Revealer Podcast Episode 3: The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, & Catholicism

In this episode of our podcast, National Correspondent for America magazine Michael O’Loughlin joins our host Brett Krutzsch for a conversation about the AIDS crisis, queer identity, Catholicism, and what these issues have to do with the present day. O’Loughlin is the host of the acclaimed podcast Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church. Their conversation explores what O’Loughlin learned from interviewing Catholics across the country about the role Catholicism played during the AIDS epidemic, how LGBTQ Catholics have reconciled their queer and religious identities, and what lessons the history of AIDS has for us during today’s pandemic.

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We hope you enjoy episode 3 of the Revealer podcast: The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, and Catholicism.

Happy listening!

The post The Revealer Podcast Episode 3: The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, & Catholicism appeared first on The Revealer.

The following excerpt comes from the book’s introduction.

***

This is a book about UFOs. Most such books try to make a case for UFOs’ physical existence as visitors from other planets or possibly other dimensions. A much smaller but still substantial chunk of the literature will argue that they’re a sustained absurdity, a mishmash of honest human mistakes compounded by dishonest ones. Those are the two main currents of thought on the subject: that of the “believers” and that of the “debunkers.”

I’m writing as someone with a particular investment in the topic. Back in the 1960s, I was a teenage “UFOlogist.” I grew up to be a professor of religious studies whose main research interests have been religious traditions of heavenly ascents and otherworldly journeys. I’ve worked with the visions of the Biblical prophet Ezekiel, particularly the first and strangest of them: the vision of the “living creatures” and the wheels that sometimes rested on the ground, sometimes flew in the air. In other words, UFOs.

I don’t believe, nor do I debunk. This book will advocate for a third way.

My starting point: UFOs are a myth. But in saying this, I don’t mean what you might think I do.

A little over fifty years ago, two books appeared within a few years of each other bearing almost identical titles—and almost opposite messages. One was The World of Flying Saucers: A Scientific Examination of a Major Myth of the Space Age, by astrophysicist Donald Menzel. The other was Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, by psychologist Carl Jung. Menzel, the most vocal and prominent UFO skeptic of the era, used myth as people often do, to mean “bunk, nonsense,” or at least something that isn’t true. For Jung the word had nearly the opposite meaning: not falsehood, but the profoundest truth of all.

Jung’s writings are notoriously dense and difficult. Flying Saucers, the last book he published before his death in 1961, is no exception. How valiantly I struggled through it as a budding UFOlogist, just past my thirteenth birthday! (It was one of three books on UFOs in our local library.) Of course I could make neither head nor tail of it. I hadn’t a clue about the assumption on which it rests: that our ordinary awareness is an eggshell boat on the vast roiling sea of the unconscious, the deeper (“collective”) levels of which we share with all other humans.

These depths, accessed through individual dreams and the collective dreams called myths, aren’t always bright or benign. But they’re holy, or “numinous,” as Jung liked to say: uncanny, transcendent, timeless. When a myth takes visible form, when it’s projected into the sky as a flying disk (or “mandala,” as Jung would say), that’s a major event, akin to what our ancestors might have called a vision of God.

All this is controversial, hardly less so than UFOs themselves. I find Jung’s models just plausible enough that I’m prepared to use them as tools if they make sense of the otherwise unintelligible. When other tools work, I also take them up gladly. The insights of twenty-first century cognitive psychologists into the evolutionary grounding of our disposition toward myth add depth and poignancy to our human inclination to trust what the Bible calls “the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). The timeworn Freudian dictum that “every memory returning from the forgotten past … puts forward an irresistible claim to be believed, against which all logical objections remain powerless” turns out to shed unexpected light on some of the thornier riddles of the UFO. None of these approaches can be ignored.

In his emphasis on the gravity of myth, on the force of its claim to our attention and respect, Jung marks out the path I’ve chosen to travel. As “myth,” UFOs aren’t nonsense. They’re about the furthest thing from “bunk” that can be imagined. They’re a creation of the space age and yet as real, as vital, as universal as any myth that has spoken from our unconscious since the dawn of prehistory. The central question that needs to be asked about them isn’t, What are they? or Where do they come from? or, conversely, How can any sensible person believe such rubbish? The question is, What do they mean?

Should we care?

Grant that UFOs are a myth. Or even more: a full mythology, complex and ramified, stretching into areas of experience that seem far removed from objects in the sky, its true subject not space aliens but who we are as human beings. Yet there’s a sharp difference between UFOlogy and the great mythical systems of the past, such as that of the Greeks. Those mythologies were the consensus beliefs of entire cultures. UFOs seem doomed to a shadow existence on the fringes of ours.

They may have “conquered the world,” as the title of a recent book on UFOs puts it, but it’s a hollow sort of conquest. More than seventy years after their emergence, they show no sign of going away, but neither do they show the smallest capacity to move into the mainstream. They remain the province of the eccentric, the discontented, and the deluded, if at times the wildly gifted. Can a mythology of losers and misfits be of any significance for the rest of us?

The following reply suggests itself: Who says the rest of us are nonmisfits, nonlosers? “Fitting” in this life is a painful, difficult, always inadequate process, and at the end each and every one of us loses that which our whole being strains most terribly to keep. We point a mocking finger at the “losers,” the “kooks,” the marginal. Beneath our laughter is an awareness that we’re not really so different. What we see in those “losers” is here in all of us.

“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls / And tenement halls,” Simon and Garfunkel sang a generation and a half ago. As a scholar of religion, I’ve been well served by Freud’s insight that it’s often the jumbled and bizarre, the disreputable and seemingly senseless that’s the pathway into our deepest secrets. A mythology of the fringe is not to be presumed negligible, especially when it’s as plugged into the wider society as this one is. From the hinterlands, UFOs cast their shadows across our culture.

Ever hear of Roswell, New Mexico? Area 51? Chances are you have, even if you’re not sure exactly what’s supposed to have happened at Roswell or what Area 51, the top-secret tract of Nevada desert that’s seen some of the Cold War’s most horrific weapons tests, has to do with UFOs. When Barack Obama declared in 2013 that “when you first become president, one of the questions that people ask you is, ‘What’s really going on in Area 51?’” of course he was joking. But the joke would have fallen flat if there’d been no truth in it that his audience could understand and appreciate. Hillary Clinton may have been less than serious in promising a New Hampshire reporter that if elected in 2016 she’d “get to the bottom” of UFOs, sending a “task force” to Area 51. But would she have said such things if she hadn’t calculated that “courting the UFO believer vote,” as one web headline put it, would resonate with a substantial chunk of her constituency? And when some cartoon or advertisement depicts a creature with a face shaped like an old-fashioned light bulb and just as hairless, dominated by two slanted, enormous, solid-black eyes, do you need to be told it’s an alien?

“Thirty-six percent of Americans, about 80 million people, believe UFOs exist,” ABC News announced in June 2012 on the basis of a study by the National Geographic Channel. Nearly four-fifths of those polled, moreover, thought the government was hiding something about UFOs. These figures, which can’t have escaped the shrewd Ms. Clinton, were in line with earlier surveys that suggest that an even larger percentage of Americans—something like half—believe in UFOs. This is not exactly a “fringe.” Not only are the UFOs embedded in our cultural awareness. In very considerable numbers, we seem to think they’re real.

Yet not to be taken seriously. In our culture UFOs are funny; those who see them, funnier; and those “fringe” types for whom they’re a significant part of reality, the funniest of all. This is a paradox, one of many to be explored in this book. Why does the UFO-themed Close Encounters of the Third Kind gross over $300 million and become a cinema classic, while organizations dedicated to UFO research languish for want of public interest? Why, in the words of folklorist Thomas Bullard, are UFOs “at once so popular and so despised?”

The resolution of the paradox lies in the slippery, elusive, “as-if” quality of UFO belief, which needs to be explored if we’re to understand its significance. This is a peculiar sort of belief, not quite what it appears on the surface. I should know. I once held it myself.

David J. Halperin was a teenage UFOlogist, afterward a Professor of Religious Studies. He trained in Semitic and classical languages at Cornell University, and received his Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 1977 from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1976 until his retirement in 2000, he taught the history of Judaism in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of five books on Jewish mysticism and messianism and one novel, Journal of a UFO Investigator, published in 2011 by Viking Press and translated into Spanish, Italian, and German. He blogs about UFOs, religion, and other subjects dear to his heart at www.davidhalperin.net.

The post Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO appeared first on The Revealer.

Source: al-Naba’ No. 153

Pie charts are probably not the first thing that come to mind when you think of the Islamic State (IS), variously known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), ISIL (Islamic State in the Levant), or Daesh (a transliteration of the acronym formed from the group’s Arabic name, al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fil ‘Iraq wa ash-Sham, which ironically can also be an insult). Since surging onto the world stage in 2014, the militant group has become synonymous with gore in its varied forms, from videos of beheading prisoners to photos of mutilated corpses. Yet the group also churns out a different type of content, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to the type of fare you might take in with your morning coffee. Take al-Naba’, the group’s Arabic-language newsletter: part news bulletin, part corporate report, al-Naba’ recounts the military operations IS operatives undertook during the prior week, details how many enemies of varying stripes were killed or injured, and celebrates the spoils of war. The reader can quickly absorb much of this information by consulting charts and graphs that present different data points on a single page – an executive summary, if you will.

