A family gathers to celebrate the departed and have a meal in Mukhatgverdi Cemetery on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In the United States, Thanksgiving notoriously snarls traffic throughout the country, as people take to the road to visit their far-flung family members. In Georgia, the rugged Caucasus country nestled between Russia and Turkey, Easter is much the same, with one difference: the family members people are traveling long distances to visit are no longer living.

Light illuminates the opposite side of the valley at Mukhatgverdi graveyard on April 9, 2018 in Northern Tbilisi, Georgia.

Every year, thousands make pilgrimage to the gravesites of their ancestors to leave offerings, commune, and share a meal. Traffic jams are common in Georgia’s ancient graveyards on the Monday following Easter (celebrated according to the Orthodox/Julian calendar).

Wine is spilled on a grave in remembrance of the dead in Mukhatgverdi graveyard on April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Visiting graves is such an important part of Georgian culture that many gravesites incorporate simple metal tables next to the plot. Most Easter spreads feature red-dyed eggs, which symbolize the rebirth of Christ, and paska, sweet bread that incorporates ingredients like butter and eggs that can’t be eaten during Lent. Homemade wine and Georgia’s robust national liquor, chacha, are abundant, and are poured on graves following toasts to the departed. Sweets, khachupuri (the Instagram-famous cheesy bread) and grilled meats round out the feasts.

Girogi Bregvadeze, center, toasts the departed at the grave of Irakli Ejabidze, with Alexandre Bodbeli, left, and Nukri Gamtendaze, right, at Mukhatgverdi cemetery on April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Liana Elikashvili, who was visiting her father’s grave on Easter Sunday because she had to work the day after Easter, noted that her father “loved candy.” “He also loved vodka, but I don’t have any.”

Liana Elikashvili lights candles at her father’s grave at Mukhatgverdi on Sunday, April 8, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The cemeteries themselves reflect Georgia’s complicated, cliché-defying diversity. Western Christian Crosses and Orthodox Crosses with their 3 crossbars are plentiful, but just as numerous are the indigenous, drooping crosses of St. Nino, who introduced Christianity to Georgia in the 4th Century. Most graves from the 1900s feature the Cyrillic alphabet, a hallmark of Soviet-era efforts at homogenization, while more recent tombstones feature flowing Georgian lettering. And ever since Georgia fought a bloody war with Abkhazia, families have struggled with how to visit ancestors buried in the region. Once its own Soviet State, it was folded into the Georgian SSR in 1931 and, following an armed conflict in the early 1990s, now exists as a mostly-unrecognized autonomous republic.

Two pieces of Paska, and a red-dyed Easter egg, are seen on a table at an overgrown grave at Mukhatgverdi cemetery on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi Georgia.

Nato Kapoliani was at her plot at Mukhatgverdi Cemetery on the outskirts of Tbilisi, and said she’d considered exhuming and moving her ancestors from Abkhazia so that they can be visited more easily. Ultimately she decided against it because she felt it would be tacitly condoning what most Georgians consider an illegal occupation. Nevertheless, imagining the graves in Abkhazia, “so lonely and abandoned,” is a source of profound sadness for her.

“Whenever we see an abandoned grave, we leave a small piece of paska or something…the point is we don’t respect only our ancestors, but all of them. When we die we go to live another life,” explained Malkhaz Solashvili who was visiting his ancestors nearby.

“I feel I’m coming home when I come here,” explained another visitor.

A man crosses a grassy hillside at Mukhatgverdi cemetery on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

The tradition of visiting graves after Easter straddles religious and cultural lives of Georgians, says theologian Mirian Gamrekelaschwili,  somewhat akin to Mexico’s Día de los Muertos. While research on the topic is scarce, Levan Gigineishvili, a professor at the Institute of Classics at the Tbilisi State University, posits that the tradition naturally evolved from the village church’s proximity to the graveyards – following lengthy Easter services that lasted until the early-morning hours, parishioners would find their way to the nearby graves of their ancestors to leave red-dyed eggs that had been blessed by the priest.

A spread of food is seen in front of a grave at Mukhatgverdi cemetery on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

In general, the Georgian Church has urged people to delay visiting graves as not to tarnish the celebration of Christ’s resurrection with painful memories of death. “Yet, the Church’s admonition remains an admonition by and large neglected by the people,” notes Gigineishvili, who frames the tradition by explaining that “it is only natural and theologically correct to make the departed co-celebrants of the glorious victory of Christ over sin and death.”

***

I spent several days in the graveyards around Tbilisi, Georgia in 2018 to explore this tradition that had fascinated me for years. Vake Cemetery is situated in a posh neighborhood, with smooth marble tombstones. Kukia is ancient and crumbling, with its winding paths snaking between sagging graves. But mostly I roamed massive Mukhatgverdi, on the outskirts of town, where a small section is reserved for service members. A mother visiting the grave of her soldier son apologized for the spread at her son’s plot, which she deemed inadequate. Guests are sent by God, goes the oft-repeated Georgian refrain, but I never expected that sentiment to extend to the intimate moments spent with deceased family members.

The family of Roman Zoidze, a 20-year old solider who was killed in the 2008 flare-up of the Abkhazia conflict, including Fridon Zoidze, Roman’s brother, center, kneeling, and Maro Zoidze, his mother, dressed in black, gathers to celebrate the departed in Mukhatgverdi Cemetery on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia.

At the first grave I visited, I was implored by those in attendance to feast and drink with them. They gestured with a giant jug of chacha, assuring me they had a copious supply and that I wasn’t imposing.

“If I drink 5 liters of chacha, I’ll die,” I protested.

“That’s fine,” they cheerfully replied, gesturing to the adjacent plot, “we’ll bury you here.”

Mariam Kiparoidze contributed reporting to this story.

Pete Kiehart is an American visual journalist based nominally in Paris, France. A deep passion for visual storytelling underlies his work, which runs the gamut from conflict photography to sports, portraiture, and conceptual projects. After working as a producer and editor at  Reportage by Getty Images, he moved to San Francisco, where he was Director of Photography at  ONCE Magazine and a hybrid editor and photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the Chronicle in 2015 to live in and cover the conflict in Ukraine on a freelance basis, and relocated to Paris in 2017. Pete holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Public Policy Studies from Duke University.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Georgia Cemetery Rituals: A Photo Essay appeared first on The Revealer.

This excerpt comes from the book’s first chapter.

 ***

Chapter 1: Colbert as Character

Two hundred excited people fill the waiting area at The Colbert Report studio on November 18, 2014. Small bursts of laughter fill the crowded room as two large flat screens adorning the walls play segments from the Comedy Central program on repeat: a two-minute clip about Wheat Thins crackers, the Daft Punk band playing a set on the studio stage, The Colbert Report in Afghanistan and Iraq performing for U.S. troops. The walls are painted in red, white, and blue as the crowd gathers in anticipation around the entrance to the studio. The studio doors open, and the crowd rapidly moves to fill in available seats in the theater. A half-hour before the evening’s taping, Stephen Colbert enters the room to raucous applause. Wearing a dark suit, the actor (not the character) addresses the audience: “Anyone have any questions for me?”

Just a few hours before, I had been standing in line, waiting with hundreds of others to enter the studio. I had interviewed other audience members, asking them where they were from, what they thought of Colbert, and personal questions about their religious and political identities. As I raise my hand eagerly in response to Colbert, those seated around me (whom I had recently interviewed) quickly interject. “Ask her,” a few audience members exclaim while pointing at me. “She’s researching you.” Bemused, Colbert acknowledges my raised hand.

“Why did you choose for your character to be Catholic?” Colbert smiles at this question, an amused grin as though he had not encountered this question as part of his regular routine. How often do audience members reference his religious identity? I am not his usual fan.

Colbert gives a three-part response. First, he replies that when he started The Colbert Report, he was given some advice. “Johnny Carson told David Letterman who told Conan [O’Brien] who told me, doing a show this much, four days a week, is going to take everything you know. And I know a lot about being Catholic.” A few gasps of recognition betray that the lineage of this advice impressed me and some of my fellow audience members. In the second part of his response, Colbert emphasized that he knew he could “play up the liberal/conservative” divide evident in American Catholicism. He could take on an exaggerated conservative persona to become “Captain Catholicism.” As Colbert strikes a superhero pose, audience members chuckle. In the third part of his response, Colbert pauses and steps back, away from the audience. He stares off, almost in amazement of his situation, and laughed, “I mean, it’s pretty neat. I get to interview priests. It’s pretty fun.”

***

With its debut in 2005, The Colbert Report cast the actor Stephen Colbert as the boisterous satirical character STEPHEN COLBERT. Two personae, but one name and one body. To distinguish the two in text, I use Colbert for the actor and COLBERT in caps for the character (while it seems like shouting, all caps is appropriate, as yelling is one of COLBERT’S exaggerated traits). Both the actor and character are devout, vocal, and authoritative Catholics. Colbert’s exaggeration of COLBERT’S position and power led COLBERT to proclaim that he was “television’s foremost Catholic.” His religion was so central to the show that religion blogs dubbed him “Colbert the Catechist.” The Jesuit magazine America even went so far as to recommend Catholic educators take notes on his entertaining and persuasive evangelizing style. As The Colbert Report ended its series run in late 2014, The National Catholic Reporter named Stephen Colbert their “Runner-up to Person of the Year,” second only to Pope Francis. For the editors and readers of the progressive Reporter, Stephen Colbert represents a powerful mouthpiece for their political, social, and religious perspectives. And yet, the question I am asked most often is, “Colbert’s really a practicing Catholic? In real life?” That juxtaposition between Colbert’s revered status as a celebrity Catholic and as a polemical satirist of institutions lies at the heart of America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself).

