he doesn’t approach culture, let alone religion, in any way, preferring to stick to policy territory and the shortfalls of the medical industry.

These omissions are not minor, in my judgment, but Being Mortal does one thing very, very well. It brings the conversation of the imploding crisis of end of life care into the mainstream and legitimizes it. And it does so with a book that is accessible to many who might otherwise shy away from the subject. We should be talking with concern and intent about futile care, end of life care costs, and aid in dying. Gawande’s Being Mortal clears a place for that necessary conversation to begin.

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about the intersection of religion and medicine. Prior columns can be read here:

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 January 2016.

The post End-Of-Life Books, 2014 appeared first on The Revealer.

ISIS tank in Syria
via Reuters

By Suzanne Schneider

Does Islam need a Reformation? The question has appeared seemingly everywhere in the years since the attacks of 9/11, when radical Islam surged onto the global stage as the defining threat of the twenty-first century. Public figures like Thomas Friedman and Salman Rushdie have long argued either that an Islamic Reformation was needed or, more hopefully, in the process of occurring. More recently, one article by Cheryl Benard in the National Interest seized upon this theme in locating a possible silver lining in the rise of the Islamic State: namely, that such repulsive violence in the name of Islam may propel the world’s Muslims toward a true Reformation, to, in the author’s words, follow the Christian example by abandoning certain Qur’anic passages “as the centuries and humanity” march toward progress.

The suggestion that Islam can follow in Christianity’s footsteps by selectively privileging those portions of their tradition that some Muslims deem most compatible with late-capitalist modernity betrays a deep ignorance of both the nature of the Islamic textual tradition and the historical roots of the current crisis. A chief tenet of Islam, widely accepted across sectarian divides, concerns the divinity of the Qur’an itself. Within a tradition that de-emphasized the type of wonder-working that appear in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, the Arabic text of the Qur’an is considered Islam’s chief miracle. This gives its content an entirely different status than, say, Paul’s letter to the Galatians.

We should not take this to mean, however, that Muslims are trapped in practices of textual literalism that prevent them from being full participants in modernity. Historically, there have been numerous factors, ranging from the influence of political expediency to the power of local custom, that have helped bridge the gap between the sacred text and the actual lives of Muslims. Yet even more important than either of these factors is the tradition of jurisprudence (fiqh) and the principles it long ago established for how to interpret the Qur’an’s sometimes enigmatic passages.

These include foundational principles (usul al-fiqh) that govern the acts of Qur’anic exegesis, without which no authoritative legal rulings can be generated. For instance, one cannot issue a judgment on a particular issue without consulting all of what has been said about it within the Qur’an and the hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad). Because the Qur’an, like the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, contains passages that seem wildly contradictory, this means that jurisprudence has traditionally entailed acts of textual reconciliation that are far more complex than a simple reading of any single verse might suggest. The Islamic hermeneutic tradition also requires familiarity with the “conditions for revelation” (asbab al-nazul) for each verse, as some are considered historically limited to Muhammad’s Arabia rather than general commands for all times and places.

Beyond these interpretive guidelines, there is a tradition of abrogation in Qur’anic exegesis in which certain verses are understood to overrule others. And we haven’t even mentioned the centuries of commentary that established judicial precedents that impact how contemporary rulings are decided. Oh, and by the way, these commentators don’t necessarily agree with one another on any given matter. If this sounds awfully complicated, that’s because it is. To suggest otherwise is not just foolish, it’s actually quite dangerous.

In fact, the current wave of Islamic extremism exemplified by ISIS is not the product of too great an emphasis on the practice of jurisprudence and the tradition of shari’a—possibly the most misunderstood word in America today—but rather of their neglect.

Understanding why this is requires taking stock of a number of factors: the decline of Islamic education over the last 150 years—occasioned by the desire to nurture secular schooling in order to compete against European military and economic might—and the growing illiteracy in the Islamic textual tradition that resulted; the attempt to codify Islamic law by both colonial powers and post-colonial states, which, as the preeminent scholar of Islamic law, Wael Hallaq, has argued, has made shari’a substantially less responsive to local circumstances and more focused on punishment than ethics; the rise of mass literacy in Arab societies and the proliferation of translations of the Qur’an in other societies enabling unprecedented access to (though not necessarily deep understanding of) the sacred text; the rise of mass politics and a class of leaders who are not well-trained in conventional Islamic teachings, though certain that Islam’s past greatness can somehow be revived; and the creation of new channels of communication, ranging from the cassette tape to the social media platforms so favored by ISIS, that offer just about anyone with web access the opportunity to opine on what is and is not Islamic.

