In a June 2015 piece for The New Inquiry, “Against Students,” Sara Ahmed—who is very much not against students—investigated how college students have recently come to be regarded as the cause of a constellation of problems. Here and elsewhere, Ahmed examines the sleight-of-hand by which an intransigent figure who calls attention to an ugly truth is herself taken to be the one responsible for the problem she exposes. Ahmed calls this figure the “feminist killjoy,” in spite of the fact that her concerns with the realities of difference are not limited to gender and sexuality. Thus, Ahmed’s killjoy can also demonstrate how, for example, a structure in which “those who perceive whiteness as a problem become the problem.” In “Against Students,” the feminist killjoy manifests as the “problem student.” Such so-called “problem students” have lately been caricatured in mainstream media across the political spectrum as ludicrously oversensitive, as demanding insulation from “triggering” ideas and texts, and as excessively identified with the position of vulnerability and victimhood. What’s more, they are charged with contributing to a culture of censorship and with foreclosing the possibility of genuine free speech on campus—that “free and lively exchange of ideas” which is taken by professors and pundits alike to be the highest ideal of American higher education.

This critique of contemporary college students and their “demands” for safe spaces, trigger warnings, and so on, is inextricably bound up with the structure of the neoliberal university and the vision of students as demanding consumers of the product that is higher education—another state of affairs, as Ahmed points out, for which students are taken to be responsible. Ahmed, however, refuses to assume an oppositional stance toward these students, noting also that claims of students’ power are often vastly overstated. “My own sense,” she writes, “is that our feminist political hopes rest with over-sensitive students. Over-sensitive can be translated as: Sensitive to that which is not over.” A year later, in June 2016, Ahmed resigned from her position as Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, “in protest against the failure to address the problem of sexual harassment” of students.[1]

Earlier in 2015, another prominent feminist professor, Laura Kipnis, painted a vastly different picture of trust and power with respect to contemporary faculty/student relations in the first of two widely circulated essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” an eye-opening, troubling, and extremely funny essay, Kipnis—a cultural critic whose writing has always self-consciously positioned her as both provocateur and polemicist—lamented the current strictures around faculty-student relationships at her own university, Northwestern. In the piece, she evokes a campus culture of sexual paranoia verging upon “sexual terror” and describes the Title IX investigation of one of her colleagues in the philosophy department. She vividly contrasts the current moment with her own memories of a time when campus feminism could underwrite brash female sexual agency and resilience. Today, she sees instead a heightened sense of vulnerability and the creeping encroachment of an opaque bureaucracy regulating on-campus relationships that instills pervasive anxiety among faculty and students alike. “For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment,” Kipnis writes. “But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition.”

Kipnis also pointed out that the image of the all-powerful professor is a straw man—especially true in a time when most American college and university faculty members are contingent workers dependent upon student approbation (in the form of course evaluations) for their ongoing employment. She argued, too, for the importance of the erotics of the pedagogical situation, alluding to the relationship of asymmetrical power to desire. I suspect that any humanities professor who has even a passing acquaintance with Freud or, say, Plato, would have to concede both of these points if pressed. It might be an unspeakable truth in the era of Title IX, but it’s simply neither new nor even particularly controversial to understand education as a situation that is inextricably related to desire, to pleasure, and to fantasy. To learn requires that one desire to know; the student’s position is one of profound epistemological and sometimes emotional vulnerability, albeit not the form of it that Kipnis deplores. Unsurprisingly, it’s also a position that can involve a certain amount of projection onto the individual in the front of the room performing the function of the subject-supposed-to-know. This is only one of many reasons that the classroom is frequently a space in which everyday emotional and sexual dynamics are created, heightened, and transformed. It seems to me, however, that anyone as consistently astute as Kipnis on the subjects of both power and fantasy can surely see that the productive pedagogical functions of desire and fantasy can operate quite well without professors actually sleeping with their students, regardless of the extent to which (as we learn both from Paul in the Letter to the Romans and from Lacan, take your pick) prohibition creates desire.

Ironically, Kipnis’ “Sexual Paranoia” essay itself—performatively enacting her point better than anyone could have imagined—resulted in protests by Northwestern students and in Kipnis herself becoming the subject of a byzantine Title IX investigation. As she recounted in her second Chronicle piece, “My Title IX Inquisition,” student protesters, rather puzzlingly, appropriated the powerful symbol of now-Columbia University alumna Emma Sulkowicz’s 2014-15 senior thesis project, Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)—in which Sulkowicz carried her dorm mattress everywhere she went on campus until her alleged rapist was expelled from campus.[2] The Northwestern students protested Kipnis while carrying mattresses and pillows, as though she herself had committed an as yet unpunished assault. These feminist student protestors appear in Kipnis’ telling as misguided agents of the university bureaucracy, specifically of the inexorable Title IX machinery. Mattresses and pillows, once radical symbols of protest, effectively became pitchforks and torches; the position of grievance against an institution morphed into identification with it. Instead of focusing on how the system had failed them, students turned to it for protection and vindication. In Kipnis’ perspective, assuming the position of vulnerable victimhood leads not only to a retrogressive feminist politics; it also functions as a kind of lure, duping students into complicity with institutional power. If Kipnis wasn’t against students from the outset of the ordeal—trying, rather, to jolt them out of their comfort zones and think critically, just like any good professor—they made the choice for her when they literally came for her.If Ahmed’s resignation expressed not only solidarity but even a degree of identification with her students, Kipnis was forced into opposing hers.

It is against this roiling backdrop, at a time in which sexual activity on campus has perhaps never been more fraught, that Kelly Oliver’s Hunting Girls: Sexual Violence from The Hunger Games to Campus Rape (Columbia University Press, 2016) arrives. Oliver, a distinguished feminist philosopher who specializes in Continental thought, here turns a critical and frequently psychoanalytic lens upon a barrage of contemporary phenomena, images, and films that represent anxiety, ambivalence, and aggression toward young women’s sexuality. Opening with a brutal image (from the 2012 cycle of America’s Next Top Model) of “sorority girls” posing as literal dead trophies in “a taxidermist’s lair” with their heads mounted on the walls, Oliver analyzes “creepshots” and other photos and videos that circulate on social media of actual students and other young women who have been sexually violated while unconscious—and who frequently learn about it only when they see the image online. Oliver reads these phenomena alongside the rise of the titular figure of the “hunting girl,” which is the book’s most important contribution to the conversations about campus sexual assault and about students’ sense of their own sexual agency and vulnerability.