Stephen Colbert stands in a historical lineage of public Catholics who have navigated the shifting tides of American Catholic authority. As Colbert joked during his keynote address at the 68th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner (a dinner honoring the first Catholic nominee for the American presidency), on October 17, 2013, “I am proud to be America’s most famous Catholic.” With this bold statement in a room full of cardinals, priests, politicians, actors, and other Catholic celebrities, Colbert references both his intense popularity and his embodiment of both American and Catholic identities. He is the latest incarnation of Catholic religious celebrities and mass-mediated broadcasters in the United States.

Colbert presents a version of American Catholicism, but not the sole version. Colbert illustrates and embodies certain complexities of Catholic identity and relationships between Catholic lay and institutional authority both in his individual presentation of his Catholic identity and through the complicated endeavor of being both a celebrity and a character inhabiting the same body with the same name. While there are multiple sides of Colbert, that does not mean he represents all of the complexity in contemporary American Catholicism. Instead, Colbert’s racial and ethnic status as a middle-aged white man mirrors that of other dominant images of Catholic representation. In mass media, as in other public arenas, Catholicism, and particularly Catholic authority, is often depicted as white and male, especially in the fields of entertainment, television, and comedy.

Colbert uses satire and humor to question hypocrisies and incongruities that he sees in the Roman Catholic Church. He is a Catholic celebrity who can bridge between critical outsider and participating insider. The persona he cultivates employs satire and critical humor to navigate what it means to be an American Catholic and the relationship between lay and institutional authority. Some viewers describe this as “Colbert Catholic[ism].” Colbert Catholicism complicates the existing literature about “cafeteria,” “cultural,” and “thinking” Catholics, the liberal and conservative Catholic divide, and the trajectory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century changes in Catholic authority.

Through the persona COLBERT, Colbert explores the paradox of Catholic multiplicity. He can do so as a lay person in ways that many mediated and televised Catholic clergy have been unable to do. Colbert speaks for, with, and to an audience grappling with seeing Catholicism as multifaceted. Colbert’s Catholicism creates this contemporary paradox of being religious while also mocking certain aspects of religion primarily because Catholicism is often defined with and against the institution of the Catholic Church. There is a perception of a right answer, a real way of being religious. While that perception is false and there are millions of ways in which to be Catholic in the contemporary world, the perceptions and assumptions remain. To be Catholic is to constantly define and redefine oneself with and against the perception of a unified, authoritative, and institutional Church.

America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself) investigates the ways in which Colbert challenges perceptions of Catholicism and Catholic mores through his comedy. Through his television program and digital media presence, Colbert is a twenty-first-century celebrity pundit who inhabits a realm of extreme political and social polarization. I examine how Catholicism shapes Colbert’s life and world, and also how he and his persona influence Catholicism and American Catholic thought and practice. In addition, I analyze how Colbert and his character COLBERT nuance the polarized religious landscape, making space for Americans who currently define their religious lives through absence, ambivalence, and alternatives. Colbert and COLBERT reflect the complexity of contemporary American Catholicism as it is lived, both on- and off-screen.

Religion and the foibles of religious institutions have served as fodder for a number of comedians. In this, Colbert is not unique. What sets Colbert apart is that his critical observations are harder to ignore because he approaches religious material not from the predictable stance of the irreverent secular comedian but from his position as one of the faithful. He uses humor to engage in significant public criticism of religious institutions, policies, and doctrines. In the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, COLBERT informs audiences on current events, politics, social issues, and religion while lampooning conservative political policy, biblical literalism, and religious hypocrisy. Stephen Colbert and his character dwell at the crossroads of religion and humor. This book is a case study of that intersection: humor as an arena for the expression of religious identities and relationships. Comedy becomes a site for critique and dialogue between lay religious practitioners and their larger institutional authoritative bodies. Religious worlds are not solely serious, and individuals, in particular comedians, negotiate their relationship to aspects of religion with humor.

Stephanie N. Brehm is an administrator-scholar at Northwestern University working in the Graduate School on academic and strategic initiatives. She is a faculty instructor in Northwestern’s Master of Science in Higher Education Administration and Policy program. She earned her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Northwestern in 2017 where she specialized in American Religious History and Media/Popular Culture. 

The post America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century appeared first on The Revealer.

For a long time, I’d arrive early at the independent school where I taught humanities between stints in graduate school. If the roads threading the salt marshes of Massachusetts weren’t congested, I’d be the first to see the fluorescent lights of the faculty lounge flicker on, tentatively at first, illuminating a familiar landscape of tables, chairs, and bookcases. This congregating place provided a quiet oasis before the morning bell punctuated a crescendo of pacing students, clanging lockers, and flurried conversation.

The faculty lounge served as a depot for gifted supplies as well as a work space. As if by magic, shifting columns of National Geographics, or maps sallow with age might materialize. A discerning eye might salvage new classroom supplies from the neglected remnants of attics and basements.

One autumn morning, I found a pile of boxes neatly stacked on the shopworn table in the corner of the teacher’s lounge. Scrawled in a fading marker along the top was a label indicating the contents: “Books – Please Take!” Near the bottom of the first container, I excavated a handsome English-language Quran, its mustard folio lined with a filigree of sienna and turquoise. Knowing I’d be lecturing on Islam later that semester, I took it back to my classroom.

Paging through the volume, I encountered a publishing history alongside the usual introductory material. Intrigued, I read on. I soon discovered the first English-language translation of the Quran in the United States originated from a press within walking distance from my school. But what riveted my attention was the vitriolic preface from this American Quran, a reprint of the Alexander Ross’s 1649 translation from a French version:

“Good Reader, the Great Arabian Imposter now at last after a thousand years is by way of France arrived in England, and his Alcoran or Gallimaufry of Errors (a brat as deformed as the parent, and as full of heresies as his scald head was full of scurffe [sic]) hath learned to speak English. I suppose this piece is exposed by the Translator to the publicke view no otherwise than some monster brought out of Africa, for people to gaze, not to dote upon; and as the sight of a monster, or misshapen creature, should induce the beholder to praise God, Who hath not made him such; so should reading of this Alcoran excite in us both to bless God’s goodness toward us in this land, who injoy the glorious light of the Gospell, and behold the truth in the beauty of his Holinesse, who suffers so many Countreys to be blinded and inslaved with the misshapen issue of Mohamets braine…”

Filled with slander, the preface conjured the ramblings of an Internet troll rather than the scholarly introductions one reads today. Ross’s “Needful Caveat” presents Islam as deviant and pernicious. Seemingly thinking that his translation would pose some danger to non-Muslim English readers, Ross suggests the value of this monstrosity lies in the contrasts it illuminates. “The glorious light of the Gospell” shines brighter against the darkness of Islam. The translator therefore summons his audience to “praise” and “bless” God for this token of the “obscurity and bondage” from which they have been liberated.

This translator’s preface to the Quran represents a single specimen of a genre that flourished for centuries. For a Quran to appear in Europe and North America without an admonition on the dangers of misuse was long unthinkable. Such introductions to printed translations veer between fascination and hostility toward their subject, but invariably end by disparaging it. At the same time, the dissemination of the Quran in Europe tracks the evolution of a self-conscious modernity. Renaissance philology, Reformation polemic, and the development of new media all influenced how Europeans received the holy book of Islam in the West. Tracing the story of its publication from the beginning helps to explain the acrimony of these introductions. In the process, it reveals how social conflicts enveloping Europe shaped perceptions of an exotic, heretical Other in the colonial mind. This early history formed an important trajectory for contemporary understandings of Islam in Europe and North America.

Translating the Untranslatable

For theological reasons, rendering the Quran from Arabic into other tongues originated in Christianity rather than Islam. Because the Quran reproduces Allah’s  word in Arabic, for Muslims, translation necessarily entails diminution. Neither literal nor liberal rendering in the vernacular can approximate the splendor of Allah’s very words. Amid Babel’s confusion, the Arabic Quran alone commands authority. Privileging the language of revelation guarantees nothing is lost in translation. This commitment ensures the fundamental consistency and orality of the Quran. Like the Latin mass, Arabic resounds from the muezzin around the world, irrespective of the vagaries of local dialect and literacy rates. This linguistic tradition also restricts authoritative exegesis to an educated elite who have mastered Arabic. Only those who can make sense of the text can reach binding verdicts on its interpretation and proper application.

Unbothered by these important restrictions, the Christians who took up the project of translating the Quran faced formidable challenges. It was only with the institutional resources of the monastic center of Cluny that the first translation of the Islamic holy book was completed.

The origins of this undertaking lay in the reconquista and in the missionary initiatives of the monastic reformer Peter the Venerable. Late in the 11th century, an alliance of French and Spanish forces expelled Muslim garrisons from Toledo. The city, home to many Jews, Muslims, and Christians, thus beckoned Peter, now Abbot of Cluny, who saw opportunities for learning and proselytizing. He sojourned for a lengthy sabbatical there. Peter readily discerned that converting Muslims would require familiarity with the Quran. Fired by evangelical zeal, he commissioned a native Arabic speaker and an Englishman, Robert of Ketton, to render the Arabic text into Latin.

Apologetic concerns animated this first translation of the Quran. Its Latin title, Lex Mahumet pseudoprophete (“The Law of the False Prophet Muhammad”), reveals its dim view of the Prophet and his message. Writing to his longtime correspondent (and sometime “frenemy”) Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter described his purpose in similar fashion: “[I’m doing this] to follow the Fathers’ custom of never passing over any heresy in silence, even the most inconsequential (so to speak), but rather resisting heresy with all their faith’s might, and exposing it as abominable and damnable in their writings and arguments.” Peter put the Latin Quran to use in this enterprise, citing from it extensively in his polemics against Islam.

His efforts cemented an enduring legacy for Christian perceptions of Islam. Negatively, the depiction of Muhammad as a false prophet now became a stock representation. Peter classified Islam as a heresy rather than a distinct religion; the Quran and its disciples as deviants to be corrected rather than outsiders to be enlightened. Still, his apologetic undertaking allowed curious non-Muslim Europeans to explore the Quran for themselves for the first time. This return to the sources, framed by the contest of orthodoxy and heresy, later instigated debates over printing the Quran.

