Gif by James Kerr

We’ve been busy around here lately, so our roundup this week is short, if not very sweet.

First up, reading the news, it can be hard to keep in mind, but let’s take a minute or two to remember what the FBI is about, yeah?

Lerone A. Martin wrote about how New Documents Reveal How the FBI Deployed a Televangelist to Discredit Martin Luther King in Religion & Politics

In an FBI memo following the historic March on Washington, the FBI labeled King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country” and the nation’s top domestic security risk. The bureau had no evidence that King was a communist; in fact, the FBI concluded King and the civil rights movement he led were too religious to be influenced by communism. Contrary to the evidence, though, Hoover persisted in believing King had fallen under the influence of godless communism. King was leading the nation “in a form of racial revolution,” so he had to be stopped. On the same day the memo was drafted, the FBI sought Michaux’s help. The evangelist immediately launched a coordinated public critique against King and the gospel the civil rights minister preached. Michaux preached a radio sermon from the nation’s capital on CBS Standard and FM radio affiliates. The homily opposed the March on Washington and King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. Michaux used the Lord’s Prayer from the Gospel of Luke as his sermon text, proclaiming that King’s dream of racial equality would only materialize when God’s rule was established in the hearts of men. “Yes, righteousness will flow like a mighty stream,” Michaux said, quoting King. However, he qualified, it would only happen “when the kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ—but not until then according to God’s Word.” Advocating for legislative change was futile, according to Michaux; changing hearts was the only way to bring about racial equality. He closed the sermon by telling his listeners to cease marching and simply “seek to do the will of God and be blessed.” It was one thing to hear this from white evangelists like Billy Graham, but it was a weightier matter to hear it from a pioneering black cleric.

(Getty/Polaris/Lawrence Schiller)

And Alia Malek reported on The FBI’s ‘Vulgar Betrayal’ of Muslim Americans forNYR Daily

Boundaoui pieces together the truth that, indeed, her small neighborhood was the target of a secret FBI counterterrorism probe codenamed Operation Vulgar Betrayal, led by a particularly zealous FBI agent. But she still doesn’t know many of the specifics, including why the probe was opened and whether it ever ended. But while she connects Vulgar Betrayal to a long history of FBI surveillance of communities of color, the aim of the film is not a comprehensive look at this history or even that of US surveillance of Arab and Muslim Americans, which predates September 11 by decades. It could hardly be Boundaoui’s responsibility to address, in 86 minutes, all the lacunae in that story.

Instead, in Boundaoui’s film, she offers up herself and her charismatic siblings and mother as a way to draw attention to what was done to people who are not the menacing, terrorist sympathizers of the public imagination—a family that appears, in fact, utterly normal. In addition to investigating Vulgar Betrayal, Boundaoui burdens herself with trying to correct how many Americans perceive American Muslims: breezy scenes of her and her friends roller-skating, eating cupcakes, and taking selfies at joyous Eid celebrations and picnics seem consciously included, an indictment more of how unfairly these communities have generally been portrayed. 

A still showing Assia
Boundaoui hanging up FBI documents, from The Feeling of Being Watched, 2018

While we’re on the subject, also have a look at the editors of The Immanent Frame on  The Muslim Ban and Academia

The Muslim Ban—in its current iteration as Proclamation 9645 and in its earlier forms—is certainly an egregious attack on the values of our academic communities, but it is not a novel one. Restrictions on scholarship and scholars tied to immigration policy targeting Muslims as threats to national security, as well as to sanctions on Muslim-majority countries uncooperative with US foreign policy interests, have had an enduring presence in recent US history. From interrogations at the United States border faced by Muslim scholars attending workshops and conferences, to outright denials of visas to travel to the United States, to the inordinate amount of red tape at the Office of Foreign Assets Control in order to carry research funds to sanctioned countries, a culture of intimidation has deeply damaged the United States’ place as a forum for free academic inquiry and exchange.

SherAli Tareen interviewed Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst about her book Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad for The New Book Network.  Morgenstein Fuerst was one of our fantastic panelists at the event, “Being Brown: Race, Religion and Violence in Trump’s America,” held last month at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media and organized by Simran Jeet Singh (interviewed in this month’s issue). You can watch a video of the event here.

In her fascinating and path paving new book, Indian Muslim Minorities and the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels and Jihad (I. B. Tauris, 2017), Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont reorients our understanding of the 1857 rebellion in India, while offering a nuanced theorization of religion, religious identity, and questions of violence. The title of this book announces the key terms and conceptual pillars that sustain it throughout: religion, rebels, and jihad. The brilliance of this book lies in the way it raises and addresses a number of critical questions regarding memory, formations of religious identity, and conceptions of religion as a category through the close and energetic reading of a single event. This book is intellectual history at its fiercest. Nimbly written, it will also make an excellent text for undergraduate and graduate seminars.

Out of the Indian past and into the Indian present: Cards Against Sanskaar: An Indian version of Cards Against Humanity is here to offend you by Manali Shah for the Hindustan Times.

In a country where people are quick to claim hurt sentiments, such a game is sure to ruffle a few feathers. But Das and her friends are ready to go all in. “While writing the cards, at times, we did think whether something was very offensive, and if we should shy away from mentioning names of companies and individuals. But the entire appeal of Cards Against Sanskaar is that nobody is spared.” They have also lawyered up, should trouble arise.

And while we’re on the subject of repugnant ideology, Pankaj Mishra wrote about Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism by Pankaj Mishra for the NYR Daily

Peterson may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage. But it is worth remembering that Jung recklessly generalized about the superior “Aryan soul” and the inferior “Jewish psyche” and was initially sympathetic to the Nazis. Mircea Eliade was a devotee of Romania’s fascistic Iron Guard. Campbell’s loathing of “Marxist” academics at his college concealed a virulent loathing of Jews and blacks. Solzhenitsyn, Peterson’s revered mentor, was a zealous Russian expansionist, who denounced Ukraine’s independence and hailed Vladimir Putin as the right man to lead Russia’s overdue regeneration.

Need a vacation? Check out Where the Amish Go on Vacation by Alice Gregory with photography by Dina Litovsky for the New Yorker

Each winter, for close to a century now, hundreds of Amish and Mennonite families have travelled from their homes in icy quarters of the U.S. and Canada to Pinecraft, a small, sunny neighborhood in Sarasota, Florida. Arriving on chartered buses specializing in the transportation of “Plain people” from areas such as Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Holmes County, Ohio, they rent modest bungalows and stay for weeks, or sometimes months, at a time. It’s vacation. For many, it’s the one time of the year that they spend with people from communities other than their own.

The nightly women’s volleyball game is the community’s main spectacle.

And you might as well bring a book with you on your trip. Maybe  Todd Berzon’s Classifying Christians  reviewed by Jennifer Barry in the Marginalia Review of Books. (You can read an excerpt here.)

The current political climate in the United States attests to an increasingly potent form of social control through categorization, labeling, and attempts to pack neatly groups of people into one category or another. Fear mongers and political pundits attempt to do this by defining America against a negative, against what they claim it is not. These types of ethnographic divisions and cultural boundary markers are familiar, and they are increasingly divisive. Scholars of early Christianity are trained to keep an eye out for this type of politically expedient boundary-marking because early Christianity is precisely a movement that defined itself against what it is not, at least in the eyes of a few late ancient pundits. Heresiologists— early Christian writers who call attention to and sort out “heretics” who lead Christians astray through willful error — remain an integral part of an early Christian narrative. Texts produced by heresiologists have long functioned as a field guide for identifying, sorting, and excluding deviant forms of Christianity. In the process, these same men who try to preserve one form of Christianity have also served as gateways to understanding its alternate forms.

In his recent monograph, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, Todd Berzon performs a clever ethnographic study of the making and enforcing of Christian orthodoxy through heresiological literature. In this book, he assembles a familiar cast of characters such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, and Augustine of Hippo – familiar but perhaps not exhausted sources for understanding new insights about the history of Christian orthodoxy.

Or you could check out books by Leslie Jamison and Jamie Quatro in conversation here About Parenting, Faith, and Intoxication at Literary Hub. 

When the intersection between illicit sex and religion reared its head again, I realized that it, too, was a topic I was going to have to plumb in all of its terrifying depths. Terrifying, in part, because of the current socio-political moment. It’s a bizarre time to be writing about anything related to religious thought, with so many “Christians” supporting the administration of an insane racist misogynist. The far-right has hijacked the language, eradicated all the nuance… really, they’ve all but irreparably damaged what is beautiful and historically compelling about the Judeo-Christian faith. Even simple words like “prayer” have been sullied by the “our prayers are with the victims and their families” posts after yet another mass shooting. “Prayers” from officials who cow to the NRA and won’t enact gun control legislation.

While the tendency might be to avoid literature that still engages with faith, I believe the current moment is a crucial one in literary history for artists of faith who don’t identify with the far-right, who recognize complexity and doubt as the marks of spiritual viability. We must become voices crying in the wilderness of contemporary American evangelicalism (though I hate to use that lovely 1530s word in its tainted context): but that isn’t Christianity. That is a perversion of it. Now more than ever, artists across mediums must commit to forging a new language for the ineffable. How do I tell this story without employing the very words that have been used to pervert it?

