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   Boomtown Blues Paul Asay, religion reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette, teams up with colleague Dave Phillips to ponder the post-Haggard fate of the city sometimes called the evangelical Vatican. It's an excellent report. Megachurch light shows and Dobson fire-breathing acts are... [ Continue reading: ]  Are You A Golemist? This interview with novelist Marc Estrin, author of Golem Songs, will probably only be of interest to readers familiar enough with the Jewish Golem myth to follow Estrin as he spins out its implications through the psychology of a "new kind of Jew," in interviewer Ron Jacobs' words, "an out-of-control potentially homicidal Jewish man in the Bronx," an amalgam of "wonderful maniacs I have known," in Estrin's. And then there's "Golemism," writ large: "No one, no nation is 'the Golem.' Golem is an idea, a disturbing myth, a strategy of self-protection at all costs, regardless of the consequences for others, and often for oneself or one's own nation. We see examples of golemism all around us, all nourished on fear, from the obvious lethality of some nations, to the manipulation of elections, to the backlash against threatening feminism, to the catastrophic overuse of antibiotics "just in case.'" [ Continue reading: ] But What Does She Believe? Holly Berman: The New York Times' David D. Kirkpatrick has been covering evangelicals and politics long enough that we can only guess his story in today's paper is such a useless mess because of a clumsy editor. A wan profile... [ Continue reading: ]  Inside Christian Embassy Sharlet: An exclusive interview with the chief of staff of Christian Embassy, the behind-the-scenes ministry in the news for proselytizing in the Pentagon. [ Continue reading: ]  Savages Sharlet: In Rwanda and Burundi, the American press saw "tribal warfare" -- ancient and savagely natural -- in massacres that were the result, in large part, of 20th-century colonial manipulations. That's how it is in Africa, according to the American... [ Continue reading: ]  On Faith The Washington Post and Newsweek are collaborating on a new venture called On Faith, a "conversation on religion" which is actually more of a call and response. Every week or so a question ("Is America a Christian Nation?" "What should we tell children about God?") is posed to an impressive list of panelists, whose answers spark mostly civil debate in the comments section. This week's featured panelist is friend-of-the-Revealer Steve Prothero, who takes on the oft-repeated notion that we are all children of Abraham. [ Continue reading: ]  He Just Wants to Dance The line that really jumped out at us from the news of the New Jersey legislature's vote for civil unions was this: "But Assemblyman Ronald S. Dancer, a Republican from Ocean County, said that the bill was an affront to... [ Continue reading: ]  Something Other Than Saintliness Sharlet: Matthew Teague's "The Aftermath," an account of the days following the October 2nd shooting of five Amish school girls and the funeral of Charlie Roberts, the man who shot them is, is as good a piece of magazine writing about religion as I've come across in awhile. The set-up is pure formula: inexplicable tragedy plus media frenzy plus reporter who reports on the reporting. But Teague steps off that well-trod path with his first portrait of a voyeur, a "freelance sociologist" named Jack, who turns out to be looking for confirmation of chaos theory in the aftermath. From there, this piece gets smarter at every turn: a succinct but thoughtful engagement with the Amish concern for martyrdom; an understated interview with the undertaker; a recognition of Amish as both human and ritual-bound, and their seemingly amazing act of forgiveness -- they mourned at the funeral for the killer -- as something other than saintliness. [ Continue reading: ] "Here and Now" Sharlet: I was slated to discuss my latest Harper's piece, "Through A Glass, Darkly," on WBUR's "Here and Now," but the revelation of another megachurch pastor's secret gay life recast the conversation -- now it's about the centrality of the... [ Continue reading: ]  Kristof's Big Hitch Rhea Saran: Let me say, right off the bat, that I respect New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and that I generally applaud his efforts to force the less glamorous world issues onto breakfast tables in the West. So, it was particularly surprising to read his December 10th column “The Muslim Stereotype," and find that his argument fell more than a little flat. [ Continue reading: ] Out With the Old Trouble ahead for the accelerating press narrative of a new "religious left": American Jews aren't just conservative on Israel anymore. The rightward shift of American Jewry has been an ongoing story for some time, but this report in the Forward... [ Continue reading: ] "What the Fuck Would It Take?" That's