Printing the Unprintable

The Latin Quran Peter commissioned circulated in numerous manuscripts and proliferated across centers of learning throughout Europe. Yet officials erected a cordon sanitaire around the translated Quran, lest it “contaminate” uncritical readers with its heresy. In 1309, Pope Clemens VI outlawed the Quran. No manuscript could appear without an official imprimatur and warning to the reader inventorying its errors. More often than not, the sole purpose of reproducing the Islamic holy book was to denounce it. By controlling access to the forbidden scripture church officials could regulate this “dangerous” volume.

This curation of information ended with rising literacy and a social media revolution. The movable-type printing press became a vector for transmitting radical new ideas in ways officials found impossible to regulate. Printing enabled mass distribution, and appealed directly to the literate public. It undermined traditional authority, unleashing all the liberation and corrosion associated with the advent of modernity. Nowhere was this more evident than in the burgeoning of the Protestant Reformation, which galvanized conflict over the correct interpretation of Christianity across Europe, fragmenting Christendom.

The Reformation challenged Catholic dogma by returning to the sources, capitalizing on advances pioneered by Renaissance philologists to reinterpret them, and using printing technology to amplify their voices. The success of this endeavor prompted questions about what other subjects, formerly closed to enquiry, the reading public might examine anew. With the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna by 1529, the question of printing the Quran arose, even as violence among Christians engulfed Europe.

Publishing the Islamic holy book in this sectarian environment posed serious risks. When Basel publisher Johannes Oporinus attempted to print a new version of Robert of Ketton’s Latin Quran edited by Theodor Bibliander, town councilors suspended his printing license and imprisoned him. The presses stopped. Authorities confiscated copies of the rogue publication.

Efforts to censor the Basel Quran might have met with success had report of its suppression not reached the most influential theologian of the age: Martin Luther. Although Luther shared many of the prejudices of his time, he recognized the need to improve understanding of Islam and its revelation. Perhaps, too, he discerned in the struggle to publish the Quran a parallel to his own mission to make the Bible available to the reading public. In any case, the reformer marshaled his considerable authority to lift the ban on Bibliander’s Quran, assailing Basel with strongly-worded petitions for toleration. His lobbying produced results. By the end of the year, Oporinus was released, and the new Quran appeared with prefaces by Luther and his associate, Philip Melanchthon.

Luther’s writings on Islam, including his preface to the Quran, reveal surprising nuance alongside traditional chauvinism.

To be sure, Luther regarded Ottoman encroachments as a threat to the spiritual, temporal, and domestic order. The “Mohammedan” could only be “a destroyer, an enemy, and blasphemer of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The Turk, he complained in 1529, “ruins all temporal government, and home life or marriage, and his warfare, which is nothing but murder and bloodshed, is a tool of the Devil himself.” Ecumenism was in short supply in the apocalyptic landscape of Luther’s Europe, but his hostility toward the Ottomans and their religion was unmistakable.

Yet, in Luther’s imagination, God could exploit even “the Devil’s tool” to serve his purposes. In a 1541 tract, Appeal for Prayer against the Turk, he identified the Ottoman “scourge” as a “schoolmaster” to a Christian Europe in need of humbling.  The discerning reader can’t miss the allusion to Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, where the apostle characterizes Mosaic Law as a “schoolmaster” to train a sinful humanity for Christ’s righteousness. In his famous Galatians commentary, Luther likewise describes the Law as a “schoolmaster”: stern in administering a flogging, yes, but “indispensable” to salvation. Turkish incursions, properly understood, become a call to repentance.

Luther interpreted everything through the dialectic of Law and Grace, so his location of Islam and the Quran on these coordinates makes intuitive sense. He categorized Muslims as partisans of Law along with Jews and Papists (the wrong side of justification, for those keeping score). The Quran resembles papal decretals in form and substance. Just as the “folly and madness” of the Jews was best countered by open debate, so also with Muhammad’s prophecy.  Neither Luther’s vituperative commentary on Rome or the Jews should earn admiration today. But in other respects, this Protestant stalwart displayed far more generosity than his contemporaries, considering the Turks morally superior to the Papists. He maintained Rome’s attempt to restrict circulation of the Quran stemmed from fear of disclosing its own brand of moral rigorism. For Luther, Catholic enmity with Islam represents a species of what Freud would later term “the narcissism of small differences.”

This invective betrays the affinities Luther shared with his Catholic opponents. In a sense, Luther’s approach reflected that of Peter the Venerable: the Quran deserves study if only to refute heresy with the truth. “In this age of ours, how many varied enemies have we already seen?” Luther mused in his preface to the Quran. “Let us now prepare ourselves for Muhammed. But what can we say about matters outside our knowledge?” Struck by this realization, he eschewed stereotypes in favor of making real sources available to a wider reading public. Yet it would be a mistake to see this posture as democratizing knowledge of Islam. If Luther put his imprimatur on the Bibliander Quran, he was endorsing a Latin version to an audience educated enough to read it. He wasn’t countenancing vernacular translation, as he had with the Bible — German readers had enough legalism and heresy to occupy them without being tempted by Islam.

For their part, Catholics continued to suppress publication of the Quran and to curtail its reading. Bibliander’s print version of the Latin appeared in the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books, and in regional lists of censored publications. However, Catholic apologists weren’t above exploiting Islam for controversial ends. Counter-Reformation polemicists characterized Calvinists as venerating Scripture and the inscrutable, omnipotent divinity they encountered in its pages as “little better than Mohammedanism.” Heresy made for good terms of abuse.

A Tale of Two Qurans

It’s an irony of history, then, that a Catholic Frenchman produced the first vernacular translation of the Quran from the Arabic. Born to a petit noble family in Burgundy, André Du Ryer became interested in Islam not as a theologian, but as a diplomat. An influential patron from a neighboring district, François Savary de Brèves, recognized Du Ryer’s promise early in life and took him on as a client. Brèves himself had served Henri IV as an ambassador to Istanbul and later Rome, and groomed Du Ryer for a career in foreign service. As part of this training, Brèves dispatched his young charge to Egypt to learn Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.

Du Ryer graduated from this apprenticeship to serve out a checkered career in foreign service in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire before retiring to his family’s estate in Marcigny as a man of letters.

What Du Ryer brought back to France was linguistic fluency in Arabic and Turkish, a trove of rare manuscripts (including some prominent tafsīr, or commentaries on the Quran), and an enduring fascination with “the Orient.” More than earlier translators, he cultivated a keen appreciation for Arabic poetics, a sensibility he was to parlay into a best-selling rendering of the Islamic holy book.

The success of Du Ryer’s venture turned on crafting a lively rendering to capture the popular imagination, but also on navigating publishing restrictions of his day. His familiarity with conversational idiom as well as courtly prose imbued his translation with unusual range. Readers found his Quran compulsively readable. Even his detractors conceded this much: he wrote with verve. With some satisfaction, then, Du Ryer could claim, “I’ve made Muhammad speak good French” (j’ay fait parler Mahomet en François).

Convincing skeptical censors of his pious intentions was another matter. Even those who admired his patron, Brèves, harbored suspicions about the elder statesman’s religious sympathies. His protégé would invite the same scrutiny. To allay criticism, Du Ryer dutifully included a preface professing aversion to Islam and an enduring commitment to Roman Catholicism. In his “Address to the Reader,” he designates the Quran “a crude invention of a false prophet” (que ce faux Prophete à inventée assez grossierement). The spread of this infection throughout the world despite facial absurdities should “astonish” (estonné) its audience, he claims, and expose its law as “contemptible” (mesprisable). Far from propagating “the heresy of Muhammad,” Du Ryer claims, his undertaking would bring its self-evident deficiencies to light — a service to the legions of Catholic missionaries abroad in the Islamicate world.

It was a calculated pitch in an era of burgeoning French colonialism. The translation passed muster among both censors and readers. Interestingly, the most prominent missionary of the time, Vincent de Paul, mounted strenuous opposition to Du Ryer’s Quran, but was finally overruled. Curiosity about Islam created pent-up demand, and the retired diplomat’s political connections ensured the publication of his manuscript in 1647 over the objections of the dévots. It became a runaway hit, superseded in French only by Savary’s version in 1783. Imagine a translation of the Tao Te Ching or the Bhagavad Gita reigning atop the New York Times bestseller list, then continuing without a serious rival for almost a century and a half, and you’ll have some appreciation for Du Ryer’s success.

This feat did not pass unnoticed. Only two years after the French Quran came off the presses, it appeared in English translation. This was the edition of Alexander Ross, with the incendiary “Needful Caveat” we encountered earlier.

The translator was a reactionary of the finest vintage. A devoted Episcopalian, Ross had attracted the patronage of Bishop William Laud while serving as a schoolmaster in Southampton. King Charles I would later consecrate Laud as Archbishop of Canterbury, making Ross a client of the most powerful ecclesiastic in England. He became a royal chaplain in 1622, and used this position to establish himself as an arch-conservative polemicist. Ross produced a flurry of tracts denouncing Cartesian rationalism and Spinozism. He was a denier of heliocentric theory. He defended Aristotle against the novelties of Hobbes and Harvey in the realms of politics and physiology.

His fortunes had risen with Laud’s ascent, but when the monarch and his archbishop instigated conflict with parliamentarians and Puritans, Ross’s position as a royal cleric became imperiled. Adversaries had him evicted from his residence at the Isle of Wight. The beneficiary of Laudian patronage was now looking for work.

Ross turned his attention to a preoccupation of his erstwhile patron: religions generally, and Islam in particular. If his later publications are any indication, his distaste for the rise of freethinking may have inspired his interest in world religions. In 1653, he disgorged Pansebeia, Or, View of All Religions in the World, a survey of global religions intended to demonstrate the universality of religious experience and the consequential unnaturalness of atheism. Islam illustrates this claim nicely. “See how vigilant, devout, zealous, even to superstition they are,” lamented Ross, “whereas on the contrary we are very cold, careless, remisse, supine, and luke-warme in the things that so neere concerne our eternall happinesse.” The popularity of Du Ryer’s French Quran may have offered him both the intellectual ammunition and financial incentives he needed to make a name for himself in his changed circumstances.