And Sasha Von Oldershausen‘s piece on ‘Franny and Zooey’ in Iran for The Paris Review. 

In classic Iranian New Wave fashion, Mehrjui’s visual retelling of Salinger’s stories is allegorical and poetic. He uses symbolism to translate the incisive and dialogue-heavy characterizations for which Salinger is famous. Due to the Islamic regime’s rules about the expression of modesty, Mehrjui could not shoot his Zooey character steeped in a bathtub, as he appears in Salinger’s work, and so the director explores the symbolic potential of water and submersion elsewhere. The film opens with a waterlogged dream sequence in which Pari, the Iranian Franny, is forced underwater by a band of her classmates. In the book, Franny only mentions the dream in passing. In the film, it sets the tone, and the perpetual symbol of murky water recurs throughout.

ansa – salinger – Una foto di J. D. Salinger, l’autore del Giovane Holden in una foto di archivio. ansa

But do beware of who’s paying for your trip; Sarah Seltzer reports on Birthright Israel and #MeToo  for Jewish Currents

As the #MeToo movement unfolded, Jewish Currents spoke with more than 50 Birthright Israel participants and staffers about their experiences with the often-fraught sexual and gender dynamics on the trips, uncovering the case above along with eight other alleged incidents of sexual misconduct ranging from verbal harassment to assault. The participants and staffers told us about a volatile mix of sex and alcohol that, as on college campuses, has the potential to turn toxic. In the cases of some incidents recounted to us, it did.

But many spoke of something more: a pervasive environment of sexual pressure that encourages Jews to meet, marry, and, someday, procreate with other Jews while being awed by the beauty and culture of Israel. This expectation is communicated before the trip even begins by official social media, and on the trips is expressed most directly around American women and Israeli soldiers.

Lastly, you know we’re suckers for a good essay on Internet witches, and Emma Gray Ellis‘ latest in Wired,  Witches, Frog-Gods, and the Deepening Schism of Internet Religions, is definitely a good one.

The internet giving birth to new religions, or new versions of existing religions, is just another sign of it becoming a real place. But what ties Witchblr and the Cult of Kek together, despite their diametrically opposed viewpoints, is that each is dissatisfied with the real world and their inability to change those circumstances, and thus each has created its own sheltering cosmology. Followers of both send violent or violence-connoting images to their enemies (who are, at least in part, each other). And because each seems to comprise a mix of ironic and genuine believers—and because the internet is overrun with that nihilistic, post-truth “lol nothing matters” point of view right now—each has the potential to be a little dangerous. And that makes them hard to know what do with.

And that’s all for this month. See you again soon!

The post In the News: From Witchblr to Salinger appeared first on The Revealer.

Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

Filmed on a budget of $103 million, A Wrinkle in Time is expected to break even at best. Directed by Ava DuVernay and based on Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel of the same name, the film made only $33 million on its opening weekend. Its shockingly poor reviews (39% on Rotten Tomatoes) have people questioning why the Disney movie fell well below expectations. The short answer: there is no religion. The 2018 movie is not faithful to the book; L’Engle’s deeply religious elements are missing and nothing was added to fill that void.

L’Engle, who died in 2007, was an Episcopalian who believed in universal reconciliation, the idea that after death all humans will be reconciled with God and find salvation. Those who weren’t already alienated by this controversial belief were often put off by the book’s liberal political messages. Many Christian bookstores refused to carry her work. On the other side, secular critics attacked her books for being too religious.

Today, in a country where religion is not so much declining, as it is being increasingly consigned to private life, releasing a Hollywood movie for children with religious undertones was sure to invite a public debate. While the religious themes may go unnoticed by the target audience, their parents do much of the interpreting for them and are not as keen on letting things slide. Even the massively successful Harry Potter franchise, while an exception to the rule, remains a target for religious parents and groups. So, instead, we get this version of A Wrinkle in Time where the lack of religion makes for a lackluster coming-of-age story that many moviegoers want to like, but can’t.

The only redeeming quality about the movie is the diversity of the cast. Meg Murry (Storm Reid) is a bi-racial, natural haired, and self-doubting teenage girl who goes on a mission across the universe to find her father (Chris Pine), a time traveling astrophysicist who has been missing for four years. Her popular classmate Calvin O’Keefe (Levi Miller) accompanies her, along with her adopted prodigy brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe) – a Filipino-American who provides the movie with some much-needed comic relief. The trio is led by three magical beings in human form who can travel across space and time at will, Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling).

The story begins when the Mrs. Ws hear a call in the universe and inform Meg and Charles Wallace that their father is still alive. They confirm Mr. Murry’s scientific theory of the tesseract, a fifth dimensional wormhole that brings two points in time and space closer together. Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin, and the Mrs. Ws use it to wrinkle time and travel to the serene planet of Uriel (an unacknowledged reference to archangel Uriel). Here, they see a black cloud in the sky and learn that it is a dark manifestation of IT, a controlling force that has taken over planet Camazotz (named after a Mayan bat god) and is responsible for all the evil in the universe.

After visiting the Happy Medium, who uses his crystal ball to find that Mr. Murry is trapped on Camazotz, the six tesser there. Unable to withstand the planet’s darkness, the Mrs. Ws leave the children with advice: things are not as they seem and they should never separate. The trio navigates through a tornado and an eerily harmonized suburban neighborhood where children bounce balls in perfect unison, before ending up on a crowded beach where a man with red eyes hypnotizes Charles Wallace with the power of IT. Charles Wallace, now directly controlled by IT, reunites the group with Mr. Murry and drags them closer to IT. Mr. Murry and Calvin tesser back to Earth while Meg courageously stays to free her brother by confessing her familial love for him, weakening IT. The two then tesser back to Earth, say their goodbyes to the Mrs. Ws, and the Murry family is finally reunited.

Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

The common theme of good versus evil (represented by light and darkness) is reminiscent of the prologue to the Gospel of John and is directly quoted in the book. When the Mrs. Ws mention several important people in Earth’s history have helped fight the darkness, Mrs. Who gives them a hint: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:5; L’Engle, p.100) Charles Wallace correctly answers “Jesus!” and learns that Shakespeare, Einstein, Gandhi, and Buddha were all bearers of light too. The passage implies Jesus is no more important than the other figures mentioned, an assertion that led a school district in Alabama to ban the book in 1990.

For L’Engle, Christianity embraced a paradox – an omnipotent unknowable God who gave humans a divine yet mortal and knowable human being in Jesus Christ who could deliver his message. In L’Engle’s book, the Mrs. Ws are God’s messengers. Their powers are supernatural, but take human forms on earth in order to give the children wisdom and faith. While the Mrs. Ws are main characters both in the book and the movie, our understanding of their characters are much more limited in the latter. In the movie, they are forces of light – that is the full extent of their backstory. In the book, though, each are billions-years-old former stars who sacrificed themselves by amplifying their light to become supernovas who destroyed parts of IT. They act as guardian angels of the universe, using their power to guide the children. Well-versed in Biblical text, they translate a song sung (in a foreign language) by the aliens of Uriel inspired by the Book of Daniel and the Book of Isaiah. Without this explanation, we can’t help but wonder why the Mrs. Ws exist in the first place and what their connection is to the universe.

The movie also leaves behind the biblical battle between light and dark at the core of the book. Instead, we are left with a superficial struggle between good and evil for the sake of plot. Though the origins of IT are never revealed in the book, IT is described as a bodiless telepathic gigantic brain whose goal is to eliminate war, unhappiness, and inefficiency. Accurately depicted in the film as enforcing conformity and robotic synchronism throughout Camazotz, IT lacks the physical form of the brain and therefore the type of consciousness that can explain how evil conceptualizes ITself. Instead, IT has no motive and simply symbolizes greed, anger, and selfishness with no profound or religious justification for the presence of evil.

Still from “A Wrinkle in Time”

However, the movie effectually converts one of the central religious themes of the book into a secular one: the power of love. In the context of the book, we are led to believe that Meg’s love for Charles Wallace and the freedom it gave him from IT is symbolic of God’s love for humankind. In the face of hatred, doubt, and evil, God’s love is still powerful enough to be humans’ saving grace. We are even left with hope that love will one day free Camazotz from the clutches of IT too. It is L’Engle’s universal reconciliation at its finest. Meanwhile, the movie’s version of love, while still powerful, seems to be more limited in scope. It is brought down from the divine to the human level, limited to self-love, familial love, and our relationships with other people. Love can potentially save one person from evil, but is it strong enough to save a whole planet? Love wins, sometimes.

Nominated for a Golden Globe Award and two Academy Awards, Ava DuVernay is truly a brilliant film director known for her work on Selma (2014), which told the story of the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery led by Martin Luther King Jr., and the documentary 13^th (2016) about how the 13^th amendment freed slaves but prolonged slavery via mass incarceration. With A Wrinkle in Time, she became the first African-American woman to direct a live-action film on a budget exceeding $100 million.