Reading al-Naba’ generates a different set of questions than those usually posed concerning the Islamic State’s operations and its media. To start with, what kind of religious fanatics feel compelled to issue progress reports? How should we account for its macabre data vis-à-vis its field operations? And what does the easy, almost seamless, adoption of the corporate reporting genre suggest about the place of this so-called “medieval” Islamic State in the modern world?

***

For years, political commentators have insisted that the Islamic State represents an errant holdover from a less civilized past. This is a narrative that has taken root Right, Left, and Center – perhaps most memorably illustrated in Graeme Wood’s influential article from The Atlantic, in which he lamented the “well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature.” The slightly more nuanced version is that, in the words of former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the Islamic State exemplifies “medieval barbarism, perpetrated and spread with the most modern of technology.” This take has become Gospel among many security analysts, who tend to regard the group’s media as the pragmatic use of modern means to secure 7^th century ends.

Many seem to want the Islamic State to belong to another world — be it the medieval one or the Islamic one — the important thing is establishing maximum distance between “their” world and the one “we” inhabit. Yet no serious analysis can support this comforting myth. Even the Islamic State’s theology, dependent as it is on the 11^th/12^th century scholar Ibn Taymiyya, advances novel remixes of older concepts, from takfir (excommunication) to al-wala’ wal bara’ (loyalty and disavowal) and even Khilafah (the Caliphate). Rather than deploying modern means for medieval ends, the Islamic State is marked by that most modern of traits: the tendency to mistake means for ends, the inability to articulate an end other than one of destruction. In an age in which there appears no alternative to the prevailing political and economic order, we should not be surprised to find that the Apocalypse appears to be a viable option.

Let us unpack the argument by taking a closer look at al-Naba’, which has been distributed through a number of online platforms, from Telegram to Hoop and TamTam. Lacking many of the design features that the group’s English-language glossies (Dabiq and Rumiyah) were known for, al-Naba’ is more school newspaper than Vanity Fair. Yet the newsletter has proved the most enduring title within the IS media empire, publishing more or less continually since October 2015. Headlines are formulaic and create a blissfully context-free sense of accomplishment: “Caliphate soldiers kill 6 American soldiers in Khurasan” (No. 50). Or: “43 members of Shiite crowd killed in a failed raid on the village of Bashir” (No. 26). Against the background of the Islamic State’s defeat in Iraq and Syria, al-Naba’ still manages to find something “uplifting” to feature, often from its regional affiliates elsewhere, such as “30 apostates hit and killed from army of Niger” (No. 173). Not even the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi caused a departure from this general formula. At the level of affect, this format conveys a sense of perpetual action: here, finally, Muslims are doing something – taking action instead of merely lamenting their woes.

Recounting tales of the vanquished foe is of course an old literary trope, but we would be wrong to attribute the Islamic State’s approach to this ancient convention. The Hebrew Bible, Chronicles II, for instance, reports the killing of 500,000 men from the Kingdom of Israel in the midst of the civil war with their rivals in Judah. It is noteworthy that such figures are both exaggerated and completely imprecise. They serve as a stylistic tool, not an attempt to convey facts. And therein lies the difference between the Islamic State’s modern death accounting and the ancient trope they purportedly copy and extend: IS aims to inform, to communicate data with accuracy and precision, attending to details in a way which would have been completely foreign to their ancient counterparts. While the writers of al-Naba’ deploy several stock phrases and lean on linguistic ambiguity to amplify success—adversaries often are “killed and wounded” without specifying how many fall into which category—their accounts are by no means fictitious. Even the body counts are mostly accurate. For example, after the 2015 attacks in Paris, the lead story boasted that “more than 500 crusaders” were killed or wounded (No. 6), as compared to 130 killed and over 400 injured.

Roughly translated into English as “the announcement,” al-Naba’ is also the name of several TV stations in Arabic-speaking countries, further gesturing to mainstream mimicry. Al-Naba’ hews closely to the conventions of contemporary journalism with stories that cover the standard Five W angles of reporting: What type of assault was it? Where did the attack happen? Who carried it out, and how was it all coordinated? As we have seen from alt-right publications closer to home, the point is not to explode the genre but master it. Perhaps tellingly, the “why” never assumes a place of prominence in these stories – an absence we can either attribute to its obviousness or to the fact that such questions have simply ceased to matter.

The adoption of this communication style is reflective of broader trends that are so pervasive in our market-based world that we must stop ourselves from taking them for granted. The Islamic State feels compelled to analyze its missions, report on its activities, and justify itself through its results. We would have a hard time finding medieval Muslims thinking or speaking about jihad in such terms, which should further undermine any tendency to approach this history as an unbroken chain linking the 7^th century to the present. On the contrary, time and again we find that while contemporary jihad fails to resemble its earlier iterations, it does mirror the world we live in now.

Take, for example, the following charts. The graph on the left represents the number of people killed and wounded in different IS provinces, while the pie chart on the right indicates the number of operations undertaken in each place as a percentage of the Caliphate’s total activities. The figures at the bottom provide further detail about attacks carried out in Iraq and Syria.

Source: al-Naba’ No. 153

Later issues of al-Naba’ introduced a regular feature called “Harvest of the Soldiers,” which details the number and type of adversaries killed or wounded and the military equipment captured or destroyed. The following example comes from No. 206, the first issue published after the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. It notes that more than 179 opponents were killed or wounded in 71 campaigns that week, including “116 infidels and apostates” and “15 crusaders,” among whose ranks were five officers and commanders. Again, the focus on precision is noteworthy. Even in the face of minimal material progress, the Islamic State will have you know it is not slacking on its record-keeping.

Source: al-Naba’ No. 206

Military campaigns are not the only focus of these newsletters. They also spotlight the Islamic State’s varied media productions. The following newsletter details the activities of the Islamic State’s two primary media groups, al-Hayat and al-Furqan, boasts of the magazine issues, anāshīd (religious chants), and notes that its media is operating in eight different languages.

Source: al-Naba’ No. 6

Again, we would search the records from pre-modern Muslim conquerors in vain for anything that resembles this reporting style. On the other hand, al-Naba’ seems right at home alongside the periodic updates issued by corporations, NGOs, and government agencies: “This year we held X events, produced Y publications, served Z participants, in Q cities.” For comparison’s sake, take the following summary page from Glencore’s 2019 annual report. One of the world’s largest natural resources extraction firms, Glencore boasts of the global scope of its operations and reports its earnings in graphical formats that are easy-to-access.

This is not an argument about equivalences between radically different organizations, but an observation about how the tendency to justify oneself through recourse to “the results” is pervasive, even in the most reactionary quarters. In a world obsessed with statistics and outcomes, such reports serve as a key communications strategy for organizations seeking to validate their existence by utilizing market thinking. We must all account for our activities, and the Islamic State is keeping up with the times.

What, then, are the markers of success that al-Naba’ reports? How does it measure organizational performance? Here the essential nihilism of the Islamic State comes into clear focus. For anyone concerned with human dignity, there is something unsettling about surveying death via pie chart. The reduction of human lives to data points brings to mind some of the darkest moments of the last century, and in particular, the meticulous accounting of totalitarian states. But even they could argue to be advancing some greater aim in this world: cue Stalin’s infamous quip that one death is a tragedy while a million deaths is a statistic. But the Islamic State is not, nor will it ever be, the Soviet Union.

The reality is that a functioning Caliphate, one that replaces secular political models with divine sovereignty, remains an elusive goal. Still al-Naba’ strives to conveys a sense of purpose and action, gesturing toward a fixation on means that is shaded by the absence of ends. Indeed, it is noteworthy how little attention al-Naba’ pays to situating varied attacks in a larger strategic context. It is frenetic activity for its own sake, because destruction—and its propagandistic use as spectacle—is all there is to hope for now. Of course, the death and destruction recounted in these newsletters are not figments of the imagination, and each headline represents human suffering. But to borrow from my colleague (and frequent Revealer contributor) Patrick Blanchfield speaking of American gun culture, it is human suffering not as sacrifice but as waste.

***

For years researchers have noted the disproportionally high number of engineers within Islamic militant groups including al-Qaeda, Lashkar e-Taiba, and Hezbollah. Closer to the media front, we might recall Ahmed Abousamra, the Boston-born computer scientist who edited the Islamic State’s English-language magazine, Dabiq. For sociologists Diego Gambetta and Stephen Hertog, the presence of such recruits among the jihadist groups stems from their supposed “need for cognitive closure” – i.e. the demand for clear answers to complex questions (we might wonder, as a bitter aside, whether the relatively few history and literature majors among the jihadist ranks might forestall the oft-mentioned “death” of the humanities).