As in France and Switzerland a century earlier, publishing a translation of the Qur’an proved contentious. Soon after printing commenced, authorities seized copies of the new publication and summoned the publisher and author to court. Although Ross received a favorable ruling, critics soon attacked his enterprise in print. An anonymous controversialist, sometimes identified as the royalist minister Richard Holdsworth, savaged the English Quran and the policy of toleration that licensed its printing. An Answer without a Question, Or, The Late Schismatical Petition for a Diabolicall Toleration of Severall Religions Expounded traffics in a paranoia conservatives stoked throughout the English Civil War. Fears that loosening restrictions on publishing would dissolve Britain in anarchy found receptive audiences. Even Ross’s dependence on a French exemplar aroused suspicion. The pamphlet alleged,

“… all the absurd, wicked Blasphemies, and impossible Fictions which were wont to make that wicked volumn justly odious to the world, are left out in the English translation; for my part, I know not how to Construe it, but as done in too much favour to the Maumetan mis-religion; the pretence of the Error must be this, The English Translation follows the version of a Frenchman, too much it seemed Interested in the Turkish Court, for being employed from the French King as his Agent at Constantinople, was likewise re-employed by the Turk into France, and taking upon him to Translate this Worthy Work as he calls it out of the Arabick, thought (for what ends he knew best) to take the best and leave the worst.”

In the opinion of this pseudonymous pamphleteer, Ross had not been too intolerant, but too lenient toward Islam. The Englishman was now fleecing his countrymen with a meretricious Quran purged of its more objectionable content. Ross’s dependence on Du Ryer (whom the author of the broadside assumes had been conscripted into service by the Ottoman court) meant he was infecting unsuspecting Britons with heresy. Ross’s claim about the self-evident absurdity of the Quran was a dangerous myth. Only the censors could resolve this crisis by cutting off its circulation. With opposition this conspiratorial, the hyperbole of Ross’s “Needful Caveat” makes more sense. Fear and fascination make good marketing tools, and it’s no surprise Ross’s Quran was a success in England — and in North America.

***

Translating and disseminating the Quran in Europe were enterprises fraught with peril. Censors suppressed publication. Authorities made arrests and suspended printing licenses. Critics poured scorn on translations, disparaging their scholarship and protesting them as channels of heresy. Even the close associations with predominately Muslim countries necessary to arrive at reliable translation aroused suspicions of a kind of religious Stockholm Syndrome. For all these reasons, translators included apologias at the beginning of their volumes.

These Quranic prefaces expose the tensions that helped to form the modern world. Sectarian divisions ran deep in early modern Europe, and attitudes toward the Quran became an important proxy for fighting these battles. Interestingly, all parties regarded Islam not as a distinctive religion, but as a self-evident heresy. This taxonomy made it a useful instrument for polemical exchanges. Protestants like Luther charged that Islam was like popery, and favored printing. (Even George Sale’s widely-respected translation of 1784 claims, “The Protestants alone are able to attack the Koran with success.”) Catholics restricted distribution of the Quran, and hurled “Islam” as an epithet to attack Protestants.

While it’s tempting to interpret the appearance of vernacular translations from the Arabic as a triumph of Enlightenment, the prefaces furnish evidence that the myth of progress rests on a foundation of oversimplifications (to say the least). Du Ryer’s translation represents a considerable philological and stylistic achievement, yet marshals familiar tropes in its address to its readers. Ross assailed Islam and freethinking while also laying the foundations for a study of comparative religion, projecting an exotic Other to throw the contours of “true doctrine” into stark relief. In a real sense, the “Modern West” used Islam to develop the  boundaries of its own identity. Attitudes toward translating and printing the Quran helped shape the world we live in now, where nearly two of three Americans view this tradition negatively.

Today, printing restrictions have largely vanished; anyone can choose from a variety of Quran translations at their local bookstore or public library. Yet prejudices anchored in history tend to persist. As the genealogy of these lurid introductions indicates, the rise of a self-conscious modernity in early modern Europe arose at the same time as Islamophobia. This twinned development is no coincidence. Modern discourses about “the West and the Rest” contrast a “civilized” Occident with an “exotic Orient.” As Tomoko Masuzawa has shown, so does the comparative study of world religions. Neither tradition tends to acknowledge how this invention of the Other was crucial to its own self-fashioning. It’s fitting, then, that I discovered the history of Quranic prefaces in a donation bin at school. What gets discarded is often what we most need in order to learn — both about ourselves and others.

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of two scholars of Islam, Jessica Couch and Yunus R. A. Wesley. Their insights, bibliographic suggestions, and encouragement helped make this project possible. In a number of places, they’ll recognize valuable information they supplied. Where I’ve erred, I hope no one will hold them responsible.

Ryan T. Woods earned his doctorate in religion at Emory University in 2013. He teaches at Georgia State University and serves as an Associate Editor for Marginalia Review of Books. His interests range from early Alexandrian Christianity to Cleveland sports.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Introducing the Quran to Europeans: The Orientalism of Translation appeared first on The Revealer.

“I got a call from the hospital saying ‘We have Sam.’ He was my youngest,” Gary told me. “I jumped in my car to rush to my boy without asking why. I called my wife’s cell phone, but it went to voicemail. I dialed my older son’s. Voicemail too. Helicopters were flying above. I wondered how Sam got to the hospital. My mind couldn’t process what was happening.”

Gary and I were sitting in the lobby of my hometown’s Maple Theatre in Birmingham, Michigan, after the screening of Transforming Loss, my best friend Judy Burdick’s poignant 2013 documentary. Desperate for insight about forgiveness, watching six families coping with sudden death, I was riveted by Gary Weinstein’s story. Eight years before, a car accident had killed his 9-year-old son Sam, 12-year-old son Alex, and his wife, a pretty 49-year-old business coach with red curly hair, who had glasses, like him. The widowed jeweler made national news by publicly forgiving the drunk driver who’d killed his family. After the Q & A, I’d introduced myself, anxious to understand how he could forgive something that seemed so unspeakable.

At 55, five foot five, slim and balding, Gary reminded me of the nice, brainy, self-effacing Jewish guys I grew up with (and the one I married). As we sat on a bench, he retraced Tuesday, May 3, 2005, when his wife Judith had picked up their sons from school to take Sam to the orthodontist and Alex to Birmingham Temple for his Bar Mitzvah practice. They were on 12 Mile Road, east of Orchard Lake.

I knew the intersection, near my childhood home. I’d had an accident on that road when I was sixteen, emerging unscathed but destroying my car. I didn’t drink or toke the night of my crash but I’d operated a vehicle high before. Hearing Gary’s enormous loss, I was myopically mortified to think that driver could have been me. I was an addict, “still recovering, never recovered” according to Dr. Winters, the substance abuse specialist I’d recently fallen out with. After a 15-year close connection where he helped me get clean and sober, our estrangement – and my inability to forgive him without an apology – had motivated me to learn more about forgiving. But now, like an inverted bizarro It’s a Wonderful Life, I felt him taunting me with the damage I could have caused, had he not intervened.

“When I reached Beaumont Hospital, they escorted me to a waiting room for relatives,” Gary spoke slowly.

I pictured Beaumont’s medical complex, where my father worked as a physician for decades.

“The doctor said my wife and sons had been in a car crash. They did everything for Sam but he didn’t make it,” Gary said.

“Do you mean no one made it?” I asked.

He confirmed: “No one made it. My kids and wife were gone in an instant. For twenty years Judith was my best friend, co-parent, business advisor, golf partner, fellow traveler. I lost everything. I was alone. My life was over.” He sounded distraught, as if it happened yesterday.

Gary offered details of his family’s final hour: Judith was waiting in the center lane to turn into the parking lot when a GMC Yukon Denali rear-ended her and drove over her Honda Accord, pushing her into oncoming traffic, flattening her and Alex in the front seats. The Denali crashed into a Jaguar in the next lane, then rolled over and struck a Ford Escort. The other drivers escaped physically intact, but pictures of the site showed four vehicles totaled beyond recognition. Judith and Alex were pronounced dead at the scene. Upon impact, Sam was ejected from the car to the parking lot driveway 25 feet away. Two witnesses rushed to his aid. He was breathing, but unconscious. They stayed with him until paramedics sped him to the hospital.

At a news conference that day, the police chief said the driver’s blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit, the highest ever recorded by the precinct. The chief was amazed that Thomas Wellinger, a sales director, could still drive; someone with numbers that high usually ended up in a coma or dead from alcohol poisoning. He was charged with three counts of second-degree murder. Along with his broken neck, Wellinger was suffering with tremors from severe withdrawal. His car’s “black box” showed he’d been going 70 miles an hour and hadn’t tried to hit the brakes before ramming into Gary’s wife. Wellinger was arraigned in his bed at Beaumont, the same hospital where Gary’s youngest son was declared dead.

“I was planning a secret romantic getaway weekend for our 20th anniversary,” Gary revealed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I can’t even imagine…”

“I called my parents and siblings, who dropped everything to run to me.”

“You’re from around here?” I asked.  “Can you tell me about your background?”

“I’m the youngest of six kids. I grew up in a house full of love,” he said. After trouble with reading, they held him back a year. He was a theater nerd at Southfield Lathrup High School, where he found his passion was entertaining people on stage.

I’d also grown up in Southfield and bet my parents knew many of the fifteen hundred people who attended the funeral, including classmates of Gary’s sons, who’d brought stuffed animals and candy. Gary had his wife and children cremated, their remains buried in a memorial garden at their temple. That struck me as unusual. According to the laws of our people, dead bodies were to be returned to the earth as undamaged as possible. Cremated remains were usually not interred at cemeteries for Jews. When Gary said he belonged to Birmingham Temple, I understood. I knew their founder, Rabbi Sherwin Wine.

