Nov. 11, 1952: Brother Scott, 4, and Billy, 2, Morris hold their flags and stand at attention as marines from El Toro pass in Armistice Day parade in Long Beach. The boys’ father was in Korea.

We were stacked in the chute, getting ready to leave the wire, hastily clad in mismatched warming layers, rifles and odd ends of equipment quickly grabbed, Kevlar helmet straps not yet fastened, the cummerbunds of our flak jackets not yet secured. Nervous energy permeated and infected the group. Would we hear a name? Neglecting to double check my own gear, I nervously lit a crumpled, half wet L&M cigarette, pulling the dry, acrid, and tarred smoke into my wheezing lungs.

Over the radio – “COC, this is 1 Saber. Hero. I say again, Hero.” My eyes caught my squad leader moving towards me a split second before he yelled, “are you fucking kidding Lucier? Put that shit out” then, to the squad, “let’s go” – to the point man, “don’t rush. There is no rush now.”

In a last-minute fumbling of feet scuttling towards the gate, and hands quickly slapping Velcro together, clipping straps, and clicking buckles, we shuffled towards the spot on Route Crimson, where twenty minutes ago, a blast had erupted while we slept, shaking us from our racks – a rude awakening to a cool April morning in Afghanistan. We moved deliberately and cautiously towards the site where “A” section was circled up, their early morning patrol halted. The call over the radio had confirmed our fears. The casualty was already dead. My sergeant was right. There was no rush now.

Mike Sega/ Reuters

The language that Marines use about death is revealing. The radio code for a dead casualty when I was in Afghanistan was “hero.” It suggested to me something about the nature of service, and sacrifice. Growing up Catholic, the idea of a blood sacrifice, a human sacrifice that could save and redeem, was familiar to me. Above every chalkboard in my grade school was the image of our Christ, crucified. Now, my dead friend was the lamb burnt whole, the crucified bloody savior. He walked an 800 meter Via Dolorosa that morning, not knowing that the path would end in his death. He walked, as he always had, boldly in front of the patrol, a point man, clearing a path for those who followed behind with his own footprints. His inauspicious cross was a flag planted in the ground, with Taliban scrawl, connected to a pressure release IED. We adore you, oh Christ and we praise you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.

I returned from Afghanistan five years ago. I had gotten married to my high school sweetheart two weeks before I deployed. I came home to a wife I hadn’t seen in almost a year, a new apartment, a dog adopted while I was overseas, and a world from which I felt separated and detached. That first weekend back in San Diego, Memorial Day weekend as chance would have it, a friend who had been overseas with me called me. “Hey brother, do you want to get out of here? Take the wives and go to Vegas or something?” I quickly agreed. Being back felt like drowning above ground, like suffocating. Everything was unfamiliar and anxiety inducing. What should have felt like safety felt more menacing than a war zone. The safety of a rifle slung around your shoulders, your squad mates in front of and behind you, and the comfort of a well-worn FROG suit (the cammies worn overseas) were gone, replaced by strange clothes, strange sights, strange people. I was home, but home didn’t feel the same, and neither did I.

As time went on, and the alien homeland slowly became familiar again, I noticed the way I reacted to the civilian world was not the only thing that had changed. The way the civilian world reacted to me had changed as well. Whether civilians walked on eggshells around me, fearful I might fly into a rage, or be triggered by a question and fall to tears, whether they adored me, thanked me, deferred to me, I was now something different, something apart.

Some of the differences were innocuous. At the fourth of July, relatives asked if I would be ok with the fireworks. I tried to reassure them I would be fine, but as I tried to explain, I slipped into a story, about explosions I remembered. My eyes stared at the dirt and I kept talking, until I caught myself and looked up, and saw a small audience staring. I could have died from the embarrassment. At another family reunion I found myself in a corner with an uncle who was a Vietnam veteran. Forty years my senior, he treated me like a brother-in-arms, and equal. In low voices we said those things to each other we knew we couldn’t say to the others. We were separate, different, marked. When I started college, a year after leaving the Marine Corps, I would catch professors hedging themselves, knowing a veteran was in the room, the way you might watch your language if a clergyman was near.

Reintegrating into civilian society has been illuminating. We, the veterans who did not pay the ultimate price in war, still play an important – and, to me troubling – role in a different kind of ritual than one of blood and sacrific. Like Odysseus, like mythical warriors who have descended to the land of the dead, who went to hell and back, our exploits are honored, memorialized, passed down through families. We are applauded, ushered into places of public distinction, thanked for our service. Even for those who didn’t grow up in a tradition with incense, processions, and holy water, in all of it, there’s the whiff of something ritualistic – at sporting events, at parades, in public ceremonies, and in national cemeteries.

Many veterans today fulfill a priestly role in American civil religion. We are Americans’ conduits to patriotic grace. Memorial Day, the 4^th of July, and Veteran’s Day are high holy days when we are trusted to enact the sacraments of our national religion, the one described by Robert Bellah when he wrote his seminal treatment of the American Civil Religion.

We are perceived as receivers and safe keepers of the wisdom and tradition of American values. In this way, like priests, veterans are looked to as arbiters of patriotic values. We are called upon to comment on policy and narrative. This happens on both sides of the political chasm, though, more commonly, on the right, where former SEALs appear in NRA videos proclaiming an American dystopia from which only martial spirit can deliver us. But veterans on the left fulfill the priestly role as well, in the pages of the New York Times and other publications’ opinion section, proclaiming a more inclusive vision of America. They call for what Richard Slotkin calls the “myth of nationality” – “ the idealized self-image of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy, hospitable to difference but united by a common sense of national belonging.”

How do I move in this space, as a veteran, who just wants to come home? Who doesn’t want to be anyone’s priest, doesn’t want to be anyone’s Messiah.

Everyone has an opinion on the war, on what they think it is like, on what they think it means. After enough drinks to work up the courage, or with a hushed, soft, almost apologetic tone, I’ll get asked, by co-workers, by fellow students, by parents of friends, “What do you think about the war? What was it like?” I’ve been asked enough times, I can feel what they want to hear. Some people want you to tell them we should just nuke the whole place. Some people want to hear how mismanaged America’s misadventure has been. They know what they think, but they need it confirmed by a veteran. I can feel them reaching through me, to the place they haven’t been, for that ancient heavenly connection to the star-spangled banner in the machinery of night. I can’t tell them that I don’t want to be their connection, their priest, their messiah.

I wonder what I could tell them to make them understand. I think it would start with the cadences of boot camp.

Leader: Every other left foot, you say kill

All: beat beat beat Kill beat beat beat Kill
Leader: On a Monday

All: Kill

Leader: On a Tuesday
All: Kill
…

Leader: On a Sunday
All: Kill

Leader: Go to church and pray

All: Kill

Leader: God let me
All: Kill

Leader: God help me
All: Kill

God help me

The middle part of the story would be about poetry. In Afghanistan, the rhythms of patrol matched the rise and fall of T.S. Elliot’s Prufrock.

Let us go then, you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky…

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Those first lines, call you out to adventure, then Elliot undercuts your hope. Every patrol was the same way. I’d step outside the wire. I’d slowly come alive. I’d scan and search every tree line. One morning, cresting a hill, word came over the radio that our blimp had spotted enemy. We were coming around an area known as sniper hill. “Come get in the fight boys!” yelled a corporal, Mike. That patrol ended with four dead bodies in the high grass on the banks of the Helmand River, gunned down by A-10s. The lifeless bodies brought no joy. Just disappointment, just flesh where once there was spirit. Patients etherized upon a table.

The end of the story would be about scripture. In Philippians 2, Paul reverses the usual order of excitement and disappointment, the cycle of Prufrock, and prescribes a radically different form of religious hope.

 Let the same mind be in you that was^[a] in Christ Jesus,

⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸     he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

⁹ Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
¹⁰ so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹ and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Rather than excite then disappoint, Paul presents a dynamic of condescension, then exaltation. Paul’s Christ condescends, goes down to be among us and in communion with us. It is by lowering himself off his priestly, and godly remove, that Paul’s Christ wins exaltation. I could tell them that I went down, I performed an anabasis, but that I’m still looking for exaltation.

That’s the story I’d like to tell. A story about expectations being undercut. About praying to kill. About becoming lonely and arrogant and lethal, but not finding salvation in war, and now looking for it here at home. But I can’t tell that story. So I tell a different story instead, a story with a twist. I tell the guns, god, and glory types about the mangled bodies of sixteen year-olds who didn’t know any better, and the farmers just trying to make a living. I tell the bleeding hearts about the child rape, about the intel we got about a teenager with Down Syndrome who was going to be strapped with a suicide vest. They leave, like the man who asked The Teacher what he must do to win the kingdom. Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I lie. I talk in parables. I come at the truth from any angle I can. When people know what they want to hear, I have to try and get them to make the journey down with me first, to that place where truth is foggy. Then maybe we can search for exaltation together.

This is the water I find myself swimming in, as a veteran. The Christian Messiah was both sacrificial lamb, and high priest. So too are veterans. Stanley Hauerwas says in War and the American Difference, “If the Civil War teaches us anything, it is that when Christians no longer believe that Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for the salvation of the world, we will find other forms of sacrificial behaviors that are as compelling as they are idolatrous. In the process, Christians confuse the sacrifice of war with the sacrifice of Christ.” But I didn’t die overseas, my blood wasn’t spilled for you and for all, so that America’s sins might be forgiven. I came back.

I think America wants me to be a priest. But I’m no one’s Messiah. I’m just a twenty-eight year old trying to make sense of the things I saw. I can hear the running cadence, but I’m looking for a new chant, instead of “kill.” I’m trying to empty myself, and take the form, not of a slave, but of a citizen again. I’m wandering through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats, of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells. The streets lead to an overwhelming question – How can I go from being a priest of American religion, to just a fellow believer?

***

Peter Lucier is a Marine veteran (2008-2013) and student at Montana State, where he studies Political Science. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy as a member of the Council of Former Enlisted, The War Horse, and Task and Purpose. 

***

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

The post Not Your Messiah appeared first on The Revealer.