The argument here contains numerous moving parts whose points of connection become most evident by considering two contemporary responses to ISIS: one calling for the overhaul of Islam, the other attempting to combat radicalism from within the framework of shari’a itself. Let us first address those who believe an Islamic Reformation is long overdue. Writing for National Interest, Cheryl Benard begins her aforementioned article by recognizing that all religious traditions contain “multiple injunctions and sanctioned behaviors that shock us today.” However, she goes on to claim, “Judaism and Christianity have adapted their religions to changing mores by tacitly ignoring those passages that no longer fit the times.” This may sound plausible, but the elision here between the Jewish and the Christian only works if you ignore the entire Jewish legal tradition, which, though sharing many features with that of Islam, has no parallel within Christianity.

In fact, Jews did not alter their tradition by selectively ignoring parts of the Hebrew Bible, as Benard suggests, but by arguing about them. And those arguments are not, mind you, a modern phenomenon, but engrained in a hermeneutic tradition stretching back two millennia. Take for instance, the Torah’s prescription regarding ben soreh u’moreh, a wayward and defiant son, from Deuteronomy 21:18:

“If a man has a wayward and defiant son, who does not heed his father or mother and does not obey them even after they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the public place of his community. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is disloyal and defiant; he does not heed us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Thereupon the men of his town shall stone him to death.”

Luckily for wayward and defiant sons everywhere, Jews, for almost as long as we have a historical record, have not lived their lives in accordance with the literal text of the Torah—and not simply because they embraced allegorical interpretations. Rather, any attempt at textual literalism has been definitively mitigated by the juridical wrangling of the Talmud. With regard to the passage quoted about, the Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin features a discussion in which the definition of what constitutes rebelliousness is so restrictive—e.g. that the son must be of a certain age, that he must have eaten meat acquired cheaply, that the act must involve stealing from the father and consuming the meal in the home of a stranger—so as to almost certainly never be met.

You may think that all this legalistic hair-splitting is arcane and senseless, and that it is better to work against engrained systems rather than within them. In the case at hand, this argument may warrant consideration if we are speaking, as mainstream discourse tends to do, of Islam as a religion composed of certain beliefs and ethical practices that provide the individual with a sense of spiritual meaning. However, actually understanding how the Islamic State has emerged requires breaking out of this naturalized, Christian way of thinking about religion and instead considering Islam as a legal system, shari’a as a tradition of hermeneutics, and jurisprudence as its core “religious” practice. Might not this deeply engrained legal tradition have some bearing on Islam’s modern evolution? In short, if we approach Islam this way, would it make sense for an Islamic Reformation to proceed in the same fashion as the Protestant one, or might the same practices—the attack on institutional authority, the promotion of unmediated, individual reasoning, etc.—produce a radically different outcome?

To sharpen the contrast, let’s take a momentary detour through the substance of Luther’s revolution and the philosophic basis upon which it was built. Recall that the New Testament arrived to redeem man, not just from his sin, but also from the Jewish legal code. It was the figure of Paul who best articulated this anti-juridical stance, which, in Luther’s thought, facilitated the theological move away from Church sacraments and papal authority and toward the doctrine of sola fide (by faith alone). Following Paul, Luther grounds his argument in the distinctly Christian notion of humanity’s “twofold nature”, divided into flesh and spirit, which correspond to the material world of “works” and the transcendent realm of faith. Furthermore, and contrary to the juridical creep of the Catholic Church, “the soul needs only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by faith alone and not any works.”

This kernel of an idea—that a man’s actions are irrelevant to his salvation, whereas the truth of his faith is paramount—is completely foreign to a religious tradition built upon law, such as Judaism or Islam. More speculatively, there’s an argument to be made that Luther can grant the Christian an incredible amount of religious freedom because that freedom is limited, by definition, to the realm of faith. Here it is useful to recall Luther’s chastisement of the Swabian peasants who, claiming inspiration from his own writings, rebelled against their lords and princes. The freedom of the Christian, as Luther reminded them, does not apply to the external world of temporal concerns.