“Oh I adored Sherwin,” I jumped in.  “He was our close friend’s Rabbi.” I was surprised someone who seemed as mainstream as Gary was a follower of the Midwest’s infamous intellectual gay atheist leader, who didn’t believe in God and ran a Humanist congregation. I wanted to ask if he knew the Greenwalds but caught myself before playing Jewish geography during a talk of Gary’s wife’s death.

He spoke of the slow days following the tragedy. “It was a dark time, devastating, surreal.” He called upon what he’d been taught at The Landmark Forum’s “personal development” workshops he’d taken years before the crash. The “transformative learning” center’s creed was to take complete responsibility for your life and inspire others. Asked to design a possibility of who he could be, Gary described his potential self as full of “aliveness, fun and joy,” traits he wanted to achieve through creativity, participation in the world, and tzedakah, Hebrew for righteousness. He recalled the prophetic instructions to avoid letting past pain define you.

I remembered a classmate who’d referred to EST (Erhard Seminar Training), the earlier program of Landmark’s leader Werner Erhard (born John Rosenberg), as cult-like, while the New York Times had called it  “equal parts Zen Buddhism and Dale Carnegie.” But who was I to judge? I’d found my intense addiction therapy with Dr. Winters mind-blowingly helpful, even as colleagues criticized it as unorthodox. Meanwhile I felt bonded with Gary over our liberal views, psychological searching, and love of the Midwest’s most controversial clergy. I saw why the filmmaker Judy, a psychotherapist who’d been widowed young, featured Gary in her movie. I asked him if Landmark’s focus on taking control of your life and not blaming others meshed or clashed with Birmingham Temple‘s view that we shaped our own destiny without ancient traditions or supernatural authority.

“They mapped very well together,” Gary explained. “They helped me separate my horrible loss from who I was – and still am. Though I loved my family, I was not my family. I was still me. To not have them did not make myself go away.”

***

Discussing the Jewish Humanistic outlook on forgiveness, Gary referred me to Tamara Kolton, the rabbi who’d presided over his wife and sons’ funerals.

“I was close with the family. I was at our summer camp with Alex and Sam,” said Kolton, a vivacious blonde from Michigan. “Here’s what I remember. Right after they died, Judith and Alex’s spirits came to me in the middle of the night.”

“In a dream?” I asked.

“It felt real,” she said. “Alex said he still wanted to have his Bar Mitzvah in the fall. And Judith -who was always encouraging me to go to Landmark – told me to try it. The next day I called my mom to tell her, wondering why Sam hadn’t come too.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that Sam didn’t have any unfinished business with me,” Kolton went on. “I didn’t want to try Landmark. Mom told me I didn’t have to go. ‘You mean you don’t have to obey spirits?’ I asked her, amazed. It was the first time I’d ever been visited by the dead; I wasn’t sure of the rules.”

As a shrinkaholic poet whose mother (née Miriam Goodman) always told me “The Goodman women were witches,” I respected the literary logic of Tamara’s apparitions.

“Did you tell Gary?” I asked.

“Yes! And we had a posthumous Bar Mitzvah for Alex at the Temple. It was joyous, not the least bit maudlin. Gary was a great father.”

I gathered this was real life, not a dream. “Did Rabbi Sherwin Wine know about your spiritual encounter?”

“No way,” she said. “My supernatural powers were too far out – even for him.” She laughed, adding that her clairvoyance and radical feminism led her to leave the temple to strike out on her own.

“From a religious view, were you pushing Gary towards forgiving the drunk driver?”

“No. That was all Gary. If I woke up one morning and my spouse and two kids were gone, I might want to check out, to go be with them. How could you live or forgive the person who did this? Gary is a fucking miracle. I call him ‘a light worker on the planet earth.’ I follow his lead. He’s like my Rabbi.”

***

Not long after the 2005 crash, Gary’s jewelry store was destroyed in an electrical fire. With a settlement from Wellinger’s insurance, he rebuilt his business. Yet calamity kept striking. In 2007, Gary lost his mother, followed by his aunt. Then his older brother died at 52 of a heart attack. Rabbi Sherwin Wine died in a car crash in Morocco. Mourning his wife, sons, mother, brother, and rabbi left Gary too traumatized to return to work for four and a half years. He seemed like Job, a righteous man who suffered excessive loss. Yet he wasn’t self-pitying. He described his grief as “a brick in my pocket. It didn’t go away, though I learned I could handle it. I realized I was strong enough to carry the weight and move on. I had the brick, it didn’t have me.”

He sounded so stoic and matter-of-fact. I questioned whether it was Gary’s spirituality, rationality, illogicality, or psychological tenets that allowed him to be so forgiving.

“When I heard a drunk driver caused the crash and was five times over the legal limit from vodka at 3 in the afternoon, I knew he was very sick,” Gary said. “I didn’t hate Thomas Wellinger, I hated what he did. That’s a distinction I made. Maybe I wasn’t totally free of culpability. Who didn’t I stop from drunk driving in the past?”

In the film, he’d cried reliving what happened. For Gary’s “victim impact statement” he wrote a letter to his wife saying how heartbroken he was to cancel their twentieth anniversary party and how distraught he felt to lose his sons and his legacy. Even harder was losing the contributions his kids might have made to the world. The letter was read at the sentencing trial. Wellinger pleaded no contest.  From the Oakland County Jail, a sober Wellinger sent Gary a handwritten letter filled with remorse and regret.

“So I decided to meet him a year after the crash,” Gary said.

“What did you want?”

He shrugged. “I had no agenda. As a father, the first thing I asked was how his children were. He said he hadn’t seen his son since the crash. The jail didn’t allow minors inside.”

Gary told him, “I haven’t seen mine either.”

“Can you ever forgive me?” Wellinger asked.

“Can you ever forgive yourself?” Gary responded.

Wellinger had been sober for 17 years before relapsing. That day he’d been on his way to see his psychiatrist, having taken an antihistamine and an anxiety drug. Drinking again on medication made it much worse.

I hated to find myself identifying with Wellinger. As an addict, I had needed Dr. Winters to get smoke-drug-and-alcohol free at age 40.  I silently thanked Winters for getting me clean.

Gary was also struck by his similarities to Wellinger, who was three years older than him. “He lived less than a mile away. Since our last names started with WE, we were on the same phone book page. Our kids were in the same school district.” Wellinger had no recollection of the accident or that he’d swerved over lanes. A newspaper said the reason he didn’t use his brakes was because he’d been blacked out for miles.

Gary’s wife, Judith, was a Humanist like her husband, not believing in God or an afterlife. Gary was sure she’d want him to forgive the man who killed her. Since he saw alcoholism as a disease that caused the crash, blaming Wellinger would be like blaming someone for having cancer.

Wellinger was convicted of three counts of second-degree murder, sentenced to 30 years with no chance of parole for 19. He had to pay reparations to Gary.

“He wasn’t in good health,” Gary said. “He wasn’t likely to get out of jail. If he did, I requested that he never be allowed a driver’s license again. So a year after the tragedy, I publicly forgave him.”

It seemed a beautiful gesture. Yet sometimes forgiving came with a cost. Gary shared the messy fallout: Judith’s relatives refused to pardon Wellinger – or Gary. “My forgiveness caused contention. I was basically ex-communicated from her family,” he admitted. “The discord started after the funeral.”

Forgiving a stranger divided his family. Or did they object to the burial decisions he’d made? Both of Judith’s sisters requested some of her remains. “Why aren’t there more ashes?” one asked Gary.

“How many ashes do you need?” he’d replied.

“We had to go back to the temple to dig up ashes so they could get more,” he said.

I wondered if Gary’s reconnection with his ex-girlfriend Eileen Keegan was the hidden source of his sister-in-laws’ ire. Gary originally met Eileen on a senior class trip to Miami when he was 18, along with her father who was the stage manager of shows at the Fountainbleau Hotel. Eileen was Gary’s first love. She flew in for Southfield Lathrup’s senior prom, a memorable night, and they dated for 2 years. Yet at 20, Gary wasn’t ready to marry and they lost touch.

Gary met Judith in 1984. She was out at a local club with friends. “It was the day Marvin Gaye died,” he said. “We danced to ‘Sexual Healing.’ I was too shy to ask her out. Before I left, Judith’s girlfriend said, ‘she wants you to have her number.’ I didn’t have paper. I wrote it on a dollar bill I kept for years,” he recalled with a shy smile.

They wed in 1985 when Gary was 27. After two decades, they were planning their eldest son’s Bar Mitzvah. In Gary’s theater group production The Wonderful World of Oz, Gary was playing the scarecrow. Sam was a Lollipop Kid, Alex a flying monkey. “Alex had good lines. It was an important role,” Gary recalled.

When the musical ended, Gary planned to go to a jewelry show in Las Vegas, where Mr. Keegan lived. Gary called him to reconnect. Mr. Keegan mentioned that his daughter Eileen, now divorced, lived there too, suggesting they all get together. That never happened. After the car crash, Gary cancelled his trip. Eileen phoned her condolences, asking if it would be appropriate to attend the funeral.

“I can use all the friends I can get now,” Gary said, still shocked.

Eileen came, blown away by the support Gary had. Twenty-nine years after their prom date, they wound up rekindling their romance.

“Did having Eileen there help you cope?” I asked.

“Yes, leaning on someone made it easier,” he said. “I believed that love could heal all and Judith would want me to keep living. Forgiving Wellinger seemed critical. If I held onto regrets and rage, it would keep me miserable in the past, away from my future.”

Eileen moved to Michigan for Gary in 2011. With her by his side, he didn’t feel isolated or bitter. “She’s over there.” Gary pointed to a woman with salt-and-pepper hair talking with the film crew. “Eileen’s birthday is June 22, same as Judith’s.” The incredible coincidence seemed like fate.