By Ann Neumann

But, fundamentally, choosing against a life-sustaining measure because it is unduly burdensome or futile with the foreseeable consequence of an earlier death is not the same thing as declining or discontinuing care to directly facilitate dying. The former is a choice for a different kind of life, however long it lasts, and the latter is a choice for death. —O. Carter Snead, director of the Center for Ethics and Culture and professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, in an op ed, “Why the Pope is Fighting for Charlie Gard,” for CNN on July 13, 2017

With the death of an 11 month-old child last month, another cycle of life-and-death spectacle left the world stage. They called themselves the “C Team”: Connie Yates, the desperate grieving mother with no flesh between her bones and her draping press conference clothes, a cascade of hair to her unnursed breast, a fair curtain covering one eye; Chris Gard, the crusading father, a dark warrior with a cloth monkey in the breast pocket of his ill-fitting, armor-like suit, protectively leading his wife by the hand into a wad of press or a tangle of London traffic; and Charlie, universal infant, innocent, white, golden haired and bright, “our angel,” our future, our hope—whom we were all asked to bludgeon or protect.

A fantastical tragedy (like so many other tragedies of young women and babies before it, Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, Terri Schiavo, Jahi McMath, Baby Joseph), the story of Charlie Gard featured warriors, philosophers, saints, kings, charlatans and maids, all illuminated by a robust and perpetual chorus. All displaying the most compelling characteristics of human drama: conviction, pride, bravery, justice, duplicity, grief, frenzy, and compassion. It was a passion play of a new but familiar order, a perfect fleeting little boy onto whom so much could be projected; the ghost-like parents, gaunt, speaking, when they spoke at all, in the clichés of profound emotion.

Charlie’s condition, mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome (MDDS), was rare, debilitating, and fatal in early childhood. It affected many organs, including the brain and muscles and caused a wasting of his tissues and energy. He was deaf, immobile, epileptic and increasingly unable to see. He was kept alive only by artificial ventilation.^[1]

The Charlie Gard story in three parts: 1. The doctors of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London advised Charlie’s parents to end artificial ventilation. They refused. In April this year the Family Division of the High Court ruled for the hospital. 2. Chris and Connie appealed—to the courts, to the public, to the media, to the pope, to the US president, to Columbia University’s research scholars, to a hospital in Rome, to a hospital in New York, to US “pro-life” evangelicals, to you, me, and every media consumer. 3. Finally, when science proved even too conditional for hope, the Gards relented. Charlie died in hospice on July 28, one week before his first birthday. Donated funds were established as a foundation—little Charlie’s afterlife and legacy—for other children with rare medical conditions so that #charliesfight, #charliesarmy might have everlasting life.

Beginning, middle and end— Aristotle’s protasis, epitasis, and catastrophe–the three stages of plot structure. Our reward for attending to the Gards and their courts is a kind of Aristotelian catharsis. “Aristotle’s somewhat technical understanding of catharsis acquires its overtones of meaning from a double linguistic heritage, in part medical and in part religious,” states the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. The medical part harks to the early writings of the Hippocratic School of Medicine, which “refers to the discharge of whatever excess of bodily elements” has made the body sick. Once discharged the body may return “to that state of right proportion, which is health.”

The religious part Aristotle likely picked up from various Plato works, including Phaedo, in which catharsis consists “in separating, so far as possible, the soul from the body, and in teaching the soul the habit of collecting and bringing itself together from all parts of the body, and in living so far as it can both now and hereafter, alone by itself, freed from the body as from fetters.”

The resultant meaning from blending these two philosophical strands is both physical and psychic“A wisdom is distilled from tragic suffering: man is pathei mathos, ‘taught by suffering,’” states Poetry and Poetics, referencing the chorus in the Agamemnon. Richmond Lattimore wrote in his classic 1953 translation and introduction to the Oresteia, of which Agememnon is the first in the trilogy: “What they kill is what they love.”

Grieving mother Lu Spinney wrote in the New York Times on August 11 about the death of her son who had been mentally and physically disabled in a skiing accident. He died of pneumonia four years later when the family decided not to treat him: “protecting my son meant wishing for his death.”

Great Ormond Street Hospital wrote in a June 18 statement: “Our priority has always been, and will always be, the best interests of Charlie Gard.”

The story of modern medicine is so very many Oresteias. The suffering are dead at the hands of those who loved them. The killers, people like you and me, killing what we love. Again and again the story is epic heartbreak and tragedy. We blame whatever we can, we ascribe the eternal pain to fate, we give it order, outline it in three parts. We contrive meaning and lesson out of the cold body, the blood on our hands, the shattered lives, the cacophony of the chorus, the memories of the dead. It is what we do.

***

The four horsemen of the tragedy of Charlie Gard are same as they ever were and will be: the medicine; the media; the politics; and the faith, hope and charity.

The medicine was bitter. There was no cure for the child’s disease. The experimental treatments waved wildly before the courts’ and the family’s eyes were rudimentary, untested, and prescribed from afar. On July 7, New York Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Irving Medical Center offered to accept the child if the UK courts cleared him to leave the country. Dr. Michio Hirano offered an experimental treatment with a 10 percent efficacy, if he could get the FDA to approve his treatment of the child or his mailing of the special drug to London. Hirano was immediately and roundly criticized by other doctors and ethicists for not having examined the child before offering medical treatment. And for, rightly or wrongly, having a financial stake in the experimental treatment he intended to use. Hirano’s commitment to Hippocrates’ “do no harm” was strongly questioned.

The media spent three months voraciously vying for every angle, opinion, development and counter narrative of the Charlie Gard story. Every opinion piece, every article pumped more anguish into the exposition and rising action of Charlie’s narrative—attracting support from global luminaries like Pope Francis, who cagily tweeted on June 30:

“To defend human life, above all when it is wounded by illness, is a duty of love that God entrusts to all.” Cagey because Vicenzo Paglia, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life wisely weighed the nuances of the case and released a statement which read in part: “we must also accept the limits of medicine and […] avoid aggressive medical procedures that are disproportionate to any expected results or excessively burdensome to the patient or the family.” Factions claimed the Pope’s words for themselves; practically, the Holy diagnosis was inconclusive.

Yet a hospital near the Vatican tweeted that it would take the child in. On Twitter the hashtag #jesuisCharlieGard proliferated, accompanied by adorable photos of the infant, enormous doe eyes seeming to stare imploringly at the camera. The Gards also had an active crowdfunding website, charliesfight.org, and Facebook and Twitter accounts that amplified every shudder, heartstring, statement, or report. After Charlie’s death on July 28th, #iamcharliegard, used by the ubiquitous and consistently “pro-life” website, LifeNews.com, kept Charlie’s legacy alive by playing on the “I am Sparticus” meme to highlight other infants in supposedly similar straights as Charlie.

All this swirl, engaging general readers, infecting primed demographic groups—religious and political, particularly—did important financial work: driving traffic to media outlets and charity dollars to the family’s GoFundMe page which raised nearly $2 million dollars in the blink of an eye. What the funding did was remove any question of how Connie, a caregiver, and Chris, a postman, would pay for their child’s treatment—an important point for American supporters who apparently believe—grotesquely, inconsistently, immorally—that care really only should go to those who can afford it. The funds also exempted the Gards from British national health care, a devilish and corrupting form of socialism according to those bootstrapping conservatives across the pond.

The political chips were stirred. They fell for or against as they may: UK Prime Minister Theresa May and muppet-like UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson stated their support for Great Ormond hospital. US President Donald Trump, however—having just run through the repeal and replace gauntlet but nonetheless unwilling to admit anything like defeat—came out for Charlie’s charity-funded experimental treatments. He tweeted, “If we can help little #CharlieGard, as per our friends in the U.K. and the Pope, we would be delighted to do so.” @fight4charlie, the C Team’s Twitter account, retweeted, “Thanks @realdonaldtrump for your support – @theresa_may do the right thing and #savecharliegard!”

Unintentional comic, Trump pal, and former UK politician Nigel Farage stated on his radio show, “Should we live in a society where parents, providing they’re of sound mind, can make the ultimate choice about their children’s future. Or does the state have that power? What this case has shown, sadly, is the state has that power. I don’t like it. I want this changed.”

***

Why Farage wanted “it” changed was best articulated by Bobby Schindler, brother of Terri Schiavo, founder of the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network, self-proclaimed disability rights activist, and Chris, Connie, and Charlie visitor a few weeks before the latter’s death. Schindler wrote in a June 30 statement,

The central issue of the Charlie Gard struggle is not about rationing, limited resources, or even life support. At issue is whether universal healthcare means that bureaucrats and judges will determine appropriate treatment, or whether parents like Charlie’s with the energy, finances, and physicians to care for their child will be allowed to do so.

Schindler here and elsewhere condemns “universal” healthcare (read: blood thirsty bureaucrats) for making the hard decisions when those decisions should be up to the “consumer”—but only those consumers who have the “energy, finances, and physicians” to make their own decisions. And only if those decisions are ones Schindler and his radical “pro life” allies agree with. It’s an argument for privilege when you examine the costs to community that futile care, like what was required to keep little Charlie “alive,” are considered.

Keeping Charlie alive was an all court press conference for the specialness of some patients (the pretty young ones) at the expense of all other less meme-ready, emotionally engaging patients. If you dramatically get the audience’s attention, you get the special drug, the pope’s tweets, the moral justification.^[2] The hospital’s concerns regarding Charlie’s suffering and the misuse of resources were grotesquely re-narrated as proof of the “culture of death.”^[3] No nuance. No moral ambiguity. The world consists of the immoral killers (feminists, government, hospital ethics boards…) and the moral killed (innocent babies, the most vulnerable for whom miracles may occur).

Schindler explained to Glenn Beck in July the seemingly senseless reason the hospital both refused to treat Charlie and prevented him from getting treatment elsewhere: “But it makes sense to me. And also, think about it this way, Glenn. If they are wrong and Charlie does improve from treatment out there, think about all the other families now that are being cared for in that hospital.” Fear of being found out as fallible. He continued:

I mean, if you’re looking at it from a purely financial point of view, the hospital’s best interest is to say, “Okay. Listen, this person’s life is going to cost a lot of money. He’s not going to get much better anyway.” So then they go in and tell the parents. They give them this poor diagnosis. And they say, “Look, you don’t want to end up like a Terry [sic] Schiavo, so to speak. You know, why don’t you do what’s best for this person. Put him out of his suffering and end his life.” And they have the legal means now to do this.