Image from the 2012 cycle of America’s Next Top Model

The myth of the hunting girl has a long history. The Greek goddess Artemis is the archetypal version: she is a lone, powerful, virginal figure associated with wildness, with animals and nature, and with archery. But Oliver’s contemporary hunting girl owes quite as much to Sleeping Beauty. In what is perhaps the most compelling chapter, “A Princess is Being Beaten and Raped,” which tracks the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale from the fourteenth century onward, Oliver defamiliarizes this often-sanitized fairy tale, tracing the ostensibly romantic kiss that awakens the sleeping princess back to a series of stories in which wandering men happen upon sleeping or even dead women, have sex with them—interpreting lack of resistance as consent—and frequently impregnate them. (In one particularly memorable version from fourteenth century Italy, the prince leaves a note as to what the sleeping girl should name his son when she is awakened by the process of giving birth.) Sleeping Beauty, Oliver argues, “is the quintessential rape fantasy.” Indeed, traces of the fairy tale’s origins – as not only rape fantasy but cautionary tale about untrammeled male sexual aggression – remain even in the sanitized versions. (I will never forget watching the 1959 Disney film as a child and my mother observing to me and my mortified older sister that it’s not really a coincidence that Princess Aurora “pricks” her finger and that she does so on a symbol of traditionally female domestic labor.) These stories take on a new urgency for Oliver, however, in a landscape in which lack of consent is considered “hot,” where “pictures of sexual assault have become new forms of trophies mounted on the Internet,” and “rape has become a form of public entertainment.” She asks:

Has absolute powerlessness on the part of girls and women become the height of a new erotic fantasy? Has this form of pseudo-necrophilia become a new norm for sex on college campuses? Recent cases of sexual assault on unconscious girls suggest that something about the victim’s complete powerlessness and lack of agency has become erotic, fun, or even funny.

The combination of Artemis the virginal hunter and Sleeping Beauty the drugged and violated princess gives us today’s hunting girl, who appears all over both mainstream and YA fiction and film: figures like Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, Bella Swan of Twilight, and her fanfic counterpart, Anastasia Steele of Fifty Shades of Grey. These hunting girls are at once predators and prey. They telescope the radical extreme possibilities of feminine subjectivity and sexuality (for the most part: young, white, heterosexual, cisgender) into a single paradoxical figure. The hunting girl represents unprecedented independence and power, a specifically feminine aggressiveness and violence. She can take care of herself and she usually has to take care of others, too, often through feeding them what she has herself killed, metaphorically or otherwise. And for this unprecedented display of self-sufficiency, she is brutally punished, beaten, and often raped. Although Oliver’s analyses are nuanced, her language is accessible and even blunt: “So,” she writes, “we live in a rape culture that valorizes lack of consent and sexual assault, especially of young high school and college age girls, but we also have images of ever-younger strong girls wielding weapons who can take care of themselves.” What are we to make of the recurrence of this figure and her appeal, Oliver asks?

The hunting girl is not only both predator and prey; she couples total agency with absolute passivity. Different iterations of this trope tend to emphasize one or the other. Consider hacker Lisbeth Salander, part abused child, part avenging angel, who ties up her sexually abusive court-appointed guardian, violates him, and tattoos “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST” on his chest. Or Katniss Everdeen, the resourceful hunter from the Hunger Games, who learns the techniques of the Foucauldian hellscape that is the Hunger Games arena and weaponizes them against its makers. She not only survives, but also eventually launches a full-scale political rebellion, only to be viciously and creatively brutalized again and again. Indeed, the more explicitly agential these hunting girls are, the more ruthlessly and publicly they are punished. The passive girls—the ones who don’t fight back, or else resist quietly—seem to fare better, or at least to end up less visibly broken. Bella Swan from Twilight asserts herself more mildly, when at all; the most acute expression of her own desires arrives when she begs her gorgeous but controlling vampire fiancé to deflower her, a consummation that leaves her bruised, beaten, and wanting more, and the horror of which pales in comparison to the violence of the birth of their child, who physically claws its way out of her. But at the end, Bella, herself turned into a vampire, becomes, as Oliver observes, “both beauty and the beast”; she is rewarded with marriage, immortality, and boundless riches, even if her happily-ever-after does come with a side of mountain lion blood. Likewise, though I could not bring myself (even for the sake of scholarship) to spend more than one book’s worth of time in the company of the truly insufferable Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades, who never had a desire she didn’t second-guess, I am given to understand that after enduring an abusive relationship with a kinky billionaire who doesn’t get what consent means, she ends up with a domesticated version of him in a relationship that passes for love, plus endless orgasms and the aforementioned boundless riches.

“In these contemporary fairytales,” Oliver writes, “for the first time we see fiercely independent, strong smart girls who are agents of their own lives; but at the same time, as never before, we see teenage girls beaten almost to death, for displaying such pluck.” To which I would add that the degree of their agency not only correlates with the extent of their punishment, but also maps directly onto how they deal with being assaulted in explicitly sexual terms. The hunting girls are problem students turned into action heroes, but to the extent to which they call attention to an institutional atrocity, they are themselves understood to be the problem, and are punished accordingly. Bella and Anastasia close their eyes and think of England through the pain and wind up on the right side of the marriage plot; Lisbeth and Katniss speak out and fight back against their assailants and end up traumatized and broken.

Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander photographed by Jean Baptiste Mondino for W Magazine February 2011

At the end of Hunting Girls, Oliver turns her attention away from fairytales, and addresses issues of free speech on campus, trigger warnings, Title IX, and even the Kipnis affair specifically. I found her commentary by turns disappointing, illuminating, and heartening. Oliver does succumb to a certain amount of what is by now a familiar kind of hand-wringing over students’ desires for safe spaces and trigger warnings. But her analysis helps to make sense of the most bewildering aspects of the Kipnis affair: why would ostensibly feminist students protest a feminist professor using the instrument of Title IX, the purpose of which is to protect against discrimination on the basis of gender? Oliver identifies a displacement of the kind that Ahmed locates in the “problem student”: the person who calls attention to the problem is treated as the problem. “Trigger warnings,” Oliver worries, “….displace the problem of sexual assault onto discussions of sexual assault. The problem seemingly becomes talking about sexual assault rather than sexual assault itself.” She adds,

In a culture that increasingly values feelings and legitimates sensitivity to triggers and traumas caused by words rather than by deeds and embraces the power of language to injure, the equal legitimation of all feelings becomes a form of political leveling. Feeling reduced to mere sentiments uncritically held as true moves us dangerously close to a form of reactionary politics that closes down discussions that are too difficult, on the one hand, and cannot distinguish between sexism or racism and critical discussions of them, on the other.