“Did your psychological beliefs push you towards forgiving too?” I asked.

“Yes, I had a strong sense of who I was, even while mourning,” he said.  “I refused to hate Tom. I hoped to contribute to conversations about how forgiveness and healing could come from traumatic loss. Without my wife and sons, I needed a way to do good in the world. I am not what happened to me.”

“I am what I choose to become,” I jumped in to finish the famous Carl Jung quote.

“No, I would say ‘I choose what I have,’” Gary said, which I took to mean self-acceptance was his ambition at this stage of life.

While you couldn’t erase your suffering, I liked that you could choose what you did with it. Gary launched a charity, offering theater scholarships so other children could enjoy the stage like his sons had. He gave talks to schools on the perils of drinking and driving. He joined the nonprofit Project Forgive. Talking about the film and his speeches on forgiveness, this soft-spoken Southfield man gained stature. His capacity for forgiving astounded me. I couldn’t forgive Dr. Winters for a mistake that had hurt my feelings, while Gary exonerated a man for the triple murder of his family.

Wellinger had explained his alcoholism, begged for forgiveness, was jailed and made financial restitutions. The public, of course, took Gary’s side, punishing the criminal behavior. If a good apology required an acknowledgment of the offense, explanation, remorse, and reparations, Gary received it from Wellinger – and his community. Did getting a perfect apology encourage Gary’s magnanimity? Was it easier to forgive a stranger than someone close to you? If there were an equation for who could forgive, I bet Gary’s happy childhood and easygoing personality helped (while my role model was Sylvia Plath).

Leaving the screening, I bumped into my buddy Andy who’d gone to school with Gary.

“What was he like as a kid?” I probed.

“Gary was the oldest in our grade, the first with a mustache and jean jacket,” Andy said. “We called him Head, for ahead. He was like The Fonz. He’s been acting since sixth grade. He played the rich butcher in Fiddler on the Roof. He was really good.”

Andy forwarded me Gary’s senior photo (cute with shaggy bangs and big ears) and recent Facebook shots of him in costume for his theater ensemble’s The Diary of Anne Frank and How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying). Gary seemed alive, joyous and popular. But was Public Forgiver another role he played? It felt like a piece was missing.

Researching Gary’s case further, I stumbled on a messier coda. The news reported that Wellinger had shown up to work drunk that fatal morning and was sent home. Instead of calling him a cab or having someone drive him, his boss at the Texas-based manufacturer knew Wellinger was getting behind the wheel. Employees confirmed that this boss had scheduled an intervention the week before to confront Wellinger about his alcoholism. Wellinger never showed up. Gary brought a wrongful death civil lawsuit against the company. His lawyers argued gross negligence, since they knew he was driving drunk and willfully looked the other way for six months before the crash. Lawyers proved Wellinger drank 6 ounces of vodka before 10 a.m. A co-worker said that after lunch, Wellinger “came behind me and playfully hit me in the back. He was grinning, in a boxer’s stance. He looked scary, with a wild look in his eyes.” At 2:45 he left for his fateful doctor’s appointment.

Gary was upset that a federal jury ruled in the company’s favor. “I want to thank everyone who supported my effort to seek justice for my family,” Gary stated. “I used part of the insurance settlement for charitable foundations to enrich lives of children in this great country that my wife and sons will never see again. This lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s a call to action to make a corporate giant step up. They should be punished for allowing a drunk employee to be a menace on the road and kill people.”

It was satisfying to hear Gary sound angry, even at a corporation. It made him more human.

“You speak about this so calmly. As an actor, do you compartmentalize?” I asked.

“Maybe I was playing the role of moral outrage, demanding accountability,” he said. “I believed a debt should be paid. At the civil trial, Wellinger’s coworkers admitted they’d lied to cover up his alcoholism. Everyone knew he was always drunk at work. Colleagues cleared out the booze in his refrigerator. The judge claimed this testimony came too late. “There’s a difference between a bad accident and willful deception.” Gary added one stunning new fact: He’d learned that Wellinger’s intervention had been scheduled for May 3, the day of the crash.

“My wife used to say, ‘You need something to look forward to,'” Gary said. “For me that was raising our sons. Suddenly they were gone. Thinking of when she’d joked that I was happiest on the golf course, I set up a golf road trip to play championship courses in all 50 states. Talking about my loss is also therapy. When you repeat the painful details almost daily, they lose their charge.”

Was that why he’d sounded so composed when telling me what he’d been through? I thought of Freud’s repetition compulsion theory, where you subconsciously repeat a traumatic event to master the torment so it’s not controlling you.

“I learned to wait until the 18^th hole to reveal my past,” Gary added.  “If I shared what happened with other golfers too early, people felt uneasy and treated me differently. In a hotel lobby I read about the birth of Tiger Woods’ first child, Sam Alexis. It made me happy to think she has the same name as my boys. Playing golf with a father and his 16-year-old son, Sam’s age, I pictured Sam as a running back on the football team. I imagined Alex in college at Michigan State like his mother.”

This brought me to tears but Gary seemed at peace. His spiritual attitude had created the externals that allowed him to forgive. I wished I could be more like him.

***

Leaving the movie theatre, I went back to my parents’ house where I was staying for the week.  My folks were still up, having coffee at the kitchen table. I felt lucky they were always there for me.

“How was Judy’s documentary?” Mom asked, putting down The Detroit News.

“It was brilliant. And gut-wrenching,” I answered.  “Dad, what were you doing at Beaumont Hospital in 2005?”

“I was the medical director overseeing patient care. Why?”

“I spoke with Gary Weinstein, who was in the film. He rushed there when they tried to save his son after a car crash.”

“That would have been the trauma unit,” Dad said.

“I remember that horrible news,” Mom jumped in. “His wife and little boys were killed by that drunk driving idiot.”

I nodded. “Isn’t it odd that, as a Jew, he picked cremation over burial?” I asked. “I read that, after the crematoriums at concentration camps, it was taboo for us to burn ourselves, even after death.”

“Many Jews don’t feel that way anymore. My cousin Big Jack chose cremation,” my dad, also named Jack, said. (I loved that their rich relative Jack on Dad’s side generations ago led his family to name their kids Big Jack, Little Jack, Jacob, Yaakov in Hebrew, Yonkel in Yiddish, and Jacqueline).

“It’s cheaper,” Mom said. “Cremation is only about $1,500. A burial could be $15,000. The maintenance can be expensive. Not that many mourners still visit gravesites.”

She was right. I felt guilty we’d hardly visited my husband’s father at his Westchester cemetery.

“Money’s not the only reason,” Dad interrupted.  “It’s because it gives the mourners more choices and control. Remember our neighbor Jim who loved trains? After he passed away, his wife spread his ashes at the Pontiac railroad tracks. And when Big Jack died, his wife wanted him closer. You can take the remains home with you in an urn, to keep your loved one nearby.”

Since when was my father the romantic?

I assumed only Reform or Humanistic rabbis like Gary’s would accept cremation. Dad surprised me by saying our Conservative rabbi, Joseph Krakoff, compromised. While trying to discourage a member of their synagogue from being cremated, Krakoff made sure their cemetery had a separate section for it. Burying at least the remnants of the body was better than scattering them in the wind, adhering closer to the biblical mandates to bury the dead, and the Genesis line, “From dust you came, to dust you will return.”

“The only caveat is that you can’t reserve cremation space in advance,” my father added.

“Why not?”

“You know rabbis, they keep trying to talk you into doing it their way until the last second,” he said, laughing.

“Dad, one more question,” I said.  “The driver who crashed into Gary’s family had a blood alcohol level five times the legal limit, the equivalent of 22 vodka shots. His black box showed he was driving way over the speed limit and never even hit his brakes. The paper said he’d been blacked out for miles while still driving. Is that possible?”

“He could have been so drunk he was in and out of consciousness. What happened to him?” Dad asked.

“Broken neck, but he survived,” I reported. “He got 19 to 30 years in jail.”

“Good,” said my father, unforgiving.

Susan Shapiro, an award-winning NYU and New School professor, is the bestselling author/coauthor of 12 books her family hates, including Five Men Who Broke My Heart, Lighting Up, The Bosnia List and The Byline Bible (all available from Penguin Random House). This is from her memoir-in-progress The Forgiveness Tour: How to Find The Perfect Apology. Follow her on Twitter at @susanshapironet and on Instagram at @profsue123.

***

Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Forgiving the Unforgivable appeared first on The Revealer.

Recently, a friend of mine—a pragmatic woman, fiercely intelligent and well-respected in her field—was at an academic cocktail party and made a pessimistic comment about the likelihood of stopping climate change. Someone to her right frowned in dismay and gestured at a pregnant woman in their circle. “How can you say that?!  And with new life right here.”

My friend was startled but no one else remarked on the strangeness of a knee-jerk appeal to the “angel of the house” at a leftist academic gathering in the Year of Our Lord 2019. Instead, little by little, the conversational tide resumed, washing away the momentary unpleasantness of her observation.

It is not, in the end, so surprising that someone who didn’t want to entertain troublesome thoughts might duck and weave behind the sanctity of motherhood. It’s a sturdy enough shield, if a little time battered, and we seem to be in a mood to think of our catastrophes in freighted symbolic terms. Greta Thunberg has emerged like some child-prophetess spun out of Homeric hexameter to warn the decaying empire of its doom. The best novel of the past few years, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, is a half-parable where the action is stretched to the unnerving, inhuman timeframe of a tree. Meanwhile, the most successful climate-change book of recent memory, David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth, is a litany of world-destroying disasters that began as a viral article in New York Magazine. 