What Schiavo brought to the Gards’ fight was language, media savvy, and a well-established frame for how to hope beyond all hope (a suffering for the sake of suffering). The Life and Hope Network was called TerrisFight.org long before little Charlie was born. Everything Schiavo knows about media sensation he learned from circus barker extraordinaire, Randall Terry, who staged protesters outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice and called in legislators, from local to the president, to prevent Schiavo’s feeding tube from being removed. Schiavo also gave the Gard’s access to a fundraising network and a long-cultivated list of allies in the medical industry.^[6]

Schindler also brought the Gard cause an indisputable, if misdirected, mantra: killing the disabled is wrong. Aid in dying—euthanasia—is always immoral. And denying or removing treatment, as the courts ordered for Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, is murder. Charles C. Cosey, a professor at Fordham University, rallied to this mantra in an article for FirstThings:

They reached this judgment on the basis of [Charlie’s] expected mental disability. They denied him treatment, and ordered his ventilator removed, not because of the burden of the treatment, but because of the burden of his life. In a cruel act proposed by doctors, approved by courts, cheered by the press, and blessed by certain high clerics, Charlie Gard was euthanized. It was euthanasia by omission, but it was euthanasia all the same.”

Many saw through the ill-conceived categorization of little Charlie as disabled, as the stopping of his ventilator as murder. They were having none of the Schiavo-like tragic framing and fashioning their own lessons from suffering. Michael Redinger, psychiatrist and medical ethicist at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine, wrote at America magazine:

One category includes those treatments that are termed futile or, more accurately, “nonbeneficial,” and it has been an increasing focus of both secular and Catholic medical ethics. Physicians are not obligated to offer treatments that, in their medical expertise, have no reasonable chance of success or in which the harms so far exceed the potential benefits that it becomes inhumane to provide them. To do so violates the ancient maxim to “first, do no harm.”

Redinger’s tone, like that of the Vatican’s Vicenzo Paglia, is the tone the Mother Church uses to smack down undisciplined and upstart “pro-life” politicians and advocates who try to speak for them. Redinger shakes a finger at the “well-intentioned members of the pro-life community” who “reflexively leapt to the defense of the Gard family”: “In doing so, they unfortunately failed to recognize the nuances of Catholic teaching on end-of-life care. When life is valued so highly relative to other goods, its pursuit becomes detrimental. In effect, life itself becomes an idol.”

***

The faith, hope, and charity of Charlie Gard’s tragedy are eternal. Early on, when they first engaged the courts, Gard’s parents believed that he was strong enough, special enough, to be among the few 10 percent of patients for whom the experimental drug could be efficacious. How could they? And yet, how could they not? The day little Charlie died, they wrote, “We are struggling to find any comfort or peace with all this but one thing that does give us the slightest bit of comfort, is that we truly believe that Charlie may have been too special for this cruel world.” When there was no hope for their son’s survival, they fabricated it out of noise and light and social media posts and small-increment charity.

As to Charlie’s suffering, he was their fighter. They could see no pain on his face, despite the court’s constant concern for his suffering. Of if they could see his pain, it meant he was still theirs, still alive; his pain now paying forward his heavenly reward.

Most of the comments on Lu Spinney’s essay, “Protecting my son meant wishing for his death,” about her disabled son’s death by pneumonia, are encouraging and supportive. She had done the brave, right, counterintuitive thing: she cared for him by letting him die. But one voice stands out in the affirming chorus, one that stays with her son’s suffering rather than raising up Spinney’s grief. Cynthia Starks of Zionsville, Indiana wrote two days after the piece was published:

Yet none of the comments I have read considers that we are all called to suffer as Christ suffered. No one escapes. Not even beautiful and brilliant young men. With a belief in God, we know that our suffering is united with Christs [sic] in service to the world. My own brother, died of a particularly painful and aggressive form of cancer. Our priest said that he felt sure his suffering was his purgatory on earth. Mother Angelica, founder of the EWTN Network, once said, in her final difficult illness, that she prayed each night for one more day of life so her suffering could be offered up for another soul in purgatory. I know these beliefs are out-of-fashion, but some of us still hold to them, as they are still taught by the Catholic Church.

It’s an ancient sentiment, one that, even before Jesus hanged by nails, compelled Greek choruses to extoll pain’s great lessons. What was Charlie’s lesson? Christ too suffered? “No one escapes?” And yet, through death, Charlie Gard did.

***

^[1] I take this description of MDDS and Charlie Gard from an essay by British physician Phil Whitaker, which appeared at the New Statesman on July 11, 2017: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2017/07/decision-over-charlie-gard-comes-down-matter-belief

^[2] See also the Right to Try movement, which successfully has sought to circumvent FDA drug approval processes (big government!) to allow boisterous parents to request experimental drugs directly from pharmaceutical companies, thus jeopardizing existing testing procedures for treatments needed by the rest of us. Because: they’re special. https://therevealer.org/2015/12/21/the-patient-body-accusing-the-fda-of-playing-god/

^[3] The phrase comes from Pope John Paul II and is most often used to refer to abortion and “euthanasia” but is increasingly applied to confrontations over removal of physiological support. For more on the “culture of death,” see Wesley J. Smith, a self-appointed bioethicist of this wing of the “pro life” movement. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/three-culture-of-death-tipping-points

^[4] See also the Right to Try movement, which successfully has sought to circumvent FDA drug approval processes (big government!) to allow boisterous parents to request experimental drugs directly from pharmaceutical companies, thus jeopardizing existing testing procedures for treatments needed by the rest of us. Because: they’re special. https://therevealer.org/2015/12/21/the-patient-body-accusing-the-fda-of-playing-god/

^[5] The phrase comes from Pope John Paul II and is most often used to refer to abortion and “euthanasia” but is increasingly applied to confrontations over removal of physiological support. For more on the “culture of death,” see Wesley J. Smith, a self-appointed bioethicist of this wing of the “pro life” movement. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/06/three-culture-of-death-tipping-points

^[6] The Life and Hope Network has a long established “Lifeline” that is supported by donors and staffed by likeminded doctors, ethicists, nurses, facility and hospital directors and lawyers. In the past half dozen years, the Life and Hope Network has been involved in many of the high profile “futile care” cases that have garnered national and international attention: https://donorbox.org/lifeandhope?recurring=true

***

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 at NYU.

The post “A Different Kind of Life”: The Tragedy of Charlie Gard appeared first on The Revealer.

Image: Watson Heston, The Uses of the Cross, in The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (1896).

Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation. By Leigh Eric Schmidt. Princeton University Press, 2016. 360 pages. $35.00 (Hardcover).

By Geoffrey Pollick

Image: Watson Heston, The Uses of the Cross, in The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book (1896). [link]

Among the most notable trends in recent American religious life is the emergence of the religiously unaffiliated as an increasingly numerous and influential demographic segment. Documented mainly through Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) and studies by the Pew Research Center, “Nones” (those who respond “none” when asked about religious identification) carry the lede in story after story about the religious character of the U.S. populace. Increasing from just over 16 percent of the adult population in 2007 to nearly 23 percent in 2014, those who claim no religion mark a newly significant societal trend. And they seem to be reshaping the national polity in definite terms.

But the lack of religious affiliation isn’t novel in American culture. Atheists, agnostics, and the otherwise irreligious have long hovered in the cultural background, haunting Christianity’s dominance with freethinking skepticism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, especially, “freethought” emerged as a hyper-rational viewpoint that prioritized individual practices of empirical observation and logical argument. Embodied prominently in the career of traveling lecturer Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899), freethinkers included agnostics, atheists, and those with generally skeptical attitudes towards religious authority. As a movement, freethought challenged constructions of the United States as a Christian nation.

In a recently published history of what he calls “unbelief” in the United States, Leigh Eric Schmidt situates the nation’s skeptical past in relation to its reliance on religion as a line of civic demarcation. In doing so, he recovers the “village atheist”—a rabble-rousing, nineteenth-century figure who denied Christian authority, advocated for strict church-state separation, championed scientific rationalism, and dreamed of civil equality—as a forgotten cultural type that marked American religion through negation and provocation.

One of the subtlest and most insightful chroniclers of U.S. religions over the last dozen years Schmidt has attended to liberal formations of American spiritual life. Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation expands his work beyond the limits of liberalism to consider a more radical set of “rogue” and “rough-edged figures” who rode along the borderlines of the nation’s religious landscape.

Schmidt narrates these irreligious rogues as “secularists,” a term they imported from British counterparts during the 1850s in efforts to adopt a “more inclusive label than ‘atheist’ or ‘infidel.’” Launching skeptical critiques of Christian power, village atheists functioned as “[c]apillaries of unbelief in a body politic long inhospitable to them.” Through a series of narrative portraits, Village Atheists sketches the contours of irreligion as they solidified from the late nineteenth century into the middle years of the twentieth. In this, Schmidt uncovers the travails of skeptics during an epoch historians have termed the “evangelical century.” The pressures they faced in countering Protestant dominance led unbelievers both to denounce Christianity’s claims of exceptionalism and to assert alternative visions of an America made hospitable to secular reason. What emerges is a story of “recurring friction and negotiation [along] the charged terrain that atheists and unbelievers have long occupied between…equal and unequal citizenship in American culture.”

Spanning from the 1870s to the 1960s, Schmidt’s study stitches the story of unbelieving Americans into the main narratives of the U.S. religious past. His characters encounter liberal Protestants and the denominational skirmishes that accompanied their late-nineteenth-century articulations. They run across evangelicals and nascent Fundamentalists battling to hold intellectual and political sway at traditional centers of theology and morality. And they meet one another, at times allying in collaborative ventures and feuding over tactics and reputation.

In four sequential chapters and an epilogue, Village Atheists traces the cultural and intellectual lines that drew Schmidt’s subjects together across the continent and through decades. To cut through the thicket of materials produced by nineteenth-century unbelievers, he narrates his analysis through biography. In a “pointillist group portrait” of four principal figures, he “teases out a history tugged between…a Christian majority and the imperfect liberties of a secularist minority.” Their lives intersected primarily in the pages of the Truth Seeker— freethought’s main periodical from the 1870s through the early twentieth century—and Village Atheists culls its contents to form a consistent narrative of infidelity in U.S. culture.

