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   In Pork She Trusts Republicans aren't the only ones who believe in using faith-based initiatives to win votes. In the month before the Reverend Calvin Butts, one of the most influential black pastors in New York City, surprised his Harlem congregation by endorsing Hillary,... [ Continue reading: ] Crossing the Line Rob Boston, church/state separation activist and writer, caught a recent episode of Christian Right leader Janet Folger's "Faith2Action" radio show that should make news among reporters on the campaign trail... [ Continue reading: ] NYT vs. Jeremiah Wright, Pt. 3 Maureen Dowd, the noted columnist and student of African American religious history, jumps on the NYT Jeremiah Wright hate train, reducing Wright's learned history of the black church and why it should matter to all Americans to a "’60s maelstrom."... [ Continue reading: ] Tulsa, City of (Somebody's) Dreams Akshay Ahuja on tour with Cremated Souls, an Indian death metal band for whom Tulsa is a distant city of dreams... [ Continue reading: ] Radio Show Sharlet: I believe I'll be on the CBC -- Canadian Broadcasting Company -- program "The Current" Wednesday morning, discussing the pundit assault on Jeremiah Wright and black liberation theology. Whether or not they use my comments, I suspect the show... [ Continue reading: ]  Mormon "Genocide"? The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has created a blog, Captive FLDS Children.org, to update its position in the ongoing fight over custody of its children. The group is charging Texas with genocide... [ Continue reading: ] Faith in the Halls of Power Sociology and evangelical power -- NYU, Tuesday, April 29... [ Continue reading: ] Real Wright and Wrong Sharlet: I'm putting Diana Butler-Bass' response to the Jeremiah Wright media tour in the "timeless" category because her response on Beliefnet's "God's Politics" blog speaks of enduring questions and ideas. It's the exact opposite of the literally pathetic fretting of Obama supporters who want Wright to just go away so they can go back to believing that Obama's candidacy signals the end of racial division in America... [ Continue reading: ] NYT vs. Jeremiah Wright, Pt. 2 The NYT's Bob Herbert (writing in the opinion pages, at least), joins the liberal elite's outrage over Jeremiah Wright. Yes, I just said "liberal elite"; there is no other term with which to describe the big media Obama backers distressed... [ Continue reading: ] NYT to Rev. Wright: Be Quiet! Holly Berman: A surrogate for the Obama campaign announced today that in light of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's decision to defend himself in the public square, it's clear that "Mr. Wright doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his... [ Continue reading: ]  More Andrea Elliott Brilliance Another brilliant portrait of New York City Islam from the NYT's Andrea Elliott -- a major feature on the Khalil Gibran International Academy and the campaign to destroy its founding principal, Debbie Almontaser, who's just speaking out now for the... [ Continue reading: ]  Bishop Goes to Market There's some irony that Bishop Gene Robinson, the out gay Episcopal prelate, has been relegated to the "Marketplace" at the Anglican Communion's Lambeth Conference, a worldwide gathering that occurs only 10 years. Conservative bishops threatened a boycott unless their brother... [ Continue reading: ] Between the Motion and the Act "Between the idea /And the reality," reads Omri Elisha's epigraph for his new anthropological study of evangelical compassion, "Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." — T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. Omri, a Revealer contributing editor, spent 15 months conducting fieldwork with an evangelical church in Knoxville, Tennessee... [ Continue reading: ] Clinton, Coe, and the King What do the king of Norway and Hillary and Clinton have in common? They're both pals with Doug Coe, the "First Brother" of the fundamentalist network known to those in the know as The Fellowship and to those on the... [ Continue reading: ]  The King of Norway Wants You to Buy My Book All of The Revealer's Norwegian readers will want to look at Tore Gjerstad's front pager from last week's Dagbladet -- what, you don't read Dagbladet, the #2 daily in Norway? Get with it! -- "Hitler-beundrer på audiens hos kongen." Here at The Revealer, we know all the tongues of man, so we translate for you: "Hitler-admirer Received by King." As in the king of Norway. The