photo via: http://listverse.com/

By Ann Neumann

What is man that thou are mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For Thou has made him a little lower than the Angels and has crowned him with glory and honour. Psalms 8:4-5 KJV

What has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; what on the other hand is raised above price and therefore admits of no equivalent has a dignity. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

(1-800-SUICIDE)

I’ve been thinking about suicide lately. It fills the news: a man hangs himself in a garage and is mistaken for a mannequin and taken to the dump; a suicide bomber kills 89 people in Paktika, Afghanistan; The Economist reports that most people in the Western world favor legalization of assisted suicide. These three uses of the word suicide are very different and yet they point to a singular act; ending one’s life. After a marked rise over the past decade, suicide is currently among the top causes of death, after the usual suspects: disease and accidents. Suicide is the tenth highest cause of death in the US; homicide is the sixteenth. More Americans die each year from suicide than from car accidents, Parkinson’s disease or liver disease.

“There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide,” Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. Throughout history, views on suicide have ranged from permissive to condemning. The list of thinkers and academics who have written about suicide is endless as well as timeless: from Aristotle (384-322 BCE) to Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE); from Seneca (who committed suicide in 65 CE) to Saint Augustine (354-430 CE); from David Hume (1711-1776) to Emile Durkheim (1858-1917); from Georges Bataille (1897-1962) to Jean Améry (1912-1978).

However old and ongoing the conversation may be, in our era it is increasingly a political one. A bill that would legalize assisted suicide is now being debated in the British House of Lords. Euthanasia (or assisted suicide) is now legal in The Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and India. Aid in dying (or Death with Dignity, as the laws are called in the US) was legalized by the courts or voter initiative in Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, and Montana, while May 2013 Vermont became the first US state to legalize aid in dying through its legislature.

It’s impossible, even reckless, to summarize the history of taking one’s life, particularly if one does not wish to conflate the importantly distinct concepts of martyrdom, euthanasia and suicide. (The term suicide was only first used in 1634; euthanasia was coined by English philosopher Frances Bacon later that century). Yet my objective is not a history, but rather to show that the acceptability of suicide has fluctuated throughout human history and even when prohibited, in some eras, certain types of self-killing have been expected, tolerated, and even celebrated.

Sparta, the storied Greek city-state in the Peloponnese that was militarily dominant from the 400s until 192 BCE, when it was defeated by the Romans, was intolerant of weakness. Not only in its enemies but in its own citizens. Historians tells us, although it is archeologically unproven, that mothers bathed their newborns in wine then took them to the local doctor who determined if the child would grow to be a strong warrior. If the doctor decided that the child had an unpromising future, it was tossed into a nearby ravine. Elders, invalids, all those “ill-suited for health and service to the state” were expected to take their own lives writes Ian Dowbiggin, a medical historian at University of Prince Edward Island, in his book A Concise History of Euthanasia.

Sparta may be an extreme example but it demonstrates the ideas that ancient societies had toward suicide: in many cases, unless you were a slave, criminal or soldier, it was noble to take your life when you were no longer physically able to contribute to your community or your state. Dowbiggin tells us that the view of self-death as a positive action was new in the Spartan era: “Infanticide, abortion, and suicide were common occurrences in most if not all aboriginal societies from the South Seas to the tundras of the Arctic,” but was usually done for the good of the community, as a necessity. Because of concern for food supplies and the “survival prospects of the clan or tribe.” Sparta raised self death to an honorable action, one that demonstrated an elevated morality.

* * *

Stone slabs now cover the ground where the crumbling remains of the state prison of Athens once stood. It is here, near the law courts, that archeologists believe Socrates drank the hemlock that killed him. Hemlock, a plant that grows to two feet tall and is common to parts of Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean, was the customary means of execution in 399 BCE when Socrates died. For the past 2,400 years, Socrates’ death has been described as a show of discipline, an act that exemplifies dignity. He showed that “true dignity was not a social matter at all, but rather an affair of the individual soul.”

It was easy for Greeks and Romans to find a doctor who would help them die; the rudimentary nature of medicine at the time meant that a disease or illness meant nothing but intolerable suffering–and a drain on society’s resources. The Hippocratic Oath, written sometime between 500 to 300 BCE, denounced mercy-killing and euthanasia but it went largely ignored until the Christian era. Despite the legend of Masada, a plateau overlooking the Dead Sea where more than 900 Sicarii Jews killed themselves (and each other) to “escape” a Roman siege in the first century BCE, Judaism is often cited as the original source of a prohibition against suicide. In the Hebrew Bible, writes Dowbiggin, “God is acknowledged to exercise an absolute sovereignty over life and death. Death was the penalty for sin, and life was a gift from God that his people were meant to choose so they could continue to love, honor, and obey him.”

Suicide is not condemned in the New Testament but church leaders in the first century CE inferred from the gospels that suicide was an affront to God. Saint Augustine, who died in 430 CE, compared “self-murder” to homicide, a criminal sin. But there were always exceptions. Christian martyrdom, dying for one’s belief, “testified to an individual’s faith and was distinguished from suicide undertaken for nonreligious motives,” writes classicist Elizabeth Castelli, a professor of religion at Barnard College. In her book Martyrdom and Memory she notes:

Willing and self-sacrificing death on behalf of one’s religion, one’s political ideals, or one’s community–martyrdom–is hardwired into the collective consciousness of Western culture and is one of the central legacies of the Christian tradition.

Alarming examples of martyrdom occurred throughout the centuries following Saint Augustine. Dowbiggin cites twelfth century Cathars and Abigensians, who were declared heretics by the medieval church; Russian “Old Believers” who saw the Russian Orthodox Church as illegitimate; seventeenth century martyrs who locked themselves in monasteries before burning them–and themselves–down. “These shocking examples of self-destruction help to explain why Christian churches traditionally have opposed either religious or secular attempts to approve of suicide,” Dowbiggin concludes.