After thirty years or so of throat clearing, we have all begun to settle in for a good jeremiad. At first tentatively, but now with increasing conviction, our op-eds have begun to thunder warnings about our watery doom and the coming years when the earth will reject our seeds. The apocalypse has ceased being an object of entertainment in movies about asteroids, pandemics, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes, aliens, and zombies and become a topic of elevator chitchat. (Or perhaps merely my elevator’s chitchat.) At times, the only real question left seems when one of these clean-cut thirty-something men who love to tell me that it’s worse than I imagine will muster up enough imagination to tap into the apocalyptic roots of our very Christian nation and begin a commune or a telethon—whatever strikes them first.

I am being flippant but not entirely. It really wouldn’t be surprising if Paul’s cry to give up our lives, our goods, our earthly attachments in expectation of the apocalypse were taken up again. In fact, it seems so very natural to me that we might fall back on two thousand years of dreaming about the lives we will slough off when the new age arrives, that I sometimes feel bewildered that everyone takes it so calmly when our secular prophets denounce the efforts to change our tiny, insignificant lives—when they preach that nothing we, as individuals, can do will matter. And not just that nothing we do, short of a revolution, will matter but that all of the efforts to compost, to thrift, to limit driving are ridiculous, pompous, and wrong.

It’s a puzzle and one that needs the body of that poor woman at the cocktail party to fill in.

But first, a case study.

***

Roy Scranton doesn’t look like much of a wild-eyed prophet in any photos I have seen of him. Mild-eyed, blond, and thoughtful with neat wire-rimmed glasses, he looks very much like what he is now (an academic), a little like what he was growing up (a boy from rural Oregon), and not at all like what he was in the years that made him a writer (a soldier).

But it was his authority as a soldier that gave Scranton an entry into the literary world, first as a novelist and then, more securely, as a commentator on climate change. His previous book, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, began as a New York Times editorial, artfully weaving together his conviction that Western civilization is doomed with his time in Iraq, learning to accept his mortality. We’re Doomed, Now What? is his follow-up book, nominally meant to answer the title question.

There’s much to admire in the book. Scranton’s chief virtue might be that he’s not worried about making himself sound likable. He frankly admits that he is a bad environmentalist, one who drives cars and eats meat. He challenges the “‘can do’ Yankee grit,” which leads so many to reject the idea that something is outside of our control as blasphemy. He points out with unpitying logic that historical precedent guarantees nothing about the future. Most importantly, he said back in 2013—years before the IPCC report with its famous “thirteen years” number began finally, finally injecting some urgency into the conversation around climate change—that, “The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.”  In his new book, he puts the problem even more bluntly:

“There is little reason to presume that we’ll be able to slow down global warming before we pass a tipping point. We’ve already exceeded 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures and there’s more warming baked in. The West Antarctic ice sheet is collapsing, Greenland is melting, permafrost across the world is liquifying, and methane has been detected leaking from sea floors and Siberian craters: it’s probably already too late to stop these feedbacks, which means it’s probably already too late to stop apocalyptic planetary warming.”

The first sense that something is off came as I tried to fit this bleak summary in with the title of his book and realized I didn’t actually know what Scranton considers doomed. The human species? All of the species? The nation state? Late stage capitalism? What does the death of a civilization mean?  The end of Amazon same-day deliveries or the end of electricity and antibiotics? Is it just that we won’t have McMansions or that we’ll be living in underground bunkers wearing animal pelts? Or is it that we, or maybe our grandchildren, will quite simply die?

Tropical Storm Harvey (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Still, these confusions, taken by themselves, wouldn’t be much of a problem. Even if he is unclear, possibly even in his own thoughts, about what is doomed, he knows who and what doomed us. Capitalism? Of course, but also the whole rancid culture of technocratic elitists who only see value in action insofar as it produces a measurable result. More than anything, he wants the end of the hubristic belief that we can think or plan or spend our ways to salvation. He is one of those classic critics of modernity I read in college, a new Heidegger railing against the reduction of the world to resources for us to use, his untimely meditations made timely by our careening rush toward destruction. As such, what he ultimately wants us to do is stop. He even says as much in his penultimate essay, “What is Thinking Good For?”  “The thinker, that is to say, is an interrupter: not merely a node or amplifier within social circuits, but a place of stillness. An active pause. A total ecstatic absorption in the now.” For my part, I hear echoes of Pablo Neruda:

“If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

and of threatening ourselves with death.”

If he had written this book a year or two later, his great target might have been the businesses currently scouring the planet looking to make money by building private firefighting companies in California, planting trees in Nigeria, or speculating in Sudanese land in advance of a civil war. Instead, his attention became occupied with something else altogether. He became a father.

He knows this decision requires, at minimum, explanation.

He doesn’t exactly have an explanation—or maybe he does, which is that he once was a good pessimist and then the meaty, mammalian part of his brain took over and flooded him with a desire for a tiny pink child with fingernails like seashells who he could love and mourn and comfort when she cried. But the terrible humanity of that fact is swaddled in one of the more pernicious arguments circulating today—the idea that changing individual behavior is not only pointless but naive.

Scranton is too smart to put the argument in exactly those terms. His actual claim is more nuanced. He begins by summarizing a 2017 letter by Seth Wynes, a geographer, and Kimberly Nicholas, an activist, arguing that the most effective things any one of us can do to shrink our carbon footprint is to go vegan, stop flying, give up cars, and have one fewer children. “The real problem with this proposal,” Scranton notes, isn’t with the idea of teaching abstention and thrift, which is all well and good, but rather with the social model their recommendations rely on. Contra Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices, but a complex recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies which then subtly change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible, all the while being disrupted and nudged and warped by countless internal and external drivers, including environment factors such as global warming, material and social innovation, and the occasional widespread panic. Which is just to say we are not free to decide how to live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from options, not ex nihilo.

He then immediately starts ticking off all the reasons why Wynes and Nicholas demand the impossible. Veganism is “a sacrifice I’m reluctant to make, despite the moral and economic costs of factory farming, because I know, through my years as a vegetarian, that totally foregoing meat leaves me depressed and lethargic.” Giving up flying and driving would be fine, if he hadn’t moved to a city built for cars with a completely inadequate public transit system, which happened to be a thousand miles away from family. “No car? No job. No flying? No Thanksgiving with the family.” “As for not having a child, of course nobody needs to have children. It just happens to be the strongest drive humans have.” No, he concludes, “To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean…choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future.”

Some of this argument is simply correct. Yes, this is a problem that is much bigger than my individual choice to give up flying. Some of it is sympathetic enough—we have abysmal infrastructure in most areas of the country and giving up a car truly wouldn’t be possible for most people. Some of it relies on unkind misreadings. Even in Scranton’s own account, Wynes and Nicholas don’t insist that people should give up having children altogether, merely that they should have one fewer. Some of it just sounds like whining. (Granted these ideals might not be completely realizable by Scranton or many others, why not try to do better? Why not carpool or have fewer but longer visits home during a time of years when it might be possible to travel by train rather than plane? We’re not all called to be monks, but that doesn’t mean the only other choice is to be Henry VIII.)

Even on Scranton’s own terms, it is strange to be so hostile to Wynes and Nicholas. We may not be able to choose how to live ex nihilo, but by making a compelling moral and pragmatic case for living more sustainably, aren’t people like Wynes and Nicholas expanding the range of possible lifestyles? Would it be better if they remained silent and ceded all input into our “complex recursive dynamic” to Amazon and Exxon? Are the choices they recommend really unprecedented within our current society? 375 million people globally are already vegetarian, according to a quick Google search, and by only having one child Scranton is already fulfilling the call to have fewer children. Those don’t seem like particularly novel ways to live. Mostly, though, the argument falls apart because the main point—there are countless realities that shape the possibility and impact of individual choices—in no way entails the conclusion—therefore what Wynes and Nicholas ask is an impossible demand to reimagine life from scratch.

But that is not Scranton’s only argument against the demand to change his life. His more visceral objection is against anyone who might imagine that buying eco-friendly products or thrifting or composting or carpooling could ever be enough to absolve herself of guilt. He dislikes “Yankee can-do grit” but he hates anyone who claims moral purity. Based on Wynes and Nicholas’s argument, he concludes, “The only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint.”

Almost entre parenthèses, I have to note that this argument is simply mathematically wrong. Imagine you are an average American, producing 20 metric tons of CO2 per year. Now, imagine you successfully shrink your annual carbon footprint in half by some combination of living in an apartment instead of a single-family home, carpooling, limiting or eliminating flights, installing solar panels, buying used when possible, reducing your consumption, reducing food waste, eating less meat—all of the decisions Scranton derides, in short. You then get a half dozen of your closest friends to shave two tons off of their own carbon output each, perhaps by carpooling with them, or by encouraging them to thrift, or by swapping vegetarian recipes. Is your net carbon footprint positive or negative?  Well, there are now twelve fewer metric tons of carbon being spewed into the air each year because of your influence. You only produce ten tons. The carbon output attributable to you is now negative. The moral response, mathematically, is not to kill yourself; it’s to influence others to live more sustainably.

But here is the bigger problem with this claim: No one is talking about moral purity except for him. Somehow, bewilderingly, we have moved from an argument about the efficacy of individual change, to an argument about the moral purity of the people recommending individual change. It is easy enough to imagine why Roy Scranton, the person, makes this leap. Perhaps he is defensive about having a daughter, given his very public insistence that we’re doomed, and wants to fend off the accusations that he’s a hypocrite by taking aim at the idea that anyone is morally pure when it comes to climate change. Whatever the reason, he ends his attack on the whole notion of moral purity with a moment of tremendous contempt, as he writes, “While you could, if you had the will for it, go off the grid, your subsistence farm would still be a tiny holocaust for the pests who would seek to live off of your bounty, your land deed would still need to be recognized by the state, and you would almost certainly need to enslave animals, if not for food and material such as milk, leather and bone, then at least for labor.”