The first in Schmidt’s biographical quartet, Samuel Porter Putnam (1838–1896) illustrates the mentality inhabited by those secularists who transited the gap between evangelical Protestantism and confirmed atheism. A prominent writer and lecturer on the freethought circuit, Putnam ricocheted from childhood Calvinism to a youthfully naïve atheism as an undergraduate, then bounced between various stripes of Unitarianism, finally settling on scientific materialism in his maturity. This trajectory furnished Putnam with a mentality that encompassed the contradictions between traditional Protestantism and skeptical atheism. As he reinforced a burgeoning irreligious subculture by leading the American Secularist Union and publishing atheist-themed stories in the freethinking press, he helped to shape a tradition and construct a sense of identity for unbelieving Americans. In doing so, Putnam opened opportunities and furnished resources for carrying out the conduct of life apart from, even if imprinted by, normative Christianity.

Less bound to the cultural baggage of a Christian background, Watson Heston (1846–1905)—the cartoonist-iconographer of turn-of-the-century freethought and the subject of Schmidt’s second chapter—provides a case in cataloging the criticisms and concerns advanced by secularists in graphic form. Working from his desk in Carthage, Missouri, Heston authored more than 600 cartoons that were printed on the cover of the Truth Seeker between 1885 and 1900. As portrayed in Village Atheists, this body of visual rhetoric “produced an incomparable iconography of American secularism” in which Heston presented “the visualization of a secular republic…designed to render freethinking liberalism tangible.” Always confrontational, Heston’s images excoriated Christianity for its perceived hypocrisy and cruelty, and drew both praise and disdain from the ranks of fellow skeptics for the aggression of their messages.

In Schmidt’s analysis, the dynamics behind Heston’s representations pointed to liberal secularism’s inner complexity. Unsure of the best strategy for publicizing their views, unbelievers quarreled over both the message and the medium. Should unbelievers attenuate their antireligious polemic and the belligerence of their tone? Should freethinkers hew to the rationality of words and deliberative argument, or could the shorthand mode of cartoon fairly broadcast their claims? Testing visual media against oratory and literary expressive forms, Heston found that graphical polemics possessed the most power. But his pugnacious content risked reprisal from opponents and alienating potential sympathizers. Even so, Schmidt’s cartoonist regularly landed on the side of visual bombast. Aware that atheism “looked more like a tiny, ostracized faction than a surging tide,” Heston demonstrated self-awareness of irreligion’s marginality, but nevertheless remained uncompromising in maintaining the “rough edges” of his confrontational imagery.

In two further chapters, Schmidt raises the cases of Charles B. Reynolds (1832–1896) and Elmina Drake Slenker (1827–1908). Perhaps the best-known of Schmidt’s village atheists, Reynolds sat for a blasphemy trial in New Jersey during 1886 and 1887. Once an itinerant Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, Reynolds, like Putnam, took up the freethinking lecture circuit during the 1880s, delivering lecture after lecture in summer-season tent meetings across the northeastern United States and into Canada. Experiencing little opposition most of the time, Reynolds was temporarily stopped in his tracks after squaring off with town officials and local Christians in Boonton, New Jersey. Through protracted legal proceedings and public disputes, Reynolds resisted the town’s effort to muzzle his secularist message. Distributing copies of the Truth Seeker—illustrated with Heston’s cartoon cover art—he baited local residents and the town council with accusations of Christian hypocrisy for limiting the speech of infidels. By his resistance to Christian constructions of civic polity, Schmidt sees significance in Reynolds’s doubling of the preaching vocation: “The twofold career of ‘Elder Reynolds’ and ‘Blasphemer Reynolds’ was played out in the up-for-grabs space between a Christian nation and a secular republic.”

In similar measure, Elmina Drake Slenker’s career marked the boundaries that restricted freethinking speech and activism, cut off when they reached too near the edges of sexual and marital norms. Where Reynolds and Putnam experienced restrictions based on accusations of blasphemy, Slenker encountered resistance because her critiques of marriage and sexuality were considered obscene. As an author of freethinking sentimental literature, Slenker “strove to depict strong, atheistic women who were quite capable of persuading anyone they might encounter to exchange threadbare theology for scientific rationality.” But norms of “male privilege and masculine presumption”— both within and apart from liberal secular circles—limited Selnker’s ability to realize the ideals of atheist feminism. Publishing anatomically frank language in her fiction and activist writing, Slenker was pursued by allies of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice and prosecuted for violating anti-obscenity codes. By raising questions of sexuality and gender, Slenker found herself flung to the far edges of the atheist avant-garde, abandoned by all but the most radical of her fellow freethinkers. Through Slenker’s story, Schmidt illustrates both the extremity of opposition to unbelief in the United States and the limited extent to which unbelievers themselves were willing to question traditional constructions of gender and marriage.

Village Atheists concludes with an epilogue that considers how these four figures established patterns that carried forward into the twentieth century. Emphasizing Supreme Court jurisprudence, Schmidt links nineteenth-century narratives to battles over compulsory religious expression in public schools and other hallmark issues that came before the court between the 1940s and 1960s.

Schmidt’s figures certainly occupied ideological margins, and their articulations reached only as high as their positions allowed. Consequently, the main cultural work of Schmidt’s village atheists wasn’t to enact the robust secularism they desired, but involved the more restricted work of “filing a series of minority reports.” The modesty of these reports, however, didn’t counter their significance. By doggedly insisting on the legitimacy of their call, “village atheists negotiated their way into American public life through decades of engagement and conflict.”

In all, Village Atheists provides an exemplary consideration of the cultural significance of its titular typology, and this marks its most distinctive contribution. Where other historians have described the intellectual history of American unbelief and given that history an activist bent, Schmidt delivers a disciplined cultural historiography. Village Atheists considers the broader symbolisms and significance of unbelief in the everyday life of the turn-of-the-century nation. As he explains it, “[t]he religious estrangements that vexed [American freethinkers] were not philosophically abstracted; they were visceral, relational, and densely particular.” America’s secularists emerged authentically from the dynamics of social and cultural life, just like all others. That Schmidt places them in their complex relationship to normative practices and perspectives is the principal value of a cultural history of unbelief.

With respect to a broader understanding of U.S. religious cultures, Schmidt’s exploration of the archive of American unbelief sharpens and clarifies the narrative and expands its contour. “The underlying presumption,” Schmidt observes, “that the nation’s history must be headed one way or another—through an unfolding process of secularization or Christianization—remains hard to relinquish, but the history told here purposefully occupies the uneasy space between those persistent narrative devices.” Recalling the cultural type of the village atheist helps Schmidt’s reader to reconsider the meaning of religion in the U.S. past, cracking open any certainty in determining of the meaning of Protestantism’s normative sway and the cultural position and perception of religious minorities.

As U.S. Christianity’s anti-type, the village atheist frames the undetermined character of American religion more clearly. Much like the surging numbers of “nones” in the current moment, the rabble-rousing skeptics of the 1800s pointed to the ambiguity of religious affiliation and disaffiliation. Atheist, Christian, or otherwise, religious and irreligious labels have long marked the boundaries set around public power and civic belonging. In Village Atheists, readers will find a powerful meditation on the tension between belief and unbelief in the long project of collective identity formation in the United States.

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Geoffrey Pollick, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College, teaches and researches the history of religion in the United States. His work emphasizes religion’s entanglements with political radicalism, the role and dimensions of religious liberalism, critical theory of religion, and the cultural history and historiography of religion.

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

The post Excursions in Unbelief: Retrieving Religion’s “Antitype” in U.S. History appeared first on The Revealer.

Sikhs migrating to a new homeland after the violent partition of British India in 1947. Credit Margaret Bourke-White/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images

By Shruti Devgan

Seventy years ago, in 1947, British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent ended. At the same time, the newly independent subcontinent was suddenly and violently divided by the founding of two new sovereign nation states, one, Hindu-majority India, and the other, Muslim-majority West and East Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively). This bloody event is known as the Partition.

The Partition produced one of the largest mass migrations in world history, displacing more than twelve million people and killing at least one million. There were forced conversions, women were abducted, raped, and mutilated; female bodies became sites for the “competitive games of men.” The North West Indian state of Punjab and the East Indian state of Bengal were the most directly affected by the Partition, as their land and populations were arbitrarily and hastily divided and distributed between the new nations. Punjab province was, as historian Yasmin Khan has written, the “most brutally sliced into two parts in 1947…where by far the greatest number of massacres of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims occurred.”

Now, in 2017, the very first physical museum devoted to preserving the Partition’s memories has opened in the Punjabi city of Amritsar. The museum is part of an important moment for reconsidering and reshaping how the Partition is defined and remembered. As the historian Gyanendra Pandey has written, the Partition redefined everyone – Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and even Christian. Everyone was violently redefined by their religious identity.  He writes, “many times since 1947, men, women and children belonging to different castes, classes, occupations, linguistic and cultural backgrounds—have been seen in terms of little but their Sikh-ness, their Muslim-ness or their Hindu-ness.” 

Yet, as Pandey explains, nationalist Indian historiography continues to separate “Partition,” a constitutional, agreed-upon division of land and assets from the violence which produced the moment and which was provoked by it.  As a result, the violence of the Partition is not often included in its official history. Historians  have focused instead on the nationalist, anti-colonial movement that led to independence; when they write about the Partition,  they treat it as a culmination of political, economic, and social causes, rather than as an event with ongoing repercussions.  Pandey explains, “It is neither the genocidal murder and suffering, nor the issue of consequences for Indian and Pakistani nationalism and nation-building, that provides the charge in this body of writings, but the question of India’s unity.” 

Given this record of misrepresentation, the Partition museum signals a shift in the public discourse. It is a way to start making the ghosts of the Partition visible, an important step in facing and memorializing the brutal consequences of the Partition still with us today. The museum is housed in Amritsar’s Town Hall, a building that stood witness to several critical events in the freedom struggle against British colonial rule. Through donations and contributions from public and private sources, the Partition Museum has accumulated a collection of letters, refugees’ belongings, oral histories, photographs, audio-recordings of songs and poems from the pre-Partition era, official documents, maps, and rare newspaper clippings relating to the event. Together the memorabilia reconstruct and preserve stories of the Partition.