By the seventeenth century, suicide was largely illegal across Europe. Suicided bodies were publicly degraded, estates and belongings were forfeited to the state, a punishment to families of the deceased. By the twentieth century, suicide was no longer illegal in much of the Western world and the movement to legalize aid in dying was gaining ground. Dignity is often the defense that opponents and advocates of legalized aid in dying use, an observation that is the premise of University of California, Davis, professor Scott Cutler Shershow’s new book, Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate. In it he writes:

None of the philosophical labors expended to explain why killing one’s self can never be justified has ever been able to spare us the ineluctable possibility that someone might commit to death by the act we call “committing suicide”; and even if we refrain from ever endorsing or approving or esteeming such an act, even if we continue to do all we can to prevent it, it will always in principle be “there,” as a possibility always at least to be entertained.”

Suicide entertained. Dignity is many things: it is an inherent characteristic of all humans, “only a little lower than angels,” something which is “above price.” And yet it is also afforded to some and not to others, as in an undignified death. Too, it is a manner: one can behave with or without dignity. Currently, Western society (and most societies around the world for that matter) agrees that some forms of suicide should be deterred–with fences, 1-800 numbers, and intervention. But we also agree that there are exceptions, situations where our intervention to stop self-death usurps a person’s dignity. This complicated defense and condemnation of suicide, hinged on fluctuating ideas of human dignity, will likely long continue to stymy legal, political and public conversation.

* * *

In the US, suicide is highest among white Americans (28.5% of total suicides). American Indians and Alaskan Natives experience a disproportionately high number; so do military veterans and LGBTQ youth. Last year The New York Times reported that suicide among men over fifty increased by nearly fifty percent; in women ages sixty to sixty-four it increased by nearly sixty percent, although men (predominantly white) kill themselves almost five times more often than women (also predominantly white). More than 38,000 people now commit suicide each year (out of 2.5 million total US deaths). That’s one person every thirteen minutes.

As reasons for this increase, experts point to a faltering economy, access to guns (fifty percent of suicide deaths) and access to opioids like oxycodone. Whatever the causes, experts also agree that suicide is vastly underreported. The stigma of suicide prevents coroners from directly listing it on death certificates and families from discussing it openly.

We tend to think of suicide as an affliction of the young, those in our population who are emotionally overwrought, who don’t yet understand the value of life. And yet, statistics show that elders kill themselves at a rate consistently higher than youth. In recent years, the suicide rate among middle-aged Americans has increased dramatically. In 2010, thirty out of 100,000 twenty-five to forty-four year olds ended their own lives. Of those sixty-five and older the number is forty-seven per 100,000 (although elders make up only thirteen percent of the population).

***

In the US, aid in dying is highly regulated, requiring that an eligible patient be diagnosed with six months or less to live, and have doctor referrals, in some cases both verbal and written requests, and a mental evaluation if necessary. The patient must ingest the fatal medication themselves. Many argue that taking one’s life when it is already slated for the taking (by cancer or other disease) is not suicide but “hastening” death, easing into the inevitable.

In a room in an assisted living facility outside Washington DC, John Rehm, the husband of NPR talk show host Diane Rehm, was in the end stages of Parkinson’s disease. In an article last month at NBCnews.com–called a “lobbying piece for ‘aid in dying’” by conservative website Newsbusters–Maggie Fox wrote:

“He just kept getting weaker,” the NPR host told NBC News. “We called in the doctor and John said to him: ‘I am ready today.’ He said ‘I can no longer use my legs, I can no longer use my arms, I can no longer feed myself.’ And knowing with Parkinson’s is going to get worse rather than better, he said ‘I [want] to die.’” He asked the doctor for help.

Parkinson’s disease affects the nervous system, progressively slowing or altering physical motion. Depression and fatigue are also symptoms. It is deadly; there is currently no cure. Sixty thousand new diagnoses of Parkinson’s are made each year. About one million American’s are living with the disease.

Because John Rehm did not live in a state where aid in dying is legal, his doctors were incapable (and unwilling) to help him die. He chose to end his life by VSED, voluntarily stopping eating and drinking, his only legal option other than waiting for Parkinson’s to run its slow, destructive course. “I would like to, in every state across the country, in every city, in every county, I would very much like to see a justification, an allowance, for aid in dying,” Diane Rehm told Fox. John Rehm died nine days after giving up food and water.

Depending on where you live, what–and whether–you think about suicide (or aid in dying, euthanasia, assisted suicide, Death with Dignity…) may soon be asked of you, in the form of a state voting initiative; or asked of your representatives, via a legislative bill.

Advocates see aid in dying as the humane end of needless suffering. Shershaw writes in Deconstructing Dignity that, “self-sacrifice is the exception that troubles the prohibition of self-murder via a certain economy of life and death that, in a paradoxical and at times nearly laughable manner, seems always to be at once affirmed and forbidden.” Whatever the terms used for embracing that good night, many on all sides of the conversation are quite happy to keep the “suicide” in “assisted suicide,” either to enforce the stigma that has long accompanied suicide in Western culture or to expunge it. Or to defy it.

(1-800-SUICIDE)

***

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

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 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine. Neumann‘s book about a good death, SITTING VIGIL, will be published by Beacon Press in 2015.

The post On Suicide appeared first on The Revealer.

Just weeks after the sentencing and incarceration in Egypt of three Al Jazeera journalists on terrorism charges, anti-terrorism laws are once again being used to jail and silence the press. This time, it’s Ethiopia’s journalists who are falling foul of a law that feeds off the global ‘war on terror’ and the pervasive fear in the west of Islamic extremism.