I believe there is a slightly different angle that we could take on this data. Today’s jihadist organizations hold special appeal for those who have been trained to think in instrumental terms – and why not, given what we have seen of al-Naba’? There are numbers to be crunched, data to be mapped, casualties to be counted, and so much to do. Far from being anti-modern or even selectively modern—i.e. using the tricks and tools of the present to advance a 7^th century agenda—the Islamic State is steeped in the calculative mode of thinking we all take for granted. Far from being pre-modern, much less medieval, it represents the continued triumph of instrumental reason in our hypermodern present, offering a 21^st century spin on Hannah Arendt’s observation that “businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.” But to what end? And how do the chosen means correspond with its actualization? Here the narrative starts to falter, not merely for the Islamic State but for us as well. That our means seem increasingly without ends, or are rather confused with them, should no longer serve as a surprise.

***

In the book of Exodus, God tells Moses that when taking a census of the Israelites, each shall give a coin that will be counted in his stead. Various commentators have taken this detail to indicate that there is something indecent about counting human beings as one might number livestock. Reducing individuals to figures represents a trespass on human dignity, flattening the whole of individual existence into a data point. Similarly, in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant argued that one articulation of the categorical imperative would be to “act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” Yet we fail to live up to this directive all the time. The world built by capital and shaped by the need to manage populations is a world of facts and figures. To regard human beings as ends in themselves, whether from a religious or Kantian framework, is to find oneself at ethical odds with the normative social order where information must be collected, measured, and above all put to profitable use.

Yet our abundance of data — the thousands killed by guns each year, the millions who lack health insurance, the percentage of our population projected to die of Covid-19 — does not necessarily bring us any closer to eradicating gun violence, enacting universal healthcare, or finding a cure for the novel coronavirus. We might note that we too tend to confuse data with progress, mere calculation with human flourishing. Far from offering an alternative viewpoint, the “medieval” Islamic State enables us to see in high relief what problems might be lurking in the world we hold in common.

Suzanne Schneider is Deputy Director and Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, focusing on history and political theory. She is the author of Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine. Her new book about contemporary jihad, The Apocalypse and the End of History, will be released by Verso Books in 2021.

The post Value for Our Shareholders: Reading the Islamic State Media appeared first on The Revealer.

As a journalist, these stories have been fascinating to observe and a privilege to amplify. But as a gay Catholic, they’ve also been personally challenging.

People occasionally ask me how I manage this sometimes complicated identity, being part of an institution that condemns homosexuality. I usually try to change the subject because good answers have been elusive. But that began to change a few years ago when I learned about the Catholic Church’s complex role in the AIDS crisis. I’ve collected many of those stories in a new podcast, “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church.”

I’ve been Catholic my entire life, and gay for as long as I remember, but the Church’s role during the AIDS epidemic was a mystery to me. I didn’t learn any stories about the Catholic Church and AIDS in high school history and they were absent from my religious education classes. And even the six years I spent studying theology in college and graduate school were mostly void of them. But one evening, during dinner with a priest friend who told me about his own ministry in the 1980s, which included starting a support group for people affected by HIV, primarily gay men, I became intrigued. I wanted to learn more. After a few years of research that included dozens of interviews with LGBT Catholics who lived through the height of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the United States, I’ve learned that, in the 1980s and 90s, the Catholic Church was simultaneously a leader in health care for people with AIDS and an opponent to LGBT rights. I’ve met priests and nuns who cared for countless numbers of gay men in their final days, but I’ve also researched now-deceased bishops who fought publicly against basic non-discrimination laws. This paradox played out in inspiring and sometimes infuriating ways, and opinions on the Church’s response are as varied as the people I’ve met while reporting on this project.

Perhaps the most well-known story of AIDS and the Catholic Church is the clash between New York’s politically-powerful archbishop from 1984 to 2000, Cardinal John O’Connor, and members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. O’Connor was the undisputed leader of the U.S. Church who had a direct-access line to Pope John Paul II. Though active in interfaith work, fighting anti-Semitism, and advocating for labor rights, O’Connor was a strong social conservative, leading the Church’s opposition to the movement for gay civil rights and fighting against public health campaigns that advocated for the use of condoms to slow the spread of HIV and AIDS.

By the time ACT UP targeted the Church, the group had already made headlines with protests against Wall Street, pharmaceutical companies, and politicians of both parties in order to bring attention to the plight of people with AIDS. Sensing that the Church’s public advocacy against condoms was hurting people of all backgrounds, ACT UP partnered with the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) to carry out a massive protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, held during advent 1989. The name of the action said it all: Stop the Church.

Plans for the action had been controversial even within ACT UP. To many, the protest was personal. 30 percent of ACT UP members in New York, according to religion scholar Anthony Petro in his book After the Wrath of God, had been raised Catholic. There was also fear the action would backfire, that disrupting a religious service was a step too far. After some internal debate, ACT UP decided to proceed with the plan, anticipating a large demonstration outside the cathedral.

The morning of the protest was frigid, but about 4,500 demonstrators braved the elements and made their way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They marched down the sidewalks alongside Fifth Avenue, standing out with their colorful costumes and large placards. “Condoms Not Prayers,” read one. “Take One and Save Your Life,” read another, with strips of condoms attached to it. “Cardinal O’Connor won’t teach safe sex,” said another. One ACT UP member, Ray Navarro, dressed as Jesus, complete with white robes and a crown of thorns, shouting into a bullhorn, insisting the Church was not living up to the tradition’s ideals.

Some members of ACT UP thought a protest outside the cathedral would prove ineffective. Others had protested O’Connor regularly, including several gay Catholics who belonged to a group called Dignity, but their protests had not brought much change. So they decided to enter the cathedral for a silent “die in,” which they believed would get their message across more forcefully. When O’Connor began preaching, the protesters threw themselves to the floor, seeking to show that their target was the archbishop, not ordinary worshippers. But some ACT UP members sensed that the demonstration wasn’t getting its point across even though the die in became a spectacle, with police stepping in to arrest some of the demonstrators. ACT UP member Michael Petrellis believed the action was failing. He stood on his pew, blew a whistle, and screamed, “O’Connor, you’re killing us! You’re killing us—just stop it! Stop it!” With the organ playing loudly to drown out the mayhem, O’Connor returned to his chair, put his hand over his face, and let the police do their work. More than 100 people were arrested and taken out of the cathedral.

But the protest wasn’t over.

A few ACT UP members had tried to stay discreet during the mayhem, intent on making their presence known during a later, more sacred part of the Mass: the distribution of Holy Communion. Some of the protesters, former Catholics like Sean Strub, who recalls the protest in his memoir Body Counts, waited in line to receive the Eucharist. But instead of responding to the minister with the standard “amen” upon receiving the host, the activists spoke out in protest. Strub described the death of his partner from AIDS, while others mentioned the Church’s ban on condoms. But one protester pushed further, taking the host, which Catholics consider to be the body of Christ, and crushed it, letting the crumbs fall to the floor. The news of that desecration is what newspapers focused on the next day, causing some in ACT UP to question if the action had gone too far.

Countless AIDS activists were furious at the Catholic Church. Some former ACT UP members told me they targeted Cardinal O’Connor because he fought against safe-sex classes in public schools and lobbied against bills that would protect lesbians and gay men from job and housing discrimination. Many were former Catholics who were angry with the Church for its homophobia. But even gay Catholics who still practiced their faith felt besieged by Church leaders in Rome who issued a letter condemning homosexuality as the epidemic killed thousands of their partners and friends.

The conflict that played out at “Stop the Church” is perhaps emblematic of the most common understanding of how the Catholic Church interacted with the gay community in the early days of the AIDS crisis. It’s certainly the most dramatic.

But as I have discovered, away from the spotlight there are many more stories that buck conventional wisdom. Quietly, many priests and nuns managed to fight the stigma that surrounded HIV, becoming fierce advocates for people with AIDS. Gay and lesbian Catholics took on their Church while fighting for their survival, and demanded to be treated with respect. One such story involves a Midwestern nun who decided to help when others wouldn’t.

***

Back in the 1980s, Carol Baltosiewich was a Catholic sister and a registered nurse at a hospital in the small Illinois city of Belleville, located about 30 minutes from St. Louis. As the decade neared its end, Sister Carol noticed an increasing number of young, gay men coming through her department. There wasn’t much she could do medically for these men, many of whom had HIV, some dying from complications related to AIDS. Still she wanted to help, and she sought to be a comforting presence to them at a time when they faced tremendous stigma. Despite her best efforts, she wasn’t able to connect with them. Her patients weren’t opening up to her. She knew she needed to learn more.

Sister Carol and another sister, Mary Ellen Rombach, knew that HIV and AIDS was a major crisis in New York. They reached out to contacts there who helped arrange for the pair to spend six months living and working in the city, far away from the familiarity of small-town Illinois. A former ICU and ER nurse, Sister Carol picked up the medical knowledge quickly. But she realized she knew nothing about the lives of gay men or drug users, the two groups who were most affected by HIV and AIDS. A gay couple she met at an AIDS-care training class offered to show her around and answer her questions. She accepted the offer, not wanting to return home with an incomplete education. Before she knew it, this Midwestern nun was visiting gay bars late into the night, fielding questions about gay sex on an AIDS hotline, and exploring seedy Times Square pickup spots. The goal was simple: if she wanted to connect with the community hit hardest by HIV and AIDS, the first thing she had to do was listen. But the clash of cultures was stark and it wasn’t easy for Sister Carol.