how historian and William Sloane Coffin biographer Warren Goldstein opens his report on the rise and fall and (maybe) rise of Yale Divinity School, in YDS' alumni magazine, no less. The question was posed by Phil Donohue 26 years ago. He was trying to provoke a disinterested Coffin into recognizing the growing strength of the Christian Right. But Coffin, for all his brilliance, never quite got it, and neither did Yale Div. Yale, a recent chaplain of the school tells Goldstein, "'sat out the culture wars and has been a victim of its own class stratification; it's seen the evangelical movement as a poor people's movement. Its refusal to engage [was] a function of perception of class, as well as of ignoring William James' -- who celebrated 'the varieties of religious experience' in his 1902 book of that name." But now, says a YDS grad who leads a growing liberal church in North Carolina, "the worm has turned.." [ Continue reading: ]  Smells Like Military Spirit, Part 2 Sharlet: I'll be a guest on Air America's "Rachel Maddow Show" tonight briefly discussing the potential scandal of the Christian Embassy video featuring flag officers with a surprising sense of the chain of command.... [ Continue reading: ] The Trouble With Bibles Holly Berman: Daniel Radosh, in The New Yorker, offers up everything you ever wanted to know about Bible marketing. To religion journalists -- and to many observant Christians -- news of the wacky world of scripture packaging -- Bibles for surfers! Bibles designed to look like teen magazines! etc. -- is old news, but surely some readers will find Radosh's catalogue/article fascinating. But I read between the lines that deadliest of qualities in a reporter setting out to document a religious subculture... [ Continue reading: ] Smells Like Military Spirit Jeff Sharlet: The Washington Post's Alan Cooperman reports that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is requesting an inquiry over the propriety of flag officers appearing in a video on behalf of Christian Embassy, a deliberately low-key, behind-the-scenes Campus Crusade ministry for Washington government and military elites. Maybe the timing is coinicidence, but my Harper's cover story reporting for the first time on the video has been on the stands for a month, a fact Cooperman didn't find fit to mention. Oh, well. For what it's worth, here's my account in the Harper's story, not yet online... [ Continue reading: ]  Salvation in Uncertainty Evie Nagy: This week in the BBC News Magazine, former Anglican priest Mark Vernon writes about the need for passionate agnosticism in a world dominated by antagonistic religious debate. [ Continue reading: ] Feeding Desires, Judging Sin The Los Angeles Times offers simple solutions instead of making important connections between religion, sex and politics. By Diane Winston The “A” section of the December 7 edition of the Los Angeles Times featured five (yes count them five) articles on the intriguing intersection of religion, sex and politics. Unfortunately, none of the reporters or editors involved in the stories seemed to make the connection -- or grasp the import. The paper’s “Column One” story -- the notable feature of the day -- was on the “new” masculinity movement for young(er) evangelical men. Reporters Jenny Jarvis and Stephanie Simon provide a lot of theatrics -- strobe lights and rock-and-soul bands, “testosterone-friendly” preachers and “Train Your Penis” workshops. But they miss both the immediate context and the historical continuity of the amen-for-men movement. Evangelical outreach to men didn’t start with the Promise Keepers (the 1990s parachurch movement founded by former UC-Boulder football coach Bill McCartney). Back at the turn of the (last) century, church leaders worried that a sissified Jesus and a femininized church drove men from the pews. [ Continue reading: ]  Free Thinking Penguins Sharlet: What is it about penguins and God? Whatever the flightless, flippered birds do is taken as revelation of divine will. Mostly, this has been an ugly business, the forced conscription of some harmless birds to right-wing causes. I prefer... [ Continue reading: ] Mitt Romney's Underwear Daniel Sorrell: In 1994 Bill Clinton was asked on MTV if he wore boxers or briefs. At the time, the introduction of undergarment choice into political discourse probably had more to do with the touted hipness of our first baby boomer president and a touchy-feely intimacy that was part of his public persona. The ensuing Bush years have been refreshingly free of probing questions about undergarments and their attendant political meanings. With the upcoming 2008 presidential election, the specter of underwear talk looms in the distance, but for completely different reasons. [ Continue reading: ]  Somalis in Maine Greenfield: In this week's New Yorker, William Finnegan has an excellent piece on the Muslim Somali community in Lewiston, Maine. One