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   One Nation Under Elvis "Hound Dog," allegedly stolen by Elvis from Big Mama Thornton, was written by two New York Jews. One of the greatest icons of country music, considered by fools to be foolish, was the paradoxical Johnny Cash, theological fundamentalist, musical heretic, and politically a self-described "dove with claws" who opposed most American wars. Such are the contradictions of "One Nation Under Elvis," mapped by contrarian prose psalmist Rebecca Solnit in the latest issue of Orion. [ Continue reading: ] Knight Chair in Media and Religion Why should you read a website burdened by the unwieldy title of "Knight Chair in Media and Religion"? Because the woman in the chair is Diane Winston. [ Continue reading: ] Rise of the Egg People "Huckabee endorses 'egg as person' amendment" in Colorado, reports the Denver Post. The Post doesn't mention that the proposed amendment has been rejected as extreme even by major anti-abortion groups. And that's why this is news -- off the radar... [ Continue reading: ]  Baby Talk TUESDAY: Revealer Kathryn Joyce will be talking on her forthcoming book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, and two excerpts published in The Nation, "Arrows for the War" (on the Quiverfull movement, which pushes women to bear a "quiverfull" of... [ Continue reading: ]  There is No God! (But If There Is, He's In On It!) With the growing popularity of anti-religion / 9/11 conspiracy theory "documentaries" such as Zeitgeist, 9/11 Truthers are starting to get religion, writes the Seattle Stranger's Paul Constant -- and that's where they go really wrong. [ Continue reading: ]  My Bible, My Buffalo Brett Grainger's Plymouth Brethren family revered manual labor and looked on books other than the Bible with mild suspicion. When, on September 11, 1988, Grainger's grandmother prepared to be raptured, she called his mother to say that she could have grandma's homemade preserves.... [ Continue reading: ]  Don't Make the South Rise Again Jeff Sharlet: One of the best magazines around, Oxford American -- a glossy quarterly dedicated to writing about the American South -- has just suffered a grievous blow: embezzlement. Their bank account nearly emptied. OA is in trouble. It's been in trouble before. Founded in Oxford, Mississippi in 1992, it folded in 2002; relocated to Little Rock; folded again a year later; and rose from the dead once more. This time, it's down, but not out. It's not too late to save OA. Check out their website. Fall in love. Put your money where your heart is. [ Continue reading: ]  The Party Faithful Amy Sullivan is one of the most thoughtful champion of "faith-based Democrats," a growing wing of the party that seeks to reconcile public square religion with liberalism. She's an advocate of that approach, yes, but she's also a journalist who recognizes that to make her case she needs facts and persuasive arguments, not the kind of rightward shuffle practiced by the cynical centrists of the Democratic Leadership Council. An example of her approach can be found in this excerpt from her new book, The Party Faithful: How Democrats are Closing the Faith Gap, in Time, where Amy's an editor. Her story partakes of a certain amount of conservative framing -- she writes of the Democratic Party's "traditional fight- or-flight reaction to religion," a "tradition" that goes back no further than the Kerry campaign -- but the Democratic trend toward greater religiosity she identifies is an important one, and nobody understands it better than Amy. You can catch her in person in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington during the coming weeks. [ Continue reading: ] We Guess That Means No Spring Break in Priština This Year First Kosovo, then Westminster Abbey -- the Mooslems will soon rule the world! Or so worries the sometimes-sane Rod Dreher. Christian conservatives are great proponents of democracy in the Muslim world -- except when it's, you know, democratic.... [ Continue reading: ] It's Gettin' Chilly in Here! SEE Kathryn Joyce talk about her recent Nation cover story on the latest Christian conservative craze, "demographic winter." (That's a fancy way of saying, "Not enough Christian babies.")... [ Continue reading: ]  The Week in God (and Hardcovers) A weekly review of reviews about religion and media. By Jeff Sharlet Reasons to Believe: John Marks, a novelist and former producer for 60 Minutes -- and a former evangelical -- can't find any persuasive ones in his new book, subtitled One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and the Faith He Left Behind, which Jonathan Kirsch, writing in the LA Times, describes as "a work of courageous investigative journalism as well as a memoir of startling self-reflection." Kirsch, a writer of popular history books about religion, seems more fascinated with Marks' motives for writing the book than the book that resulted. Marks explains that he was provoked into writing "Reasons to Believe" while on assignment in Dallas for a "60 Minutes" piece about the "Left Behind" series of bestseller novels loosely based on the end-times scenario of the Book of Revelation. One of the interviewees confronted him with the fundamental question of evangelical Christianity: "Will you be left behind?" On reflection, Marks