In an interview with Vulture, DuVernay said she was not sure how A Wrinkle in Time would be received. At its core, it is the story of a young black girl who heroically saves her family and the world from darkness. Commenting on the protagonist being a black heroine, DuVernay says the symbolism of her character is deliberate, “It’s not shied away from. It is front and center.” Though she does not comment on why she removed much of the religious themes and allusions, it is likely that she did not want to overshadow the importance of racial diversity for her young audience. It is a profound moral objective she believed could be achieved without religion, and with those efforts, DuVernay does add meaning not originally not found in the book.

It is also possible that as a black woman in a field dominated by white men, DuVernay understood herself to be in an already precarious position. There is an enormous amount of pressure for her to do well, especially as her film was unavoidably compared to the hugely successful Black Panther (2018), a mainstream movie directed by African-American Ryan Coogler which was released just weeks earlier. Including religious elements may have opened her up to more criticism and the racial diversity in her cast would have been mentioned in the same sentence with an “overuse” of religion. In the end, there was not enough space for a double feature – blackness and religion are still too much for a 2018 Disney movie to contain.

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Fortune Onyiorah is a Master’s student at NYU’s Religious Studies Program.  She is currently writing a thesis on the subject of intersectionality in the Black diaspora.

The post A Wrinkle in Time Isn’t Religious Enough appeared first on The Revealer.

When the King James Bible was first published in the early 1600s, a small fraction of women lived long enough to reach menopause, their lives ended by age 35 or 40 by famine, disease, war, poor nutrition, untreatable illnesses, contaminated water and food, and, of course, childbirth. If female pleasure was considered at all in the Bible, it was the pleasure of fertility. Or sin. Today, women have a life expectancy that is nearly double what it was 500 years ago. The ensuing centuries have added another 40 years to the female lifespan. Many of those additional years are spent in peri-menopause, the period of time when fertility fades, or menopause, defined as when a woman has ceased to menstruate for a period of 12 months. Barrenness, whether by choice, reproductive incapacity, or age—at least in so-called “developed” countries—is for an increasing number of women, the new normal.

Ève maudite par Dieu (Eve Incurs God’s Displeasure) by Marc Chagall

Not that many faith traditions, medicine, or even our culture have caught up to this new female normal. Fertility, then and now, is often the defining characteristic of womanhood. (In a recent review of the current revival of Edward Albees “Three Tall Women,” Hilton Als writes that mother is “the greatest roll onstage and off.”) A woman’s purpose is so universally reduced to reproduction—through pregnancy, motherhood, and their accompanying traits: nurturing of others, caregiving, patience, self-sacrifice (of time, self-care, and even life), tending to a home, and the fostering of community—that we’ve struggled for centuries to acknowledge that beyond the baby, she also has value to society. Women are the village that childrearing requires. Every other ambition she may have is superfluous.

My own return to normal began with hot flashes last year, a few weeks after having my ovaries laparoscopically removed. The estrogen they were producing caused palpable endometrial masses to form in my abdomen. For the course of my adult life, it was my unwavering choice to not have children and remaining childless was a luxury that cost me great effort and expense—a luxury, I acknowledge, few women can afford. The irony of my over-active ovaries was not lost on me. They were now finding alternative purposes. At long last, surgery, and of course age, had taken choice out of it. The plumbing was no longer intact.

I don’t miss my ovaries, of course. Most of the romance of motherhood was long ago lost on me. But surgery gave me a new understanding of what it means to be a post-reproductive woman in American society—or as an older friend says, I began having “crone insights.” Almost overnight, the incredible skill, shame, coercion and resources that society employs to perpetuate the human reproductive project was laid bare to me—and eventually became the best solace a menopausal woman could ever have: the embodiment of the knowledge that my value as a human being could be deemed by something other than my physical desirability. I could just be a human. And that could be enough.

Agar dans le Désert (Hagar in the Desert) by Marc Chagall

While little about my appearance changed in the immediate period after surgery, at least to an outsider, I was a new being, released from the responsibility of catering first to men’s attention and then to family’s. Survival of the human species was no longer on my shoulders. In its absence was the liberation to please not others but myself. I could dress for myself, spend my time on my own work, keep house (or not) as I chose. To be clear, I’ve been single for a decade so my domestic obligations haven’t changed. But what has changed is the pressure to have a certain kind of more—a man and children. I was also relieved of the imposed apology (as in the cocktail qualification: “no, I’m single, no, I have no children.”) I was no longer defined by the absence of something. I could just be myself. All the pressure to be something in addition to an independent person became, at last, unimportant to me.

The cultural cache afforded to mothering—rather than being a woman—is explicit in our language. Female writers birth books, ones that we are often paid less for than men because, of course, our real labors reside elsewhere. Our bodies have never been our own; they belong to the state (which tells us what to do with them), to our husbands (who are free to do with them what they wish), to our children (who need every form of our attention for survival), and to our bosses (who have long put a price on us according to our appearance—think: rampant sexual assault—or our supposed outside obligations to family).

Until barrenness was physiological, I was still tethered to the pervasive and persistent construction of what a good woman must be, if not for myself, for the comfort of others. The conflicting attributes are recognizable to us all: sexy, but not too sexy; young; passive, or if a tiger, a tiger mom; if deviant, in the service of sexy; emotionally accessible, but not too emotional; independent, but not outspoken; ambitious, but not too ambitious. Snip-snip and suddenly I was not beholden to anyone.

Women, I understood at my surgically altered core, spend their early decades focused on how and when and if to have babies; once menopause arrives to undermine all our prized ideas of youth and beauty, compatibility and deference, we acknowledge why such attributes are prized in the first place. Quite often the answer is: for our own subjugation.

For decades, studies have shown that women live longer, earn more, and obtain higher levels of education if they control their fertility or remain childless. Still, most studies (including those linked above) approach the question of women’s improved circumstances from the other way around. For instance, does enrollment in graduate school decrease childbearing? The assumption is that childbearing and rearing are an unquestionable good prevented (hindered, thwarted) by other types of “achievement.”

The message of this frame has been loud and clear since the early days of modern medicine, when Margaret Sanger struck fear in the heart of our Godly nation by founding the American Birth Control League: women without children are a problem to be solved, regulated, controlled, and cured. Which explains why childlessness is either something that must be medically fixed (if you have the money) or the secret shame, the thing that must not be discussed.

Esther (Esther) by Marc Chagall

Dominant faith groups in the US have been the gatekeepers of this limited idea of woman. By systematically keeping women from leadership roles, by preaching female submission from the pulpit, by failing to acknowledge the trials of women’s domestic lives and child birthing, the loudest denominations and leaders, with both feet in the culture wars, have worked to prevent any kind of male-female equality (beyond the false “separate but equal”). Purity culture, male headship, and rules for Godly women (and the men looking for them) have all entrenched female inequality.

Our faith traditions have emboldened legislators who continue to ignore the inequality of women’s lives. The rub here of course is that even when we fulfill our wifely and motherly duties, we’re still second class citizens. Consider the epidemic of neglect of women’s medical needs, including the inadequate treatment or mistreatment of female pain, the failure to test new drugs on women, particularly pregnant women, anemic research about ailments that predominantly afflict women, and, of course, the paucity of attention to menopause.

“Despite the fact that for millions of women their menopausal symptoms are intolerable so many are suffering in silence because it is a taboo subject and treatment options are limited,” Dr. Julia Prague told Science Daily last year about her study on a new drug treatment for hot flashes, one of the many physical challenges menopausal women face. Attention deficit and lack of concentration, vaginal dryness, hair loss, drying and thinning skin, fatigue, muscle soreness, mood swings, weight gain: these are only a few of the 34 symptoms of menopause. (Many suffering women, I think, would conclude that this list is abbreviated.) Each symptom is like a strategic attack on what our society has deemed the most becoming characteristics of femininity. Still, for instance, medicine has not isolated the cause of hot flashes, the ostensible first step in alleviating hot flashes.

In a 2011 article for The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh wrote about embracing her menopause—the anger, frustration, mood swings, crying, and the throwing off of the caretaking mantle women are forced to wear. The piece is titled, “The Bitch is Back,” and challenges women to see their menopausal years as the normal years, consistent with our pre-menstrual lives. The fertile, child bearing years are the abnormality, she writes:

A sudden influx of hormones is not what causes 50-year-old Aunt Carol to throw the leg of lamb out the window. Improperly balanced hormones were probably the culprit. Fertility’s amped-up reproductive hormones helped Aunt Carol 30 years ago to begin her mysterious automatic weekly ritual of roasting lamb just so and laying out 12 settings of silverware with an OCD-like attention to detail while cheerfully washing and folding and ironing the family laundry. No normal person would do that—look at the rest of the family: they are reading the paper and lazing about like rational, sensible people. And now that Aunt Carol’s hormonal cloud is finally wearing off, it’s not a tragedy, or an abnormality, or her going crazy—it just means she can rejoin the rest of the human race: she can be the same selfish, non-nurturing, non-bonding type of person everyone else is.

“Rejoin[ing] the rest of the human race” is exactly right, in my assessment. I may have been a fist-raising feminist before surgery, but now my body has caught up to my beliefs.

These beliefs undercut religious and medical prescriptions to conform with behaviors that serve the patriarchal project of motherhood and all her attendant behaviors. Now I finally have the body chemistry to back these beliefs up.