Hitler-admirer, is a man named Doug Coe, one of the subjects of my new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, coming next month from HarperCollins. If Norwegian isn't your style, you can read all about him in Doug Ireland's column for the French magazine Bakchich, "Hillary, l’Amérique, et l’intégrisme chrétien." Hillary, you say? Yes, Hillary. But if you don't speak frog, let NBC Nightly News' Andrea Mitchell explain it for you. Or you could just buy the book. [ Continue reading: ]  Atheism Backlash, Part Two Given that atheism's most visible champions are three smart boy writers -- Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins -- who delight in sharp retorts and cultivate bad boy images, it's hard to say that American atheism has come of age. But, according to a clever story in New York magazine by Sean McManus, the movement may have reached a crucial period of institutional maturity -- the phase when it starts squabbling about who's in charge. Our prediction? Atheism will survive. But watch out for more stories like McManus's, phase two of a media backlash against a movement that allowed a few superstars to distract it from its fundamental mission, unbelieving. [ Continue reading: ] Jesus Christ, Vegas Showgirl What's worse than Mel Gibson's Passion? A biography of Jesus by the director of Showgirls. Next up: Brett Ratner directs Jackie Chan as an ass-kicking, wise-cracking Thomas Aquinas!... [ Continue reading: ]  Cult Rock! NPR reporter Jennifer Sharpe describes her journalistic immersion into the "ooga booga" of Father Yod's Source Family commune, the most beautiful cult of the 1970s. "After a few weeks, I started noticing a shift in my mental state. Father Yod's teachings unexpectedly began to resonate. Suddenly, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to stop eating meat. So I did." Ok, but did she learn how to rock to the transcendental vibrations of Pithius, Zunthar, and Octavious --YaHoWa13, Father Yod's musical ministry? Click here, and you will (Don't miss the slideshow). [ Continue reading: ] Rightward Bound Religious right watcher Bill Berkowitz, whose work we've touted before, joined two scholars we admire -- Bruce Schulman and Paul Starr -- and a third who's new to us -- Julian Zelizer -- at Princeton University for a panel discussion... [ Continue reading: ]  Fanfare for the Common Man Newsweek's cover story this week depicts a remote community of frustrated, working class folk facing dim economic prospects and a world that seems to have forgotten their community's glory days. In response, reports Newsweek, many of these people delve deeper... [ Continue reading: ] FundamentaList Faultlines Nobody's doing a better job than The American Prospect's Sarah Posner at tracking the fault lines splitting the old Christian Right. Her weekly "FundamentaList" ought to be a must-read for political reporters as well as religion writers, and for curious conservatives as well The American Prospect's liberal base. This week? An upcoming, still-secret "evangelical manifesto" may provide a new who's who of power players; Mike Huckabee makes his bid for leadership of a new Christian Right by attacking the old Christian Right; meanwhile, Huckabee's old Christian Right financial backers are under ever-fiercer attack by a lion of the everlasting elite fundamentalist organization, The Family, Senator Chuck Grassley. (And don't just read Posner's FundamentaList; get the whole story of "Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters" in her new book, God's Profits.) [ Continue reading: ] Bishop Tom's Clever Fundamentalism Leave it to the Anglicans to make biblical literalism sound thoughtful. Sholto Byrnes in New Statesman on Britain's cleverest fundamentalist, Bishop Tom.... [ Continue reading: ] Ring Those Bells "Art demands detachment," writes Leon Wieseltier, "but religion forbids it." Huh? That's about as narrow a conception of both as we can imagine, but Wieseltier is broader-minded when it comes to the Muslim call to prayer broadcast in Harvard Yard...... [ Continue reading: ]  Staging Belief The counterpart to today's NYT frontpager on the pope's mild stand on behalf of immigrants is the Metro section lead, "A Populist Shift Confronts the U.S. Catholic Church." It's a fairly ordinary piece about the growing appeal of Pentecostalism, particularly... [ Continue reading: ] A Pat Robertson Retrospective Bill Sizemore of the Virginian-Pilot has spent much of his career reporting on Pat Robertson, the last alpha male of the old Christian Right. Now