Yet, even the use of the term “Partition” remains, itself, fraught. For example, as it was a moment of separation, division, and violence, it was also the moment of Pakistan’s independence, making its meaning both painful and proud for many people.

Furthermore, the singular nature of the term is also problem; the Partition was not the drawing of a single line, it was the drawing of many lines in many places, lines that continue to create and reinforce fractures between and within communities. That is to say, the Partition was not a Partition, it was many partitions.

Indian feminist and publisher Urvashi Butalia’s new edited book, Partition: The Long Shadow , is one of the first works to introduce us to the multiple other, plural, narratives and to explore the durable effects of the Partition. For Butalia, Partition is an umbrella term subsuming many neglected histories within it.

A boy in a Delhi refugee camp; from the new edition of “Train to Pakistan.” Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White / LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

Urvashi Butalia is among the foremost scholars of the Partition. Her book published in 2000, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, was written with a “deep and abiding feminism” and broke ground in moving from a generalized, sanitized history of events to particular, unheard, and unspoken memories. The newly published Partition: The Long Shadow continues to advance her feminist methodology and study of 1947 by approaching history through personal narrative. Feminist scholars have long rejected the distinction between the political and personal, challenging the impersonal objectivity of interviews, all the while reflecting on the ethical problem of personal narrative. Butalia acknowledges that the essays in her new book are a “small fraction of the many unexplored histories…(only) some aspects of the Indian experience.” Especially because transnational and collaborative research is extremely difficult due to continued hostility and strained relationships between present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Nevertheless, they are an essential new collection of voices and perspectives.

Each of the twelve essays in Butalia’s book has a distinct focus, yet together they tell stories of partitions, plural and in lowercase ‘p.’ The volume includes essays about the impact of the Partition on “peripheral” Indian states such as Ladakh and Assam. The book is also notable for paying attention to differentiation and stratification along caste and class lines within the refugee experience. One of the essays in the book is a poignant account of untouchable and poor refugees’ eviction from Marichjhapi, West Bengal and their mass massacre at the behest of the Left Front government. In keeping with remembering “forgotten history,” the book has an essay about the rise and demise of a pre-insurgency communist militia in Kashmir that fought against princely rule and defended a secular democratic state. The volume also has two essays telling the untold stories of the Sindhi community. Underlying all these essays are broader questions of borders, boundaries, home, belonging, and intergenerational hauntings. The volume’s authors ponder questions of representation and incorporate art and new forms of narrative to tell stories within the story of the Partition.

 The best essays in the book contain visual and textual narratives, while others fail to draw a connection with the reader, and remain impersonal and staid chronologies and appraisals of existing representations of the events. The many details specific to each context, and thus each chapter in the book, are a source of rich information but also form labyrinths of people, places, and events that may be hard to navigate for unfamiliar audiences. Yet, this is a much-needed anthology bringing together academics, activists, and artists who often make connections between the personal and political in telling the stories of partitions.

One especially strong essay is by Siddiq Wahid, an academic and political activist, who, in writing about Ladakh, situates the Partition and its effects within the larger phenomenon of modernity. He argues that the Partition forced younger generations of Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians to confront a sudden and rapid change in their established way of life, including a loss of their traditional vocations. Fluid trade routes closed as modern states with strict boundaries, India and Pakistan, emerged, and China took over Tibet, sealing off access to another important trade route. Wahid borrows from sociologist Anthony Giddens to explain the ways in which Ladakhis began experiencing the “discontinuities of modernity” in the early 19^th century culminating in the process of decolonization when transition occurred at a speed and suddenness that was “alienating, insidious, imperceptible and traumatic.” Contrary to popular belief that “peripheral” regions such as Ladakh were not affected by the Partition in the same way as “central” states, Wahid argues the “series of partitions—exiles, both physical and mental” are in some ways of greater intensity in the former because they remain obscured.

Similarly, Sanjib Baruah, a professor of political studies, writes in his essay that in Assam, the “meaning of partition has been unfolding slowly over decades through a torturous process.” The citizenship status of cross-border migrants from Bangladesh to Assam is a living issue. Baruah contextualizes this subject and traces its roots to colonial rule. British colonizers encouraged Muslim peasants from East Bengal to migrate to Assam for mostly economic reasons. Resistance to this migration started fomenting in the final years of colonial rule and the Partition exaggerated ambiguities of citizenship and belonging: are the migrants “citizens,” “refugees,” or “foreigners”? In 1947, the Muslim majority district of Sylhet, which was part of Assam, became part of East Pakistan/Bangladesh. The migration of Hindus from Sylhet to parts of the Indian North-East, particularly Assam, is remembered differently than the history of Muslim migration. The continued presence of unauthorized Muslim migrants from what became Bangladesh continues to be a source of tensions. Baruah calls for a partnership with Bangladesh and recommends “instead of trying to harden the border with stricter policing,” the two nations “accept the realities of a soft border.”  

The historic 19th-century Town Hall building now home to The Partition Museum in Amritsar.
Photo: Anshika Varma

Kavita Panjabi, a humanities professor, makes the same call for mutual dialogue in a particularly engaging and evocative essay of the book. She reflects on the question of multiple and conflicting identities and belongings through her father’s homeland, Shikarpur in Sindh. In the book’s other essay on the Sindhi community, Rita Kothari, a writer, translator and academic, explains that “unlike Bengal and Punjab, Sindh was not ‘partitioned,’ rather its Hindu minority…fled to India.” Panjabi’s father was one of those who fled from Pakistan to India and settled in Bombay. She writes of his schizophrenic identity, vehemently refusing a Pakistani identity, yet tied to his homeland, Sindh, alongside his passionate political loyalty to the Indian nation. She describes the ways his different identities found a way to coexist: “Within him, his lived realities of Shikarpur and Bombay dovetailed into each other; outside, they were positioned on opposing sides of this geometry of borders.”

Panjabi has written about the loss experienced by the second generation, calling them “postmemories,” or memories of the “generation after” of survivors who experienced trauma (a focus of another essay in the book by Sukeshi Kamra). Even though comparisons between the Partition and the Jewish Holocaust are often made, and to some extent justified, Panjabi draws a distinction between the two. The Partition was not the one-sided genocide of one race by another. It was “an event of reciprocal violence, of a deeply ironic ‘equality’ in which the violated was also the violator, the oppressor also the victim.” Panjabi wonders if the violators and violated nations have the courage and will to mutually acknowledge culpability, mourn together for lost lives, and start looking for mutual forgiveness. She asks if the experience of belonging to homelands can move beyond territorial ownership and if it is possible to claim belonging without possessing?

Partition: The Long Shadow extends Butalia’s project, The Other Side of Silence, which remains pivotal in disrupting official histories of the event. The Long Shadow further complicates these narratives, and reveals fractures within them, by including stories of other communities, caste, class and places and through new forms of visual narratives.  The book focuses on many ‘partitions’ in order to dig deep and reach another layer in the multi-layered exploration of memory. As Butalia herself writes:

One cannot begin to open up memory and reach a point where the exercise can be done and laid to rest. Every historical moment that offers us the possibility of looking at it through the prism of memory demonstrates that the more you search, the more there is that opens up.

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Shruti Devgan is Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers University in 2015, and studies stories of trauma, collective memory, emotions, media and transnational flows with a focus on the Sikh diaspora and India. Her recent scholarship examines diasporic, intergenerational and digitally mediated narratives of state-sponsored anti-Sikh violence of 1984 in India. 

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

The post P/partition: Urvashi Butalia’s Volume of Essays in Lower Case appeared first on The Revealer.

An excerpt from Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age by Jeffrey Shandler, published by Stanford University Press in August 2017. Reproduced by permission. 

Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age examines the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive (VHA), the largest and most widely available collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors. Created in the mid-1990s, the Archive’s extensive holdings are accessed online through an elaborate index and search mechanism, making for an especially complex imbrication of new media and memory practices. The VHA is both an important resource for learning about Holocaust memory and a significant work of Holocaust remembrance in itself. Created at a threshold moment both for Holocaust memory, as survivors were aging, and for new media, with the emergence of digital technologies, the VHA exemplifies the cultural possibilities and challenges now being addressed in digital humanities. This book examines the VHA by first situating it in a complex of contexts (Jewish ethnography, late twentieth-century public memory practices, the advent of digital media) and then probing the Archive’s holdings, reading it “against the grain” through a series of case studies that focus on issues of Holocaust remembrance beyond the VHA’s mission. One of these case studies examines the visual element of these videos, revealed in exceptional moments when Jewish survivors display Christian religious objects. Most of items were acquired during the war, when the interviewees were concealing their Jewish identity by passing as Christians. The displays of these objects disrupt the VHA’s austere visual aesthetic of “talking heads” by conjoining the iconography of material evidence with religiously inspired moral exhortation.

[Excerpt from Chapter 4, “Spectacle: Seeing as Believing,” Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age]

Among the many different kinds of objects that Jewish Holocaust survivors chose to include in their videos are a small number of items that the VHA index identifies as “Christian religious objects,” appearing in twenty-two interviews.[1] Survivors usually acquired these crucifixes, rosaries, saints’ medals, and similar items as part of efforts to pass as Christians during the war. Displayed in the context of an interview with a Jewish survivor, these are inherently provocative objects. Their presence among the survivor’s collection of personal artifacts prompts an accounting of their place in a “Jewish” life history. Consequently, these items sometimes engender complex narratives of survivors’ relationships with individual Christians or with Christianity in general, both during the war and, in some cases, afterwards, continuing up to the time of the interview.