The state of affairs Oliver describes here is surely distressing, and on one level, she’s not wrong. This is precisely the discursive slippage that, for example, opens up a space for white supremacists to claim the mantle of marginalization, or for pundits far away from campus or other sites of political struggle to bemoan “the failure of identity politics.” But in fact, students are talking about sexual assault—and about racism, misogyny, misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, and transmisogyny—on campus all the time; a lot of people just don’t like the way they’re doing it. What’s more, resistance is just as much baked into the pedagogical situation as desire. Yet I have never once seen students “demand emotional safety from feelings they don’t like,” as Oliver claims—with the noteworthy exception of students who object to being exposed to so-called “diversity.” There is no inherent conflict between free speech and an insistence on recognizing and bearing witness to individual and collective trauma. Students remain quite capable of both having feelings and talking about ideas.

The truth is, trigger warnings aren’t the problem—the problem is the misguided “trigger warning” controversy. All too often, this pseudo-debate presents the phenomenon of students’ being triggered as the primary issue, over and against any consideration of what their reactions articulate or reveal. Reactionary contempt for trigger warnings—which are recognitions, however flawed, of the messy reality of human vulnerability on campus and beyond—becomes a way to simultaneously dismiss that vulnerability while also doubling down on the systemic erasure of its causes. In other words, the problem, kids, isn’t the epidemic of sexual violence on campus; the problem is that you’re a shrill special snowflake demanding that the world coddle you. The debate is a red herring, a displacement: it’s a proxy battle for the same old culture wars arguments about who ought to be represented in the curriculum, in the classroom, and among the faculty, re-emerging in the guise of concerns about freedom of expression and students with insufficient character armor. The more interesting question raised by the Kipnis affair is rather: Why would it appear desirable for students to identify with—and organize around—a politics of vulnerability rather than a politics of resilience? To which Oliver’s own figure of the hunting girl offers a suggestive answer. Resilience and agency will not protect you from vulnerability. They will not stop you from being beaten or raped; they may even invite it.

Reading Ahmed, Kipnis, and Oliver together, and tracking their configurations of possibilities for how feminist professors can situate themselves with respect to their students, I am left with a series of questions. Must we really choose to be for or against our students? Are relationships of either identification or opposition really the only options? Why on earth, if our purpose as educators is ostensibly to equip students with a critical apparatus, ought we then expect our feminist (or any other kind of) politics to neatly align with theirs? Finally, in the context of the contemporary university: when girls—and not only girls—are being hunted, who should take care of those who are likely to be harmed? Is it necessarily paternalistic to believe that colleges and universities should care for and even protect their students and their faculty? Why not invoke instead the good old-fashioned feminist values of care, solidarity, and even coalition-building as a model for faculty-student relations in a moment when many faculty are embattled, precarious workers earning poverty wages, and students are paying a quarter million dollars for a bachelor’s degree and a one-in-four chance of being sexually assaulted on campus? Oliver ends Hunting Girls with a gesture toward the necessity of thinking intersubjectively—specifically toward re-imagining the vexed notion of sexual consent as a “journey” together rather than a contract to be upheld or broken. “Consent, then,” she writes, “means being sensitive to each other, sensing and perceiving the agreement of the other.” It is a sentiment that might go a long way not only in re-thinking consent, but also in organizing a politics of faculty-student relationships that doesn’t require us to choose between identification and opposition, or between thinking and feeling.

***

[1] “Resignation” posted by Sarah Ahmed on feministkilljoys.com on May 30, 2016 and “Speaking Out” posted by Sarah Ahmed on feministkilljoys.com on June 2, 2016.

[2] “Emma Sulkowicz: “Carry That Weight” posted on YouTube by The Columbia Daily Spectator on September 2, 2014 and “Meet the College Women Who Are Starting a Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault” by Vanessa Grigoriadis in New York Magazine, September 21, 2014.

***

Abby Kluchin is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Ursinus College and Associate Director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 

The post Nevertheless, She Resisted: Problem Students and Hunting Girls appeared first on The Revealer.

First, a note on Field Notes. Writing is a lonely activity, and one is compelled to be absolutely certain before putting arguments out there. Notes, though, are a space to speculate and experiment with new and inchoate ideas, without the pressure of publishing or the fear of being wrong. Scholars have few opportunities to show their work, to pull back the illusory curtain of solitary, objective research, and display everything that goes into what they write. Everything: illnesses, injuries, worries, wonders, rough drafts, cold drafts, draft-dodging, draft beer. The life of the mind is still life, brief and vulnerable and abundant. And it is worth sharing.

For those who work their way up the great chain of academic being without the privileges traditionally attendant upon that ascent – privileges of caste and class, of family pedigree, and of curated educational opportunities – each level can be progressively alienating. This is particularly so for those in the humanities, where efforts to democratize the university are imperiled by the destruction of the space itself. The problem is even more acute if you study religion, especially your own religion, so often hostile to interrogation, bubbling up and over the methodological agnosticism of scholarly inquiry. Because, like your hometown sports team, you can never quite renounce it. For all the patriarchy and pageantry, the scandals and self-deception, it leaves its ineradicable traces within you, in life, and afterlife, and life after life.

By my own account, I have had more privileges than most, beginning with the support of my family. They don’t really understand what I do, though they read all my publications meticulously, but they believe that my work has its own value, simply because I am the one doing it. Maybe it is their responsibility to believe so, but what am I, in the words of Psalm 8, that they should be mindful of me? I am by training a philologist, by accident an intellectual historian, and by temperament a peacemaker. The first identifies the materiality (and thus secularity, or worldliness) of a text, amassing physical evidence to reconstruct words and their meanings so that we become the best-informed readers possible. The second attends to changes in the history of ideas, and approaches readers in the past with generosity, in order to understand what they were doing in writing as they did. The third believes in pluralism, in intellectual and in social life, and works to build bridges between communities otherwise separated by belief and practice. At the university, this is called interdisciplinarity. At home they call it love.

About two years ago, when I began a luxurious but lonely postdoctoral fellowship, I wondered how I would keep these parts of myself together. Without the community of my colleagues in graduate school, I returned to what sustained my research in the first place, the encouragement of my family. Instead of engaging in our usual polite inquiries, I asked my mother if she would consider working with me on a new research project. A friend had photographed a Sanskrit manuscript for me from a library in southern India. For most of its premodern history, Sanskrit was been written in local, regional scripts from West to Southeast Asia; a good manuscript researcher must know at least five, with their diachronic variants. This manuscript was in Grantha, a South Indian script once used widely by speakers of Tamil and Malayalam to write the Sanskrit language. I speak a highly dialectal version of Tamil, inflected with Malayalam, but have never learned to read or write either. My mother, however, knows both, but does not have the requisite level of expertise in Sanskrit. With our powers combined (and the help of a Grantha primer), I reasoned, we could move through the text much faster than I could on my own. Because my mother lives in India, and I am in the U.K., we had to conduct these sessions over Skype. In this virtual way, we met nearly every morning over the course of two months, perhaps the first people to read this text in the decades since it was catalogued.