In short, we arrive at an ethical system in which matters of individual belief are quite necessarily individual. Yet we do not grant individuals the same amount of interpretive latitude when it comes to outward matters that impact others, but rather, look to laws, legal precedents and individuals with specialized legal training to establish and maintain a social order. To give an example from our own legal framework, most of us would never choose to disregard years of judicial rulings and govern the United States with only the text of the Constitution. Similarly, no sane person would want to live in a society where individuals are encouraged to interpret and execute the law for themselves. It would undoubtedly produce anarchy, the complete breakdown of authority and probably give rise to acts of senseless violence. In other words, it would look a lot like the Islamic State.

And here we can start to discern the real problem with calls for an Islamic Reformation. The religious fundamentalism of ISIS and its cohort is not evidence that Islam needs a Reformation, but that one has already occurred. There was, after all, no logical reason to believe that an Islamic Reformation would follow the same historical trajectory as the Christian model, which was rooted not merely in a specific time and place, but in a unique conceptualization of the relationship between religion and law. In contrast, both historical examples and common sense would indicate that juridical traditions evolve most successfully within the structure of legal disputation. Yet, over the last two centuries, it is precisely this tradition of Islamic jurisprudence has been progressively weakened by attacks from Muslim reformers, colonial governors and, more absurdly, the state of Kansas.

Focusing on the first group here, as writers including Ali Eteraz, David Kelley, and even Reza Aslan have noted over the last several years, we need look no further than the Arabian peninsula to locate Islam’s Luther. If we want to find someone who undermined the institutional authority of Muslim clerics in favor of the individual’s right to freely interpret religious doctrine, Abdel Wahhab, the ideological forefather of Saudi Arabian Islam, certainly represents a formidable contender.

It was he who first rejected the traditional regard given to judicial precedent and thereby created a new brand of puritanical Islam powered by ijtihad, or independent juridical reasoning. In the Sunni world, ijtihad had not been widely exercised by scholars (‘ulema) since the eleventh century. Yet contrary to what we might expect, Abdel Wahhab’s resuscitation of ijtihad led to the creation of an Islamic society that was markedly less tolerant and pluralistic than that of Sunni traditionalists, who, the common narrative went, were engaged in a cycle of imitation (taqlid) that had led to Islam’s stagnation. The radicalism of his message was not lost on the nineteenth century Orientalist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who described the Wahhabi movement in his 1882 text, The Future of Islam:

“The reform preached by Abd el Wahhab was radical. He began by breaking with the maxim held by the mass of the orthodox that inquiry on matters of faith was closed. He constituted himself a new mujtahed [one capable of exercising ijtihad] and founded a new school, neither Hanafite, Malekite, nor Shafite, and called it the school of the Unitarians, Muwaheddin, a name still cherished by the Wahhabites. He rejected positively all traditions but those of the companions of the Prophet, and he denied the claims of any but the first four Caliphs to have been legitimately elected. The Koran was to be the only written law, and Islam was to be again what it had been in the first decade of its existence.”

Blunt noted that Abdul Wahhab’s reformation was halted, at least temporarily, as the peninsula was brought back into the Ottoman imperial fold by Muhammad Ali’s army. Yet, as Blunt saw matters,

“Just as the Lutheran reformation in Europe, though it failed to convert the Christian Church, caused its real reform, so Wahhabism has produced a real desire for reform if not yet reform itself in Mussulmans. Islam is no longer asleep, and were another and a wiser Abd el Wahhab to appear, not as a heretic, but in the body of the Orthodox sect, he might play the part of Loyola or Borromeo with success.”

Abdul Wahhab was hardly the only modern figure to argue that the “gates of ijtihad” remained open, and what is striking is how this posture has generated some of the most puritanical interpretations of Islam and the most liberal. Another famous reformer who embraced ijtihad as central to Islam’s future was the Egyptian scholar, Muhammad ‘Abduh. He similarly turned away from judicial precedence and placed renewed emphasis on the text of the Qur’an and sunna (the words, habits and actions of Muhammad) as the only true sources for deriving legal rulings. Yet unlike his Saudi counterpart, he did so in support of women’s education, religious pluralism and the advance of the modern sciences.