At one point, she considered cutting her immersion experience short and returning home. As she put it to me, she had “had it up to here with sex.” But she stuck it out, and continued to learn how she might be able to help back in Belleville. When she returned home, Carol reached out to gay leaders there and practiced what she had learned in New York – listening. Eventually, Sister Carol opened one of the first AIDS drop-in centers in her part of the country, becoming a hub for people with AIDS. That center, Bethany Place, is still open today.

Sister Carol’s story is compelling, but I learned it’s not entirely unique. Many other Catholics stepped up to help, even if there were bumps along the way.

During another reporting trip, this time to San Francisco, I spoke to a 55-year-old former property manager named Thomas Ellerby. He told me that as a Black, gay man with AIDS in the 1980s, there was “a lot of discrimination to go around.” But fellow Catholics at a small church in the Castro provided community and spiritual sustenance when others turned their backs. He recalled with fondness the drag-filled Christmas parties in the church basement after Mass.

Back in New York, I interviewed Dr. Ramon Torres. Dr. Torres ran the AIDS clinic at St. Vincent’s Hospital from 1990 to 2001, and during our conversation he railed against Church leaders who made his staff hide the condoms they illicitly passed out to patients. But he paused to say how much he admired Catholic clergy for devoting substantial resources to treating people with HIV and AIDS who were homeless and likely would have otherwise remained forgotten.

At that same hospital, which closed in 2010, Father William Hart McNichols worked as a young chaplain at the forefront of AIDS ministry when he decided to come out as gay. He was also an artist and drew images of a crucified Jesus with Kaposi sarcoma lesions covering his body, the words “leper, drug user, and homosexual” scratched onto a cross to draw attention to the plight of those with AIDS. He received reams of hate mail and endured professional setbacks. But he said it was worth it if it meant dying gay men trusted him fully with their deepest questions in their last days.

There is no silver lining to the AIDS crisis. The bigotry, suffering, and discrimination experienced by so many people living with HIV and dying from AIDS is a stain on this country’s history. Even more, the HIV and AIDS crisis in the United States is hardly a thing of the past. About 39,000 people will be diagnosed with HIV this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with people of color and people living in rural communities disproportionately affected. Recalling the history of people who stepped up in the face of intense social stigma to do the right thing is important as we continue to confront this modern plague.

As I talked to people who lived and worked through the early years of the epidemic, however, they helped put in context some of the challenges facing other queer Catholics today. Father McNichols, the gay priest I interviewed, told me that in the Church, even today, “gay people don’t have a green card.” But in reporting this story and meeting these pioneers, I discovered how hard LGBT believers have fought to be included within the Catholic Church. For them, and for countless others, it’s home.

Michael J. O’Loughlin, national correspondent for America Media, is the host of the podcast “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church”.

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Interested in more on this story? Check out episode 3 of the Revealer podcast: “The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, and Catholicism” featuring an interview with Michael J. O’Loughlin.

The post AIDS and the Hidden Catholic Church appeared first on The Revealer.

Father Bryan Massingale in 2017

The Reverend Bryan Massingale stands at the front of a small conference room on Fordham University’s Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx. He is teaching a course on African American religious ethics and begins the day’s lesson with a question: “What have religious ethicists said about Black love?” It is December 2019 and we are in Duane Library where he teaches. He continues without interruption: “White supremacy impacts the way we love.” Some of the students are quickly typing notes on their laptops, others nodding in approval. Like everyone in attendance, I am enthralled. For almost 20 minutes, he lectures but does not proselytize, and concludes by asking his students to ponder: “How do we have conversations about what it means to love and be loved as Black people? What would it mean to prioritize Black love in the context of Christianity?”

Father Massingale, one of the world’s leading Catholic social ethicists and a prominent African American theologian, has been a professor at Fordham since his arrival from Marquette University in 2016. I visited his class and encountered a space where his students, a majority of whom are white, are able to engage in complicated discussions about race. “I teach classes on sexuality, race, and what I tell my students, especially when talking about race, is that we’re going to have a very honest, open conversation about issues that no one in this room is skilled at talking about,” he tells me after his class ends. “Part of being in American society is we’re not skilled at talking about race in an interracial situation. So, what that means is that we’re going to have to allow each other some freedom here to get it wrong and to maybe say something that could be insensitive and then we can clean it up later, and even though this is going to be a very difficult conversation, I believe that you can do it.”

This approach to teaching is informed by his role as a self-described “scholar activist.” From preaching to teaching to writing, his Catholic faith and commitment to social justice shape his work.

Massingale was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1957 to Catholic parents. His father converted to Catholicism in the late 1940s and his mother converted when they married. Both were devoted to pre-Vatican II Catholicism, referring to traditionalist practices like the Latin Mass that took place prior to the Second Vatican Council. He and his four younger siblings went to Catholic grade school; Massingale would go on to attend Catholic high school, college, seminary, and graduate school.

“I saw that there were people who combined the love of God with a concern for social justice, and that was something that was very appealing to me as a young man,” he tells me. “There was just this deep down sense that being a priest would enable me to help people but also be a force for justice, too.”

From 1979 to 1983, Massingale attended Saint Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, where he was the only African American student. He shared a home with white men who had never lived with a Black person. The first time he remembers any students or faculty addressing racism came during an ethics class when he gave a presentation on “Brothers and Sisters to Us,” the 1979 pastoral letter on racism published by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Lectures on inculturation didn’t discuss Black or Hispanic Catholic worship, nor did the seminary’s liturgies reflect anything but a white culture aesthetic,” he tells me. He describes this as “cultural erasure,” adding that it sent a clear message: “My cultural background didn’t count and wasn’t valued. It was as if I didn’t exist as a Black man.”

It was during these four years that he began to deal with questions of his sexual identity and how to unite his faith, race, sexuality, and aspirations for social justice. He reached a turning point in his third year while on a spiritual retreat. Massingale was asked to read from Scripture, and as the group talked about the biblical creation story, he reflected on the lack of Black or gay people in the canon. “I realized at some deep place that I wasn’t even consciously aware of that I didn’t see how God could be imaged as Black or as gay, and certainly not both simultaneously.” While this was devastating for him, it allowed him to begin to reject many of the internalized ideas he had about his own identity and what it meant to be a Black, gay, Catholic man.

“That’s when it first dawned on me: The problem is not from God’s side of the equation. The problem is with the Church.”

A Call to Serve
In 1983, at age 26, Massingale was ordained as a priest at St. John’s Cathedral in Milwaukee.

Prior to his ordination, he had shared that he was gay only with close friends, his spiritual director, and the seminary psychologist. Neither his family nor his archbishop knew; revealing his sexual orientation to his archbishop would have been unthinkable in the early 1980s.

At ordination, he experienced a moment that he describes as the merging of his racial identity, sexuality, faith, and vocation. While lying face down on the ground—a requirement during the ceremony—and praying, he had a moment of radical self acceptance. “I realized that God was calling me. This was not a fluke. This was not an aberration. That God knew who I was and what I was, and called me anyway,” he tells me.

Massingale’s first few years ministering as a priest took place as the AIDS epidemic was claiming the lives of thousands of people. One of the first funerals he remembers performing was for a young man who had died from AIDS complications. He met the man’s parents and they expressed the difficulties of burying a gay son and the shame they felt. Massingale recalls sharing their story months later while speaking at a diocesan event for adults looking to enter the Catholic Church. After his talk, three different families approached him to share that they, too, had gay sons who had lost their lives to AIDS. All three parents had kept their sons’ homosexuality a secret.

Thinking back to those early years of the epidemic, he remembers the fear, uncertainty, and hostility shown toward the gay community. “I don’t think we understood the deep silence, the shameful silence and isolation in which many members of the LGBT community lived in then. That the silence impacted our Church and our Church was complicit in it.”

For nearly four decades, Massingale has challenged the Catholic Church’s treatment of LGBT people, dedicating much of his professional career to calling out the Church’s homophobia. In the early 2000s, when same-sex marriage was still not a legal option in most states, Massingale went against the guidance given by the Wisconsin Catholic Conference of Bishops and argued that a person could support same-sex marriage and still be a good Catholic. Despite preaching about LGBT Catholics for years, that was the first time he made such a public statement.

Last year, during a lecture at the 50th anniversary of DignityUSA in Chicago, a group for LGBT Catholics, Massingale began his talk by declaring: “I come to this conversation as a Black, gay priest and theologian.” Although Massingale came out prior to that lecture, many saw it as a rare yet hopeful moment for the Catholic Church.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church instructs that all gay Catholics are to remain celibate; when a priest is ordained, he vows to remain abstinent and unmarried, regardless of his sexual orientation. In 2005, the Vatican released a document officially stating that while gay men and women are to be treated with respect, they are not allowed to take holy orders because people with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” are “in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.” Three years later, the Vatican also implemented an “evaluation of the candidate’s psychic state” as a way to look for “areas of immaturity,” which included “lack of loyalty; uncertain sexual identity; deep-seated homosexual tendencies.”