Women may not yet be represented in scientific studies; treatments for menopause and every other female ailment under the sun may not yet be in development. But as women live longer, enter male-dominated fields (including medicine) in greater numbers and contest inequality—#metoo, #unequalpay, #girlslikeus, #rapecultureiswhen, #intersectionality, #everydaysexism, #effyourbeautystandards—a new post-reproductive idea of woman that doesn’t predicate femininity on fertility is emerging. By continuing to reimagine our roles in society, we can catch up with our bodies: independent, capable, beyond the confines of domesticated motherhood, perfectly enough on our own, thank you, normal.

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Ann Neumann is author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon, 2016) and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU.

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

The post A Normal Woman appeared first on The Revealer.

Simran Jeet Singh (photo by Alexander Müller)

Simran Jeet Singh is, among many other things, the current Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs post-doctoral fellow at the NYU Center for Religion and Media (which publishes The Revealer).  Here, he discusses everything from Sikhism and civil rights to children’s literature and sports with The Revealer’s editor, Kali Handelman.

Revealer: Can you tell me a bit about the work you’re doing now?

Of course. I’m trying to balance a few different things right now, all of which I view as falling at the intersection of education, religious literacy, and justice. I do this work in two broad ways, both of which are constantly informing and overlapping with one another: as a scholar and as an activist.

On the academic side, I resigned this year from being a professor at my beloved alma mater, Trinity University. I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, which you know because, well, you’re my boss. I secured another post-doctoral fellowship for next year through the American Council of Learned Societies, which means I will remain affiliated with NYU for the next year.

Both of these fellowships are primarily focused on my writing, so I have a few book writing projects in the works. Without revealing too much, there are three in particular that I’m excited about. One is an academic book on the life of Sikhism’s founder, Guru Nanak. Another is a book that looks at the various forms of racism that Sikhs experience in America. And the third is a children’s book project about one of my personal heroes. I’m excited about all three of these projects and about reaching different audiences with each of them.

I also recently took an expanded role with the Sikh Coalition, the largest Sikh civil rights organization in the country. I have two primary roles there: 1) to help represent Sikhism in the public sphere, and 2) to help build partnerships with various other communities, including multi-faith, multi-racial, and multi-cultural groups. Much of this work occurs through engagement with the media, and that is a world with which I have become familiar as well.

Revealer: How did you come to occupy this space between academic work and public advocacy and writing?

I grew up very aware that our community was deeply underrepresented in America. I rarely came across any mention of Sikhs in books or on television, and all my Sikh friends and I would talk about how much we wanted that to change. I think it was after 9/11 when I felt this most deeply. There was hardly any coverage of the hate violence targeting people who looked like us, and when there was coverage, it was usually someone else talking about us and doing so inaccurately and unauthentically.

I think that’s when I really got interested in changing how these narratives were presented. But I always imagined doing so behind-the-scenes, through writing history. I have always been a social person, but I used to HATE speaking publicly in any capacity. I mean, I had trouble talking in my classes, that’s how uncomfortable I was.

I think the watershed moment for me in that regard came after the 2012 anti-Sikh massacre in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. I was still in graduate school at that time, and I really didn’t feel like I had enough authority or knowledge to step forward. But I started getting calls from media outlets for interviews, and when I tried to direct them to more established scholars of Sikhism, they were not able to find anyone willing to speak.

I was raised to believe that with privilege comes responsibility, and I recognize that I have had immense privilege in my life, including my personal background, my access to education, and the resources around me. I have tried to keep myself honest to this commitment by viewing everything I do through the lens of seva , the Sikh tradition of selfless service inspired by a drive towards justice.

In our current political context, I think certain communities don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not to be publicly engaged — and for communities like ours, it’s very much a matter of life and death.

Revealer: What issues are you most focused on writing and speaking about right now?

You mean, besides the NBA playoffs and my beloved San Antonio Spurs? Well, there’s the general stuff about introducing Sikhs and Sikhi to people. That’s been a staple for years. I built on some of this work recently with the support of the Sikh Coalition and the Religion New Foundation to help produce a guide for journalists looking to cover Sikhs in some capacity. That has been hugely successful, and therefore, very rewarding.

Of course, there’s the academic work, which I know many people find boring but I absolutely love. The project there centers on the earliest accounts of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh tradition. I look specifically at manuscripts of the Puratan Janamsakhi, a text that hardly any scholars have studied seriously. That represents the challenges and opportunities of scholarship in Sikh Studies. On the one hand, there has been remarkably little work done in the field, which means that we do not know nearly as much as we should. On the other hand, it creates an opportunity to study significant aspects of the faith and make a substantial contribution. I’m grateful for the latter, though it does come with a lot of pressure!

My other interest is born out of personal experience and political urgency. With the rampant racism and discrimination we endure, I have become deeply committed to dealing with hate as it manifests itself at the intersection of ignorance, racism, and Islamophobia. There are two angles in particular that have caught my interest recently: 1) the ways in which our racialized understanding of “the Muslim other” are constructed and manifest themselves, and 2) how we can mitigate or address these issues at both a personal and systemic level.

And, finally, I also have a secret love for children’s literature (which was a lot harder to explain before my first daughter was born). I’ve been working on some children’s stories that I’m excited to get out there.

Revealer: How did you decide to write a children’s book? What will it be about?

I’ve always wanted to write children’s books. There was a time, when I was in college, where I legitimately thought I would be the next Shel Silverstein or Jack Perlutsky. I mean, not legitimately in real life, but I actually thought that in my mind.

I have always enjoyed children’s literature and have wanted to write my own. I guess I got serious about it when my daughter was born two years ago. I realized how much I wanted her to see minority communities like her own in the books that she read, and I began to feel a real urgency to begin writing stories featuring minority communities who are not historically or even presently represented in kids’ books.

I can’t exactly say what my current project is about, but I can say this. It features a Sikh protagonist who I consider a personal hero. So in addition to challenging norms by depicting a Sikh protagonist, I also see this as a chance to pay tribute to someone whom I respect and admire.

You are pretty active on Twitter and your Twitter self seems like an intentionally complete version of your real self. In other words, a combination of goofy jokes, family photos, Sikh community love and advocacy, and critical commentary about politics and culture. How did you decide that you were going to go all in on social media? Have you ever been concerned about sharing so much of your personal life? What do you find useful about being on Twitter the way that you are.

First of all, I think you meant hilarious, not goofy.

Second of all, you’re right about my approach to Twitter. I haven’t always been that way, and I’m not sure I always will be either, especially given how nasty some of the attacks have become. But I’m happy to explain why I’m taking this approach right now. In short, my sense is that this is one of the few opportunities people will have to come across a Sikh. And my vision is to try and humanize us as much as I can. I really believe that in a world where dehumanization is the problem, humanization must be at least part of the solution. So that’s why I’m out there trying to share about my life more fully, including what I love, what I experience, and even, what I know is hilarious.

A deeper part of it comes from an urge to un-flatten some of the ways in which people try to empathize with us. I find myself deeply dissatisfied with the ways we are represented in media, even when it’s well-intentioned. Most commonly, we find ourselves within the frame of victimhood, even though that concept doesn’t even exist within Sikh traditions. Part of why it bothers me so much is that it doesn’t represent how we see ourselves. But another part of it is that it often functions to produce another form of hierarchy in which we end up being seen as a poor, helpless community that requires a more powerful, agentive community to intervene on our behalf and save us.

I’m not sure if I actually achieve this, but my idea, at least, is to create a more robust representation of Sikhs that is neither limited to my physical identity or my experiences with hate. Both are important to me, of course, but I really want the conversations and representations to go beyond that.

In terms of safety, it’s a real concern that I try to take seriously, especially now that I have children to think about. It’s about physical security. I receive death threats and threats of violence, but in a way, those are the easiest to take seriously. The harder ones are those that deal with professional security. There have been multiple instances where online trolls have led campaigns to call my university’s president to demand that I be fired. I’ve ended up on the Professor Watch List, and Breitbart, and a number of other places where I don’t want to be. I try to strike the balance between fearless and reckless, but that calculus is constantly evolving, especially in a world where the technology and the stakes are changing so rapidly.

Revealer: You’ve made something of an art of responding to trolls and critics with a combination of snark and love. Why do you respond the way that you do and how has it been productive?

Well, I guess the easy answer is that reciprocating hate with hate never produces anything useful. And Dr. King’s quote seems relevant here: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” It’s become a cliche, I know, but I actually believe that. And I think there’s actually interesting work that can be done through such responses.

For one, I think it models for people what it looks like to live one’s values unconditionally, rather than when it’s just convenient or easy to do so. If you can be loving in the face of hate, then what excuse do they have?

Second, I think it’s disarming for people and opens up a space for them to connect with someone that they might otherwise overlook. Rather than offering a more typical (and natural?) response stemming from anger, replying with a bit more personality has a different kind of aesthetic for those who are observing the interaction.

And, finally, I respond, in part, to share with people the kind of hate that marginalized communities endure. I think it’s important for people who don’t typically encounter bigotry know that it really exists, so I try and share that — not every time, but when I feel it’s appropriate and helpful.

Revealer: Who else do you look to for leadership on issues of race and religion right now? Who are you following and working with?