The text in question was a commentary on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (BhP), a popular legend of the god Krishna, whom it describes as being at once the philosopher’s formless absolute and the devotee’s embodied lover. It is difficult to overestimate the animating power that the BhP came to possess for a variety of religious, scholarly, literary, and performative communities in South Asia, so as to become one of the most famous Hindu scriptures of the second millennium. The text and its stories were translated, explicated, painted, sculpted, and performed throughout the subcontinent. Not only did it purport to be the quintessence and culmination of all Brahmanical scripture, it also claimed to extend access to that wisdom to (or incorporate the voices of) those outside the pale of Brahmanical religion. This was because it spoke the language of bhakti, or love – in Sanskrit, yes, but in a gentler, richer, more enthusiastic register, one that combined the archaic and the fresh, the philosophical and the literary, and bore witness to the irruption of the local into the universal. In spite of its vast cultural reach, however, scholars tend to place the BhP within a surprisingly limited set of historiographical narratives. My research re-examines some of the historiographical common-sense that features in scholarly accounts of the history of religion, philosophy, and aesthetics in the reception of the BhP.

Although the BhP found its final form around the tenth century, the first extant commentaries date from a full three to four centuries later. The most famous among them was written by Śrīdhara, who probably lived in Orissa, in northeastern India, around 1400 CE. His text became the standard for many later readers of the BhP. The commentary sent to me from that Southern Indian library and that my mother and I reconstructed was by one Lakṣmīdhara, a contemporary of Śrīdhara who may have lived in Orissa as well. I had written about Lakṣmīdhara’s other works in my dissertation, but, to my knowledge, no one before had read these fragments of his commentary on the BhP, called the Amṛtataraṅgiṇī or River of Ambrosia. I approached this text with little more than the general thrill of discovery, and the simple hope that it would shed light on his overall philosophical theology. Instead, my mother and I may have stumbled on an entire alternative commentarial tradition on the BhP, one that circumvented the routes and religious affinities that scholars have associated with the reception history of that text.

We began by slowly analyzing the bare text: identifying the copyist’s unique ligatures, applying punctuation for organizational purposes, differentiating the commentary on one verse from the next, and producing a working transcript. Along the way, we made notes on the content, comparing its style and substance with Śrīdhara and other major interpreters. It quickly became clear that the River of Ambrosia had quite a distinct interpretive take on the BhP, and seemed to betray no familiarity with Śrīdhara whatsoever. It even included verses absent from Śrīdhara’s version of the text, explicitly pointing out variant readings in several verses. Moreover, it gestured to the existence of a previous commentary unacknowledged by Śrīdhara. And although there is good reason to believe that Lakṣmīdhara lived in Orissa, in the northeast of India, almost all extant manuscripts of the River of Ambrosia are found in Kerala, in the southwest.

This last detail puzzled me until I noticed passages from the River of Ambrosia being repeated almost verbatim in a similarly neglected (but published) commentary on the BhP written two hundred years later in sixteenth-century Kerala by Rāghavānanda. He was a practitioner of Tantric goddess worship, influenced by both the South Indian ritual cosmology of Śrīvidyā and the northern Kashmiri philosophy of non-dual Śaivism, treating the god Śiva as the ultimate, all-pervading reality. I had been reading Rāghavānanda as I rewrote the first chapter of my book in progress to show how the BhP, a text otherwise sacred to devotees of the god Viṣṇu, inspired followers of a religion often in competition with theirs. Rāghavānanda’s writings allowed me to explore the intellectual history of the structural correspondences between Brahmanical and Tantric religion that characterized politics and society in medieval Kerala. I located this history at the nexus of several complex and overlapping relationships: between private esotericism and public religion, between high textual culture and antinomian, anti-caste ritual practice, between austere philosophical traditions and exuberant literary aesthetics, and, in the end, between Śaivism and “the bhakti movement.”

Rāghavānanda was not simply parroting Lakṣmīdhara; he worked with the River of Ambrosia – the imported passages are too extensive to be coincidental – but towards much more ambitious commentarial ends. His contemporaries in Kerala knew of the text too. The fifteenth-century litterateur Pūrṇasarasvatī, for example, briefly cited the River of Ambrosia while commenting on a devotional hymn. And a few generations later, in the eighteenth century, a tutor of the ruling class of Kochi composed a commentary on the BhP that placed the River of Ambrosia and Rāghavānanda’s Krṣṇapadī in the same genealogy. Finding Lakṣmīdhara in Kerala telescoped this regional story into subcontinental networks of intellectual exchange and manuscript transmission. Suddenly the transference of ritual manuals of goddess worship like the Śāradātilaka from Orissa to Kerala, and the northeastern popularity of Sanskrit poems by the Kerala native Bilvamaṅgala, made good sense, as did the possibility that an alternative commentarial tradition on the BhP circulated along the same routes.

I am still building a proper case for the alternativeness of this tradition, and working to answer the question that if it was a tradition, why it was overshadowed, and why it survived. The scholarly article that results will perform the basic task of revising the assumptions of current historiography. But it will be pared down to its argumentative core, stripped of serendipity and joy, my mother relegated to a footnote of acknowledgment. As an intellectual historian, I am often more concerned with the history of ideas than the ideas themselves. Why should my own case be any different? Why should I not be fully forthcoming about the conditions of my research, rather than leave its illocutionary effects for a future graduate student to reveal?

After all, my mom was no silent subaltern or native informant. She is a devotee of the same god celebrated by the BhP, knowledgeable in both the philosophical wisdom he teaches and the inscrutable tricks he plays. Though ours was a scholarly, not a spiritual exercise, she would bring out her tattered copy of the vulgate BhP to check against the commentary, and supplied notes she has made over decades of attending religious lectures, remarking with surprise when Lakṣmīdhara failed to find important verses of interest. These discussions oriented me to the many histories of the text’s reception, and to the interventions that Lakṣmīdhara thought it meaningful to make. Sometimes we discussed the finer points of methodology. When my inner philologist obsessed over a corrupt reading, I heard a more insistent voice from the Skype window, saying: “I am a pragmatist. Is it useful for you? Then okay. Otherwise let’s move on; I have tea on the stove.” If I have not convinced her to take credit for co-authorship, it is because her distrust of publicity exceeds her desire for recognition. But she will not fail to remind you, and rightly, that she has literally fed my success.