On July 17, an Ethiopian court charged nine journalists with inciting violence and terrorism. The journalists, including six bloggers from Zone 9, an independent collective writing news and commentary online, were arrested in April and accused of working with foreign human rights groups and using social media to create instability in the country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Ten days later, Ethiopian authorities arrested photojournalist Aziza Mohamed for covering protests at Addis Ababa’s Anwar mosque.

But the Ethiopian government is not taking its lead from Egypt; Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism law has been used to imprison more than a dozen journalists, as well as opposition politicians and activists, since its introduction in 2009. The law has been widely criticized by human rights groups and press freedom advocates as a tool to stifle dissent.

Ethiopia shares its borders with some of the world’s most fragile states; including Sudan and South Sudan to the west, and Somalia to the east. It has cast itself as a bastion of stability in a volatile region and a key player in regional counterterrorism and anti-extremism operations. Somalia-based al-Shabaab—an offshoot of the Somali Council of Islamic Courts that merged with Al Qaeda in 2012—is considered a primary terrorist threat by the U.S State Department and Ethiopia is strategically placed to help counter that threat. Ethiopia’s 2009 Antiterrorism Proclamation (ATP) is seen as part of those efforts. As a result, Ethiopia’s government is rarely on the receiving end of international condemnation for its repressive laws, and still receives millions of dollars in aid each year. (In 2013, Ethiopia received $508.7 million in aid from the United States, more than any other sub-Saharan country).

As Alex Thurston wrote for The Revealer in 2013:

“[Prime Minister Meles Zenawi] and his successors have proven particularly skillful at positioning themselves as a “U.S. ally in combating terrorism” and positioning domestic dissidents as extremists. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have charged the Ethiopian government with using its Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of 2009, which “includes an overbroad and vague definition of terrorist acts,” to “stifle peaceful dissent.” In May, Meles said, “We are observing tell-tale signs of extremism. We should nip this scourge in the bud.” The language of the “Global War on Terror” has become useful for the country’s rulers as a domestic political weapon.”

As a result of the government’s crackdown on the press, 41 journalists have fled Ethiopia since 2009—Ethiopia is now fourth in the global ranking of journalists forced into exile, behind Iran, Syria and Eritrea. One of those journalists, Kassahun Yilma, spoke at last year’s press freedom day symposium at NYU, ‘Information on Trial.’  He described how more than 50 newspapers have been shut down by the Ethiopian government since parliamentary elections in 2005 failed to return the majority Meles’ government had hoped for. The post-election violence and government crackdowns forced many journalists to leave the country to find safety elsewhere. Yilma left for Kenya when Addis Neger, the magazine he worked for, was closed in 2009.

I spoke to Yilma, who goes by Kassa, last week, and asked him if anything has changed in Ethiopia since the symposium, and what it means for him to live in exile. Yilma currently lives in Washington D.C. where he works for ESAT, an Ethiopian news channel.

Kassahun Yilma: At that time, there were four or five journalists in prison in Ethiopia. Since then, there are a lot of changes. Ethiopia has become a very dangerous place but not just for journalists, bloggers and activists, but also for any organized citizens who are writing on social media.

Since press freedom day last year, many have fled to the neighboring countries, but the Ethiopian government is abducting journalists and opposition leaders in neighboring countries and from elsewhere—Andargachew Tsige, a prominent opposition figure, was kidnapped from Yemen airport, on June 26.

At the time, Ethiopia was number two in Africa for jailing journalists. Now the list has become very long, I don’t know how many I can mention; six bloggers and three journalists have been detained, it will be 100 days for them in prison. After that, one fellow journalist has been taken into prison a week ago on covering Ethiopian Muslim’s protests, and before this came there are two journalists who have been writing on the religious newspaper called ‘Muslim Affairs’ so that will take it to 12 total, and we are getting information that the government is still planning to imprison the rest.

How is freedom of expression in Ethiopia affected by social and digital media? 

The daily newspaper in Kenya ran a cartoon about Ethiopia. The cartoon was the former prime minister giving orders to jail Facebook and Twitter. Now the government has assigned cadres on social media who can write and argue in favor of the government.

http://www.pambazuka.org/

The Zone 9 bloggers and the three journalists were arrested three months ago because they blogged and they tweeted and were posting on FB consistently, almost every day. The evidence for the prosecution has been what they have tweeted and posted on their FB pages. It’s considered as evidence for being a terrorist, for working with a terrorist organization.

The three Al Jazeera journalists who were jailed in Egypt last month were also jailed on terrorism charges. How are terrorism laws being used in Ethiopia? 

Ethiopia introduced its very vague anti-terrorism law in 2009 and it’s working very well to prosecute journalists, religious leaders, opposition figures and citizens. The word ‘terrorism’ is scaring all the western countries, so the government knows very well how the western countries will be convinced very easily if they mention terrorism. The Ethiopian government regards three opposition parties, Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), Oromo Liberation Front, and Ginbot 7, as terrorist organizations.

In Ethiopia, it’s not allowed to write about the opposition; if you write about them you will end up in jail because you write about ‘terrorists’. If you write about injustice or freedom you’ll be considered as a threat and that anti-terrorism law used as a tool to prosecute and to erase all journalists activities and all citizens who care about press freedom, democracy and justice.

What does it mean for you to live in exile?

It means a lot for me. I was not a very prominent journalist when I left that country, but I was in one of the very credible newspaper, Addis Neger. When the newspaper was shutdown, all of us left our country. I wasn’t ready that time, and nobody was ready, to leave that country.

