The Revealer: July 2005 Archives

Saint Me
BAGnewsNotes looks beyond the veneer of St. Frist's would-be martyrdom[ Continue reading: ]

Incommunicado
The Revealer is pleasantly incommunicado. We'll return July 25th. [ Continue reading: ]

Incommunicado
The Revealer is pleasantly incommunicado. We'll return July 25th.... [ Continue reading: ]

A Time Before the Word "Fuck"
Bernard Goldberg became a hero of the right when he published Bias, his insider account of what he argues is CBS' liberal agenda. Now, he's back, with another hard-hitting expose: 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37). Very few conservatives make the list, but Goldberg says that's beside the point. What's the point? Well, as best as we can tell from Goldberg's appearence on Jon Stewart's Daily Show, it has something to do with a golden time in America when even "a drunk in a bar" wouldn't use the word "fuck." Ah, the golden age -- please, take us back to the Garden, Bernard! Stewart, meanwhile, has other ideas. [ Continue reading: ]

Taking It the Liberal Way
Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, knows what gay sex is all about -- "man-on-dog." Now he announces that he knows how liberals are "taking it," too -- the "wrong way," of course. And that, says the Senate's sage of... [ Continue reading: ]

Don't Run, Hillary, Don't Run
Amy Sullivan: "Jill Lawrence, one of USA Today's campaign correspondents in 2004, has observed that very few political reporters wrote about the way Kerry used religious language—even though, she noted, it occurred every week on the campaign trail—because they assumed that Democratic candidates weren't deeply religious. 'The stereotype of the Democratic Party is so deep that it never broke through,' she said. That's already happening with [Hillary] Clinton, whose religious references and comments on abortion generated headlines early in 2005. Most news outlets characterized her remarks as a distinct break from the past—implying that she was transforming herself for a White House run—even though she is a former Sunday School teacher who has spoken publicly about religion for decades." [ Continue reading: ]

Pop Goes the Times
Press critic Michael Massing turns his eye on The New York Times' pop culture coverage in the latest Columbia Journalism Review. Only, he's not very critical. Sure, the piece poses as a hard-hitting analysis of the Times' failure to take... [ Continue reading: ]

Digital Fetishistic Hasidic Graffiti
Artist Elliott Malkin writes The Revealer to inform us of his construction of a semacode eruv. One of these two words is Hebrew, one is digital. Visit Elliott's site to find out which is which! [ Continue reading: ]

Neil Young, Superstar
Doug LeBlanc at Get Religion is reporting that Neil Young and NPR are teaming up to kill God. That's because Doug doesn't know that Neil Young is God.... [ Continue reading: ]

Middle Ground Blahs
The NYT's Laurie Goodstein turns in an entirely servicable piece on the growing number of evangelical chaplains in the Air Force. Numbers; anecdotes; academic talking heads -- everything is there, except the life of the story. As a perfectly-excuted piece... [ Continue reading: ]

Some People Say... Something
Press critics routinely decry labels such as "conservative" and "liberal," but this useless story in the conservative The Washington Times is evidence of the need for some degree of labeling. Summary: One group has changed its policy on sexual abstinence... [ Continue reading: ]

Spinning the Gospel
Evangelical leader Rob Brendle debates media religion with The Revealer's Jeff Sharlet in the nation's only gay cowboy tabloid. [ Continue reading: ]

Christianity Ha-Ha
In about 36 hours, 1,000 pastors from around the country are coming to my megachurch, where I have worked for the last six years. They are coming for a pastors' conference to learn how to run their churches more effectively. My job is to make them laugh... [ Continue reading: ]

Alt Weeklies and Alte Kackers

An ancient Indian burial ground... A modern construction project that can't be stopped... A remake of Poltergeist? No, something better: good alt-weekly journalism from Chrisanne Beckner of the Sacramento News & Review, writing on the debate over "science," "grave robbing," the rights of the dead, and the sacred, recently excavated by transit workers beneath downtown Sacramento.

Most "alternative" weeklies deserve only one half of that label these days. Owned by corporate chains, the majority function as arts & leisure supplements to local dailies that are too busy retreading wire reports and running "health" columns. That may be the economic reality, but it's no excuse for the poverty of writing one encounters in these rags -- self-styled Menckens who think muckraking consists of bashing pop bands and regurgitating already-antique cultural studies dogma.

And yet, some of the more interesting religion writing in recent years appears in these papers, reported by journalists who simply haven't been trained in the dailies' doctrine of religion as either a transparent vehicle for politics or "inspirational." No alt weeklies we know of are publishing great religion writing on a regular basis, but there are a few writers who are simply doing the job the dailies aren't, with a little extra kick... [ Continue reading: ]

China Eyes Jerusalem
How big is evangelicalism in China? Consider this: Chinese Christians, writes a nameless grad student, reviewing David Aikman, a former Time reporter turned evangelist, "see themselves as the ideal candidates to bring Christianity 'back' to the Muslims of the Middle East, to break into the '10/40 window' (the band of earth from 10 degrees above the equator to 40 degrees below it) that evangelical Christians worldwide see as their next big challenge. In a... meeting in Beijing a few years back, the Chinese Christians surprised the international evangelicals present by announcing their 'back to Jerusalem' goal to have 100,000 Chinese missionaries active outside of China by the year 2007." More, at Lumpenlogracy. [ Continue reading: ]

NYT: This is What Religion Should Look Like
Noah Feldman's carefully-reasoned essay on the church/state dilemma of American politics, excerpted from his new book, Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem -- and What We Should Do About It, in today's New York Times Magazine reveals a distillation of the Times' sensibility when it comes to religious conflict. That attitude is not, as conservatives would have us believe, high church and haughty, but rather plaintive: "Can't we all get along?"

That the answer might truly be "No" never seems to occur to the Times... [ Continue reading: ]

Ted Haggard's Big Israeli Adventure
Confusing news from the Jewish Forward: the National Association of Evangelicals is set to announce a new, more pro-Palestinian policy on Israel. Why? Because it wants to counter liberal churches that are putting economic pressure on Israel to make concessions... [ Continue reading: ]

Arguing the ABCs of AIDS in Africa
Agreed: The Bush administration's response to AIDS in Africa is a failure. Disputed: The reasons why. Bob Smietana challenges the mainstream press narrative. [ Continue reading: ]

The Shape of Journalism to Come
Sharlet: This fall, I'll be teaching The Revealer as a text and as an assignment for a group of journalism graduate students here at New York University, as part of a seminar in magazine writing called "Journalism Faces Faith." As I finalize the syllabus, I'm hoping Revealer readers will help me select work with which to train the next generation of journalists... [ Continue reading: ]