There are so many amazing people working on these issues right now. I am so grateful to be doing this work alongside such smart and passionate colleagues. In terms of scholars working on Islamophobia, I would point to folks like Moustafa Bayoumi, Zareena Grewal, Khaled Beydoun, Todd Green, Ilyse Morgenstein-Fuerst, Omid Safi, Jordan Denari, and Deepa Kumar.

Sylvester Johnson has been a huge influence on me recently, and of course, folks like Cornel West and Amina Wadud are important to how I think intersectionally about my work as a scholar-activist who works on religion and race. My favorite books of the past few years on topics of race and justice are Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, How to Be a Muslim by Haroon Moghul, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.

Revealer: How do sports and sports culture fit into your work? 

Bringing sports and sports culture into my work is natural to me. I grew up with four brothers in South Texas, so sports have always been a central part of our identities. And I still probably enjoy sports more than a scholar of religion is supposed to admit. But since it’s out there now, I may as well own it and answer your question.

There are many ways in which sports and sports culture fit into my work. For one, the intersections of sports, politics, and justice are far too many to identify. Perhaps the most prominent example is Colin Kaepernick, who has taken a moral stand on police brutality against people of color — and has been targeted by the league and even the President as a result. I care about sports stories like these because they capture the attention and imagination of the American public. So when I ran the New York City Marathon this year, my friend and I wore Kaepernick shirts to show our solidarity with the movement.

I always grew up thinking of sports as the ultimate equalizer. People may not have seen me as normal, but it didn’t really matter if I was competitive on the soccer field or the basketball court. My brothers and I loved the experience of showing up for a pickup game, people avoiding us because they assumed we couldn’t play, and then us showing them up as soon as we got the chance. I feel the same way running marathons now. Just looking the way I do and being in public is a political statement in today’s context. To do so while running challenges all sorts of stereotypes people have about me, and I love that.

Revealer: Okay, last question, and this is the only real hardball (see, I can make hilarious sports jokes, too!) question I want to ask you: We’ve been having a conversation on-and-off for years about the legal battle Sikhs are fighting for the right to wear religious attire while serving in law enforcement and the military. The politics of that fight are obviously very complicated. On the one hand, it is about the civil rights of Sikhs and religious freedom more generally. On the other hand, there is the ongoing issue of state violence against people of color — police violence and military violence — violence you have, of course, opposed in very strong terms. So there’s a tension here, right? Sikh religious freedom and civil rights are important, but protecting the civil rights and lives of others is also important. How do you think about that tension?

Yes, absolutely, there’s a tension here, and I’m grateful to you for bringing it up. I could write an entire book on the complexities entailed here, so I’ll try to keep it relatively simple and straightforward.

On the one hand, I see this as an issue of religious freedom and workplace discrimination. I believe all people should have the right to serve or receive employment no matter what religious tradition they follow. When our military — the world’s largest employer and an arm of the US Government, by the way — discriminates against people based on their religious identity, it sends the message to every other employer in the world, in the public and private sector alike, that they can do the same without consequence. This is unacceptable.

At the same time, I am highly skeptical and deeply critical of these same institutions. And to be completely transparent, I would not choose to serve in our military or law enforcement, even if I had the opportunity to do so freely. I understand their idealized role within a properly functioning government — but I think we are far removed from that ideal right now and that these institutions actually produce and perpetuate injustice, especially for vulnerable populations.

So how do I reconcile the two? I try to maintain enough humility to recognize that there are a diversity of political and opinions and even religious interpretations within the Sikh community. Not everyone feels the same way I do about these institutions or even has the same type of understanding of what it means to be American. Some Sikhs believe that serving in the military is a natural outcome of their identity and an important part of being a devout Sikh. Others see the imperialistic nature of our military and foreign policy as antithetical to what Sikhi teaches about ethics and justice. In my work on this effort, I see the authenticity and earnestness in both perspectives and sincerely try to honor these differences.

What does that look like in efforts for inclusion of Sikhs in law enforcement and the military? It means being humble enough to secure and preserve equal rights for Sikhs to serve if they choose to, even if this doesn’t necessarily reflect what I would want to do personally. It also means that while doing so, remaining committed to addressing other core issues with militarized and police violence against vulnerable populations, whether that manifests itself as police murders of young, black men or drone strikes against innocent civilians in Muslim-majority countries.

I don’t see it as a proposition of choosing one or the other. My theory of change is that we need to address racism and oppression from a diversity of angles, including from within the institutions that exist today. At the end of the day, the injustices and inequities we have to overcome in this country are deeply embedded and systemic. We need a multi-pronged and multi-level approach to deal with these issues effectively. From my vantage point, this is our only hope for ensuring more equity and justice for marginalized communities in the long-term.

Revealer: And I think that’s exactly the kind of answer that shows why so many people bother following you on Twitter in spite of the jokes. I mean, besides that they like your jokes. Seriously, though. I know you’re in a pretty unusual position where, when you make public statements, you are speaking to a number of different publics, and that’s challenging. I appreciate your taking the time to think this stuff through with us and put it out there for everyone. Thanks so much for having this conversation with me! Now get back to work.

***

Dr. Simran Jeet Singh is an educator, writer, activist, and scholar who currently serves as the Senior Religion Fellow for the Sikh Coalition and Henry R. Luce Post-Doctoral Fellow for Religion in International Affairs at New York University’s Center for Religion and Media.  He is the author of “Covering Sikhs,” a guidebook produced with Religion News Foundation and the Sikh Coalition to help journalists accurately report on the Sikh community.

The post Scholarship, Activism, and Dad Jokes: A Conversation with Simran Jeet Singh appeared first on The Revealer.

The academy claims to be a meritocracy, in which the best and brightest graduate students gain employment as professors. When Kelly J. Baker earned her doctorate in religion, she assumed that merit mattered more than gender. After all, women appeared to be succeeding in higher ed, graduating at higher rates than men. And yet, the higher up she looked in the academic hierarchy, the fewer women there were. After leaving academia, she began to write about gender, labor, and higher ed to figure out whether academia had a gender problem. Eventually, Baker realized how wrong she’d been about how academia worked. Sexism Ed is her attempt to document how very common sexism and labor exploitation are in higher ed.

She writes about gender inequity, precarious labor, misogyny, and structural oppression. Sexism and patriarchy define our work and our lives, within and outside of academia. She not only examines the sexism inherent in hiring practices, promotion, leave policies, and citation, but also the cultural assumptions about who can and should be a professor. Baker also shows the consequences of sexism and patriarchy in her own life: hating the sound of her voice, fake allies, the cultural boundaries of motherhood, and the perils of being visible. It’s exhausting to be a woman, but Baker never gives up hope that we can change higher ed—and the world—if only we continue to try.

This excerpt is about the dangers of men who pretend to be allies, but really aren’t, and the problems that they can cause.

 ***

Men Who Claim to Be Allies

I started my morning, before coffee, reading Irin Carmon’s “Women shouldn’t trust the men who call themselves allies” at The Washington Post. [1] Go ahead and read it. After coffee. Lots of coffee. Carmon writes powerfully about allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and a whole slew of men who proclaim to be allies to women while harming, maligning, and harassing them. The actions of these men tell us a story about how claiming to be an ally doesn’t actually mean you are an ally. This is a story—perhaps, the story—about power, misogyny, masculinity, and the emptiness of words without action. Camron writes:

To the preexisting condition that is misogyny in the world, such men add a certain sense of hopelessness. They fuel those old snickering jokes about the ulterior motives of men who visit feminist spaces. They exploit the fact that women are eager to affirm men making baby steps toward our humanity and make a mockery out of our socially ingrained impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt. At least the Bannons of the world stab you in the front.

As I read her article, I laughed grimly, though I wanted to cry, when I reached this line: At least the Bannons of the world stab you in the front. I couldn’t help but agree with her. We know where the Bannons stand and how much they hate us. It’s the knife in the back from the men who are supposed to be friends, partners, colleagues, co-workers, bosses, and professors that we aren’t expecting. They say that they are allies. They say they are feminists. They assure us that they are on our side. And we want to believe them. We want to take them at their word, but like Camron, I’m not sure we should.

A man, who claims to be an ally and/or a feminist, has become a red flag for me. Especially if he loudly proclaims to be an ally. Especially if he looks around to see if everyone is paying attention to him. Especially if he insists on telling me about his feminism in detail while ignoring my arched eyebrow.

He’s a guy who has learned to use the right lingo. He talks intersectionality. He tells me about what he’s been reading (but doesn’t necessarily ask me about what I’ve read or think). He’s trying so damn hard to show that he is “woke.” He’s hoping that someone might call him a “feminist” or an “ally.” He really wants me to praise his ability to use the right terms. What he really wants praise for thinking other people are also human, which is a really low bar.

And yet.

And yet, he doesn’t act like an ally, does he? He doesn’t notice I’m being patronized, talked down to, objectified, sexually harassed, or worse. He doesn’t have my back something goes wrong. He doesn’t believe what I say about other dudes and how they act. He explains that I must be remembering something wrong; that I must have misheard; that I must have imagined something rather than it being real, that another dude, especially another ally, would never, ever act that way; and that maybe I was overreacting or emotional or hysterical or some other gendered insult that folks like to pretend isn’t. He claims to be an ally, but never acts like an ally should.