Where survivors locate Christian religious objects when organizing material to be photographed informs their significance within the implicit narratives of these sequences. Survivors sometimes place Christian religious objects immediately before or after other objects related to their efforts to pass as Christians, such as wartime photographs of themselves wearing crosses or participating in Christian rituals.[2] In Maurice Elbaum’s video the scapular he wore during the early 1940s precedes a photograph of himself taken at the time. He explains that he then wore a hairnet at night to straighten his curly hair, intimating that doing so was also part of concealing his Jewishness. Next comes a photocopy of his wartime Arbeitskarte (German government-issued work permit), which identifies Elbaum as Ignacz Dzikowski, a Pole.[3] This set of three items, together with their narrative, documents Elbaum’s efforts to pass as a Christian, the external emblems of his disguise—a religious amulet, an ethnic Polish name—in tension with his Jewish physiognomy. Other survivors’ videos position religious articles adjacent to photographs of the Christians who hid the survivors or helped them disguise their Jewishness, thereby acknowledging the agency of their protectors.[4]

By juxtaposing Christian religious objects with emblems of wartime Jewish stigmatization, some survivors create opportunities to comment on the complex connections between their personal histories and the identities they assumed during the war. […] At the end of her interview, Daisy Shapiro-Rieke asks interviewer Eileen Molfetas, “Can I hold that rosary in my hand? Can I? And the star?. . . I’d like to end this tape by holding these two things, I really want to hold them.” From her position off camera, Molfetas hands Shapiro-Rieke a yellow, six-pointed cloth star, which is under glass in a small wooden frame, and a rosary. The latter item belonged to Shapiro-Rieke’s mother, who had created a false identity for herself and her children as Christians; the star was worn by Shapiro-Rieke’s father, who was unable to assume a false identity during the war. Holding one object in each hand, Shapiro-Rieke raises them, framing her face. “I am both, I am here because of both. And this is—this is my story. . . . And I want this to be on the tape. And I want to hold this.”[5] Though the video subsequently includes a separate shot of the rosary and the star displayed by themselves, per the VHA guidelines, Shapiro-Rieke takes command of the filming process at the end of the interview proper, so that she can be photographed clasping these objects. After having spent more than an hour and a half narrating her life history, Shapiro-Rieke offers viewers of her video an alternate form of autobiography, one that is not only, or even primarily, verbal but rather is material and gestural: the spectacle of her face framed by these defining objects within her close embrace.[…]

At the very end of Sonia Liberman’s video, following a photograph of her four grandchildren, the camera records a close-up of the palm of her hand holding a small crucifix on a chain. She explains that the Christian family that protected her gave her this on the day she was baptized, “and that’s what saved my life.”[6] Liberman’s last words exemplify the sentiments of other survivors who attest to the power that Christian religious objects held for them during the war. In addition to acknowledging their instrumental value for disguising one’s Jewishness, some survivors speak of these objects’ talismanic power. Irene Barkan explains that a Polish woman, Kasia Puszczynska, gave her a rosary “to help me, to bring me luck, and in case I was found, that they would think I was not Jewish by carrying this.” Of the crucifix that his mother wore during the war, Maurice Baron recalls that, “after the war, she kept it and thought this was, let’s say, a good luck charm to her, but she was very, very emotionally involved with that cross.” These survivors’ attachments to Christian religious articles are, nonetheless, distinct from what they would mean to a Christian owner, a point some survivors address directly. Eugene Winnik describes his childhood of going to church, wearing a cross, and saying Christian prayers on his knees while in hiding during the war as a matter of wanting to be “like everybody else”—that is, all the Poles—in the village where he and his mother hid after escaping the Warsaw ghetto. But when interviewer Jacob Pinger asks Winnik if having religious faith helped him, he replies, “Faith? You mean mentally? Oh, no. This won’t help me survive. This helped me survive, to avoid being killed. That’s all. I don’t believe in this now. But in these years, yes, I was a believer.”[7]

Displaying their religious objects prompts survivors to address the materiality of these items in conjunction with their symbolic value. […] Leo Turkell reveals an especially profound attachment to a rosary, which he discusses at three different points during his interview. Turkell first mentions the rosary when recounting how he and hundreds of other soldiers in the Polish army were captured by German forces at the beginning of the war. Another soldier, Witold Szedlecki, a Polish friend of Turkell’s, gave him the rosary a few minutes before the Germans separated out the Jewish soldiers and shot them. As Turkell is about to relate this episode, he indicates that he wants to get the rosary, but interviewer Temmie Margolis tells him to wait. Turkell then explains that Szedlecki “took off from his neck his rosary and he gave it to me, and he says, ‘Please, put on quick the rosary.’ And I put on quick the rosary on my neck. (He gestures with his hands as if putting the rosary over his head.) . . . And I bent down my head, because this was a call for all the Jews to step out.” After recounting how the other Jewish soldiers were executed, Turkell continues:

Then the generals walked through the whole line, looking at faces, is there any Jew who didn’t step out. I bent down (he lowers his head) and I fixed my shoe, that they shouldn’t see my face. And here (he indicates with his fingers alongside his neck) was hanging the rosary. [As] soon [as] they saw the rosary, they even didn’t touch me, they didn’t look at me, and that’s the way this rosary saved my life. And I have it ’til today. And I told my wife, “When the time comes, this rosary you will have to put in my grave.” She says she will be ashamed of it. I say, “Why should you be ashamed of it? This rosary saved my life. I wouldn’t be here to be your husband and have children and grandchildren.” . . . And I still have it here, which I would like to show it. . . . I would like to have it on the camera.[8]

Turkell’s request is soon fulfilled; at the beginning of the next videotape, Margolis asks him to return to the story about the rosary and to display it. Turkell already has the rosary in his hands; he holds it up before his face and speaks: “Please—this was my lifesaver. This what I keep ’til today, until I die, I want this to go with me.” The camera pulls back in order to show more of the rosary, which hangs down to Turkell’s mid-torso. He retells, more concisely, the story of how Szedlecki gave him the rosary just before the Jewish soldiers were selected for execution. All the while, Turkell holds up the rosary with both hands, as if he were about to put it on. Turkell concludes the narrative by adding, “And with this rosary I went through the whole war.”[9] Then Margolis tells him to put down the rosary so that they can continue with the interview.

The rosary is seen again at the end of the video—this time laid on a dark background—following a sequence of Turkell’s family photographs, wartime documents, and rubber stamps he made during the war to create false identification papers. As the rosary appears on screen, he says, off camera: “This is what I can hardly talk about it. The best of my life, what saved my life. I wore this cross, who was given to me by my friend Witold Szedlecki, about five minutes before they took out the Jews to be killed, and they were killed several hundred. And this cross I wore since 1939 and I keep that ’til today; I will keep it ’til my grave.” As Turkell speaks, the camera pushes in on the crucifix and then pulls back out to the full rosary. A male voice (possibly the videographer, Warren Yeager) can be heard saying, “It’s so great that you have that.” Turkell comments: “And this cross saved my life. The cross with the Lord Jesus Christ.”[10]

Turkell conveys his profound sense of indebtedness to the rosary—and the man who gave it to him—through a compelling, thrice-told narrative as well as his insistence on displaying the rosary. He voices this desire the first time he relates the story, after being forbidden to interrupt the interview to get the rosary. During this first telling, Turkell invokes the rosary’s presence through gestures that mime its placement around his neck at the crucial, lifesaving moment. Following a break between videotapes, now with the rosary in his hands, Turkell tells the story of his rescue a second time. He does not reenact donning the rosary this time but holds it up, so as to have it on camera and to have it seen with him, parallel to his wish to be buried with the rosary. Finally, when the rosary is displayed by itself, Turkell recalls, more briefly than before but as passionately, the incident when he received it from Szedlecki, whom he names each time the story is told. The spectacle in these three tellings of the same story changes from the rosary’s absence to Turkell’s absence. This shift, though it is serendipitous, becomes significant for viewing the narrative as a whole. At the center of this dynamic is the rosary’s role as disguise, concealing Turkell’s Jewishness and replacing his face, which, he implies, might give him away as a Jew. The telling of the story—without and then with the appearance of the rosary; with and then without Turkell’s presence on screen—evokes the rosary’s double role of saving and obscuring a Jew.

Though Turkell repeats some information in all three tellings, each one also offers different details. In his final account, as the camera offers a close-up of the crucifix, he first mentions “the Lord Jesus Christ”—a provocative locution for East European Jews, who traditionally avoided uttering Jesus’s name, let alone acknowledging his divinity. Yet Turkell’s oblique validation of the Crucifixion—and his forthright affirmation of the rosary as the instrument of his rescue by a Polish Christian—contrasts sharply with what ensues and concludes the video. The shot of the rosary is followed by a final image: a color photograph of Turkell standing before a sign marking the entrance to Stopnica, his hometown, taken when he visited Poland in the 1980s. He remarks bitterly: “There was no [Jewish] cemetery, no synagogue, everything was thrown down by the Polacks. That’s what I couldn’t believe, as I lived between people, and a lot of them were just animals, murderers.”[11] The double-edged story of Turkell’s rescue parallels the ambivalence with which he ends the video, recalling Poles variously as rescuers and persecutors.

***

[1] The VHA also indexes under a separate search term seventy-six interviews in which survivors display baptismal certificates.

[2] Sophie Billys, VHA Interview Code (hereafter, IC) 10850, segment (hereafter, seg.) 112; Eugene Winnik, IC 2746, seg. 100; Susanne Cohn, IC 9317, seg. 262; Esther Rosman, IC 14218, seg. 165.

[3] Maurice Elbaum, IC 9317, seg. 108.

[4] Sara Kaye, IC 23573, seg. 112; John Koenigsberg, IC 29548, seg. 70; Eugene Winnik, seg. 100.

[5] Daisy Shapiro-Rieke, IC 48028, seg. 18.

[6] Sonia Liberman, IC 2530, seg. 176.

[7] Eugene Winnik, segs. 45-46.

[8] Leo Turkell, IC 41507, segs. 16-19.

[9] Leo Turkell, seg. 31.

[10] Leo Turkell, seg. 161.

[11] Leo Turkell, seg. 162.

***

Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His previous books include While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999); Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), a study of contemporary Yiddish culture; Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), which analyzes the impact of new communications technologies and media practices on American Jews’ religious life, from early recordings of cantorial music to hasidic outreach on the Internet; and Shtetl: A Vernacular Intellectual History (Rutgers University Press, 2014), an examination of how Jewish life in East European provincial towns has become the subject of extensive creativity, memory, and scholarship, from the early modern era to the present. Among other books, Shandler is the editor of Awakening Lives: Autobiographies of Jewish Youth in Poland before the Holocaust (Yale University Press, 2002) and co-editor of Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (Indiana University Press, 2012). Shandler has served as president of the Association for Jewish Studies and is a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. From 2003 to 2009, he and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett co-convened the working group on Jews, Media, and Religion at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media.