was forced to concede that, by the lights of his questioner, he was "doomed to cosmic incineration" because he had embraced the corruptions and temptations of the secular world. "I will be destroyed, as will my wife, my son, and my gay friends," writes Marks, summing up how he was regarded by his born-again kin. "It's nothing personal. They love me, but salvation knows no loopholes."So this is a book about a particular subset of fundamentalist evangelicals, a distinction likely not lost on Kirsch but apparently too subtle to make it into his review, which presents the book as a tale of a prodigal son discovers he doesn't even want to go home again. But Kirsch is a little bit confused about where exactly Marks is located now. "Journalists and religious true believers stand on opposite sides of a chasm," Kirsch starts his review. "The journalist is trained to ask how he knows what he thinks he knows; the true believer is satisfied that everything he truly needs to know is contained in a text, a dogma, a practice." That's awfully generous to us journalists, and pretty stingy toward true believers. Then again, the two species aren't so far apart. Journalists also believe that what they they truly need to know is contained in "a practice": journalism. They believe that by asking questions, by demanding facts, they will arrive at something called the truth. That makes them true believers, too. Which isn't always such a bad thing, after all. Marks is currently on the road with filmmaker Craig Detweiler, an old friend from his evangelical days, promoting a film they've made together called Purple State of Mind. It sounds like My Dinner with Andre for people interested in American religion, a conversation between skeptical Marks and Detweiler, who is still a believer, the author of a book called A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture. The fact that these two men are able to have a conversation -- and, presumably, one interesting enough to document -- is one more bit of evidence that the chasm between journalists and believers is not always so wide. Here's the schedule for the film/book/conversation tour, complete with live music at several events. *** The Age of Shiva: The Washington Post's usually thoughtful Michael Dirda turns in an oddly shallow response to The Age of Shiva, the long-awaited follow-up to Manil Suri's excellent first novel, The Death of Vishnu. And the weird thing is, Dirda knows it. "Given so much that is impressive in The Age of Shiva," he writes, "why, then, is the novel perplexing? The overall answer will seem completely shallow: The book simply isn't a page-turner." The problem, Dirda, thinks, is that the novel, the story of -- well, that's not quite clear, but it seems to follow the life of an ordinary Indian Hindu woman amidst decades of Hindu-Muslim conflict, beginning with the Partition in which at least half a million were killed -- offers "precious little fun for the reader." Perhaps not. Perhaps the reader ought not be "burdened" with "info dumps" about the Hindu-Muslim conflict. After all, Indian literature is hot right now not because it tells stories of slow, grinding violence and the depressing complexity of political conflicts, but for the same reasons Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a classic colonialist's tale of Indian exoticism Holly Berman excoriates below is a bestseller: India is supposed to transcend all that. India is supposed to be timeless. Dirda, a critic of wide-ranging and eccentric tastes, surely knows better, and Suri may indeed have produced a diatribe instead of a story. If so, it deserves Dirda's condemnation. But not in these terms. Try to imagine a review of Holocaust novel that complained that the story provided "precious little fun." *** The Banality of Evil: There isn't much fun in Tony Judt's essay in the latest New York Review of Books on "The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe." "Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of 'evil,'" writes Judt. "We prefer more rationalistic and legal definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, crime and punishment. But in recent years the word has crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse. However, now that the concept of "evil" has reentered our public language we don't know what to do with it. We have become confused." Judt is the author of Postwar, an extremely useful synthetic history of Europe since World War II that for all its insight and narrative drive tends to sleight religion. That may be why he doesn't realize that many of the arguments about how official memory of the Holocaust can obscure the "problem of evil" that he lays out in this essay with admirable clarity have been made before in Peter Novick's The Holocaust in American Life. What Judt contributes is a European contextualization for the "banalization" of the Holocaust narrative. It's nimble history, a persuasive analysis for what was first the neglect of Holocaust history and what has since become a dangerous obsession, making this essay a useful counterpart to the news reports about Sarkozy's new Holocaust curriculum for French 5th graders.  A new book from Revealer creator Jeff Sharlet 
"One of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read -- just don't read it alone at night!"
--Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed
[ Continue reading: ] NYT: Stay Out of Our Pages! Is the New York Times actually anti-abortion? In subtle ways, yes, argues Debbie Nathan in The New Republic, just like we all are. No, wait -- just like anti-abortion conservatives want us to believe we all are. Nathan parses the... [ Continue reading: ] The Cross & The Camera: the films of Gan Xiao'er TODAY! Revealer readers in New York can get an inside view of China's booming Christian culture and meet one of China's most provocative filmmakers at a special event presented by the Center for Religion and Media (home of The Revealer)The... [ Continue reading: ] Prophets of Moderation Diane Winston likes The Atlantic's new religion issue. (Worst coverline ever: "Which Religion Will Win?") We do, too, but we can't help but notice that center-leftist Alan Wolfe and center-rightist Walter Russell Mead -- that is, two smart moderates -- both prophecy a coming great moderation. What a coincidence! [ Continue reading: ] Missing: The "Right" Babies Christian conservatives predict a looming catastrophe as birthrates fall in Europe and Muslim immigration rises. Kathryn Joyce reports. [ Continue reading: ]  Orgone Sounds Like? If you happen to be in Vienna and in need of... stimulation, you'll want to visit Jewish Museum of Vienna's current exhibit on Wilheim Reich, mad scientist of psychoanalysis and inventor of the Orgone Box, for which he served two years in prison. Writes Gideon Lewis-Kraus at Nextbook: "It seems not to matter to the show’s curator, Birgit Johler, that one of Reich’s central explanations for Freud’s unresponsiveness to his earth-shattering orgasm theory of 1927 was that Freud’s vestigial obligations to Judaism left him frigid, which is to say unimaginatively monogamous." After that, the story gets weird. [ Continue reading: ] Bishop Who? Last September we noted the death of D. James Kennedy, a leader of Christian conservatism in America. More important to our concerns here at The Revealer, we noted the lack of notice Kennedy's death received in the mainstream media despite... [ Continue reading: ]  Border Disputes in the Christian Right strong>Sarah Posner, author of the new God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, has been doing some of the best reporting around on Huckabee's connections to the Christian Right. Like that's news, right? Well, it is... [ Continue reading: ] Survey Says: Evangelical Democrats! Smart religion writers have been complaining for awhile that exit polls don't ask Democratic voters about their religious affiliations. Now "Faith in Public Life," a center-left outfit, has done something about it. Robert P. Jones reports at Religion Dispatches. The implications are huge: In Missouri and Tennessee, one-third of white evangelical voters voted in Democratic primaries. And, more surprising, in both states they favored Hillary over Obama by overwhelming margins: MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%. That blows a hole in the conventional wisdom that Obama represents a "third way" a lot of white evangelicals will follow, but it may confirm an argument about Hillary's long, slow outreach to Christian conservatives that Kathryn Joyce and I made in Mother Jones last fall. The survey also finds that a majority of evangelicals want an agenda that goes beyond abortion and homosexuality. Faith in Public Life, and partners like center-leftist Jim Wallis and center-rightist Randy Brinson, announce that finding like it's news. Not to anyone who's spent time with ordinary evangelicals and knows that they care as much about poverty and suffering as anyone. The difference was never a matter of what people cared about; it's an issue of how you want to respond, and on that score, these new numbers may reveal a growing evangelical comfort with big government. Or maybe not -- as intriguing as this survey is, it's just a beginning to the project of understanding the relationship between evangelicals and the contemporary Democratic Party. Progressive optimists see this growing relationship as the great liberalization of evangelicalism. Progressive cynics see it as the conservative conversion of the Democratic Party. Mainstream media favors the former interpretation, but only because mainstream media still views evangelicals as "out there"; it doesn't occur to them that the establishment could gravitate around religion, rather than the other way around.
--Jeff Sharlet
[ Continue reading: ] Save "Spiral Jetty"! The artist Robert Smithson died in 1973 when a small plane malfunctioned while he was filming his masterpiece, "Spiral Jetty," from above. The piece is literally a landmark of conceptual art, a 1500 foot long, 15 foot wide counterclockwise coil, formed from mud, salt crystals, and rocks, that juts into Great Salt Lake. It's also one of the great works of mysticism in the 20th century, intended by Smithson to "heal" those who engaged with it. And beyond that, it's beautiful. But now it's facing its end. In Afghanistan, the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhists with a more abstract god in mind. Same principle here, only instead of fundamentalist Islam lighting the dynamite, it's fundamentalist capitalism -- the plan, it seems, is to drill for oil in Great Salt Lake, a project that will destroy "Spiral Jetty" and endanger the lake. Sound like a bad idea? Then save "Spiral Jetty." [ Continue reading: ] Profit Mel Somebody should have told Mel Gibson that he was supposed to share the 30 pieces of silver.... [ Continue reading: ]   God is a Monster Gabriel McKee on sin and redemption in Cloverfield. The Revealer editors were reminded by a