He doesn’t support women to just support women, but rather he’s hoping to cash in on being called an ally. He’s hoping to gain some cultural capital by using the right words. He’s hoping his words deflect from his actions. He’s hoping we pay more attention to what he preaches and less to what he practices.

Worse than that, some men, who claim to be allies, talk feminism and allyship while they actively harm women. Allyship becomes their cover for abuse.

I’ve known, and know, so many of these so-called allies who are men. They are mostly white men. They’ve been my professors, colleagues, bosses, fellow writers, and even friends.

There were the professors who claimed to be feminist while doing extra for male students, so they could get ahead and much less for their female students. These professors who claimed to be allies also questioned my commitment to my work because I was a woman and mother. They ignored how gendered their assumptions were, and if pressed, they would claim that their actions had nothing to do with gender at all.

There was the senior male colleague at the last university I worked, who claimed loudly, to anyone who would listen, that he was a feminist. Once he pulled me into his office to explain how he was a better feminist than I was and could ever be. It was not a random encounter. I had been invited to participate in a methods and theory group, and he had not. He wanted me to let me know that I was a token addition to the group, which was mostly men. With sympathy in voice and a sneer on his face, he reasoned that they needed women, which was the only possible reason that I was invited. He shamed me for my acceptance of the invitation. He doubted my abilities and my scholarship. His so-called feminism would not allow him to participate in such a group because of their gender politics. Thus, he was a better feminist, and I was a bad one. He was just trying to be an ally, and I knew that he really wasn’t.

There were colleagues who talked like they were feminists but acted like they were misogynists because they were. Theses colleagues understood women to be objects, not people. These colleagues hugged a little too long and their eyes lingered. They commented on my appearance and other women’s bodies to let women know their “place.” They talked to other colleagues about how women were “bitches” who you couldn’t trust. They ignored sexual harassment because that dude was such a “nice guy.” They ripped off the work of white women and women of color and pretended it was theirs. They hepeated, mansplained, and gaslit women, all while calling themselves allies and feminists.

And then, there are the men who are writers. They who loudly proclaim their feminism while denigrating women in the same breath. They put feminist in their Twitter bios but don’t act like they don’t actually understand what feminism is.

I could tell you more stories, so many stories, about the men who claim to be allies and the damage they wrought. I could tell you more recent stories about my interactions with men who are self-proclaimed “good guys” who are anything but.

But, reader, would you believe me? Or would you trust their words over mine?

They’re men, after all. We tend to believe them. We tend to not believe women.

But, maybe, this time, you will believe women. Maybe, you’ll hear our words. Maybe, you’ll pay closer attention to their actions. Maybe, you’ll realize that they aren’t allies. Maybe, you’ll realize they aren’t feminists. Maybe, you’ll recognize yourself in the men who claim to be allies. Maybe, you’ll change. Maybe, you won’t.

I’ll hold out hope that you will.

October 2017

***

Kelly J. Baker is the editor of Women in Higher Education. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others. She’s the author of an award-winning book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011) and The Zombies Are Coming!: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Bondfire Books, 2013), Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (killing the buddha and Raven Books, 2017), and Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (Raven Books, 2018). When she’s not writing assignments, editing, or wrangling two children, a couch dog, and a mean kitty, she’s writing about zombie apocalypses and their discontents for the University Press of Kansas.

The post Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia appeared first on The Revealer.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MARCH 5: Serena Williams of the United States during the Tie Break Tens Tennis Tournament at Madison Square Garden on March 5, 2018 New York City. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)

I am a huge tennis fan. Most of all, I prefer to watch long baseline rallies and carefully constructed points. I can also appreciate the work of the net rushers who pounce on balls that land well short of the baseline and put the volley away for a winner. Serena Williams is, without a doubt, the greatest tennis player of all time. I, like many a fan, have experienced the thrill of watching her dominate since she was a kid in the late 90s. Now her devotees get to share in the thrill of watching Williams make her comeback after having given birth to her daughter with Reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, only this past September.

Over the years, the public has taken a constant interest in Williams’ romantic life, following her relationships with famous musicians and sports stars. Now we dutifully attend to her posts about marriage and motherhood.

Truth be known: I personally think Williams doesn’t get enough credit for being the amazing tennis player and athlete that she is. David Foster Wallace famously wrote of “Federer as Religious Experience” and while the eulogized virtues and habits would certainly differ, someone needs to write the same kind of piece about Serena Williams. If they did, they might be wise to use Kathryn Lofton’s new book, Consuming Religion, as their guide.

Given her substantive gifts, it would certainly be tempting to simply condemn the hypermediated interests in Williams’ so-called “private life” as ephemeral, pop culture noise. But, Lofton’s field-defining study might suggest, condemning that noise would just play into the ideology of secular fundamentalism that is convinced of its separation from ‘religion’ and is intent on disavowing the violence it cannot but enact and affect. Most basically, however, pop culture can only be so dismissed if its power to organize and manage experience is not taken seriously enough. As Lofton reminds us, conjuring the ghost of Émile Durkheim, the study of religion is nothing if it is not the study of the ways in which “our socialization is our humanization.”

Departing from a central conviction that, “if we are to understand what religion is, we must understand who we are in relation to it, in relation to what we define as our social life in this time we call secular,” Lofton tightens the assumed gap between religion and pop culture by using treatments of, among other subjects, TV binge watching, office cubicles, Britney Spears, the Kardashians, the corporation as sect, contemporary parenting, and Goldman Sachs. In the age of selfie sticks, Lofton thus brings the study of religion up close and personal with its own ‘othered’ and refracted reflection in the mirror. Agreeing with Durkheim’s assessment that, “religion seems destined to transform itself rather than disappear,” Lofton proceeds to explore the dynamics of secular ritual and religion by way of carefully chosen case studies.

***

Lofton’s first chapter, “Binge Religion—Social Life in Extremity” takes direct analytical aim at a quintessentially 21^st century Western bourgeois ritual so many of us now partake in: binge watching.

My partner and I recently binge watched the full seven seasons of Game of Thrones. Doing so became a ritual of sorts. Given the logistics of our schedules this year, we usually don’t get home until 7:30 P.M. At that point, I could have continued to respond to emails but, after the dog was fed and chicken coop door closed, I really looked for a way to separate myself mentally from work (especially since I have found that social networks that include work colleagues can make this a more difficult proposition than it might have been twenty years ago when I graduated from college). My partner had, for months been hearing coworkers rave about the show at work and asked me if I wanted to join him in watching the show. Even though I initially had some moral reservations (I had heard there was gratuitous violence and an unnecessarily gendered expression of violence at that), I thought it would be fun to do something together after our busy work days. The dog would sit on the couch beside us. Over the course of the next several months, we made our way through seven seasons of the show, spending an average of $30-40 to download each season from Amazon.

Consuming Religion by Kathryn Lofton (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Since the immersive experience of binge watching is linked to technologies of social organization (scientific, economic, political, domestic), it conjures the ‘religious’ not simply in terms of metaphorical hyperbole but in an analytically precise Durkheimian sense. Generations of moderns (and religious studies readers), of course, have been trained to look for the religious in churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. Lofton shifts our attention to that which has already stealthily captivated it under the guise of consumer freedom and choice. She offers, “the last ten years of scholarship on secularism, however, has worked to show that secularism is not the least bit minimal in its engagements, classifications, bureaucracies, or habits.” It is today a common sight: Americans at the couch, spending time together by binge watching a show. Lofton asks: “Why should we not see ourselves, in these consumer contexts of binging and streaming, fingering and uploading, spending and screening, as sorts of fundamentalist seculars, choosing the dialectic of mechanized intimacy over and above one of interpersonal encounter and intimacy?” Sheesh, here I am constantly pleading with my students to put their phones away and talk to each before class starts—like we would do in the good ol’ days.

The religious history of the American office Lofton provides in Chapter 2 examines the ‘ontological consequences’ of a “particular product line offered by a specific company in the mid-twentieth century.” In this chapter, Lofton’s attention is on the “hermeneutic abundance” inhered in the history the Herman Miller Research Corporation, which in the mid twentieth-century played “a central role in the popularization of European modernism in America,” especially by way of its Action Office product—otherwise known as the office cubicle. It is perhaps simultaneously the clearest and most surprising example of religious determination Lofton surveys.

Here, Lofton documents the kinds of theological and religious valances Max Weber taught us to attend to. A product rooted in a particular corporate biography tethered to geographical and personal histories, Action Office, we learn, bears the traces of “Neo-Calvinist civility” and a “dissenting Baptist pugnacity.” However, Lofton’s treatment of Action Office is also appropriately mediated and dialectical. At its broadest ebbing, the argument is that secular Capitalism’s most “unspecial” (ubiquitous, neutral and simple) things can serve as secular religion’s most powerful “missionary tool(s)” and can be the most telling symbols of its metaphysical arrangements and commitments. In the case of Action Office, a modernist desire to support, “new connections, new visual landscapes, and new postures,” at work sadly gave way to, “the dream of a comfortable support system for the seated back.”[1] Alas, plenty of Americans still find themselves living that “dream”.