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Clergy members and local activists marching in Charlottesville, VA on August 12, 2017.
Photograph by Jordy Yager.

This month we’re pretty focused on U.S. politics, race, racism, white supremacy and Christianity, but we promise, there are other stories here and even some art and jokes for those who stick it out to the end.

First, this isn’t just the best thing we’ve read this month, it’s the best article we’ve read in a long time. This essay is spellbinding, excruciating, and so necessary; An occasion to be really grateful for a superb writer doing the hardest work.

A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah for GQ

Roof is what happens when we prefer vast historical erasures to real education about race. The rise of groups like Trump’s Republican Party, with its overtures to the alt-right, has emboldened men like Dylann Roof to come out of their slumber and loudly, violently out themselves. But in South Carolina, those men never disappeared, were there always, waiting. It is possible that Dylann Roof is not an outlier at all, then, but rather emblematic of an approaching storm.

Followed, just yesterday, by the other best thing we’ve read this month/ in a long time:

The First White President by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling, Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a “piece of ass.” The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then strolling into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.

Coates also wrote recently about the new show “Confederate” being made by HBO:

The Lost Cause Rides Again by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic

The problem of Confederate can’t be redeemed by production values, crisp writing, or even complicated characters. That is not because its conceivers are personally racist, or seek to create a show that endorses slavery. Far from it, I suspect. Indeed, the creators have said that their hope is to use science fiction to “show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could.” And that really is the problem. African Americans do not need science-fiction, or really any fiction, to tell them that that “history is still with us.” It’s right outside our door. It’s in our politics. It’s on our networks. And Confederate is not immune. The show’s very operating premise, the fact that it roots itself in a long white tradition of imagining away emancipation, leaves one wondering how “lost” the Lost Cause really was.

Coates’ critique is well aided by the always superb Wesley Morris who wrote In Movies and on TV, Racism Made Plain for The New York Times

Whatever white supremacy was and is — the murderousness of the K.K.K., the centuries-old institutional bias toward white people, the self-pitying narcissism of the so-called alt-right — it’s older than what happened in Charlottesville, older than this presidency. It’s wedged in the bedrock of American popular culture. Even when you aren’t looking, it manages to find you.

For some religious studies context, we can’t imagine anyone better than Judith Weisenfeld and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. who recorded a conversation on The Formation of ‘Religio-Racial’ Identity for the AAS 21 Podcast

In this episode, Professor Glaude and Professor Judith Weisenfeld discuss the development of ‘religio–racial’ identity during the Great Migration. Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her latest book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration is a historiography of twentieth-century black religious groups, including the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, and Ethiopian Hebrews. The two discuss the racial claims of these groups, the impact they had on the development of African American identity, and their interactions with government entities, other religious groups, and African American communities.  Weisenfeld also sheds light on her research process, which pulls from marriage and divorce certificates, immigration and naturalization records, and FBI files in order to create a multifaceted view of the practitioners.

Also contributing a very helpful religionist angle on current news, Spencer Drew published Public Shrines to Treason: Charlottesville and the Cult of Confederate Memorialization at Religion Dispatches

“Unite the Right” called attention to this, that dueling visions of America—American history and expectations for and patterns of an American future—are more than just differences of opinion, they are radically divergent worldviews, with separate systems of values, conceptions of humanity, and even understandings of the good. The problem of the proliferation of Confederate civil religion has always been what to do with a citizen who glorified secession, how to reconstruct these United States, to warring visions into one America. Dismantling shrines is far easier than squelching a robust faith.  Secession and treason, on the other side, is far easier than conversion.

And our friend of the very necessary middle initial, religion scholar Christopher D. Cantwell, wrote about his experience sharing a name with a now very notorious white supremacist in  The Digitally Entangled Lives of Two Christopher Cantwells for The Atlantic

While much of the world met Cantwell for the first time last weekend, this self-proclaimed fascist has tormented my digital existence for years. I share a name with the young man, and our lives have collided online for half a decade. The rush to register usernames on social media first led our paths to cross, while the algorithmic coincidences of simple Google searches have given me a front row seat to Cantwell’s public life. The view not only introduced me to his bigotry, but also made me something of a witness to his radicalization. Though many watching the events in Charlottesville may have been shocked to see white nationalists marching down the street so brazenly, my experience highlights the mechanisms hiding in plain sight online that brought at least one of the marchers to Virginia. And the process by which my namesake came to embrace fascism may shed light on how many of the other faces in Vice’s documentary became radicalized, as well.

Also offering some religion background on the events in Charlottesville, Katherine Kelaidis wrote White Supremacy and Orthodox Christianity: A Dangerous Connection Rears Its Head in Charlottesville for Religion Dispatches

While the Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates may be relatively few in number, there is increasing evidence that Orthodoxy has become an integral part of the ideological and recruitment apparatus within some segments of the white supremacist movement. Importantly, these ideas and the converts to them are being tolerated, and frequently exploited, by much more powerful voices. This growing attachment to Eastern Orthodox Christianity  among a segment of white nationalists has serious implications for more mainstream currents in contemporary Orthodox life.

And Anthea Butler makes some brilliant necessary points in her piece for The Washington Post, The U.S. Catholic Church’s last major effort on racism was in 1979. Charlottesville woke it up

The last major statement on racism in the church and America was “Brothers and Sisters Among Us,” a pastoral letter from 1979, 38 years ago. Black Catholic bishops answered that letter in 1984 with a response: “What We Have Seen and Heard.” Since then, while various groups within the church have dealt with issues of race, the establishment of the new committee, and the promise of a pastoral letter on racism from the bishops in 2018 are important first steps for the Catholic Church in America. The bigger question is how will that translate into practical steps to counter racism?

(She also had some choice words on The Cheap Prosperity Gospel of Trump and Osteen at The New York Times)

Though it’s less obviously about religion, we were very interested in these two pieces on how white supremacists are using their attire to stand out and to blend in.

First, The New Uniform of White Supremacy by Cam Wolf for GQ

For years, white supremacists dressed to set themselves apart, to hide and to scare. Charlottesville showed us that the most sinister evolution of their uniform, and the hate it symbolizes, isn’t about fear and ghosts and standing apart. It’s meant to achieve inclusiveness and assimilation. It means that hate doesn’t need to live underground when it can blend in right next door.

And secondly, A Charlottesville White Supremacists Stripped Down to Escape Protesters and We Got It on Video by CJ Hunt for GQ

In case you were wondering: The Creator of Godwin’s Law explains why some Nazi comparisons don’t break his famous Internet Rule by Abby Ohlheiser for The Washington Post

Which makes this a pretty good time for this advice: Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Response Guide from the Southern Poverty Law Center

And this poem: Hymn: A New Poem by Sherman Alexie at Early Bird Books

To love somebody who resembles you.
If you want an ode then join the endless queue

Of people who are good to their next of kin—
Who somehow love people with the same chin

And skin and religion and accent and eyes.
So you love your sibling? Big fucking surprise.

Lastly, before we move on, please read these two pieces on antifa.

First: Who are the antifa? by Mark Bray for The Washington Post

Antifascists argue that after the horrors of chattel slavery and the Holocaust, physical violence against white supremacists is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective. We should not, they argue, abstractly assess the ethical status of violence in the absence of the values and context behind it. Instead, they put forth an ethically consistent, historically informed argument for fighting Nazis before it’s too late. As Cornel West explained after surviving neo-Nazi attacks in Charlottesville, “If it hadn’t been for the antifascists protecting us from the neo-fascists, we would have been crushed like cockroaches.”

And second: Why the Media Refuses to Understand Antifa by Malcolm Harris for Pacific Standard

I’m sure the people who want to let the Nazis fizzle out on their own have good intentions. I don’t believe my argument, or any argument, will change their minds. And I’m sure they won’t have any trouble finding microphones to amplify their concerns. But even if the antifascist ranks never grow beyond groups like Black Lives Matter, progressive communities of faith, and people to the left of Bernie Sanders, that will be more than enough to win. If winning this fight means those groups can build trust, solidarity, and interdependence, they can set themselves up to do a lot more than that—and it will be the fascists who are sorry they ever showed up.

Speaking of the media, let’s go Down the Breitbart Hole with Wil S. Hylton at The New York Times Magazine

In the short annals of journalism, there’s no real precursor for Breitbart. I don’t mean to suggest that this is because of the site’s political agenda — the history of journalism is a cacophony of strident writing as far back as you want to look. You can pore through the earliest examples of what we’d consider a newspaper, The Tatler and The Spectator of the early 1700s, and you’ll find yourself in a familiar landscape of hit pieces and hot takes; continue into the middle 1800s, and you encounter the unalloyed activism of Horace Greeley, whose New York Tribune campaigned with equal fervor against slavery and against women’s rights. What makes Breitbart distinct, then, has nothing to do with accuracy or bias; it’s the convergence of scale and time. It’s the way the site appeared to materialize overnight, from the outermost periphery of the media, and to dominate the political conversation in a pivotal election.

And in case you’re not angry enough yet, may we suggest reading William Finnegan‘s 2009 New Yorker profile Sheriff Joe: Joe Arpaio is tough on prisoners and undocumented immigrants. What about crime?

The Guadalupe raid did have a chilling effect. It began the day before a Catholic-church confirmation ceremony—a big deal in Guadalupe—was scheduled to take place in the village plaza, and although the children had prepared for months, a number of them were afraid to come out, and missed their own confirmations.

America’s toughest sheriff is, as ever, unapologetic. Over lunch in New York, he told me that he doesn’t mind the effect he has. “If they’re afraid to go to church, that’s good.”

And we know this round-up has been very U.S. centered so far, so please check out Kathryn Joyce‘s incredible reporting on The New War on Birth Control for Pacific Standard

Fosu had long insisted that his campaign was about protecting African women, not an attempt to open up new fronts in the culture wars. The day we met, he told me he’d carefully trained his African student protesters to avoid mentioning abortion, and vehemently refuted the notion that his partners at C-Fam had an ideological or religious agenda. But by the summer of 2015, Fosu seemed to have dropped the pretense, as the Rebecca Project embraced a series of anti-abortion “sting” videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood engaged in selling fetal tissue.