The River of Ambrosia flows through our home now, rippling between Dropbox folders and Google Docs, surging over online phone calls, pooling in the silences of time zones apart. By the time it gets to peer review, it will be dry as the Nilā, on the banks of which it was once read, centuries ago. For a commentary on a text that encouraged its audience to drink of its rasa, that juicy distillation of aesthetic delight (BhP 1.1.3), this would be a sad, desiccated fate. Instead, here, I am sharing a different version of scholarship, attentive to the conditions of everyday life, mindful of the loving voices amplifying my words.

***

Anand Venkatkrishnan is a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in South Asian Religions from Columbia University (2015), and a B.A. in Classics from Stanford University (2010). His book in progress, Love in the Time of Scholarship, examines the relationship of bhakti, religion as lived affect, with philosophy as intellectual practice, in early modern India. It also demonstrates how vernacular ways of knowing pushed through the glass ceiling of Sanskrit intellectuality. Anand fills his spare time with sports commentary, pop culture, and translations of Sanskrit poetry at http://apurvaracana.tumblr.com.

The post Love in the Time of Scholarship appeared first on The Revealer.

By Angela Zito

This talk was delivered at the panel on “Refugees, immigration and national security” at the Symposium on Religious Literacy and Journalism, Harvard Divinity School, December 9, 2016. It ended a long day of discussion of how religion was, could and should be covered by journalists.

For the past 15 years, I have lived my life in a Venn diagram formed by journalism, religious studies and anthropology. What the three share is a deeply modern history of allegiance to the creation of knowledge through experience. Journalists value the eye-witness account; anthropologists do fieldwork to produce ethnography; and religious studies has wrestled with the issue of experience as key to its modern definition, at least since William James wrote about its varieties.

In their classic forms, they also share anxiety about experience: Journalists fear failure through overly subjective investment; anthropologists fear going native; religious studies trusts neither the converted nor the convicted. These anxieties all share the territory of the border, of insider/outsider policing. But even more, all three anxieties also register angst over how the passions of identity might swamp our rational faculties. As if. As if we could really defend ourselves against our “selves,” our parts. In global modernity religion is deeply embedded in persons and in systems as a marker of identity – too deeply to be easily turned aside or overlooked.

Today I’d like to tell one small story and share one large thought experiment. Both are done in service of understanding the difficulty of grasping the workings of religion in everyday motivations. Religion is often usefully unobvious, and yet present. Because, as the poet Kenneth Koch says: “One Train May Hide Another.”

The story: A young woman was once hired in her first tenure track job at a famous and very old small New England college. Let us call it Notamherst. It was exciting, even though the place was in the woods and required weekend commuting back to a place called Notmanhattan. It turned out to be exciting, as well, because she found out very quickly that she had the honor of being the first woman ever hired on the tenure track in the Religion Department. Ever. She was aghast as one colleague after another broke the news to her, as in, “So you’re the woman the Religion Department hired!” She figured that it was safe to say she had cracked a barrier in place for nearly 200 years, assuming that if the college had had one curriculum in place from the start, it would have been the study of religion.

But as she stayed and worked in the department, she took note of its structure in other ways. How the four senior professors were white and male and Protestant. And how they had assembled a junior staff around them consisting of The Guy Teaching Hinduism (a bridge figure since he was white and Protestant himself); The First Jew—working on Judaism; herself, The First Woman Ever, specializing in ritual studies and China (tellingly, not gender studies) and The First Ever Black Lesbian, a philosopher of Protestant theology. It dawned on her slowly that while outsiders were incited by the whole sexed-gender identity thing, she was coming to think that the more subversive identity she embodied was as, possibly, the first Catholic on the tenure track. Ever. This was born out in anecdotal, though not archival, research. It seemed to be so in people’s memories.

In fact, the intellectual topography of the department had been adroitly arranged so that the four senior white men taught all the courses on theory, while the junior faculty taught content. They had a kind of metropolitan center that contrasted with the (colonial) periphery. In the center, a lot of unmarked Protestant thinking went on, while the rest of them spent time on the body and its performances and rituals. Living the Cartesian split.

The woman was forced to conclude that she had harbored within herself an identity that was not nearly so obvious to her as it was to the others around her—she was well on her way out of the Church and toward Buddhism by then. And yet, in her scholarly interests, she was indeed Catholic: exuberantly absorbed in studying collective ritual life, in the capacities of embodiment and emotions to perform that life into being. The delicate, yet ironclad, filigree of her identity suit forged for her a set of opportunities and dangers. And she suddenly felt its heaviness, and its protection, in a way she had never noticed, since we all know that we acquire our selfhood in the eyes of Others. In her migration into the northern woods, looking for work, she never expected that being Catholic would count for much.

From that small story, I’d like to take up the issue of much vaster migrations, done for reasons far more exigent and deadly than the pursuit of one scholarly career. I invite us to move from the context in which migration actually takes place to the context in which it is imagined by a group of people we have all been wondering about for the past year and a half: Trump voters.

I’ll quote Shakyeed Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California from one of our collected news pieces on immigration: “Some have framed the issue as a monolithic issue of a particular denomination. But that is a myth: the immigration issue transcends all creeds, all colors, all languages.” Syed delivers this insight as a hopeful, positive point. But what if instead he has actually drawn attention to a source of profound anxiety about immigration—its transcendence of boundaries? What if religion now marks a feature of people “out of place”?

Historically, the great evangelizing religions have never respected borders. Beginning with Buddhism, continuing with Christianity and then Islam, they have not only, and always, been involved in providing ideas, bodies and practices for creating authoritative versions of life on the ground in specific places. They have also all been at the forefront of expanding that territory of influence. Indeed, the Buddhist Sangha, the Christian Kingdom of God, and the Islamic Umma provide a corollary genealogy to the world of globalization, a different angle of history of this new world we inhabit, now so tightly knit through transportation, communication. Yet the flows of religious enthusiasm have ridden upon and compelled the flow of money and its networks of financialization and debt.

Famously, Buddhist monks travelled with merchant caravans; within Islam developed some of the earliest forms of banking along the Mediterranean; the intimate ties between Christian missionaries and business interests were infamous within the European colonial world. So my question for us now is this: given the close ties religions have maintained with worlds of wealth, just how much of the anger and anxiety about Islam spreading itself through refugees and immigrants is really an expression about the other modern, global, non-respecter of borders, the Corporation?   I’ve been struck by Trump’s spectacular mash-up of things-to-fear: How corporate abandonment of the borders of the nation blends so well with stories of immigrants assailing those same borders. Do religions whose members are suspected of having extra-territorial first loyalties, harboring international ties beyond the (literal white) pale absorb anger deflected from corporate disloyalty and supra-national interests? And like that junior professor who found one hidden aspect of herself suddenly spotlighted, Arabic- speaking people must also be surprised to be squeezed into a singularity of religious identity.