The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author of Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the LGBT Community Can Enter Into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion, and Sensitivity, tells me that bishops often interpret the Vatican’s teachings about gay priests in a variety of ways. “First, ‘deep-seated’ means anyone who is gay and so they cannot be accepted. Second, it means anyone who is gay but can’t live chastity or celibacy, so that opens it up for many gay men. And third, it means that the identity is the center of their lives, so, for example, someone who had been an activist, could not be accepted.” Martin says that while there are many ordained gay priests living out their vows of chastity and celibacy—many ordained prior to 2005—very few are willing to be as candid as Massingale. “There are more and more gay priests being more open about their sexuality, but a real ‘public’ declaration, like Bryan made, is still rare,” he says, adding that Massingale’s coming out “gave great hope to many LGBT Catholics.”

In 2018, New Ways Ministry asked Massingale to serve as the director for their annual retreat for gay priests, brothers, and deacons. The organization, founded in 1977, focuses on ministry and advocacy for LGBT Catholics. Frank DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, tells me that a significant part of the organization’s work is to minister not only to LGBTQ churchgoers, but to gay clergy as well. Around twenty to thirty men attend these yearly retreats, many of whom are closeted.

Once New Ways Ministry announced Massingale as the director of their retreat for gay clergy, Milwaukee’s Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki denounced the event as “not in line with Catholic Church teaching.” Massingale became a target for conservative websites and critics, with many demanding he be censured. Local militias sent death threats to Massingale and the Catholic sisters who were hosting the event at the Sienna Retreat Center, the latter eventually hiring 24-hour security. More than twenty protestors, mostly lay Catholics, showed up at the October 2018 retreat, the first time DeBernardo recalls such a thing happening.

Massingale tells me the retreat was a blessing. Thirty-five men gathered, talked about their identities and relationships with God, and prayed together in a space that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality. He says the juxtaposition of prayerful Catholics inside the retreat center with protestors outside was jarring and representative of two facets of the Church. “On one hand you have this awesome, holy, sacred, powerful experience of leading people in prayer. Then there are people who gathered to conduct an exorcism because they saw our presence as defiling a sacred space,” he says. “The local bishop spoke out against these priests who were praying, questioning the idea of a gay retreat, but said not a word about the violence and the vitriol to which a group of people who are committed to God’s service are being subjected to. It angers me that people who want to gather to pray are seen as the problem, whereas those who would incite and insult get a pass.”

The Fight For All
Along with pushing for more acceptance of queer Catholics, Massingale is also one of the Church’s fiercest critics on racism. From his writing in National Catholic Reporter on white privilege to his 2017 talk at the Ignatian Family Teach In for Justice, Massingale is committed to challenging how white Catholics and Church leaders view faith through a white lens. “For most of our bishops, they don’t have sustained interactions with persons of color who can acquaint them with the basic facts of life and reality,” he says. “On some level, they don’t want to articulate that we live in a world that privileges white lives because if they face that reality, then they’re called to change. I think that’s something that people don’t want to do.”

In 2010, he published Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, an examination of racism in America from the Civil War to the election of Barack Obama. “I was trying to create a book that would account for undeniable racial progress on one hand, and yet also the deep intransigence and persistence of racism and white supremacy on the other,” he says. The book features a timeline of the Church’s teaching on race, including statements released by the U.S. bishops, and concludes with ways the Church can fight for racial justice.

Ten years since the publication of Racial Justice, at a time when the Church and country seem more polarized than ever, and when the election of Donald Trump has shattered the post-racial illusion many in the Catholic Church held dear, Massingale believes his book is even more urgent. “America has always understood itself as a white Christian nation, but it is no longer a white, Christian nation. That identity is being shaken,” Massingale insists. “Many white Christians are anxious about it. This is where Catholic faith can make a contribution and say, ‘None of the human ways we understand ourselves really matter because deep down, we are all fundamentally children of God.’”

Part of Massingale’s power is his ability to do what many in the Church find too frightening: publicly rebuke bishops for their treatment of marginalized communities.

Matthew J. Cressler, an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston and author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration, says, “The gift Massingale gives us is his insistence that we see the Church as it truly is and, in so doing, that we be given the chance to transform it.” The Rev. Mario Powell, a Jesuit priest who serves with Massingale at St. Charles Borromeo in Harlem, adds that Massingale brings a uniquely prophetic voice to the pulpit. “Bryan would kill me if I call him a prophet—but what is the role of someone who is attempting to be prophetic? It’s to challenge the powers that be and it is to push against the dominant cultural tropes that are out there—that’s what he does.”

Anthea Butler, associate professor of Religion and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, adds, “It has been difficult in Catholic theological circles for African Americans to gain a foothold, but Massingale’s work has opened the door for many of us who have grown weary in engaging the American Church on the issues of race and racism.”

I met with Massingale several times over the course of a month and saw why so many people have called him a prophet. From making theology accessible to shining a light on the marginalization of Black people in America, Massingale is committed to making the Church he loves a more equitable place for all.

“I’m a Catholic. This is a tradition that nurtures me and supports me, but I’m also very upfront about the fact that I’m not going to apologize for its weaknesses and its failures,” he says during our last meeting. “My whole ministry, in some way, has been to help the Church catch up to God, to help the Church understand that God has already gifted people of color with dignity and value and worth, and God has already gifted LGBT people with dignity, value, and worth.”

Olga Marina Segura is a freelance writer living in The Bronx, N.Y. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Refinery29, National Catholic Reporter, ZORA Magazine and the Guardian. Olga is currently working on a book on the Black Lives Matter movement and the Catholic Church that will be published in Spring 2021.

The post Meet Father Bryan Massingale: A Black, Gay, Catholic Priest Fighting for an Inclusive Church appeared first on The Revealer.

“Slave Bible” exhibit at the Museum of the Bible

We need to have a hard conversation. The “Slave Bible” is not a Bible—even if the Museum of the Bible tells me so.

In the first couple years of its tenure near the national mall, the privately-funded Museum of the Bible (MOTB) has worked its public relations team in overdrive, navigating between setback and scandal, satisfying some but not all of its critics. But on one issue the museum has successfully courted laudatory media coverage: its outreach to African Americans. “We need to include more people of color,” then-curator Seth Pollinger commented to BuzzFeed News in late 2018. In an attempt to garner broad appeal and enhance its brand, the museum has expanded beyond the evangelical Christianity of its white donors, the Oklahoma-based Greens of Hobby Lobby fame, now self-fashioned as the MOTB’s “founding family.” Performances by gospel choirs and lectures by black pastors and academics soon graced the museum stage.

The main endeavor to attract a racially diverse audience was a special “artifact in focus” exhibit entitled “The Slave Bible: Let the Story be Told.” On display from November 2018 through September 2019, the museum heavily promoted the exhibit on its website. According to a press release, MOTB partnered with Fisk University, from whom the artifact was on loan, and the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the Museum of African American History and Culture. Steve Green, original visionary and current chair of the MOTB board, praised the exhibit, commenting on its consistency with his family’s affection for the Bible and its strategic value for reaching a more diverse crowd.

Media outlets from The Root to CBN News to NPR to The Times of Israel covered the story of “The Slave Bible” by echoing the MOTB’s own description of the artifact at the exhibit’s center: a 19^th-century Bible edited by white colonial Christians to oppress enslaved Africans in the British West Indies. Many praised MOTB for choosing to cast a light on the dark history of racism and slavery in the United States.

A promotional email from August 2018 summarized MOTB’s interpretation of the artifact. Bearing the subject line “A Bible that was manipulated to emphasize themes of submission and subservience,” the message featured a photograph of the book against a dark background. Superimposed in large white letters was the phrase “The edited Bible.” A bright red “X” went through the word “edited,” resulting in a sleek visual—“The edited Bible”—with an obvious message: this is the Good Book gone bad. The body of the email read:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28, ESV)

Imagine a Bible that starts with creation but then jumps right to Joseph being sold into slavery and makes a point of how imprisonment benefited him! An edited Bible, where the Exodus story of God rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt is removed, together with every reference to freedom, such as the above passage from Galatians. A Bible that is manipulated to emphasize themes of submission and subservience. Does this sound like the Bible you know?

In the early 1800s, Rev. Beilby Porteus, bishop of London, instructed a group of missionaries to create such a book.

“Prepare a short form of public prayers . . . together with the select portions of Scripture . . . particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters.”

It is a morality tale that most are likely to support in this day and age. But, unfortunately, it’s not a true story.

It seems that no one actually gave the “Slave Bible” a closer look. It’s not a Bible. Not really. Published in London in 1807 (and again in 1808) on behalf of the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves, the book bears the title Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the Use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands. Its producers were candid about its contents as partial. One might wonder, then, what rhetorical work is being done by interpreters and curators who have deemed the book a Bible—the “Slave Bible.” If it is not actually a Bible, why call it so?

The answer, the evidence suggests, is that such a move exculpates the Bible from complicity in slavery, placing blame squarely on the human manipulators who tampered with the Bible as they enslaved other humans. The Bible, then, joins enslaved Africans as a victim of white European enslavers and their allies. Ken McKenzie, then-CEO of MOTB, articulated such a perspective in an on-screen interview in April 2019 in response to NBC Nightly News’s Geoff Bennett, who asked the museum official: “When people encounter this exhibit, what lasting impression do you want them to leave with?” McKenzie replied, “Well, we want to pass the message on that ‘may this never happen again.’” While one might expect his “this” to refer to the enslavement of human beings, he instead continued, “The Bible itself is a, is a whole book; it’s not one that you get to carve up and use this piece or that piece.”