I was in Kenya three years without work, but I was writing. I was trying to write and to be active on social media at that time, and my colleagues have been in different countries, in Uganda, United States and UK. We constructed an Addis Neger website and we tried to write and tried to continue our profession. The other life takes a lot of energy, because you are not settled and you don’t know what will happen. We were living in a precarious situation. When I moved to the US, thanks to [The Committee to Protect Journalists] CPJ and CUNY [City University of New York] I got a fellowship and I moved to New York.

The Ethiopian government knows that when you leave that country it will be over, because it will be about survival, and you won’t have time to write. The government is very happy if you leave.

I have family who live in fear in Ethiopia. I know that they fear. It’s five years since I saw my mom, since I saw my sisters, and I don’t call them every time, because I know that there is only one telecom service owned by the government, so all calls are intercepted. Even the internet is risky because they track you and it’s been written in the news that the government is spending many millions of dollars to buy technology from one of the spyware company in Italy.

ESAT is working for the people of Ethiopia. It’s supported by contributions from the Ethiopian diaspora. I’m very proud of working for this media, but we are in exile, no matter how the situation is we decided to commit ourselves for this media and Ethiopian people because there is no media in that country.

I’m living here but I’m always in Ethiopia because we follow up every situation in that country, and it’s getting from worse to worse.

But there are millions in a very dangerous situation in that land and many journalists and activist in jail, so this is an easy job, a very tiny contribution compared to those who are paying a huge sacrifice.

***

Natasja Sheriff is an freelance journalist based in New York. From 2012-2014 she was the Luce Foundation Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media and served as The Revealer’s international editor. Natasja co-organized the Information on Trial event with members of Amnesty International Local Group AI280.

The post Religion and Press Freedom in the Digital Age – Part Three: Interview with Kassahun Yilma appeared first on The Revealer.

“Ann Neumann: In Search of a Good Death” in Cosmologics. The Revealer‘s contributing editor and writer of the monthly column “The Patient Body,” Ann Neumann interviewed by Lewis West.

It’s clear that we’re not a secular nation; a particular brand of Christianity dominates our laws, politics, health care, and culture. But religion is particularly overt around the death bed, and it’s not just family members who resort to religious concepts when they watch a loved one die. It seems that, in our culture, religion often gives us the language we collectively find acceptable when discussing death and dying.

“John Michael McDonaugh and Brendan Gleeson on ‘Calvary‘” by Mary Valle in the Los Angeles Review of Books 

MV: Religion is a complicated subject to say the least, but it occurred to me that maybe one of the hidden strengths of Catholicism is its acknowledgment of pain, suffering, and death, going back to the notion of religion ebbing away in Ireland. Father James suffers terribly in the film, but, as a religious man, he seems to accept it at an almost cellular level. 

For more on “Calvary,” check out S. Brent Plate‘s review, “Calvary Won’t Set You Free” at Killing the Buddha. 

Photo by Maurice Chammah via Texas Monthly

“Where Have All the Cowboy Churches Come From?“ asks  Maurice Chammah in Texas Monthly. 

But looking around at the congregation in Ellis, it was clear that this church attracted more than the traditional rancher. In fact, it didn’t look much different from any suburban mega-church crowd, save for a few extra cowboy hats. As the number of literal cowboys in Texas dwindles, one begins to wonder, how do you grow a church based on a way of life that hardly exists anymore?

“Why Is the Mormon Church Getting Out of the Adoption Business?” by Kathryn Joyce in The Daily Beast. 

As LDS Family Services told the Salt Lake Tribune, “It’s a different world for adoption.” And that’s not all bad.

There’s more about the fallout of the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision below, but first, “Thank you, Satanists” by Brook Wilensky-Lanford.

…a New York-based religious organization (although non-tax-exempt, because it doesn’t believe religious organizations should be), announced an ingenious response to the Hobby Lobby verdict. They have created a letter of exemption for women  to show their doctors in hopes of getting out of the requirements of the “informed consent” laws now applied to abortion procedures in 35 states.

“The relentless trauma of covering Gaza” by Jared Malsin for the Columbia Journalism Review. 

For journalists in war, bearing witness to horror and documenting atrocities are at the core of the job description. It is a task that forces reporters to the extremes of human experience and tests the endurance of even the most seasoned correspondents. For international journalists, it prompts vexing questions: When to stay and when to go? When do concerns about exhaustion override the imperative to capture the story? How to write and report in the face of overwhelming violence?

Meanwhile, in New York City:

“An Orthodox Brooklyn Clothing Line Shared a Photo of a Woman in a Hijab, and Their Customers Flipped Out“ by Anna Merlan in The Village Voice‘s blog, Runnin’ Scared.

Mimi Hecht of Mimu Maxi tells the Voice, “We were definitely surprised by the negative reaction to the photo. It certainly is not the Jewish way to be attacking or hateful. At the same time, given high tensions between Jews and Muslims right now, we totally, totally understand the visceral reaction. But truthfully, its exactly at this time that such a collaboration means the most.”

Photo by Anthony Delmundo for the New York Daily News

“New York Sikhs demand feds’ involvement after alleged hit-run ‘hate’ attack” by Jenna O’Donnell, Thomas Tracy, and Corky Siemaszko in The Daily News.

The Sikh community turned the heat up Tuesday on the NYPD to find the lead-footed bigot who ran down a Queens businessman with a pickup truck after yelling, “Go back to your own country, Bin Laden!”

“God Lives on Lemon Street“ by Scott Chesire in Harpers.

When I was a small Jehovah’s Witness boy living in Queens, Bethel was Oz-like for me. I mean that with all the awe, utter hopefulness, and mythic fear with which Dorothy and her friends had approached that magical city.

And Killing the Buddha has an excerpt from Scott Chesire‘s new novel, High As The Horses’ Bridles. 