My point here is to remind us of religion’s complexity, that it is never an object or an essence of traits, easy to find, even in a single person’s profile. It is always an achieved moment, the outcome of an ongoing process, an aspect of the assemblage of desire and fear that motivates a person, and persons, in their shifting collectivities. It can be contingent. It can surprise. In our small story, gender hides religion. In the large hypothesis, religion covers economics. When we write about religion, I hope we go for uncovering rather than covering. As in these last lines from Kenneth Koch’s poem

….One friend may hide another, you sit at the    

               foot of a tree

With one and when you get up to leave there is another

Whom you’d have preferred to talk to all along. One teacher,

One doctor, one ecstasy, one illness, one woman, one man

May hide another. Pause to let the first one pass.

You think, Now it is safe to cross and you are hit by the next one. It      

               can be important

To have waited at least a moment to see what was already there.

***

Angela Zito teaches anthropology and religious studies at NYU, where she is co-founder and co-director of the Center for Religion and Media, publisher of The Revealer: a review of religion and media. Find her at www.angelazito.com.

The post Uncovering Religion: One Train May Hide Another appeared first on The Revealer.

Mark and Malinda Clatterbuck, members of Community Mennonite Church and founders of Lancaster Against Pipelines, participate in Easter Sunday service. (EmmaKate Martin)

By Ann Neumann

The field of bioethics—and the important social and policy contributions it makes to our democracy—will be profoundly affected if authoritarian populism displaces constitutional democracy. —Mildred Z. Solomon, Bruce Jennings, “Bioethics and Populism: How Should Our Field Respond?” The Hastings Report, March 16, 2017

As the sun came up on Easter Sunday, I was standing in a sprouting, dew-wet cornfield in Lancaster County with 60 others who had gathered to celebrate the resurrection and spring. The crowd was a hodge-podge, made up of members of my family, members of the nearby Community Mennonite Church, members of a neighboring, sprawling Amish family, and a smattering of activists (local and national) who have been camping on the site for several weeks, their objective to stop the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline which will slice through the county, jeopardizing the lives and health of everything in its path.

Since the election of Donald Trump, questions about health and safety are no longer rhetorical. All around us, individuals have been making rich, ramshackle communities and loudly parsing the difference between partisanship and morality: non-believing people (like me) are joining churches of all stripes, tapping into existing communities of all types to raise a louder voice.^[1] Alarmed mothers are marching and running for office, millennials and minority groups are gathering to protest and make friends, students and teachers are walking out of classrooms. Within disciplines, too, vocal debates are taking place about members’ responsibilities for what many have qualified as the rise of authoritarian populism and the endangerment of public health.

Recently, contributors to a listserv I read, a heap of otherwise non-religious political scientists, policy wonks and journalists, waxed on about their renewed participation in local churches and synagogues, their need for community heightened by the election. Like our Easter Sunrise service in the path of a pipeline, resistance to unhealthy policies is making rich and diverse new communities in which moral actions are the collective purpose, an embrace of the longstanding but often muted morality of the liberal American church.

Churches embody community by, at the most local level, providing social support to those who will most benefit from it: housing, food, child care, care for the disabled, and even health care. The voices of activist groups like Lancaster Against Pipelines and inclusive churches like Community Mennonite are made more relevant and necessary in the current political environment when they work together. Such disparate groups are increasingly finding themselves as allies. Which is only natural; we are all members of more than one group in our communities and professions.

***

A recent debate in the field of bioethics, a discipline predicated on balancing the health needs of individuals with those of the public, highlights the ways in which discourse about moral obligation to community has bloomed since the election. In the March-April issue of The Hastings Center Report, Mildred Z. Solomon, a professor at Harvard Medical School and president of The Hastings Center, and Bruce Jennings, a professor at Vanderbilt University and a senior advisor at The Hastings Center, co-wrote an essay that’s garnered a host of telling commentary. Their essay, “Bioethics and Populism: How Should Our Discipline Respond?,” is a kind of rallying cry for bioethicists to see the centrality of their role, as members of an interdisciplinary field long predicated on the study of justice and equity in public health, in this political moment.

Solomon and Jennings spend the first third of the essay defining America’s current form of populism. They argue that “In the discourse of constitutional democracies, ‘the people’ is an inclusive, egalitarian, and culturally and religiously diverse conception, while in today’s populist discourse, the people are defined as an exceedingly selective and antipluralistic entity.” This redefining of “We, the people” has further marginalized the concerns of all but an elite group of people, threatening the health and well being of vast demographic categories of residents.

The rest of the essay answers the question, “Why and How Should Bioethics Respond?” Bioethics, they explain, embodies the very same “values and norms of discourse” as constitutional democracy because bioethics “has been concerned with the age-old communitarian question, how should we live together?” Who should have access to new and expensive medical technologies and drugs? What health resources are we all entitled to? How can the costs and benefits of public health best be distributed? What health services violate human morality or medical ethics? How can the autonomy of individual patients be protected and defined within supportive communities?

Science, like the Church, has taught us that we are all in this together, that “We, the people” must mean everyone. The health of all, as medical science tells us, is determined by the health of individuals, and vice versa. Herd immunity, for instance, provides health safety to individuals who are not inoculated against deadly viruses, thus demonstrating the reliance of all on community. While protecting the health of the nation may involve politics, our collective obligation to do so should not be a partisan debate.

Solomon and Jennings make the case that the interdisciplinarity of bioethics, its moral weight in discussion of health justice, and its process of debating equitable structures and distribution, put bioethicists squarely at the forefront of the debate about the politics of health. The authors broadly (and rightly) include issues of the environment, the justice system, immigration, education, and food and drug safety in the realm of bioethicists’ concerns. And while they acknowledge that they are engaging in politics (it’s absurd but frequently claimed that the profession – any profession – is apolitical) they deny any partisanship. The equitable distribution of health care and resources protects and elevates the health of all Americans. What’s controversial about that? Yet, history tells us that disciplines and organizations of all types have been complicit in atrocities.

Chillingly, the essay notes how the medical industry had, in the past, been “coopted for state purposes”:

Academic medicine and practicing health care professionals played key roles in the early twentieth-century eugenics movement, assisted the U.S. government with human radiation experiments during the Cold War, and most recently were involved in the support of torture.