McKenzie’s language about this artifact’s production process mirrors the picture we get in the museum exhibit and promotional materials: the book’s producers are represented as starting with a “complete” Bible and calculatedly suppressing its liberative content through excision of freedom-related passages. As one placard in the exhibit read, “Its publishers deliberately removed portions of the biblical text, such as the Exodus story, that could inspire hope for liberation.” The image we end up with is a wounded Bible—one that has been cut and left in pieces. It bears lacerations, unhealed scars, missing members. It limps— afflicted, constrained, hacked to pieces. If the Bible is a (co)victim, it can’t be a (co)perpetrator.

But the museum has exaggerated the supposed scars. In fact, the museum’s claims about the contents of this artifact do not line up with its actual content. If the publishers were, as MOTB suggests, weaponizing the Bible in the cause of slavery, they didn’t do a very good job. Several texts that support slavery as an institution (Exodus 21:2-11; Deuteronomy 15:12-18) and a long discussion of how the enslavement of non-Israelites was acceptable to Israel’s god (Leviticus 25:39-46) were not included. Passages from the Pauline corpus supportive of slavery do not make an appearance either (1 Corinthians 7:21-24; Colossians 3:22-4:1; Philemon).

Most significantly, the museum’s oft-repeated claim that the Exodus is absent is only partially true. God’s redemption of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt is recalled over and over again. Consider this series of verses that were included in the so-called “Slave Bible”:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Deut 5:6, NRSV).

Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there… (Deut 5:15, NRSV).

. . . take care that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery (Deut 6:12, NRSV).

. . . you shall say to your children, “We were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt, but the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (Deut 6:20-21, NRSV).

. . . do not exalt yourself, forgetting the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery… (Deut 8:14, NRSV).

Neither is eschatological hope absent from the “Slave Bible.” While the artifact does not include the book of Revelation, it does include both 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4-5, two important New Testament passages with expectations for a redemptive future.

MOTB’s interpretive mistakes compound in its framing of the artifact’s historical context. In exhibit signage and promotional messages, the museum has truncated a 19^th-century quotation to make it appear compatible with the exhibit’s storytelling. On one exhibit wall appeared an 1808 quotation attributed to Rev. Beilby Porteus, identified as Bishop of London and Founder of the Society for the Conversion and Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves. It read: “Prepare a short form of public prayers for them . . . together with select portions of Scripture . . . particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters” (bold original).

The quotation is excerpted from a letter to “the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations, in The British West-India Islands.” Rev. Porteus’s aim is to convince these readers to allow enslaved Africans time and resources to receive Christian religious instruction. Porteus envisions a labor-free Sunday so that the enslaved can gather and be formed into Christian slaves. He speculates that local clergy would be willing to prepare “a short form of public prayers for them [the enslaved], consisting of a number of the best Collects of the Liturgy, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, together with select portions of Scripture, taken principally from the Psalms and Proverbs, the Gospels, and the plainest and most practical parts of the Epistles, particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters.”

The museum has taken Porteus’s quotation out of its context and edited it to make it say something it does not say. When we read the unabridged statement, we find that he was not issuing a command, and specifically that he was not issuing a command to produce a Bible. Porteus envisioned a collection that expanded beyond biblical texts and included liturgy for public worship. Such an anthology would have been similar to other compilations of biblical and religious texts intended for liturgical or devotional use, examples of which can be found displayed with appreciative tone at the museum.

Notice too that Porteus’s proposed production process is one of building from the ground up. He wants the clergy to curate biblical passages deemed most relevant and situate them among other kinds of religiously useful texts. Since Select Parts of the Holy Bible includes only biblical texts, this artifact does not precisely embody what Porteus was commending. But if we think with the Porteus quotation as a lens to understand how Select Parts of the Holy Bible came to exist, as the museum invites us to do, it turns out that we must shift our thinking from cutting to curating—not a Bible carved to pieces but a blank canvas ready to be filled.

The full context of Porteus’s statement gives us a clue as to what his criteria for inclusion of material would have been. Museum curators have excised a significant segment of Porteus’s statement that makes the phrase “particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters” appear to refer to all of scripture, when it actually refers to “the plainest and most practical parts of the Epistles”—a phrase which shows that Porteus was motivated principally by a desire to offer enslaved readers texts deemed easily digestible and relevant to their experiences. He was not playing seek and hide with freedom-themed Bible verses.

The book he imagines is not very different from other compilations of biblical passages aimed at making the Bible accessible or relevant for a particular population of people with similar circumstances. MOTB has published examples of such tailored books of Bible content, available for purchase in the museum store. It also holds historical analogues in its collection, such as this abridged Bible from 1786 or the “Souldier’s Pocket Bible.” The latter, said to be originally issued for Oliver Cromwell’s army and then reissued for American soldiers during WWI, bears a longer title that explains the reason for its abridgement down to about 100 verses that all deal with how to behave during war: this pocket-sized book was intended to “supply the want of the whole Bible, which a souldier cannot conveniently carry about him.” Something is better than nothing, the logic goes. And the something is envisioned as particularly helpful for the intended population of readers. The producers’ motivations were more mercenary than monstrous.

Partial Bibles are not uniformly condemned by the museum. The difference between what’s acceptable and what’s not is not based on the act of curation itself. Tailoring is not inherently evil. Abridgement is not necessarily manipulative. Why, then, is such activity represented as the main problem in the “Slave Bible” exhibit? Why present tailoring and abridgement in this case as a stark moral issue? And while we’re posing questions: what led MOTB to distort the facts around this artifact so significantly?

The answer has to do with saving the Bible: slavery is nearly universally condemned in our 21^st-century collective American conscience, and MOTB protects “the whole Bible” (and thus the Bible) from blame for such a moral evil by falsely aligning the partial Bible with devious manipulation. By representing the act of cutting up the Bible into Select Parts of the Holy Bible as an evil act, the museum effectively situates the alternative—the whole Bible—on the other side of a moral binary that successfully (if illogically) exculpates the Bible from complicity in slavery.

Indeed, all of the museum’s mistakes are explicable when we identify the ideological commitment underlying the exhibit: the notion that the Bible is inherently good. The claim that the Bible, properly whole, properly applied, is universally beneficial and even benevolent cannot be historically sustained but nevertheless animates the Impact of the Bible floor at MOTB and repeats an apologetic refrain promoted on occasion after occasion after occasion by members of the Green family.

The “Slave Bible” exhibit implies further problematic ideas, including that enslaved Africans depended on literacy to discover and use the Bible (they didn’t), that cutting up a Bible couldn’t be faithful and freeing (it could), and that the Bible’s stance on slavery always determined white Christian colonists’ own stance (it didn’t). Moreover, the museum’s portrayal of the missionaries who produced Select Parts of the Holy Bible as deceitful schemers and the “whole” Bible as self-evidently liberative falsely communicates that the Bible would have to be tampered with in order for it to support slavery. A casual flip through this artifact would provide all the counter-evidence one needs to see that this claim cannot be sustained. So would a casual flip through any Bible. In the struggle over slavery through scripture, antislavery and abolitionist writers had to do far more hermeneutical work than did proslavery readers to make the Bible work in their favor.

Plenty of people with “whole” Bibles have read their Bibles and concluded that they supported slavery. Even though the missionaries who produced Select Parts of the Holy Bible were not manipulating a Bible with malintent, they were engaged in other activities that we are likely to find abhorrent today. Lest Reverend Porteus be exculpated, we must note that racism and paternalism fueled his commendation of Christian education for the enslaved. In his letter, Porteus portrays converted slaves as feathers in the caps of their owners, calling them a “pleasing and interesting spectacle, of a new and most numerous race of Christians ‘plucked as a brand out of the fire,’ rescued from the horrors and superstitions of Paganism.” Yet if conversion was intended to rescue enslaved Africans from horrors, it was not horrors in the here-and-now. Porteus reasons that Christian slaves work harder and are more compliant than those who do not convert. He argues that plantation owners should allow their slaves to receive Christian religious education so that their sexual activity can be controlled with the hope of producing more offspring. More enslaved babies, more slaves, more labor, more profit.

An opening placard in the exhibit attempted to acknowledge the relationship between the “Slave Bible” and missionary efforts to convert the enslaved. Interestingly, though, conversion and education efforts were not lumped together with the missionaries’ perceived Bible blunder: “These missionaries aimed to do more with the Slave Bible than convert and educate enslaved Africans. They edited the Slave Bible in a way that would instill obedience and preserve the system of slavery in the colonies.” This framing implies that conversion and education are not activities that deserve interrogation. The curators suggest that these activities are innocent. A line is crossed, it seems, when the missionaries went further: when they messed with the Bible in order to oppress enslaved Africans into peaceful servitude to white plantation owners.