Today, the undoing of the metaphysics of the cubicle also makes the news. As Silicon Valley ritualizes its philosophy of working while you play and sells this dream of ludic labor to elite sectors of the new economy in the name of creativity, comfort, and connection, Lofton’s chapter serves as a historical reminder that what is old is also new again. Capitalism has always attempted to manage the spirit of work and there is little to suggest that the Google playroom jettisons this prime directive.

As Durkheim understood well, all socialization involves the sacrifice of autonomy for the sake of group consciousness.[2] This is an especially hard and fast rule at work. Among many related things, the Cambridge Analytica scandal re-problematizes and re-politicizes the issue of invisible labor. Google wants us to play at work. Facebook makes our leisure work for them. In the information society, our leisure is collected, packaged, sold, and analyzed as ‘data’ that is later redeployed to organize and manage us in turn. The technologies– and therefore the political implications—are certainly new. As we are reminded by Lofton’s cultural history, however, the attendant tensions between structure and agency are not.

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Despite her phenomenal success, it is simply an ontological fact that Serena Williams has had to embody and navigate a very different reality than any of her male tennis pro counterparts has had to. On her journey to achieving iconicity, Williams, who famously learned to play on the public courts of Compton (the southern California city of Straight Outta Compton fame), has long had to endure racist and heterosexist ambivalence around her muscular physique and has found the still very white and wealthy American tennis scene sometimes openly hostile despite her prodigious talent.[3] At once loved and periodically cut down to size (a measurement specifically contoured to her black, female body), Serena Williams, a fashion forward super athlete who hangs out with celebrity friends like Beyoncé, is, in the terms set forth in Consuming Religion, sacrificed to our ritual consumption of her celebrity. She is sacrificed (where others might not be) because sacrifice is one of secular religion’s fundamental rituals.

An advertisement for Herman Miller’s Action Office

The most arresting and haunting chapter in Consuming Religion is given the title “Sacrificing Britney—Celebrity and Religion in America.” In it, Lofton shines light on the logic of violence which animates the contemporary consumption of celebrity. More than that, however, here she most directly conjures forth to the scene of analysis considerations of gender (and, by extension, difference) that, while I think strategically understated in the monograph, begin to clear paths that the study of religion desperately needs to follow.

Celebrities, Lofton argues, are transfigured into ideas. “Transforming flesh into commodity,” celebrity fetish might evoke the theological procedures whereby a first-century Palestinian Jew became the Christian Christ or bodily suffering has been figured as salvific martyrdom. Through the abstracting process of celebrification, a human being is redrawn as a, “composite sketch, with parts and pieces, and accessories easily redacted and packaged, remembered and satirized.” The alchemized celebrity becomes a kind of mindscape, zeitgeist, discourse, or brand. For its part, as a cultural practice, the worship of celebrity has some mean spirited, even sadistic, registers.

As perhaps as even most people who avoid E! and the supermarket rags still know, once reborn simply as Britney, Britney Jean Spears has endured endless speculation, scrutiny, and gossip with respect to relationship problems, drug problems, mental health challenges, and weight issues. Like Serena, Britney has been raised up and then torn back down according to a formula that just cycles and repeats. What does this mediatized schadenfreude regarding Britney Spears’ personal challenges teach us about the dynamics of secular religion?

Lofton functionally connects the ‘ritualized celebrity stripping’ to which Spears has been periodically subjected to a, “sacrifice made on behalf of a social body, a sacrifice that centralizes communication with, and thinking about, the legitimate social order (or relationship to divinities, to ideals, or higher principles).” Sacrificial logic, she reminds us, “prompts the entire community to select victims outside itself for the sake of itself, to kill someone who isn’t them to keep them going.” Lofton writes, “watching those declines and ascents might be read as a sort of public sacrifice, a Eucharist consumed by a public needful of something as an ironical counterpart of sacral nationhood and moral family making.” That is, Britney is sacrificed and consumed in order to keep the demons of fundamentalist religion at bay. While, as we learn, the religious right prays for her soul, the adherents of consuming religion take pleasure in doing her in so that we might periodically raise her back from the dead. How can we otherwise delight in the ways in which Britney is Stronger if she isn’t made to have to get back up again?

Still from Brtiney Spears’ music video for “Stronger”

In her chapter on the Kardashian family (K-Klan), Lofton asks, “Is the only way to become a woman with corporate power to commodify your capacity to expand your kinship networks, namely your ability to sell products that magnify your physical features?” Her suggestion throughout the monograph as a whole is: as a structural matter, financial and political power remains unevenly distributed across axes of sex, race, gender, and other fields of difference. And we ought not be fooled: women (and poor women and women of color especially so) are still disproportionately burdened with the tasks of material toil. The great Serena Williams rejoining her quest for tennis greatness only months after a delivery which almost cost her life is an almost scripted given. Despite the hollowing claims of corporate feminism, homonationalist discourse, and official multiculturalism, the center is not a rainbow. Difference is consumed to perpetuate the order; we lean into our own consumption.

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In her discussion of binge watching, Lofton troubles the assumed borders of fundamentalist religion. The men who flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on 9/11, Lofton writes, “identified in those towers the wrong religion.” One of these men, Mohamed Atta, spent September 10, 2001 shopping at Walmart and eating at Pizza Hut. Lofton writes, “the confrontation between Atta and the North Tower is a confrontation of value in which porn, Victoria’s Secret advertisement, and Showtime programming constitute subjects of intense consumer practice equal to the maximal absorption (we assign) to the terrorist. These are two extremities facing off with each other.” Lofton adds, “binaries are not static opposition as much as they are descriptive of a tense purlieu of their differentiation.” Violence is endemic to the logic of secular fundamentalism. Secular fundamentalism demands its own bogymen and sacrificial victims. Lofton’s intellectually dizzying and absolutely brilliant book calls our attention to the fundamentals of our consuming religion. Our commercial temples, celebrated virgin sacrifices, and sacred television dramas are not separate from ‘religion’ but important religious artifacts of, these, our supposedly secular times. As a counterpoint to New Atheism’s bright lines and an escalating Islamophobia, the suggestion is as pressing as it has ever been.

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[1] Lofton explains that in order to accentuate the hoped for connections of the original design, workers had to “come to terms with modularity” and actively participate in shifting their modules, which they often did not. High real estate costs also led companies to cram cubicles together, a state of affairs that we are today more likely to associate with the office cubicle.

[2] The American anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, in turn, argued that Durkheim’s account of socialization leaves little room to account for the existential textures and dimensions of social and collective ordering. Although it is without the scope here, I find that Lofton avoids suffocating the livingness of the phenomena that interest her by interjecting her own voice and intersubjective experiences.

[3] For fourteen years, Williams boycotted a major tournament at Indian Wells (California) due to a well-publicized incident involving racially motivated taunting. She announced her return to the event in 2015 with a videogram in which she urged her followers to support the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit that provides legal representation to poor persons of color denied equal treatment by the legal system.

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George González is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Monmouth University. Beginning August 2018, he will be the Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Study of Religion) at Baruch College, CUNY.  His research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to liberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology.  He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of postsecular, neoliberalism through the framework of religious social change. He is the author of Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project and is currently working on a multi-site ethnography and historiography of the ritualization of consumer capitalism and began fieldwork with the famed radical performance troupe, Rev. Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping in early 2017.

The post Consuming Religion appeared first on The Revealer.

I loved The Crucible as a teenager (the 1996 Daniel Day Lewis version, obviously). Every Friday from the age of sixteen to eighteen, I came home from field hockey practice, kicked off my cleats, hurled myself onto our scratchy mushroom-brown floral couch and began my private Sabbath ritual of rereading one of my three favorite books — Lolita, The Catcher in the Rye, or Arthur Miller’s script. I thrilled when I reached the climactic pages where the hero, John Proctor, snatches his signed confession from the Salem judges and demands, “is there no good penitence but it be public?!” I exulted when he turns to his wife, estranged no longer, kisses her savagely and implores her, “Show a stony heart and sink them with it!” And even now, as a much more cynical adult, I tear up as Elizabeth Proctor watches her husband carted off to his execution and waves aside all attempts to persuade him to recant with the sad, proud remark, “He have his goodness now. God forbid I take it from him.”

But about halfway through watching it last month, I turned to my husband, stretched out on our ratty black futon next to me, and voiced the thought that had been building for an hour. “Maybe this whole witch hunt never would have happened if John Proctor had stopped beating the everliving shit out of all of the teenaged girls who worked for him.”

We are in a collective cultural moment when the rhetoric of “witch hunts” is being bandied about to describe the mass firings of famous men accused of sexual assault. Ladled down our collective throats as an allegory for McCarthyism in high school, recently revived to rapturous acclaim on Broadway, and personally beloved as a nostalgic object of my adolescence, The Crucible, I thought, was the perfect vehicle for thinking about the strange twists in American consciousness that made it possible to talk about the reckoning visited on Louis C.K., one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, as if he were an illiterate Puritan peasant woman tortured for selling strange herbs.