Complicity in immoral state actions, they warn, lies in ignoring democratic values and failing to publicly work for them. Indeed, bioethics in part grew out of this history of state-sponsored eugenics (as well as the ethical challenges created by rapid development of medical technologies).^[2] The authors are warning that the field should remember its roots.

Yet, Solomon and Jennings have received ample criticism which falls into two categories: polite admonitions that everyone should please calm down (‘cause, you know, Trump’s not so bad); and hand-wringing warnings that bioethics, the discipline, will be damaged by taking a moral stand. As Franklin G. Miller, a professor at Cornell Weill Medical College, writes in his response (also published in The Hastings Center Report):

Solomon and Jennings give the impression that bioethicists all do, or should, subscribe to a stance of liberal progressivism. Evidence for this view is the way that they advocate for “a greater focus on justice” as one of the ways in which bioethics should respond to populism. The section of their essay devoted to this position gives no attention to competing conceptions of justice; rather, their discussion of distributional and “structural” dimensions of justice provides a liberal progressive perspective, as filtered through a communitarian lens.

I stifled a giggle when reading Miller’s response. “Justice,” as he would have it, is a kind of dirty word, a dog whistle for leftists, a concept and objective that cannot be defended without partisan leanings. Trump’s administration—and his supporters—have long been on a campaign of making “justice for all” the enemy. As this conversation plays out in bioethics, it more clearly and accurately represents the health discrimination Americans have long struggled with. That Miller so publicly concedes this is stunning. Michelle Bayefsky’s response, also a criticism of Solomon and Jennings, drives Miller’s point home:

While Solomon and Jennings may have intended to appeal to fundamental democratic values upon which all civic-minded people can agree, their emphasis on human interdependence and structural and distributional injustices, as Miller points out, would likely appeal more to those with a progressive, communitarian approach.

Bayefsky worries that when bioethicists advocate for justice it could convince “those who disagree with those views” that they “do not belong in the field of bioethics.”

With new emphasis on community and justice, it’s gratifying to imagine that Trump’s election has renewed the power and persuasion of community, not only in the professions, like bioethics, but in the nation’s moral and organizing bedrock, the church. For decades, the power of liberal churches has been usurped and out-shined by the prosperity and political dominance—the partisanship—of the religious right, their purpose maligned as a relic of organized religion’s past. It is bewildering that some would try to rewrite the history of bioethics to erase its foundational purpose of health equity.

Religion has forever granted authority to moral positions on health equity (its own prejudices notwithstanding); it is seen as the keeper and legitimizer of right behavior toward one another. The role that liberal churches are playing today —and the backdrop they provide for local and national organizing—is that of moral authority. If the liberal church—with its embedded community infrastructure both physical (here is the church, here is the steeple) and social (look inside and see all the people)—can demonstrate ways to include those Trump and his henchmen have singled out, the moral conviction and license of like-minded activist groups are made stronger. The religious right has long influenced unjust moral, legal and scientific laws. But an opportunity now exists for a renewed moral voice to usurp that influence.

Mark and Malinda Clatterbuck, members of Community Mennonite Church and founders of Lancaster Against Pipelines, participate in Easter Sunday service. (EmmaKate Martin)

That the religious left is experiencing new authority in political and social America has been the topic of much discussion in the past several weeks. Daniel Schultz (pastor and, in the past, contributor to this publication) was joined by a host of conservative voices in denouncing the liberal church’s influence—on anything, let alone the health sciences. Schultz writes:

Most people on the left aren’t hostile to faith, but they’re only willing to cede it so much authority. That’s not because liberal clergy deal away the moral (or even revealed) content of their faith, as the stereotype often has it. In fact, I and many colleagues across denominations struggle mightily to know God and to understand where our faith is leading us. But we take pluralism seriously, and we are painfully aware of how faith has been used to control, hurt, and oppress the vulnerable.

I’m not denying Schultz’s well-made points—that the left is a plurality of voices whose power is affected by its acceptance of a multitude of faiths and nonfaiths. My point is more pragmatic and along the lines of Solomon and Jennings’s distinction between politics and partisanship. The religious left in the US cannot alone counter the greed and individualism that this administration is hell bent on enacting, but its voice, when amplified by activist movements and disciplines in need of moral authority and organization, perhaps can.

A multitude of positions then is not a weakness but a strength, contributing what it can to the cause of equity. I have only these slim evidences: members of a non-religious listserv extolling the benefits of right-minded, inclusive churches; and a motley but righteous Sunday Sunrise service in a Pennsylvania cornfield. The call within bioethics for a unified voice for public health makes bedfellows of the American religious left and the scientific community—and a driven smattering of movements across the country. That’s more than the recent American past can boast. And given the vagaries of the near future, enough to place one’s hopes on.

***

^[1] Community is itself in need of some bit of reclamation. As Kate Reed Petty recently wrote at the Los Angeles Review of Books, “community is overused by nonprofits and has been co-opted by corporations, used as a synonym for ‘consumers.’ What hasn’t capitalism yet coopted?” (Petty directs us to this helpful discussion of the use of community in technology.) But as the word is used among burgeoning anti-Trump movements today, so has it also long been used to identify not only affinity (senior and youth centers) or proximity (the 400 block of Main Street), but a group’s organization around the practice of identifying and caring for people in jeopardy. This is where churches, the more inclusive the better, have prevailed in leveraging moral voices against injustice.

^[2] For more on the history of bioethics, read here, here and here.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

***

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

The post Herd Immunity appeared first on The Revealer.

Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica”

Thanks for checking out our latest collection of religion writing from around the web. 

First up, a few Easter items we didn’t want to leave in our basket.

Crucified man had prior run-in with authorities by Alexandra Petri for The Washington Post

Born (possibly out of wedlock?) in a stable, this jobless thirty-something of Middle Eastern origin had had previous run-ins with local authorities for disturbing the peace, and had become increasingly associated with the members of a fringe religious group. He spent the majority of his time in the company of sex workers and criminals.

And Ed Simon‘s The Crucified God: A Death in Pictures  for Marginalia, a beautiful and thorough reading of crucifixion.

I have, perhaps due to an innate inclination towards the macabre, always appreciated the crucifix more than the cross. The crucifix and the cross are certainly not contradictory, and obviously the later is the ultimate narrative conclusion of the former. But in its sanitized abstraction, the cross seems to me to be eliminating the most crucial part of the story, and in the modern era of the Death of God I don’t think the story Sunday tells is as important as the one that Friday does. While Christians of all denominations wear crosses, for the most part only Catholics embrace the crucifix. Interpreting a crucifix as an important part of religious material culture conceptualizes the object as a symbol of group allegiance, one advertising its wearer not as a member of the United States’ traditional Protestant ruling classes. In popular culture it is the shriveled Irish nun, the Italian boxer, the Hispanic laborer, who wears the crucifix, while the cross is worn by the WASPy suburban couple, the campus Christian, or the cheerful door-to-door missionary. As a matter of semiotics, a crucifix has different connotations than a cross does. But this perspective has more to do with sociology than theology, and for me the fact remains that my attraction to the crucifix has a noumenal element about it as well.