he brings all the threads of the story together in "The Christian With Four Aces," a literary essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review. There's nothing new here for those familiar with the bits and pieces of Pat's biography, but it's an excellent synthesis of decades of reporting on a transformative figure in American religious history, one whose influence will likely be felt long after he's "promoted to Heaven." [ Continue reading: ] "What's a Pope?" Peter Manseau in The Washington Post, on the incredible shrinking papacy.... [ Continue reading: ]  Religion is Media (and Sometimes Media is Religion) Three powerful new essays from Revealer contributing editors look at the history, theory, and news of religion and media. [ Continue reading: ]  Persecution Complexes A historian of early Christianity looks at contemporary evangelicalism's persecution complexes in light of the Christian martyrdom tradition and the dangerously bruised egos of a massive movement that sees itself as victimized minority. By Elizabeth A. Castelli Excerpted with... [ Continue reading: ] Blasphemous Lollipop Jeff Sharlet: Daniel Radosh sucks one in this Bloggingheads "diavlog" -- a video blog conversation Daniel and I had about Daniel's delightful new book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. You can watch the whole half-hour diavlog, or you can skip straight to the sucker, a green, cross-shaped lollipop Daniel picked up at the Christian Booksellers Association convention, just one example of what industry insiders -- not radical secular leftists! -- call "Jesus junk." Daniel has also created one of the best book websites I've seen, with a "multiamedia appendix" of visual aids. Lollipops notwithstanding, Daniel's no sucker -- Rapture Ready's a smart book about a surprisingly subtle subject, and one that should be of interest to evangelical readers as well as a couple of Brooklyn Jews like Daniel and me. [ Continue reading: ]  Religion is Media Is there something about mediation itself that resonates with modern ideas of religiosity? By Angela Zito Excerpted from Rethinking Religion 101: Critical Issues in Religious Studies, edited by Bradford Verter and Johannes Wolfart . Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2009. The critical cultural anthropologist in me asks this question first of all: What does the term “religion,” when actually used by people, out loud, authorize in the production of social life? What does it allow people to do? And that question immediately opens others: What acts can then possibly be performed? What stories can be told? What conversations can be had? What thoughts can be thought? What sorts of people are imagined to be interlocutors, and audiences? Who becomes the enemy? Who an ally? What histories are excavated, and negotiated aloud? What is perforce forgotten? What hierarchies and politics of power are then possible? And above all, what pleasures of self-making? What communities do those senses of personhood entail? And finally, what happens when “religion” is rejected?
When we open the question of “religion” to being understood as an original moment of definition, the act of defining itself can be recognized as a social act of some importance, one that shapes the ongoing embodiment of religious life. And having done that, the way lies open to connect the study of religion to the question of “mediation” in the deepest theoretical sense of that term: the ongoing production of social life itself.(1)
[ Continue reading: ] The Confession Forum How mainstream media reduces religion to moral matters and why that hurts the debate about the politics of faith. Cross-posted from The Immanent Frame. By Omri Elisha
JON MEACHAM: Senator, we’ve heard about HIV/AIDS. Many people here are concerned about Darfur and a number of other humanitarian issues. Why do you think it is that a loving God allows innocent people to suffer?A funny thing happened on the way to last Sunday’s Compassion Forum with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: the politics of religion gave way to the politics of confession. While Newsweek editor Jon Meacham’s 30-second warning was obviously tongue-in-cheek, the insinuation was not far off the mark when one considers the overall tone of the televised event. In addition to this being one of the very few questions that might actually have shed some light on the complex relationships of theology and public policy, this was also the only question of the entire night that began with the word Why? [ Continue reading: ] |