And it is. But it is also a movie about how if you beat your domestic worker long and hard enough, she will sell you out as a warlock who stops her breath and interrupts her sleep with night terrors to the first angry mob that comes by. In that respect, the movie may have some problems, but it is a better allegory than Arthur Miller could have planned.

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It takes a certain willful perversity to turn witch hunts – a form of persecution famous for targeting marginalized women – into a tragic story about how a wealthy male landowner is destroyed when his own unyielding principles collide with the vengeance of a lustful schoolgirl. It was not strictly wrong of Miller to focus Salem on the story of a man, of course. John Proctor was a real man who was hanged during the Salem witch trials, though he was sixty and his seductress in the play, Abigail Williams, was in reality twelve, and the accusing children were all female. Still, even Salem was a much smaller and much more female affair than the playwright makes it seem. Only five of the executed were men; the other fourteen were women.

Curiously, this rather obvious point was not one of the objections that Miller bothered to address in interviews he gave in the years following The Crucible’s 1953 debut. The story he consistently gave was the one many of us are familiar with from high school English: the play was born out of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

At first, Miller was oblivious to the rising the anti-communist fervor surrounding him. Most of the people he knew in Hollywood were socialists or communists of some sort. He himself had attended a few communist meetings in a desultory way. It seemed impossible to imagine Hollywood turning on everyone who had expressed sympathy with the Left. Who would be left to write movies?

He only began to suspect the gravity of the threat when it came time to turn The Death of a Salesman into a movie. The play had been widely acclaimed as the poignant story of one man’s breakdown as he confronts the impossibility of realizing the American Dream. After the bidding war that ensued among the major studios for adaptation rights, he was wholly unprepared for the flurry of panicked requests his producers at Columbia Studio sent his way. Would Miller sign an anti-Communist pledge? What about softening the message to placate the American Legion, which was threatening to picket the movie as un-American? Could he at least try writing something about America that was less…depressing?

Irritated, Miller refused all of their requests. In return, he relates in a 2000 interview:

The studio actually made another film, a short to be shown with Salesman. This was called The Life of a Salesman and consisted of several lectures by City College School of Business professors – which boiled down to selling was a joy, one of the most gratifying and useful professions, and that Willy was simply a nut. Never in show-business history has a studio spent so much good money to prove that its feature film was pointless.

Hollywood’s efforts to distance itself from Miller became decidedly less darkly comical in future years. He lost contracts, friends, audiences, years of his creative life. He was called before the House of Un-American Activities (HUAC) for his refusal to name other writers as communists, though offered a pass if his wife, Marilyn Monroe, would consent to have her picture taken with the Chairman of the Committee. Miller refused.

Instead, he began writing The Crucible. In the years to come, Miller would face accusations that he had conflated the imaginary crime of witchcraft with the real crime of communism. He shrugged off the accusations as besides the point. Both communists and witches had seemed real to the societies bent on ferreting them out. And, anyway, even the communists who did exist in Hollywood were certainly not the threat they were made out to be. Mostly, Miller thought, their movies were “silly.” No, the real point of The Crucible, for Miller, was that it “became awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin.”

And now, some version of Miller’s story – with its conflation of witches and communists, petty sexual vengeance and politic persecution, accusations and self-interest – whispers beneath every conversation in which #MeToo is called a witch hunt. In that respect, Arthur Miller did something remarkable. In writing The Crucible, he did more than produce a great work of art. He changed history. He changed our collective memories about what Salem meant. He gave us a vocabulary for talking about moments of mass uncertainty and ad hoc justice that has become a shorthand for rightful, righteous suspicion of our own Puritanical past.

It just so happens that the vocabulary he gave us was misogynistic.

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To be even blunter: The Crucible is breathtakingly misogynistic. It reduces the whole tragic mess to the calculating sexual jealousy of a teenage girl who was happy to watch her neighbors hang if it meant she might one day resume her adulterous affair with her former employer. It’s Fatal Attraction with buckled hats. It even goes so far as to suggest that witchcraft is real, in a way, and it is being practiced by the silly teenaged girls who accuse everyone in their paths in order to deflect attention from themselves.

In its single-minded focus on the dangers of a jealous woman, the play misses the real cause of John Proctor’s downfall. John Proctor does not hang because he slept with the wrong woman. Abigail Williams, after all, confesses in a farewell scene that she never meant for him to be harmed. John Proctor hangs because his current servant, Mary Warren, accuses him of witchcraft to save her own life. And why wouldn’t she? Proctor spends the entire play beating her and berating her. Whatever begrudging loyalty she felt to the man and his wife that drove her attempt to unmask the girls of the village as “pretending” crumples the minute she is forced to choose between her life and his. We are meant to think that Mary Warren is well-meaning but weak and Proctor’s downfall comes from a tragic collision of events. What we are not meant to wonder is whether Proctor’s real sin might not be in his thoughtless participation in a social system that makes it acceptable to beat your servants but not your wife.

This dogged refusal to see labor disputes led by women as anything other than an expression of petulance and unruly sexuality is one legacy of The Crucible in our current moment. The unselfconscious willingness to turn the metaphor of a witch hunt against women is another.

Without The Crucible, would we still be willing to rhetorically conflate powerful men accused of well-documented sexual crimes with powerless women persecuted for imaginary crimes? Or women who tell their stories with hysterical villagers waving pitchforks? I suspect we would find some language to discredit women but it is not obvious that this is the metaphor that would be in play. The Crucible might well be a great work of art, but its moral mathematics skew male every time.

I can hear Miller’s ghostly objection as I write this. I am merely repeating the old blunder of his critics who insisted on drawing literal-minded parallels between Salem and McCarthyism, mistaking the effort to capture an atmosphere with a statement of fact. Perhaps that was once true but the metaphor long ceased being his alone. In the present moment, the true danger of the Salem-McCarthyism allegory isn’t that it confuses imaginary crimes for real ones. The danger is that it suggests that even if the crimes are real, they are treated as though don’t matter terribly much.

To call our current reckoning with sexual assault a witch hunt is to assert a position of smug futurity—to say, in effect, that I, unlike all of those swept up in the fervor of this terrible reckoning, can distance myself enough to see that one day we will all look back on this moment in shame. #MeToo, like Salem, like McCarthyism, like the Satanic Panic, will become yet another bead on our national rosary of unreasoning moral panics that we murmur to ourselves in contrition during history class. When that moment finally comes, we will see the true victims were not the accusers but the accused.

But why should that be the case? Why should this vantage point of the future that imagines our moment as a new Salem be right?

Is it because there are a huge number of men being accused? A much larger number of women have been assaulted. And, anyway, I promise you most guilty men will never be held accountable.

Is it because so many women are so angry and so vehement? We have good reason to be angry.

Is it because the question revolves around sex and we Americans have always been puritanical? There are plenty of nuanced conversations happening about how to draw boundaries between flirtation and harassment, but even if there weren’t I refuse to assume this burden. Academia has spent thirty years dismantling appeals to vague national essences; I am not about to accept their use now because it’s politer than calling women who complain about unwanted sexual advances frigid.

Is it because it seems frightening, arbitrary, and capricious who is outed and fired? If there are two guilty men and only one is ever punished for his crime, it may be unfair that the first is punished but it is in no way unjust.

Is it because the crimes actually aren’t the same and it seems unfair to lump Louis C.K. in with Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein? They all behaved abominably.

All of this is not to say that critics are entirely wrong. It is reasonable and even admirable to be on guard against false accusations and hasty dispensations of justice. But in calling #MeToo a witch hunt, critics are doing more than inserting a cautionary note into a heated conversation. They are actively discrediting women and coopting the history of women’s persecution to insinuate that collective expression of women’s anger must be hysterical. They are dodging the question of whether that anger is justified. The Crucible might be righteous but it is also reactionary.

Miller is worth rewatching in this moment because in a tidy two hour and four minute plot, he created a powerful allegory of the way fear, personal interests, and unyielding principles can all combine to grind innocents in the gears of history. But in doing so he also contributed to a culture that has no way of talking about the real dangers of grassroots, ad hoc justice that isn’t either misogynistic or classist. Witch hunts, hysteria, mob justice — these are all just different ways of dismissing large groups of angry people as irrational, dangerous, feral. And that is a problem in a moment there are so very many reasons for large groups of people to be angry, whether that means sexual assault, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement or growing economic inequality.

People have been shoving back against this language. In a column in the New York Times a few months ago, Lindy West skewered Woody Allen for calling the accusations against Weinstein a new Salem. She wrote, “Setting aside the gendered power differential inherent in real historical witch hunts (pretty sure it wasn’t all the rape victims in Salem getting together to burn the mayor), and the pathetic gall of men feeling hunted after millenniums of treating women like prey, I will let you guys have this one. Sure, if you insist, it’s a witch hunt. I’m a witch, and I’m hunting you.” The column is funny, trenchant, and cathartic. It is also, I hope, a sign that this old, tired, fraught, unutterably stupid rhetoric might be coming to an end in order to make space for new language that does not carry its conclusions in its metaphors.

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Liane F. Carlson is Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Religion at Princeton University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. Her research interests include continental philosophy, with emphasis on theories of religion, embodiment, evil, and the intersection of religion and literature. 

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

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