There was a tension, however, present in this reformist platform, the nature of which remains instructive. On one hand, ‘Abduh followed in Abdel Wahhab’s footsteps by condemning heterodox local practices and Sufi customs, and thereby attempted to centralize control of religious knowledge in the hands of select members of the ‘ulema who alone claimed the capacity to understand the true nature of Islam. Yet on the other hand, he embraced the use of ijtihad as a means to accommodate Islamic practice to contemporary needs and recognized that any educated individual could theoretically be a mujtahid. In Indira Falk Gesink’s words, this effectively meant, “legal authority on religious questions would no longer reside in the hands of the scholars, but would be possessed by ordinary individuals.” Conservative members of the ‘ulema rightly pointed out that the displacement of legal rulings into the hands of each individual would mean the undermining of judicial precedent and with it, the entire structure of shari‘a.

Muhammad ‘Abduh clearly never envisioned a world in which ijtihad would be practiced by the masses or the Sufi sheikhs and village imams with whom they associated. At the time of his death in 1905, the literacy rate in Egypt is estimated to have been in the low single digits. Yet over the following decades, literacy expanded dramatically with the creation of new public school systems in Egypt and across the Middle East.

To compress a much more complex story into a few sentences, the new Egyptian public schools featured standardized curricula and textbooks that were devised by centralizing bureaucrats intent on “putting Islam to work,” as anthropologist Gregory Starrett has coined the process. While this meant that schoolchildren were still learning about Islam, the instrumentalization of religious knowledge meant that what they were learning lacked much of the energy and local diversity that existed in the past. On one hand, this meant Islam was increasingly boiled down to certain orthodox elements that every pious Muslim was called to believe. School texts from the interwar period are instructive in this regard, inviting the student to read a certain passage from the Qura’an or hadith, and then didactically providing its “correct” interpretation. Not surprisingly, curricula displayed a marked preference for those portions of the Islamic textual tradition that could be best mobilized in the service of the modern state.

This occurred not merely in Egypt, but in Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq as well.

It is worth noting the British colonial presence in each of these countries. As I have argued elsewhere, the interwar years there were characterized by an expansion of public schooling in which religious instruction in the Protestant mode played a central part. Take, for instance, the syllabus for Palestinian public schools published in 1921: “The Qur’an should be the source of authority in deducing doctrines, ritual, moral axioms, and civil transactions.” Elsewhere the curriculum stressed the usefulness of the Qur’an in helping students achieve literacy, and spoke of the need to develop in the population a “habit for rapid silent reading.” Whereas the Qur’an was typically a text that was memorized and recited in social settings or, in anthropologist Brinkley Messick’s terms, embodied, a new generation of educators dismissed this practice as pedagogically backward. True comprehension, it was assumed, could only be attained by sitting down and reading a text in quiet solitude.

As historian Richard Bulliet has long argued, this expansion of modern education marched side-by-side with the decline of traditional centers of Islamic learning. In the decades following the Second World War, the fruits of this process were beginning to appear, chiefly in the form of a new generation of leaders who had never received a conventional Islamic education, yet proffered solutions to all forms of modern malaise with Islam at the center: Sayyid Qutb (who, not incidentally, was educated and later taught in Egyptian public schools), Ali Shariati (trained in sociology), Khurshid Ahmad (economics), Hasan al-Turabi (law, at the Sorbonne). Osama Bin Laden’s training as a civil engineer rather than a religious scholar is surely most familiar to many of us, but he was merely the most glaring example of a trend that began decades before. As Bulliet argued in the mid-1990s, “the fact that the answers these thinkers gave to the questions asked them were often at odds with traditional teachings, or manifestly predicated upon ideas deriving from Western academic study, did not deter the young men and women from the new edge from following them.”