What to make of this startlingly ungenerous riposte? Why does Scranton not just disagree with these people but despise them? Telling imaginary interlocutors to go kill themselves if they’re so worried about their moral purity is a child’s response or a troll’s, not a serious thinker’s. Taunting activists with the specter of murdered insects is hardly much better. Somehow, a type of bullying machismo has taken over the essay. Scranton the thinker of sad truths has become Scranton the Stoic, who passionately hates the whole world of environmentalists who advocate thrifting, composting, and reducing consumption. The soldier hates those who play out their politics in the domestic sphere.

And those targets? They are overwhelmingly women.

Scranton doesn’t say as much; his ostensible foils are Wyne and Nicholas. But to anyone remotely conversant with environmentalism in America, the most visible advocates of changing our consumption patterns are the largely twenty- and thirty-something white women of the zero waste movement. (Mind you, I say most visible, not only.) They run blogs called things like “Trash is for Tossers,” “Litterless,” and “Going Zero Waste.” For those interested in fashion, there are My Green Closet and Project 333 advocating capsule wardrobes, and a host of bloggers following Livia Firth’s challenge to buy only clothing that will get 30 wears. There are women writing cookbooks to reduce food waste, like Lindsay Jean-Hard, who runs a column in Food 52 called “Cooking with Scraps” and a seemingly endless number of young women on Reddit’s ZeroWaste swapping tips about how to sew reusable menstrual pads.

And, yes, sometimes they are thin, wealthy white women with luminous skin, shilling impossibly expensive linen dresses, and flaunting photos of how all their trash for a year fits in a mason jar, but just as often they are debating corporate tactics of “greenwashing” products to make them seem more sustainable, lamenting the impossibility of real change within a capitalist system that produces much of its waste upstream of the consumer, and acknowledging the degree of economic privilege necessary to go zero waste.

Greta Thunberg

Since we tend not to imagine young women as political agents, especially young women on Instagram, nothing is easier than to dismiss their collective body of work as “lifestyle blogs” and treat their point that consumption choices matter as frivolous or ill-conceived. But an argument is not wrong simply because it is espoused by young women on Instagram, any more than the arguments in favor of gun control have no validity because their most prominent activists are the Parkland teenagers, or climate change can be safely ignored because Greta Thunberg is young, autistic, and Scandinavian. It is bad faith to assume every person recommending that we fly less or drive less or buy used or, for Heaven’s sake, ratchet down our insane overconsumption at least a little, is some knock-kneed idiot from Park Slope clutching her Swedish dishcloth as if that were enough to mop up Miami. It might be expedient to pretend that is the case but it is not honest.

None of this means that Roy Scranton is personally a misogynist. He might be a perfectly lovely person, completely oblivious to the gender implications of dismissing people who advocate lifestyle change as fantasists who go faint at the idea of killing insects on their off-grid farms. Whatever he means to say, though, he is voicing an argument that is powered by misogynistic stereotypes.

I can hear the objections. “The reason we feel so much disdain for these people is that they keep pushing the idea that individual choices will be sufficient to solve the crisis, when really it will take systemic change—quite possibly even revolution and the overthrow of capitalism as we know it.” But there is no reason a commitment to individual change can’t co-exist with the belief that the only thing that will really save us is mass, governmental, revolutionary change.

Scranton’s insistence that individual action is pointless rests on a fairly common misunderstanding about the relationship between individual action and systemic problems. I would hazard that most academics reading this piece more or less agree that racism is a systemic problem, with deep roots in violent histories, slavery, unjust laws, decades of redlining, school segregation, and ingrained habits, among others. I would also hazard that most would agree that white individuals simply being nice to black individuals won’t fix the problem. Yet no one would think for a nano-second that white people now have license to sling around the “n” word because their individual actions don’t matter. Why? Because we intuitively understand that the presence of enormous forces, shaping us and existing far outside of our control, doesn’t actually absolve us of the responsibility to behave ethically in the here-and-now. Your actions in everyday life are an expression of your values and if you don’t hold fast to your values when they are inconvenient or your virtue is unrewarded then you don’t hold them at all.

The only way it makes sense to disregard individual action is if climate change is an entirely pragmatic matter that really can only be solved on a national and international level. If buying and trashing a new wardrobe from Zara every season is fine except for the small detail that it is unsustainable, if melting ice sheets in Greenland only bother us because they one day will make Miami uninhabitable, if the mass extinction of other species only matters because it might one day affect our crops, if, in short, the planet has no value except insofar as it sustains human life, then we can gaily chuck our litter straight into the Grand Canyon and—why not?!—bulldoze all of Brazil to raise a few more cows for our hamburgers. So long as we can still hole up in our air conditioned apartments and save ourselves the worst inconveniences of the heat, why worry?

The thing is that Scranton does care, by his own admission. He ends the book for a call to “live ethically in a broken world,” and with a startlingly earnest paean to nature. So if, like Scranton, we claim to “believe in the first pink cherry blossoms bursting and falling in the spring…squirrels chasing each other through maple branches, toads mating by the river, herons nesting in the bogs, and knobby-kneed fawns bounding through open meadows,” for non-instrumental reasons, we ought to do the little things as an expression of that care. I think of it this way. One day my husband asked me please not to leave the sponge in the sink but to put it on the counter where it could dry out. Now, does it really matter where the sponge goes?  Is the location of the sponge even within the top 100 things that bother my husband? Will putting the sponge away materially alter his life or destroy our relationship?  Will it shield him from job stress or prevent him from being hit by a bus tomorrow or dying at one hundred in his sleep? Of course not. We’re all maggot food on a rapidly heating planet orbiting a star that will engulf our planet in another five billion years, give or take. Nothing we do matters, from the long view, least of all what I do with the stupid sponge. But what did I do? I started putting the sponge on the counter. Not because I thought this one single action made the slightest bit of difference to anything, even our marriage (which has survived just fine the few times I have forgotten) but because I love my husband and didn’t want to keep doing something that made his life worse, no matter how trivial. That is the point Scranton misses when he pooh-poohs the efficacy of driving less, of flying less, of giving up steak. It’s not about saving the world through consumption choices alone. It’s about living as if he actually gave a damn about the planet he built a career on eulogizing. It’s about enacting his self-professed regard for the cherry blossoms, even if the planet explodes tomorrow.

***

If I have focused on Scranton, it is because I think he gets something right amid everything else he gets wrong. Our infinite American faith in our ability to solve anything is starting to crumble and we really do need to imagine how to live in a world where there are monstrous injustices of our own making that we have no power to fix. That is where I think his courage lies. Not in telling us that we’re doomed—every two-bit director with zombie prosthetics has been telling us that for the last two decades—but in telling us that we have created some problems that are too big and tangled and tragic to ever make whole. And then, again, in telling us that we need to learn how to live with those failings with humility, rather than making them worse.

I disagree with Scranton about what that way of living with the unfixable looks like. I think he creates adversaries where he ought to see allies and in doing so finds himself complicit in a dark turn in American politics, where sustainability has become coded as women’s work and Stoic resignation as a man’s response. But even in his prickliness, he asks the right questions. How can we live as pessimists but not nihilists? How do we face the possibility of the worst without taking refuge in the idea that nothing matters? How do we keep that reflexive sense of the man at that cocktail party that life is precious, without using the sanctity of that life to deflect questions we had rather not entertain? How do we live every day with the knowledge we have done the unforgivable?

This question matters—and I will stop here because I feel myself slipping perilously close to prophecy, which hardly sits better on a thirty-something white lady than a thirty-something man—because the planet isn’t the only thing we’ve broken so badly it is hard to imagine a repair. What can make politics feel so tragic and hopeless is that most of our social ills feel impossible to set right. It’s not just about believing in the first pink cherry blossoms, which after all will fade and fall silently no matter what we do; it’s about believing in people who are rightfully furious about the whole, long brutal course of history and may never, never forgive a single moment of it.

Liane Carlson is the former Henry R. Luce Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. She lives in NYC, where she is writing a book tentatively titled Against Forgiveness. Her first book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is available from Columbia University Press.

The post The Apocalypticists Are Disappointing appeared first on The Revealer.

Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to the new issue of the Revealer and my first as Editor! I step into this role following three venerable predecessors. The Revealer began in 2003 at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. The founding Editor, Jeff Sharlet, stayed with the publication five years and went on to become a bestselling author. His book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, is now the focus of a Netflix documentary series. The Revealer’s second Editor, Ann Neumann, also became a successful writer whose book, The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America, achieved widespread critical praise. And, Kali Handelman, who served as the magazine’s Editor from 2013-2019, has established herself as a sought-after editor and writing coach. She is staying with the Revealer as a Contributing Editor.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I come to the Revealer as an expert on religion and LGBTQ politics. My first book, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics, came out earlier this year from Oxford University Press. While my writing focuses on LGBTQ issues, the Revealer will continue its broad focus on religion throughout the world.

You can count on the same high-quality writing about religion you’ve come to expect from the Revealer. Our writers are a mix of scholars, journalists, and freelancers who have unique and illuminating things to say about religion. This issue is no exception. In it, Liane Carlson reflects on current debates about the climate crisis and what it means to live with a sense of doom. Susan Shapiro writes about her journey toward forgiveness by meeting a man who forgave the drunk driver who killed his wife and two children. Ryan Woods explores the complicated history of translating the Qu’ran into European languages, which promoted anti-Islamic attitudes. Stephanie Brehm shares an excerpt from her book about Stephen Colbert’s Catholicism and how he has influenced American Catholic practices. And photojournalist Pete Kiehart offers images and stories from his time observing cemetery rituals in the Eastern European country of Georgia.

We have great things planned for the Revealer. I am especially excited about the magazine’s first themed special issue in March 2020: “Religion and Sex Abuse: Within and Beyond the Catholic Church.” Look for more innovations in the coming months.

In a world of fast-paced headlines and quick hot-takes, the Revealer offers monthly nuanced perspectives and a broader picture of religion’s place in the world and people’s lives. Whether you are new to the Revealer or a consistent reader for several years, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.

The post Editor’s Welcome Letter appeared first on The Revealer.