The logic is made explicit in the text overlaying the virtual tour of the exhibit on the museum’s YouTube channel: “A British missionary organization created the Slave Bible. They hoped to convert enslaved Africans but also reinforce the colonial slave system.” The adversative but invites the viewer to weigh these activities in opposition to one another. Converting, good. Reinforcing slavery, bad. As New Testament scholar Allen Dwight Callahan has observed in his analysis of a similar historical train of thought, “Slavery backhandedly facilitated the conversion of Africans, dragging them bound and shackled into the light of the Christian Gospel.”

Converting and educating slaves were not innocuous activities occurring in an ideological vacuum. The exhibit’s sole focus on the use of the Bible in missionary efforts encourages visitors merely to question what was happening with the Bible rather than inviting them to question the larger framework in which the Bible was implicated in the African slave trade. (This move repeats an analogous problem from the MOTB’s precursor traveling exhibit called Passages, which minimized Christian complicity in the Holocaust.) The “Slave Bible” exhibit leaves no room for visitors to question how biblical texts shaped Christians who supported the racialized system of enslavement. Their Christianity, informed by the “whole” Bible, allowed for racism, paternalism, oppression, and acceptance of the enslavement of other human beings. Rather than asking what these missionaries did to the Bible, perhaps we should be asking what the Bible did to them.

In one noteworthy quotation on display in the “Slave Bible” exhibit, Brad Braxton, the director of the Center for the Study of African American Religious Life at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, pushed past the false equivalencies animating MOTB’s overall presentation with this challenge: “In our interpretations of the Bible, is the end result domination or liberation?” The moral compass here is distinct from the rest of the exhibit in an important way: Braxton’s question subjects the use of the Bible to a moral imperative that he does not claim, circularly, to be the right, true, self-evident message in the Bible. It opens up an intriguing possibility so far unimagined in the exhibit: that the Bible isn’t good by itself. It’s what readers do with the Bible that is good or bad.

But as soon as such a possibility opened, the museum forcefully shut it down. At the exhibit’s exit, visitors were invited to respond to what they had seen in an interactive crowd-sourced reflection. Visitors were to write answers to prompts and then add them to the previous responses on the wall. “Would you,” one of the questions asked, “call the Slave Bible the ‘Good Book’?” Guests divided over whether the answer was “yes” or “no.” Yes, some said, because it still contained some of God’s Word. No, others replied, because it didn’t contain all of God’s Word. But they all accepted the fundamental premise: that the Bible is supposed to be the Good Book. It is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to resist the premise of this question.

MOTB severely limited the choices for how people today can make meaning out of the existence of this historical artifact. The exhibit’s ideological commitment to the inherent goodness of the Bible distracts us from the suffering of enslaved Africans and also invites us to ignore harrowing present-day stories narrated by those who have endured abuse from (often well-meaning) Bible-believing folk and who have experienced firsthand that the Bible is not good for them.

The special exhibit has now run its course and the artifact is back at Fisk University. But the museum’s framing persists in the widespread media coverage that replicated MOTB’s narrative, which is actually more of a fable. The moral of the story for this museum that celebrates the Bible and commends its central place in American public life is that the Bible is good for us. The moral of this story is that we can’t believe everything the Museum of the Bible tells us. 

Jill Hicks-Keeton is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She is author of Arguing with Aseneth: Gentile Access to Israel’s Living God in Jewish Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the co-editor of The Museum of the Bible: A Critical Introduction (Lexington/Fortress Academic Press, 2019).

The post The “Slave Bible” is Not What You Think appeared first on The Revealer.

“Welcome home,” he replied.

This is how Disney religion operates. “Home” is how devoted Disney fans, and the Walt Disney Company itself, refer to the company’s theme parks. On social media tourists count down the days until they can go “home” again. They post pictures snapped the moment they pass under the road signs declaring “Walt Disney World: Where Dreams Come True.” Often, the captions simply read, “Home!” Disney as “home” always sounded a bit Christian to me: a longing to be in the world but not of the world, a sense that the real world, the better, truer world, is in fact elsewhere.

But now, in the midst of a global pandemic, as I watch Disney fans recreate It’s A Small World in their living rooms and Splash Mountain in their backyards (#HomeMadeDisney), I am reminded, instead, of Judaism, a tradition with a long history of reckoning with exile. The U.S. Disney parks have been closed since March 16. Even when they reopen, as Disney World is slated to do on July 11, they will not be the same: no fireworks, no parades, no hugs from the characters. Disney acolytes are figuring out how to rebuild their way of being during the loss of their center. They are not the first people to face this challenge. Disney fans today are like Judeans after the fall of the temple in Jerusalem.

***

Judaism might not exist were it not for two great catastrophes, two losses, in the ancient world: the destruction of the first Jerusalem temple by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E. and the destruction of the second temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. The first of those events catalyzed the process of collecting and editing the books that would form the core of the Hebrew Bible. The second led to the eventual compilation of the Talmud and the rise of Judaism itself: the development of a system that focused on the home, the study house, and the synagogue, on commandments and learning, rather than on temple-based rituals. Out of loss, came something new. The Talmud, an encyclopedic compendium of law and legend, is one giant attempt to build a new system of life: one with memory of the old system— the temple and its sacrifices— at its core.

This is what all of us are coping with right now, not only Disney fans. We are striving to remake our social worlds, our sacred worlds, on new terms. We stream prayer services, hold graduations on Zoom, we celebrate and mourn virtually. It’s not the same. And what about our pilgrimages? What do we do when the navel of our world is lost?

Photo by Matt H. Wade

Though decades of critics have decried Disney as simulacra, for devoted Disney visitors, Disney World is not just real— it is the most real place there is. That’s what lay behind how I was greeted in Disneyland, at a place where I had not set foot in nearly four decades. Disney parks are where you go to make your life more real. Just won the Superbowl? What makes it real? “I’m going to Disney World!” Graduated from high school or college? There’s a pair of mouse ears for that. Nearly every time I’ve been seated in a restaurant on Disney property— even when I am alone— the hostess has asked: “Are we celebrating anything special today?” Disney parks cement our achievements— and our losses, too— with a heaping of pixie dust.

Disney is also a place where we can safely play out our emotions— perhaps, for the more repressed among us, Disney gives us permission to have emotions. Last fall, an episode of Invisibilia told the story of Richard Kraft, a man who grew up in a family that discouraged expressing “big emotions.” Kraft found Disneyland to be a place of release and comfort after a great loss. Shaken by a death in the family, he found himself driving to Disneyland and boarding Pirates of the Caribbean. “There’s a finite amount of time that you’re immersed in anything. And so I can escape within the attraction for a finite amount of time, under very controlled conditions, and then, I can reemerge out of it and be ok,” he told NPR’s Meghan Keane.

The promise of a limited duration is the brass ring we reach for the most during this pandemic. What would we give to know that we only need to endure social distancing for the two minutes and twenty-five seconds it takes to ride Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, or worry about our family’s health for the time it takes to embark on the Jungle Cruise? What if the Israelites who lost the first temple had known, in advance, the precise duration of their exile, and that it wasn’t forever, because Cyrus of Persia would come along and permit some of them to return? Disney promises us something even better: a time limit and safety. For a high price, we know that the fear we experience in the darkness of the Haunted Mansion is just that: fear itself, in darkness that lasts only as long as our doom buggies careen along the track.

The whole world is a doom buggy now. It always has been. But the pandemic has revived that knowledge, the sense that no activity is ever truly risk free— though some of us, usually dependent on our social class, and, especially our race, get to be safer than others.

***

Religion is a business of bodies. Ancient Judeans shifted from a tradition where you buy a pigeon to sacrifice in the bustling temple, where the priest sprinkles the blood of large animals on the congregation, to a practice where you gather in study houses to debate. Over centuries, religion became rocking quietly in prayer or reading a holy book, instead of gathering in droves for an agricultural festival. What will it mean to worship Disney differently? For Disney World, too, is—was?— a religion of spaces, of grand vistas, miles on your feet each day in the parks, a story written onto your sweaty, blistered body as it moves from land to land, feeling the heat of the sun, the soothing sweet chill of Dole Whip. Most of all, it is a religion of crowds. Its pilgrims normally cram shoulder to shoulder in lines, shuffling in and out of theaters that seat hundreds, jostling for a better view in a sea of tourists watching fireworks. For the devoted, the pleasures of ecstatic community go hand in hand with the pain of heat, lines, and crowds. When the parks reopen, they will be half empty, without the sea of humanity that is their hallmark.

Now, for most fans, Disney is lived out in the quiet climate controlled spaces of our own homes, a religion of pixels and mementos, but also an embodied panoply of recreated recipes for park treats and families imitating the jerky moves of audio animatronics. This dialectic was not born of the pandemic. It is, in fact, an original feature of the whole system. In the 1950s, Walt Disney secured crucial funding to build Disneyland through a partnership with ABC. On Sunday nights, families gathered around their new-fangled consoles and tuned into the Disneyland television show to watch as the park rose above Anaheim orange groves. Through cathode tubes and flickering black-and-white screens, they were transported into the phantasms of Uncle Walt’s imagination. Disney religion has always been, in part, a home religion. What is new, now, is the feeling of total exile. The flag goes up daily on Main Street. None of us is there to see it.