All of this brings us to the present, to ISIS, its leadership and the crisis engulfing the Middle East today. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State and the self-appointed Caliph of Islam, claims to be a graduate from the Islamic University in Baghdad (today the Iraqi University). In what is likely purposeful ambiguity, his biography implies he received a Ph.D. without actually stating so: “he studied in the university at all levels (Bachelor, Masters and Doctorate).” It’s impossible to deduce the exact nature of his educational experience in the university, which was only founded in 1989, but it is certainly not a known leader in the training of ‘ulema. The fact that al-Baghdadi uses his university experience to shore up his religious credentials ultimately testifies to the shift away from traditional institutions of Islamic learning and the type of knowledge they offer.

It is connection to this upheaval in religious authority that we should consider a second and entirely different response to ISIS: a 17-page open letter to al-Baghdadi that was issued by Muslim leaders in late September. A powerful rebuke, the letter is signed by 126 scholars, intellectuals and Muslim leaders from countries as diverse as Egypt, Uzbekistan, Morocco, the United States and Indonesia, many of whom are prominent members of the Sunni ‘ulema. What is most noteworthy for our purposes is the type of rebuttal this is: it is not grounded in a liberal discourse of universal human rights, nor does it echo Obama’s attempt to distinguish between ISIS and true Islam (a slippery theoretical slope when combatting a group that persecutes Muslims based on similar logic) or follow the Saudi course of action and declare ISIS modern-day Kharajites. Rather, this is a legal disputation that operates within the boundaries of Islamic jurisprudence and showcases the dangers of an Islamic Reformation in the Protestant mode.

The document opens with an Executive Summary, the first points of which are as follows: 1. It is forbidden for an individual to issue legal rulings (fatwas) without the necessary qualifications, and fatwas must conform to the rules of “Islamic legal theory as defined in the Classical texts.” 2. No one who lacks mastery of the Arabic language may issue legal rulings. 3. It is impermissible to oversimplify shari’a and “ignore established Islamic sciences.” 4. “It is permissible in Islam [for scholars] to differ on any matter, except those fundamentals of religion that all Muslims must know.” The rebuttal therefore begins by calling attention to the requirements of legal training, the importance of judicial precedence and the heterogeneous nature of shari’a, all factors that mitigate the untrained individual’s capacity to simply read the Qur’an and decide for him or herself what it means.

As the letter goes on to state, this is in fact exactly what the leaders of the Islamic State entice their followers to do. The third section of the letter, simply titled “Oversimplification,” includes the following admonition:

“It is not permissible to constantly speak of ‘simplifying matters’, or to cherry-pick an extract from the Qur’an without understanding it within its full context. It is also not permissible to say: ‘Islam is simple, and the Prophet and his noble Companions were simple, why complicate Islam?’ This is precisely what Abu Al-Baraa’ Al-Hindi did in his online video in July 2014. In it he says: ‘Open the Qur’an and read the verses on jihad and everything will become clear…all the scholars tell me: “This is a legal obligation (fard), or that isn’t a legal obligation, and this is not the time for jihad”… forget everyone and read the Qur’an and you will know what jihad is.”

No, you won’t, or so the letter argues, bringing the following arguments to the foreground: a war against fellow Muslims cannot be classified as a jihad, one must receive permission from his parents to participate in a jihad, an armed jihad is considered the lesser battle than that of man against his ego, jihad is necessarily defensive, not offensive, the rules of conduct in armed jihad forbid the killing of prisoners, refugees or non-combatants, and on and on. In short, the letter argues, “jihad without legitimate cause, legitimate goals, legitimate purpose, legitimate methodology and legitimate intention is not jihad at all, but rather, warmongering and criminality.”

The case for the mitigating influence of jurisprudence is also made in the discussion of hudud, punishments like amputation and stoning meted out for serious crimes. In an interesting parallel to the example of the wayward son quoted above, the letter states that hudud “are not to be applied without clarification, warning, exhortation, and meeting the burden of proof… In all schools of jurisprudence, hudud punishments have clear procedures that need to be implemented with mercy, and their conditions render it difficult to actually implement them.” While Disney’s Aladdin has helped popularize the idea that shari’a commands cutting off one’s hand for an act of minor theft, the juridical reality is of course more complicated:

“Moreover, suspicions or doubts avert hudud; i.e. if there is any doubt whatsoever, the hudud punishment cannot be implemented. The hudud punishments are also not applied to those who are in need or deprived or destitute; there are no hudud for the theft of fruits and vegetables or for stealing under a certain amount. You [ISIS] have rushed to enact the hudud while, in reality, conscientious religious fervour makes implementing hudud punishments something of the utmost difficulty without the highest burden of proof.”