While in the rest of the country:

“Satantic Temple Wants Religious Exemption from Anti-Abortion Laws“ by Philip J. Victor for Al Jazeera America‘s The Scrutineer blog.

An organization known as the Satanic Temple says the controversial Hobby Lobby Supreme Court decision allows it to invoke a religious exemption from state-mandated informed consent laws on abortion, which it says result in the distribution of “scientifically unfounded” and “medically invalid” materials to women.

“Family Behind Hobby Lobby Has New Project: Bible Museum“ by Alan Rappeport for The New York Times. 

The development of a Bible museum has long been a dream of the Oklahoma-based Green family, which has built Hobby Lobby into a $3 billion company in which its religious beliefs infuse every aspect of the business, from the music played in its stores to being closed on Sundays.

“Another White House Iftar, Another Ramadan Without My Brother” by Mariam Abu-Ali in The Huffington Post.

As many Muslims sit down tonight to break their Ramadan fast at the annual White House iftar, a tradition started by President Bill Clinton, I am thinking about my brother Ahmed spending his 11th Ramadan away from my family.

President Obama, just as he has done every year since coming to office, will probably include in his remarks stories of successful Muslims making significant contributions to American society, attempting to show how interwoven Muslims are in the fabric of this country. What he won’t mention, and what most in the room would rather not think about, is the growing number of Muslims who are victims of the U.S government’s ruthless persecution of Muslims that includes spying, torture, and unfair trials.

I believe that my brother is one such victim.

“Examining the Growth of the “Spiritual but not Religious” by Mark Oppenheimer in the New York Times. 

At the very least, we might conclude that “spiritual but not religious” isn’t necessarily vague or wishy-washy. It’s not nothing, although it may risk being everything. 

A 1989 interview with long-time NPR reporter Margot Adler who died in July. Adler was a Wiccan priestess interviewed here about Pagan practices, politics, and communities.

“The Leftovers: confusion and doubt mirrors my religious journey“ by Sarah Jones in The Guardian.

From A Thief In The Night to Tim LaHayes’s Left Behind series, representations of the Rapture in America have traditionally been promoted by Christians who read the Book of Revelation literally. It’s an interpretation I know well: I grew up fundamentalist in the Appalachians. The Rapture – and the fear and anticipation I felt for it – seeped into the bones of my faith.

“The Rise and Fall of the Potato King“ by Josh Nathan-Kazis in The Jewish Daily Forward.

My grandmother grew up in a big house on a hill in Fort Kent, Maine, a few hundred yards from the Canadian border. The house had a porch and a turret and, in the bathroom, a Jewish ritual bath. My grandmother’s mother was a religious fanatic. Her father, Jake Etscovitz, was the Potato King.

Though he lived all his life at the edge of the wilderness, the Potato King dressed for Fifth Avenue. He wore a suit in his potato fields, to his car dealership, to his music store, to his gas station, and to the tiny synagogue down the street from his house. Today, on a wall at the car dealership he once owned in town, there’s a picture of him looking like Bugsy Siegel in three-piece pinstripes and a tall fedora. It’s 1928, and he’s standing in an open garage door with eight men in mechanic’s coveralls. His hands are in his pockets, his hips pushed out, a little grin on his face. He looks ready to eat the world.

He didn’t.

“How the Baha’i Faith became South Carolina’s second-largest religion“ by Jennifer Berry Hawes in The Post and Courier.

Of Baha’i teachings, few are as sacred as the belief in the oneness of humanity, regardless of race or class or gender. In South Carolina, that oneness brought Baha’is together in a Jim Crow era, when blacks and whites couldn’t so much as drink from the same water fountain, much less worship in each other’s homes.

 Yet, that is just what they did.

“Simple wooden crosses mark the grave sites at an indigenous cemetery in Chefornak, Alaska.”
Photo by Loren Holmes for The Atlantic

“When Global Warming Kills Your God” by Adam Weymouth with photos by Loren Holmes in The Atlantic.

An amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union elaborated further:

A Yup’ik fisherman who is a sincere believer in his religious role as a steward of nature, believes that he must fulfill his prescribed role to maintain this ‘collaborative reciprocity’ between hunter and game. Completely barring him from the salmon fishery thwarts the practice of a real religious belief. Under Yup’ik religious belief, this cycle of interplay between humans and animals helped perpetuate the seasons; without the maintaining of that balance, a new year will not follow the old one.

But now the seasons are out of balance, and the Yup’ik can’t stop hold the sea back. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an estimated 86 percent of indigenous villages in Alaska will need to move within the next 50 years, at a cost of $200 to $500 million per village. Newtok is preparing to move to a new site, across the water to Nelson Island, but a struggle against the village leadership has recently stalled the relocation effort.

“The Great Calvinist Reawakening“ by Braillen Hopper in Religion & Politics.

But how did American Calvinists go from writhing in public in the eighteenth century to more buttoned-up forms of religious expression in the twenty-first? Why aren’t today’s young Reformed doctrine nerds still shouting glory through their tears and throwing their prized possessions into the flames? And what was American Calvinism, before it became a brainier, sterner alternative to “cheesy” popular evangelicalism? 

Whilst in the world beyond…

“The enduring influence of the Crusades” by Nick Danforth for Al Jazeera America.

So instead of rehashing an old narrative 915 years after it happened, let’s consider the odd story of how the Crusades, in all their messy historical detail, became a lasting symbol for Muslim-Christian relations. Rather than look for overly precise political parallels in the 11th, 19th and 21st centuries, we should consider how selectively — and effectively — the language of holy war has been invoked throughout history, often to the mutual benefit of opposite sides in the same conflict. The way we talk about the Crusades tells us a lot more about the world we live in than the Crusades themselves could.