Okay, it’s time for a dance break, yeah?

How about Mashrou’ Leila and the Night Club’s Political Power by Elias Muhanna for The New Yorker

Mashrou’ Leila is known for its erudite, often enigmatic, lyrics, and “Ibn El Leil” is the band’s most allusive effort yet, with copious references to Greek mythology, ancient poetry, and pagan ritual. When I asked the band members whether I’d correctly identified a quote from Walt Whitman, they peppered me with other literary inspirations that appear on the album: Abu Nuwas, Sappho, Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare. Unsure of what to make of a reference to mushrooms and the Bible in the chorus of “Tayf” (“Ghost”)—a song about a gay club in Lebanon that was shut down by the authorities—Sinno explained, “It’s from Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Mushrooms,’ one of the most incredible feminist texts I’ve ever read. It’s really beautiful.” Abou Fakher, the band’s guitarist, speculated that for much of its fan base, especially outside of Lebanon, the band’s appeal has to do with the energy and spectacle of the show rather than with the lyrics. “But if someone really wants to get what you’re talking about, they just Google it,” Sinno added.

And their video for the song “Roman” is very cool:

Here’s the video summary on their official YouTube post:

Equality. Solidarity. Intersectionality. #charge مساوة. تضامن. تقاطعية. #عليهم The video self-consciously toys with the intersection of gender with race by celebrating and championing a coalition of Arab and Muslim women, styled to over-articulate their ethnic background, in a manner more typically employed by Western media to victimise them. This seeks to disturb the dominant global narrative of hyper-secularised (white) feminism, which increasingly positions itself as incompatible with Islam and the Arab world, celebrating the various modalities of middle-eastern feminism. The video purposefully attempts to revert the position of the (male) musicians as the heroes of the narrative, not only by subjecting them to the (female) gaze of the director, but also by representing them as individuals who (literally) take the backseat as the coalition moves forward. So while the lyrics of the verses discuss betrayal, struggle, and conflict, the video revolves around the lyrical pivot in the chorus: ‘aleihum (charge!) treating oppression, not as a source of victimhood, but as the fertile ground from which resistance can be weaponised.

And Sam Kestenbaum goes Inside the Hebrew Israelite Movement That’s Inspiring Kendrick Lamar & Kodack Black: The community feels conflicted about its new celebrity fans. for Genius

Kendrick’s lyrics often delve into spiritual territory, but the Old Testament fire and brimstone is a new theme for him. Perhaps disillusioned by what many see as a dark turn in the country’s history, he is searching for roots by referencing the teachings of the Hebrew Israelites, a black religious movement that has thrived on the margins of the country’s spiritual landscape for over a century.

He also got the answers to a question we, frankly, had not yet even thought of asking: Your ‘Blessed’ Emoji? Rabbi Brands It Idol Worship published over at The Forward

Done dancing, watching time, with Jedediah Purdy‘s Fiery Heaven, Bastard Earth: The Cosmology of “Game of Thrones”  for the Los Angeles Review of Books

But in one respect, the world of Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is just as traditionally fantastical as the worlds of Grandfather Tolkien, Pious Uncle C. S. Lewis, and Skeptical Cousins Philip Pullman and Ursula Le Guin. The books’ pleasures are not just narrative and political, but cosmological. All of these authors engage in world-making in a deep sense: they are interested in the organizing principles of their imagined universes, and the moral and historical meanings of their elements and landscapes. Magic works as more than a deus ex machina or literary CGI effect in their stories because it bodies forth these principles: it is part of the physical and moral laws of a somewhat different world. Fantasy is partly interested in other ways of imagining ice and fire — and earth and sea, rock and wood, summer and the coming of winter. Both the books and the show have, so far, put cosmology at the center while leaving it mysterious, with many open questions about what sort of world this is. Now it falls to the show to give one answer.

And S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate asking When do moviegoers become pilgrims? for The Conversation

Among the millions of travelers heading out for the summer holidays, some are choosing an unlikely destination: a rusted bus on the edge of the Alaskan wilderness.

Fairbanks Bus 142 (aka the “magic bus”) is where the 24-year old Chris McCandless died in 1992. Well-educated and economically secure, McCandless rejected the materialism he saw in contemporary U.S. society. He set out to explore with only what he could carry, and ended up living off the Alaskan land for a few months before dying of starvation. His story was first told by writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer in the book “Into the Wild,” and later made into a film directed by Sean Penn.

Since then, dozens of people every year seek to follow in McCandless’ footsteps. Finding inspiration in his mode of self-sufficiency, many head out to Alaska like secular pilgrims seeking to imitate a great saint from long ago, and to live more simply.

Staying closer to home? We’re still only part way through Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Struggle, but we appreciated reading about Knausgaard’s Secular Confession by Martin Hägglund for boundary 2

To understand the philosophical poetics of My Struggle, then, we must attend to what happens in the narrative alongside the many and often contradictory statements of intent. The view that our secular lives are soulless and banal—that we need to be saved from our time bound existence—belongs to the tendency to disown his life. While this tendency persists throughout My Struggle, the very writing of the book goes in the opposite direction. Far from regarding his life as soulless or banal, the writer of My Struggle depends on the faith that there is enormous significance and depth in the experiences of a finite life, one worthy of being explored down to the most subtle nuances and emotional reverberations. The aim is to attach himself more deeply to his life, rather than transcend it. From this perspective, it is Augustine’s mystical ecstasies that are soulless and banal, since they seek to leave the world behind in favor of an eternal presence where nothing happens. What is profound in Augustine is not the ascent to heaven but the descent into time and memory. It is the latter, descending movement that Knausgaard follows in his practice as a writer.

Lastly, some photography and writing by and about two of our favorite people:

In the gorgeous Telemetry Jeff Sharlet shares photographs and writing about photographs, hearts, family, writing, and much more at Virginia Quarterly Review

The third night I went to the hospital, I woke in the dark in the cardiac wing and looked past my toes to the light of the door, open like a book. In the hall a nurse’s face glowed blue with the light of the telemetry monitor on which she watched our hearts. I took a picture. I posted it with a note about the smells and shapes and sounds of the hospital, my neighbor gently snoring. He was a dishwasher who loved his job; he liked to tell the nurses about his coworkers, “old hens” who would, he said, cluck over him when he returned. He had been washing dishes for sixteen years, ever since he’d stopped driving, because of depression, because, he said, “you don’t ever know what you might do.” He said he was happier just walking.

The next morning, two police officers came to my room. A report of picture-taking; not allowed. I apologized and deleted it. It’s pretty scary, this world. The trees, the whispers, the pictures.

And photographer Tanya Habjouqa‘s work was featured in The Revealer this past June. Here, she gets some well-earned attention in Photographers edit photographers: Tanya Habjouqa’s provocative and mysterious images by Karly Domb Sadof for The Washington Post

I’m drawn to Tanya’s work because she never looks straight ahead, she’s always poking around in little corners and private places, trying to reveal confounding secrets and mysteries and layers of meaning.  And she does it with an aesthetic that doesn’t slam you over the head. Which is quite a trick, to be subtle in the aesthetic but to have the pictures be so filled with provocation and mystery.

In the Unholy-Holy Land edit, I tried to connect images of lone individuals confronting or submerged in a landscape, to more domestic scenes where the ideas of play, performance and identity are still there, but more subdued.

I also chose images where one element confused me, where I kept looking and could never quite pin the picture down. That’s what I love about her work. I look at an image and it seems almost blasé and then it whips you around and I’m not sure what to think. I love that.

Lastly, this is just too fascinating not to share: A Controversial Restoration That Wipes Away the Past by Benjamin Ramm for The New York Times

The restoration seeks to reconstitute a temple of light, to challenge the popular perception of Gothic dejection. But in doing so, it raises an intriguing question: What happens when our inherited assumptions about the past come into contact with layers of accumulated myth?

Okay, now some funny stuff and then we’ll leave you to your reading, watching, shouting, protesting, praying, dancing, etc.

How Medieval Chefs Tackled Meat-Free Days by Natasha Frost for Atlas Obscura

All of these restrictions led to some flagrant misinterpretations of what was or was not a fish. The Benedictine abbey of Le Tréport, in northern France, came under fire from the local archbishop, in Rouen, when it was discovered they were regularly noshing on puffins. These, they argued, were mostly found in and around water and must therefore be fish.

And God Created Millennial Earth by Sara K. Runnels for McSweeney’s

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. #CreationGoals #EarthIsBae

2 Now the earth was formless and basic, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was lowkey hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and it was lit AF.

4 God saw that the light was so extra, so He separated the light from the darkness (for aesthetic), then bragged it was hashtag no filter.

5 God called the light “day,” then threw some shade and called it “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first truly #blessed day.

Unholy Piñatas Modeled After Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights” by Sarah Rose Sharp for Hyperallergic

Here, in the United States, piñatas are most commonly considered a fun, slightly violent activity at children’s birthday parties. A hollow papier-mâché form is filled with candy and small toys and then playfully bashed by partygoers with a stick or baseball bat, until it spews forth the contents to cheers and a mad scramble for treats.

But wait! Get behind me, Satan! It turns out that the playful piñata — which has a long and culturally diverse history that includes roots in China, by way of Italy (perhaps disseminated by Marco Polo) — is an object lesson in beating down sin and temptation. The traditional seven-point star piñata is a Mexican Catholic interpretation, with each point representing one of the seven deadly sins. Fun at parties!

How appropriate, then, that Los Angeles-based artist Roberto Benavidez has made wild, larger-than-life representations from the Hieronymus Bosch painting, “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” in piñata form.

Sorry guys, wrong Martin Luther.

Incredible Pagan-Themed Photoshoot By Polish Photographer Reveals Stunning Beauty of Slavic Culture by Dominyka Jurkstaite about Marcin Nagraba’s work for Bored Panda — more on his Instagram

And that’s all for this month. Best wishes for your Septembers.

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

***

You can find previous “In the News” round-ups here.

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