recent viewing of I Am Legend that horror and sci-fi movies are often the best religion journalism around -- documenting popular religious ideas, and fears, most of us lack the courage to express in more sober venues. For a full-on film festival, add to your Cloverfield reading "Godzilla, Born Again" and "The Last Man on Earth: A Romance," by The Revealer's Kathryn Joyce. Then visit McKee's SF Gospel blog for further adventures in the religion of science fiction. [ Continue reading: ] Huckabee Pecans Huckabee is Paulie Walnuts to John McCain's Tony Soprano, says Dan Schur in today's NYT, responsible for kneecapping Romney and now more useful than ever as a foil against which McCain can reveal himself as a truer heir to Reagan.... [ Continue reading: ]  God-heroes, Witches, and the Creator at CPAC A round-up of reporting from CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference at which John McCain sought the support of his party's right flank yesterday: The conservative Human Events remains skeptical, arguing that McCain will hear but not "listen" to conservatives.... [ Continue reading: ] Gimme Shelter "Gimme Shelter," Sasha Abramsky's report in The Nation on the "New Sanctuary Movement" -- a formalized network of houses of worship that provide sanctuary to illegal immigrants -- is uncommonly good religion journalism... [ Continue reading: ]  Eat, Pray, Loathe Jewcy's Izzy Grinspan may be overly-optimistic in reporting a backlash against Elizabeth Gilbert's spiritually infantile Eat, Pray, Love, but we're glad she called our attention to Maureen Callahan's "Eat, Pray, Loathe" ... [ Continue reading: ] Religion Dispatches New on the gods beat: Religion Dispatches, created by two religious studies scholars, Gary Laderman of Emory and Linell Cady of Arizona State, and a journalist, Evan Derkacz, formerly of Alternet. They're joined by Lisa Webster, a veteran of Tricycle: the Buddhist Review. And me -- I'll be writing "This is Not a Religion Column," for them every two weeks, starting with today's un-religion column, "The Religious Vote of the Future, With a Pickle." [ Continue reading: ]  Let There Be Light Crude Lest anyone accuse Paul Thomas Anderson of going over the top in his juxtaposition of God and oil in There Will Be Blood, Mother Jones features in its latest issue a story -- non-fiction -- about an evangelical oil hustle that bilks believers of their retirement funds with a plan to drill for oil in the Dead Sea, drain the Arab oil fields, provoke an attack on Israel, and set off Armageddon.The headquarters for this scheme features an oil well bursting out of a giant Bible. The article, by Mariah Blake, is sloppy in spots. "It is widely believed among evangelical Christians (and some Orthodox Jews)," she writes, "that Scripture foretells a massive oil find in the Holy Land." Widely believed? Hardly. But with a history of God-for-oil schemes to tap, Blake doesn't have to dig deep to hit black gold. This story's a gusher of American weird religion creepy goodness! [ Continue reading: ] The Myth That Ate Itself Revealer contributing editor S. Brent Plate is evidently saving his best stuff for the all-new Religion Dispatches, where he has this to say about There Will Be Blood: "Here is mythology as a critique of mythology. This is why this film is worth watching: because it shows how the use of mythological structures and elements can be used against other, perhaps more oppressive stories. Propositional logic (the kind Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens use) offers straightforward, non-fictional language that makes truth claims and offers critiques. That may offer a viable critique of the ideologies of myth, yet here is another, more subtle, and I would suggest altogether more powerful way to approach myth. Let the fires burn themselves out." [ Continue reading: ] The Party Faithful Amy Sullivan, "Nation" editor for Time and a friend of The Revealer, is coming out with her first book, The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the Faith Gap. We haven't read it yet, and the reviews are not in, and we disagreed with Amy over one of the Washington Monthly pieces that led to this book, but nonetheless we can still say with certainty that The Party Faithful will be must-reading for any journalist covering religion and contemporary American politics. Amy writes with a pitch-perfect ear for the nuances of religious language in politics and from a deep well of knowledge about American religious history. More TK. [ Continue reading: ] Praying With Lior The Jewish Week calls attention to Lior Liebling, 12-year-old Jewish "spiritual genius," and a new documentary about his prayers and the fact that he has Down's Syndrome, Praying with Lior. Faye Ginsburg, one of the founders of The Revealer, comments: "Faye Ginsburg, a professor of anthropology and director of the graduate program in culture and media at New York University, said that the increase in the numbers of these films, beyond the relative ease of using today’s cameras, and the prominence of sites like YouTube that support all manner of video, can be attributed to a shift in the culture in the area of perception of disability. “There’s a sea change in terms of public acceptance of disability in the Jewish community,” she said. “It’s an issue we need to take on.” [ Continue reading: ]  Why Did the Press Get Huck Wrong? Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism runs a website called Nieman Watchdog that bills itself as revealing the "Questions the press should ask." Usually it's pretty decent, but a Feb. 1 post by political scientist Laura Olson, "Huckabee and the Religious... [ Continue reading: ] |