“A Threat to Cambodia’s Sacred Forests“ an Op-Doc by Kalyanee Mam in the New York Times.

The Chong people, who are considered Khmer Daem (or original Khmers), have lived in this valley for over 600 years. They grow rice, forage for roots and mushrooms, and fish in the streams and river. In March, a group of young monks traveled over 150 miles from Phnom Penh, the capital, to help them in their campaign to protect the forest, which they consider sacred.

“Church of England General Synod approves of female bishops“ by Andrew Brown in The Guardian

The Church of England has finally agreed that women may become bishops next year, breaking with nearly 2,000 years of tradition and ending 20 years of bitter compromises since women were allowed to become priests in 1994.

and  “Church Founded in Sixth Century Has More Modern Views on Women Than Scalia“ by Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker.

“In recognizing that women are the equals of men, the Church of England has embraced a position that is centuries ahead of Scalia’s,” Davis Logsdon, a professor of religion at the University of Minnesota, said. “This is a remarkable achievement, given that Scalia was born in 1936 and the Church began in the late five hundreds.”

“FIBA [Féderation International de Basketball] forces India’s Sikh basketball players to ditch their turbans as Asia Cup” by Karan Madhok for his blog, Hoopistani.

Now, India finds itself in the Quarter-Finals with dreams to go even further. And both our big long-haired Sikh superstars will be an integral part of realizing that dream, with or without their turbans. But more importantly for their culture and for their beliefs, we hope they earn some respect to make the rest of the basketball world realize that it’s not Indians’ headgear they should fear; it’s their game.

“Two men are seen mourning at the funeral of a woman who died from stomach disease.”
Photo by James Nachtwey for Time

“The Rohingya, Burma’s Forgotten Muslims“ a photo essay by James Nachtwey in Time‘s Lightbox blog.

The U.N. estimates that 86,000 people, mainly Rohingya, have fled by boat in the two years since clashes erupted between the majority Buddhist and Muslim populations. In the 1980s, the all-Buddhist military junta stripped most Rohingya of their citizenship, claiming that they were recent immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. But many Rohingya have lived for generations in Burma. The country is now ruled by a quasi-civilian government praised by the West for its reforms.

 “Book by transgendered Roman Catholic consecrated maiden explains why God doesn’t hate you“ by Sean Meyer in the London Community News.

As the world’s first transgendered Roman Catholic consecrated maiden, Tia Michelle Pesando has many reasons for wanting to prove Why God Doesn’t Hate You, which is also the name of her new book.

More about Tia Pesando in “Call to religious life strong for transgender Londoner” from “CTV News London.

“Red Giant: An Interview with Shane Jones“ by Laura van den Berg in the Paris Review.

I’m always surprised when writers say they don’t believe in a god or religion but they believe in creating a world on two hundred pages using symbols. We’re all worshiping something.

And then, there is Israel-Palestine.

The July 17, 2014 cover of the New York Times.
Photo by Tyler Hicks for the New York Times.

I’ll share here a few articles I’ve appreciated reading, but first, I encourage you to read these two lists:

The names of all of the Palestinians who have been killed in Operation Protective Edge.

The names and photographs of the Israeli soldiers who have died. The names of the Israeli civilians killed are in the list linked to above.

For those of you who feel like  you have some catching up to do in order to understand what’s going on right now, Zach Beauchamp at Vox put together this impressive and helpful slideshow called “Everything You Need to Know about Israel-Palestine. ”

Josh Nathan-Kazis wrote about divisions within the young American Jewish Left in The Jewish Daily Forward: “J Street’s Gaza War Support Wins ‘Moderate’ Praise – But Alienates Some Backers.”

“I understand the strategy that J Street has adopted, and I think it’s fine to have an organization like J Street moving that strategy,” [Daniel] May said. “I also think that there’s a need for an approach that fits this moment.”

Rashid Khalidi and Nadia Abu El-Haj both weighed in on the civilian death toll in Gaza.

Khalidi‘s piece, “Collective Punishment in Gaza” appeared in The New Yorker,

What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.

and El-Haj‘s, “Nothing Unintentional” was published by The London Review of Books. 

There is no safe place in Gaza. There is nowhere to go. And there is nothing unintentional let alone moral about civilians being killed when there is a 100 per cent probability that an assault on a refugee camp or a crowded neighbourhood or city street will result in mass civilian casualties. The distinction between the intended and the unintended has lost all sense here.

From an Israeli perspective, novelist Etgar Keret had two thoughtful pieces in US media this last month. The first, “What to do when Israeli-Palestinian Peace Is Out of Reach” was published in the LA Times. 

True, it’s more difficult to write songs about compromise, especially the kind my son and other kids can sing in their angelic voices. And it doesn’t have the same cool look on T-shirts. But in contrast to the lovely word that demands nothing of the person saying it, the word “compromise” insists on the same preconditions from all those who use it: They must first agree to concessions, maybe even more — they must be willing to accept the assumption that beyond the just and absolute truth they believe in, another truth may exist. And in the racist and violent part of the world I live in, that’s nothing to scoff at.

The second, “Israel’s Other War,” in The New Yorker. 

At times it seems that there are two wars going on. On one front, the military is battling against Hamas. On the other, a government minister, who called Arab colleagues “terrorists” on the floor of the Knesset, and hooligans who intimidate peace activists on social media, jointly  persecute “the enemy within”: anyone who speaks differently.

Sana Saeed writes about the pitfalls of attempting interfaith work in the region in “An Interfaith Trojan Horse: Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation” for The Islamic Monthly.

This is, in its essence, what washing the occupation and apartheid clean actually is: to sanitize the narrative in which the oppressor becomes the oppressed or, at the very least, a relatable oppressor.