Exile is the harbinger of messianism, and messianism is always nostalgic: the longing for a return to somewhere even better than what we remembered. This, too, is a feature, not a bug. It is at the heart of what Walt Disney always did, creating a Victorian main street on which no one had ever lived.

Pilgrimage is more of a rarity than not. Most Muslims don’t take part in the haj to Mecca every year—it is often a once in a lifetime event. Most kids in the 1950s did not get to go to Disneyland. The dream was the reality. For many contemporary Disney fans, visiting a Disney park is a dream long deferred, something saved up for over years. Even for frequent out-of-state visitors— the sort who travel to Orlando once or twice a year—thinking about Disney World is a teleological exercise. They are always imagining a future trip that is more perfect than any trip could possibly be.

Yet with the parks closed, it is a curiously empty dream.

A confession. I am one of those dreamers. Since my teenage years I have had what some might call a mild obsession with the best strategies for visiting Disney World, a tendency I repressed for some time, then let out of the bag again a few years ago when my daughter turned five. Ever since that year, I have had the Disney World app installed on my phone. The app lets you see, in real time, the wait times for a given attraction, that day’s showtimes, and more. Sometimes, when I’m having a bad day, I comfort myself by opening the app and checking ride times, or seeing which characters are out, and where, calmed by the knowledge that 1,049 miles south of me, someone is waiting in a 110-minute line for Space Mountain. Now, when I open the app, the park map is blank. No one is waiting in that line. Something is missing from the universe.

“How can we sing a song to the Lord on alien soil?” This poetic cry in Psalm 137 reminds us that religion’s portability is never simple. But the Judeans eventually came up with an answer that worked for them: write it down. Write down the stories and laws so you don’t forget them in a new place. Even more dramatically, after the fall of the second temple, generations of rabbis codified their debates on how and when to do what we now call Judaism.

They knew the best way to keep a people together came in bringing holiness into the quotidian realm. The Walt Disney Company knows this too. Using the hashtag #DisneyMagicMoments, they are giving fans a habitus, a way to recreate their lost temple, daily. Sad that movie theaters are closed and you can’t come to Disney World to meet the characters? Learn how to draw them from Oscar-winning animators. Miss Disney park treats? Make this recipe for “The Grey Stuff” (“It’s delicious!”) from the Be Our Guest restaurant. 

These digital inscriptions of Disney life do not only come from the company itself. The one I found most moving came from over 100 Disneyland cast members, “parade alumni,” who recreated 2005’s “Parade of Dreams.” In their living rooms and backyards, on beaches and in an eerily deserted Times Square, they individually danced their roles, sometimes with a homemade costume or prop, recreating the original choreography. I watched the tiny boxes of dancers on You Tube, all edited together with the parade soundtrack backing them. Disney choreography has a particular quality of exaggeration to it, arms stretched in extraordinary arcs so that gestures will register with crowds even when the dancer is on top of a float or inside a bulky costume. I had never seen this parade, but it brought me back to dozens of others, my experience of sitting on broiling concrete, enraptured. “Welcome to our family time, welcome to our happy-to-be time!” the chorus chimed. Now our family times happen in tiny boxes, too.

***

On May 11, Shanghai Disneyland re-opened with limited capacity and new social distancing measures in place. It was heralded as a crucial emotional benchmark on the road to the new normal. The metaphysical stakes of the Walt Disney Company were as clear as they have ever been. “Our brand is about hope,” Joe Schott, the president of Shanghai Disneyland, told The New York Times.

As the plans for Disney World’s reopening emerge, some fans are overjoyed. I am maudlin instead. Schooled in the history of the world’s religions, I know that rebuilt temples, material and virtual, are never the same as the ones that came before. With over 100,000 Americans dead, I am not ready to reach for hope.

What we need the most from Disney right now is the company’s unmatched ability to help us mourn. Disney has always been tinged with what Gary Laderman calls “the Disney way of death.” Walt himself was obsessed with, and fearful of, his own mortality, and the fairy tales on which so many Disney films are based were rooted in loss.

And so, when I watched the first Disney Family Sing Along in our darkened living room, I was not surprised that Beyoncé’s heartbreaking rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star” felt like grief to me. In the absence of meaningful collective, national mourning, what catharsis there is to be found will have to come from other places.

What we miss when we miss Disney World is an abundance of feelings: joy and fear, grief and mirth. Disney captivates because we get to be in the story: to fly over Neverland, to lift the sword from the stone. Survival means learning to tell the old stories in a new land. It’s not always pretty. Psalm 137 ends with an immensely graphic fantasy of retributive violence. In the middle, though, it balances on the precarious ledge between celebration and sackcloth that we will experience many times in the months and years to come. “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even in my happiest hour.” Someday we may return to our earthly Jerusalems, whether they are Cinderella Castle or the most powerful refuge of all: the arms of our loved ones.

The memory of our exile will linger.

Jodi Eichler-Levine is the Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization and Associate Professor of Religion at Lehigh University. She is the author of Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community (forthcoming October 2020) and Suffer the Little Children: Uses of the Past in Jewish and African American Literature. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, Kveller, Killing the Buddha, Religion Dispatches, and other venues. She is currently working on a book-length study on the intersections of religion and Disney.

The post What We Miss When We Miss Disney World appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

I am writing this letter as the Coronavirus death toll in the United States spirals past 100,000 people, as millions of Americans demand justice for the grotesque murdered of George Floyd and countless Black Americans like him, and as the country’s President ordered federal police to shoot peaceful protestors with tear gas so he could have his photograph taken in front of a church while holding a Bible. Before sitting down to write, I watched a video of Minneapolis police arrest Black protestors and a CNN reporter, all while thinking about the gun-carrying white men who recently stormed the Michigan capital and walked away without so much as a citation. Initially, I started this letter with the sentence, “We need to consider why the Michigan militias who charged the capital have not been arrested as domestic terrorists.” But I deleted the sentence because there is nothing to consider. They are white. And it is that simple.

This pandemic and our country’s chaos are producing profound pain and untold forms of grief. The grief of mass death, of separated families, of lost jobs, of feelings of safety, of disrupted daily routines, of pervasive and deadly racism. As the novel coronavirus ravages Black communities disproportionately, Black Americans face an additional, and no less terrifying, threat of death from the police. And all of these things are happening simultaneously.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

We need to tend to the many manifestations of grief in this time of tremendous loss. We need to grieve for the dead and for the many changes to our lives, the grief that comes from lost ways of living, lost connections to other people, from the lack of loving touch. Our lives have altered radically since March 2020, maybe irrevocably, and the deadly assault on Black Americans has remained constant in spite of these enormous changes. We need to take care of our grief and acknowledge our associated rage. Grief and rage are so often connected.

As we enter the summer months, I am reminded of how different June 2019 felt. It was the 50^th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and New York City hosted a Pride festival that brought millions of visitors from around the world. People danced in the streets. Strangers hugged. Groups embraced in all sorts of ways. But travel is now dangerous. Celebrations are cancelled. And New York City neighborhoods with a higher density of people of color have been devastated by the pandemic. We are starting June 2020 in a period of intense grief and with no national plan to rectify the many problems we face.

The articles in this issue of the Revealer addresses grief, race, and LGBTQ people and religion. The issue begins with a reflection on a seemingly ordinary source of loss in Jodi Eichler-Levine’s beautiful essay, “What We Miss When We Miss Disney World.” In it she describes why the closure of Disney theme parks has been difficult for many and how she has turned to Jewish notions of exile to make sense of this loss. Next, in “The ‘Slave Bible’ is Not What You Think,” Jill Hicks-Keeton takes us inside a Museum of the Bible exhibit to explain how the museum presented misleading information to attract more people of color to their grounds. And since most Pride festivities are cancelled this year, we are bringing you two articles about LGBTQ people and religion. In the first, “Meet Father Bryan Massingale,” Olga Segura profiles a Black, gay priest who has been fighting for a more inclusive Catholicism for decades. And, in “AIDS and the Hidden Catholic Church,” Michael J. O’Loughlin describes the surprising things he learned while creating the acclaimed podcast series “Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church.”

The June issue also features articles on topics long discussed elsewhere, but that go deeper and offer more nuanced considerations. In “Value for Our Shareholders: Reading the Islamic State’s Media,” Suzanne Schneider explores why ISIS produces monthly newsletters that mirror capitalist corporate reports. And in an excerpt from his new book Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO, David Halperin applies his expertise as a religion scholar to make sense of people’s longings for life beyond our planet.

In this issue we are also sharing the third episode of the Revealer podcast: “The AIDS Epidemic, Queer Identity, and Catholicism.” Michael J. O’Loughlin joins us to expand on his article in this month’s issue, discuss reconciling queer identities with religion, and reflect on what the AIDS epidemic can teach us about today’s pandemic. You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

In this time of mass death, mass confusion, mass change, mass rage, and with no unified national plan to address all that has been lost, my thoughts turn to our grief. Like others, I still hope for a quick ending to the pandemic and to our culture of white supremacy, even as I know such hope is likely magical thinking. So I hold onto hope and grief together, mourning the ways our lives have been shattered, and doing what I can to demand a better and more racially just world than it was before the pandemic, or ever in this country’s history.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Letter: Mass Grief and Racial Injustice appeared first on The Revealer.