thing did leave me unsatisfied, however -- there was only one photograph printed with the article. Thankfully, you can... [ Continue reading: ]  An Interactive Blog Experiment Mitch Stephens, a Professor of Journalism at New York University, has developed an experimental new site in connection with his blog (Without Gods) at The Institute for the Future of the Book. He has posted a twelve part paper on the site that includes controversial ideas from the the early chapters of his forthcoming book on the history of disbelief. The paper -- "The Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness" -- will be presented tomorrow, Dec. 8, to the working group on "Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge" of the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, but the intention is for the comments, criticism, and ideas that their meeting generates to be expanded upon through the interactive, reader-friendly site. [ Continue reading: ]  Don't Ask, Don't Talmud Josh Francis: According to the Los Angeles Times, an international rabbinical council may reconsider its bans on gay rabbis and same-sex commitment ceremonies, sparking unease among some in the Jewish community. Ordaining gay clergy has been an ongoing debate in Christianity for some time, and now it seems the big dilemma is facing Conservative Judaism, a movement which includes both traditionalist and liberal strains. [ Continue reading: ]  Secret Prayers Peter Manseau: "Did Pope Benedict XVI pray in the Aya Sofia? How could we really know? Prayer, after all, is an interior act. It is often made visible with prostrations and gestures, and it is often made audible with words, but it is first of all a movement of the mind, as impossible to detect as a passing thought or a daydream..." More on the pope's Turkish trip and the methodology of religion writers, at The Revealer's sister-site, Killing the Buddha. Also new on KtB: Danielle Trussoni, whose memoir Falling Through the Earth has just been named a top 10 book of the year by the New York Times, writes about prayers of her own in a Buddhist temple in Vietnam. [ Continue reading: ] United States Artist Sharlet: Revealer contributor Michael Lesy is one of the first 50 recipients of the $50,000 United States Artist Fellowships in recognition for his work in the visual arts. From the announcement: "For more than 30 years Michael Lesy (b. 1946,... [ Continue reading: ] Senator No? President, Yes! (Well, Maybe) Jeff Sharlet: Sam "Swedish Fruit" Brownback is one step closer to the White House he'll never visit as anything but a guest of his bi-partisan triangulation buddy Barack Obama... [ Continue reading: ]  Bibilically Illiterate Bible Believers Greenfield: Today at AlterNet: "The Christian Right Goes Back To Bible Boot Camp." Focus on the Family goes on the road to share the "truth" with biblically illiterate Bible-believing Chiristians.... [ Continue reading: ] Dear Jim and Chuck Greenfield: David Kuo tries to set the record straight in an open letter to James Dobson and Chuck Colson posted at The Huffington Post. Asking the men to stop their misrepresentations, Kuo gives a six-point summary of the arguments he... [ Continue reading: ]  Atari Apocalypse Clifford Helm: Based on the bestselling Left Behind series, the new video game company Left Behind Games released its first game, Left Behind: Eternal Forces, for PC in late October. The game has been subject to heavy criticism from secular and Christian outlets since it was first announced. Left Behind Games' website describes Eternal Forces as an exciting real-time strategy (RTS) game based on the novels. Players join in the ultimate fight between Good and Evil, either on the side of the Tribulation Forces (Christian) or the Global Community Peacekeepers (secular). [ Continue reading: ] Thinking Outside the Brain Cameron Bird: For every individual engaged in the age-old struggle to reconcile naturalism and supernaturalism, struggle no more. Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace has a third way out of the circularity of philosophical quandaries, as he shares in a recent sit-down with Salon. The former Buddhist monk, who gave up a meditative life at the monastery for a Ph.D. from Stanford and a leadership position at the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, tells interviewer Steve Paulson of his dissatisfaction with the absolutism of both traditional religious followers and materialistic scientists. [ Continue reading: ]  A Merge of Civilizations? Christina Huh: Pope Benedict XVI seems an unlikely candidate to bridge the gap between Catholics and Muslims. He is the fellow who, quoting a medieval text, said that the Prophet Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman." However, John Allen, the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, believes Pope Benedict could be the “unlikely soul mate” to Muslims. [ Continue reading: ] |