And this where what I will refer to as ‘Faithwashing’ comes in. Faithwashing is about changing the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (or, rather, Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine) from a mid-20th century Euro-American settler-colonialist project (that brought anti-semitism to the Muslim world) to a non-existent centuries long enmity between Jews and Muslims.

Lastly, I’d recommend reading Ray Filar‘s interview with scholar Judith Butler in Open Democracy: “Willing the Impossible: An Interview with Judith Butler.”

In fact in politics, sometimes the thing that will never happen actually starts to happen. And there have to be people who hold out for that, and who accept that they are idealists and that they are operating on principle as opposed to realpolitik. If there were no such ideals then our entire political sensibility would be corrupted by this process.

***

– Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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I read Sulamith Ish-Kishor’s Children’s History of Israel: From Joshua to the Second Temple like it any other textbook. I kept my television on and my laptop open, compensating divided attentions by answering the comprehension quiz at the end of each chapter. “Whom did David meet in the wilderness of Ziph?” asked the book, early on.  Easy, I said. Johnathan, son of paranoiac Saul. “How did Nehemiah help in restoring the purity of Judaism?” Well, he spearheaded the return to Jerusalem after the city had been abandoned, working to rebuild its walls and reinstate the Law. It was material I’d learned before; an economical retelling of the Hebrew Bible’s annals of judges, kings, prophets and conquests.

“Do we have any ‘prophets’ nowadays?” the History asked, in the questionnaire on its closing page. “What great men of this generation might be called the prophets of various nations?” That I had to think on.

All the while, the screens surrounding Ish-Kishor’s slim volume were alive, babbling out the incidents of “Operation Protective Edge,” modern Israel’s latest military adventure in Gaza, in tones of escalating tension. The book’s large print competed, word by word, with images of human outrage: broken bodies, anguished parents, homes ablaze. Through its onionskin pages, I could the trace the geometry of rocket fire, glowing blue. The History became a text that did not end in itself; it branched and bled, reaching into the circumstances of a summer more than eighty years removed from its publication.

Sulamith Ish-Kishor, a Jewish-American journalist and literati, could hardly have imagined the violent circumstances of my reading. I suspect, however, that she could have sympathized. Her Children’s History, written to serve a small but diverse body of interwar primary schools, bears unmistakable marks from surrounding politics. This kind of ephemera, produced in limited quantities for limited markets, has always had a light behind the page. It may differ in brightness or hue, but it is, invariably, present. Ish-Kishor handled it better than most.

In 1933, when the Children’s History was written, Jewish education in the America was rapidly expanding. Sunday schools, usually associated with the Reform movement, were well-established by this time, having been a common feature in many communities for nearly a hundred years. Their highly generalized, once-a-week instruction proved inadequate for many twentieth parents, however. As a result, Jewish afternoon schools began to propagate. Their two principal varieties were heders, small schools run by the direct payment of their students’ families, and Talmud Torahs, larger institutions funded by the public resources of a single synagogue or immigrant enclave. By 1910, the Talmud Torahs had become the more respectable of the two, employing better trained instructors and using a more complex, and standardized, institutional structure. Members of the educated class, both Jew and gentile, dismissed the heders as regressive; products of the “old world,” not the new.

After the First World War, “secular” afternoon schools taught in Yiddish became popular. According to historian Beth S. Wenger, writing in her 2010 volume History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage, these Yiddish academies were responsible for teaching “as many as 10 percent of the nation’s children who pursued any kind of Jewish education” at the time of the Children’s History’s release. In New York, the figure was double. It was a landscape with which Ish-Kishor would have been at least familiar; at the time, she had been living in New York for more than two decades.

The first Yiddish secular school was established in 1910 by the Labor Zionists, the socialist Jewish movement through which the young David Ben-Gurion would rise to prominence. Its curriculum was, understandably, influenced by Marxist political thought and the language of Jewish nationalism. Although subsequent Yiddish schools would make modifications to these points according to their originating organizations, their essential outline remained unchanged until the 1940s. Often, instruction in Yiddish secular schools was designed to “counter” the content of American public education, offering a robust defense of both Communism in general and the U.S.S.R. specifically. They were more rigorous than other forms of Jewish education and were accorded slightly more prestige, but the political radicalism of the Yiddish secular schools served to separate them from the American mainstream as surely as the perceived regression of the heders.

It was this separation that the “Benderly boys,” a group of Jewish professionals operating out of a few New York City teachers’ colleges, set out to solve. The boys unofficially leader, Samson Benderly, was the director of the newly-established Bureau of Jewish Education, an outgrowth of the increasing sophistication and coordination between the region’s Talmud Torahs. Benderly’s goal, as articulated in his 1908 essay “Jewish Education in America,” was to create “a Jewish life in harmony with modern civilization… Such a life,” he continued, “cannot in the least interfere with our rights, nor clash with our duties in [America.]” For Benderly, the ideals of American democracy were, in a very real sense, Jewish ideals. The curricula and publications he inspired were heavy on civic and religious pride: biographies of Jewish-American war heroes, records of Jewish immigration since the days of the Mayflower — even history texts written from a modern, American frame. By the interwar years, numerous presses had sprouted to handle the demand – including the concern responsible for the Children’s History, the Hebrew Publishing Company.

Given the politically charged market into which it was released, the Children’s History of Israel: From Joshua to the Second Temple was careful to satisfy all potentially interested parties at a minimum of controversy. For instance, it featured some vestigial Marxism — a concession to the Yiddish secular crowd. After a chapter drawn from the Second Book of Kings Ish-Kishor asks her readers: “Did the rich people of Israel treat the poor ones fairly?” Soft soap next to the 1929 Yiddish reader Dos naye bukh, or The New Book, which asked: “What does exploitation mean? Which classes are exploited? […] Is the worker secure of his job under a capitalistic government?”