On issue after issue—the establishment of a Caliphate, the mutilation of the dead, the treatment of women and children, the massacre of non-Muslims, the use of coercion and the killing of innocents—the letter condemns ISIS from within the juridical framework of Islam itself. And herein lies the tragedy of this rebuttal, which no doubt required substantial effort to produce: such an argument will be of little use in tackling a group that has so explicitly disconnected itself from the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence and rebelled against the established sources of religious authority.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the longest section of the open letter to al-Baghdadi is that dedicated to the issue of declaring people non-Muslims, or takfir. This section quotes several Qur’anic verses and hadiths that discourage this practice, such as Muhammad’s warning that “the person I fear for you the most is the man who has read the Qur’an…cast it off and thrown it behind him, and taken up the sword against his neighbor and accused him of polytheism.” The letter prefaces its discussion of takfir by stating, “Some misunderstandings about takfir are a result of the exaggeration of some Salafi scholars.” To whom might they be referring? The next page makes it clear: “The reason this point has been discussed in such detail is because you [ISIS] distributed the books of Muhammad bin Abdel-Wahhab as soon as you reached Mosul and Aleppo.”

And indeed, Abdel Wahhab did more than any other modern figure to advance the practice of takfir, a stance that required a break with the established Sunni precedent. This brings us to the oft-noted irony that Saudi Arabia, America’s strongest Arab partner in the fight against ISIS, is similarly devoted to Abdel Wahhab’s “protestant” approach to Islam and in particular, his rebellion against jurisprudence. The distinction, of course, is that, since the dawn of its modern statehood, Saudia Arabia has been deeply invested in reconstructing an authoritative institutional structure in order to monopolize the discourse about Islam and ensure its compatibility with the whims of the ruling dynasty. This is no doubt why the Kingdom has denounced ISIS in terms that differ significantly from those evident in the open letter to al-Baghdadi: they are not sinful or misguided Muslims in need of rebuke and correction, but Kharajites who are outside the boundaries of Islam. It is the anxious response of a Kingdom looking its reflection in the eye.

Yet at the end of the day—having taken note of these “protestant” challenges to the tradition of Islamic jurisprudence, the changing nature of education and the spread of mass literacy—the rapid growth of ISIS would be impossible without the thoroughly modern means of communication on which it relies. There is, of course, something egalitarian about media forms that allow individuals to share views that might otherwise never find their way onto mainstream platforms. At the most basic level, social media allows one to circumvent those traditional sites of authority that govern whose voice can be heard by the masses. However, with regard to Islam, the use of such media both reflects and contributes to the decay of institutional powers that historically decided who was qualified to issue legal judgments or offer religious guidance.   

It is tempting to view this as a battle between the old guard and the young generation, and this image is not entirely off. Against the cautionary scolding of ‘ulema who warn that the waters of Islamic law are deep and treacherous for those without proper training, ISIS offers recruits a chance to jump right into the waves, automatic weapon in hand. If ISIS recruiting videos sometimes resemble a particularly violent spring break—young, angry men gone wild—it is because its leaders are skilled at appealing to a generation of Millennials that combines an ingrained skepticism against authority with bleak economic prospects and a preference for consuming information in 140 characters or less. Combine this human material with the assurance that Islam is simple and scholars are useless, and you have the elements for a perfect storm.

Yet, while many ISIS recruits are young, it would be wrong to view its success as stemming merely from the failure of Millennials to appreciate nuance or respect their elders. The battle underway is not primarily between the young and the old, but between radically different approaches to understanding Islam: one that stresses proper legal training and respect for judicial precedent, and one that urges Muslims to open their Qur’ans and decide for themselves. The Reformation, you see, is already here. It just doesn’t look like we hoped it would.

***

The post The Reformation Will Be Televised: On ISIS, Religious Authority and the Allure of Textual Simplicity appeared first on The Revealer.