Benderly-style Jewish-Americanism also appears, briefly, in the Children’s History. Ish-Kishor’s discourse about the responsibility of rulers, brought up in the context the ignoble latter years Solomon, is heavy on democracy. “Rich and mighty kings often forget the reason why they are rulers of the people,” she wrote. “A king is really the servant of his people.” A little more than a decade later, when Bendery’s method was all but unquestioned in the Jewish educational circles, Ish-Kishor would write one of its chief texts, 1947’s American Promise: A History of Jews in the New World. In 1933, however, she preferred to dodge the crossfire.

Personally, Sulamith Ish-Kishor was as subject to the cross-pressures of twentieth century Judaism as anyone. Zionism, the various political threads advocating for a Jewish homeland, was a significant feature of her upbringing. Ish-Kishor was born in 1896, the same year as Theodor Herzl’s foundational Zionist text The Jewish State was issued. Her father, Ephraim Ish-Kishor was one of Herzl’s earliest converts, and an important organizer of working class Jews in London’s East End for the cause. It is surprising, then, that the History declines a position on Zionism more completely than any other ideology. Its only openly Zionist passage is Ish-Kishor’s dedication: “To My Father.”

Today, Sulamith Ish-Kishor is best remembered for her children’s novels of the 1960s. Her most famous was the semi-autobiographical Our Eddie, a runner-up for the 1970 Newberry Medal. In it, the author chronicles a Jewish family’s immigration from London to New York in the early twentieth-century, centering the narrative on the clashes between a rebellious son and his stridently “old world” father. Although Ish-Kishor encouraged her readers to see Eddie as fiction, not fact, the similarities between it and the immigration of the Ish-Kishor family from London to New York in 1909 are too glaring to ignore. Whatever her feelings toward her father and his politics, it is clear that Ish-Kishor preferred her writing to deal in the interpersonal, rather than the doctrinaire. From the 1920s until her death in 1977, she advanced this theme prolifically, working in a diversity of forms and genres. She wrote poetry, short fiction, journalism, biographies and, of course, specialty textbooks. For the most part, her efforts were released by small presses catering to the Jewish market.

In the 1930s, contemporary with the publication of her Children’s History, Ish-Kishor seemed on the verge of breaking into the mainstream of American letters. In 1929 she had interviewed Theodore Dreiser, the well-respected author of the novel An American Tragedy, for a piece on Russian Jewry commissioned by The Jewish Daily Forward. Afterwards the two maintained a healthy, if one-sided, correspondence. Ish-Kishor hounded Dreiser for opportunities and advice; Dreiser, for his part, gave it – when he was in the mood. In 1932, when Dreiser launched his new literary magazine, The American Spectator, Ish-Kishor was one of the first people he solicited for work. A few years later, in 1935, Ish-Kishor even supplied an introduction to a volume of his poetry called Moods: Philosophic and Emotional, Cadenced and Declaimed. There she wrote of her mentor’s potency; his ability to capture “the adventures of the ego in its painful search for a center of gravity in the universe, for a poised and conscious fact at the center of the chaos.”

The Children’s History, in its way, attempts a similar feat – darting between its political obligations in search of either a more profound, or simply more saleable, solidity. Her text does not modify the Bible overmuch. In fact, the author sanitizes nothing – an unusual choice for a primary school reader. Characters such as Saul and David are allowed to keep their sins and the Hebrews retain their slaughters, in the History. Although Ish-Kishor makes occasional efforts to explain such failings, in context they are as malnourished as the book’s political passages. In the end, before asking about who might represent a prophet of the modern day, she asks her readers to select the volume’s “noblest deed” and “worst action.” A final word, reserved for the audience. An invitation to use the text as a mirror.

I read the History with the T.V. on, stealing glances at a nation which seems to have arrived at the end of the world a little quicker than the rest of us. My choice for “worst action” is still up in the air, but I’m already certain it lies nowhere in the text itself.

In the same year as the History was issued, 1933, Ish-Kishor wrote a successful essay for Dreiser’s American Spectator called “The Novelist”:

“Its main character was man and its theme was ultimate happiness,” she began. “It was rejected by all the causal dynamos of Natural Law. ‘Humanity? A preposterous notion! […] Nature can make no use of your idea. Again — what’s your name? God? Your creation is a mere mad jumble.’” Like most rejected authors, the God of Sulamith Ish-Kishor initially fumes. After a few thousand years of consideration, though, he starts to see the wisdom of natural law’s critique: “God apologized to his split-atoms and told them he was aware the Book needed revision … He wanted to tear [it up], but it was too late; it was alive. Every word was a family, every letter a human being.”  There was no stopping it. For all its violence and contradiction, the world was the world – and beneath its battered exterior, its core was bright, and sacred.  “No, it is not as I intended it to be,” her God concludes. “But, after all, I do still think there was something in the idea.”

“What great men of this generation might be called the prophets?” asked the quiz at the end of the Children’s History. I’m still mulling that one over, too. I’m tempted to suggest Ish-Kishor, if only for “The Novelist.”

Can a “great man” of “this generation” be three-decades dead, and female?

***

“The Last Twentieth Century Book Club” is a monthly column about religious ephemera. Prior columns can be read here:

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

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Don Jolly is a Texan visual artist, writer, and academic. He is currently pursuing his master’s degree in religion at NYU, with a focus on esotericism, fringe movements, and the occult. His comic strip, The Weird Observer, runs weekly in the Ampersand Review. He is also a staff writer for Obscure Sound, where he reviews pop records. Don lives alone with the Great Fear, in New York City. 

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