Fascism and Art by S. Brent Plate for Killing the Buddha makes a great segue piece, addressing the relationship between art and authoritarianism:

During this time Picasso’s misogynistically distorted women morph into abstract monuments littering unreal landscapes, like they’ve broken free from their portrait studios and remain at large. Simultaneously, he’s sketching a handful of Crucifixion scenes, some of the only works in his immense career with explicit religious content. Like the deconstructed women, the crucifixions could almost be deemed what we call in English “still life” paintings: fruit, meat, containers, flowers in formal arrangement. Bringing us closer to the truth is the Spanish term for such a genre, naturaleza muerta (“dead nature”).

It is the great artistic lie that captures natural life, pins it down, dissects it, and then shows it to all of us as if it’s still living, walking among us; now a prodigious, perverse husk of a natural thing. The crucifixion is the greatest still life of all.

And speaking of art and authoritarianism: Rebecca Mead profiles Margaret Atwood, the Prophet of Dystopia for The New Yorker

“Clip-clippety-clip, out of the newspaper I clipped things,” she said, as we looked through the cuttings. There were stories of abortion and contraception being outlawed in Romania, and reports from Canada lamenting its falling birth rate, and articles from the U.S. about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of U.S. congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions, in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called “handmaidens”—a word that Atwood had underlined. In writing “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Atwood was scrupulous about including nothing that did not have a historical antecedent or a modern point of comparison. 

…

Two days before Trump’s Inauguration, Atwood had published an essay in The Nation, in which she questioned the generalities sometimes made by left-leaning intellectuals about the role of the artist in public life. “Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty, a fate other professionals—dentists, for example—generally avoid,” she observed. “There’s nothing inherently sacred about films and pictures and writers and books. ‘Mein Kampf’ was a book.” In fact, she said, writers and other artists are particularly prone to capitulating to authoritarian pressure; the isolation inherent in the craft makes them psychologically vulnerable. “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect,” she wrote. “At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”

A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu

And Christopher Dougals has some important insights about Why Hulu’s ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Maybe the Wrong Adaptation for [the] Trump Era in Religion Dispatches

But it wasn’t only the gendered lines of combat that Atwood recognized in the nascent Christian Right—and this is where Hulu’s adaptation appears to take a self-conscious risk that may ultimately make it the wrong adaptation for the Age of Trump. Margaret Atwood’s novel also carefully noted the racialized history of the Christian Right, which predated its opposition to abortion. In the novel, African Americans are called the “Children of Ham” and are being “resettled” out of Gilead into the less prosperous “National Homeland” formerly known as North Dakota.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the patriarchy: Mary Shows Up: At the heart of The Young Pope is the repression of the feminine divine Jessa Crispin argues very persuasively in The Baffler

Our insistence on seeing Mary, on worshiping Mary, on praying to Mary implies that we need her. It also implies that the followers of patriarchal religions might be carrying around some psychological damage from being asked to see masculinity alone as divine—from being asked to accept a secondary position for feminine divinity, or to deny its existence altogether.

Included in the walking wounded is Pope Pius XIII, the fictional holy father played by Jude Law in Paolo Sorrentino’s HBO series The Young Pope. The title is a bit of a tease, the assumption being that since the young are naturally liberal reformers, a young pope will be one who seizes hold of a reluctant Church and yanks it into a brand new age. Yet we forget that the young are also the most fanatical, and indeed this pope, with the wonderfully absurd name of Lenny Belardo, declares in his address to the cardinals, “Fanaticism is love.” He wants to purge the church of homosexuals, make abortion an unforgivable sin, begin excommunication proceedings, and basically drag the church backward in time, to an era in which the church actually had control over its believers.

And playing on another channel nearby:  ‘I Thought I Understood America’: Talking with Neil Gaiman about ‘American Gods’ by David M. Perry in Pacific Standard.

Thanks to the rise of President Donald Trump and Trumpism—including intensifying anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric—the “red state” immigration narratives of the new Starz show American Gods are newly relevant. Based on a book by Neil Gaiman, the show wraps fundamental American themes around a weird and wild story about the old gods staving off threats from the upstart deities of technology. Much of the show takes place in the heartland, where we are consistently told “real Americans” live in opposition to those in coastal bubbles, but even in the heartland of American Gods, we find deeply ensconced immigrant narratives. Look back far enough, and every American story starts with immigration.

And we were totally captivated by Kathryn Schulz‘s telling of The Many Lives of Pauli Murray for The New Yorker

Despite all this, Murray’s name is not well known today, especially among white Americans. The past few years, however, have seen a burst of interest in her life and work. She’s been sainted by the Episcopal Church, had a residential college named after her at Yale, where she was the first African-American to earn a doctorate of jurisprudence, and had her childhood home designated a National Historic Landmark by the Department of the Interior. Last year, Patricia Bell-Scott published “The Firebrand and the First Lady” (Knopf), an account of Murray’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, and next month sees the publication of “Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray” (Oxford), by the Barnard historian Rosalind Rosenberg.

All this attention has not come about by chance. Historical figures aren’t human flotsam, swirling into public awareness at random intervals. Instead, they are almost always borne back to us on the current of our own times. In Murray’s case, it’s not simply that her public struggles on behalf of women, minorities, and the working class suddenly seem more relevant than ever. It’s that her private struggles—documented for the first time in all their fullness by Rosenberg—have recently become our public ones.

Pauli Murray

As we were taken with Nathan Goldman‘s In the Age of Trump, Reclaiming the Golem as a Symbol of Jewish Resistance by for Literary Hub

Many white Jews would prefer not to hear Spencer’s opening of the question of Jewish inhumanity and its echoes across the nation and in the White House. And many have responded by clinging closer to whiteness, hoping that it will protect them. These white Jews reaffirm their commitment to whiteness in the hope that, by mimicking the motions, they will be protected and spared.

…

What can we learn from this? Perhaps that we need not cling to the white supremacist imaginary’s understanding of personhood. Just as Rabbi Loew, with his black magic golem, refuses to advocate for Jewish personhood on the anti-Semitic terms set up by the Christian community—white Jews can refuse to hold firm to their whiteness. We cannot, of course, shed it. But we can say, with Baldwin, that whiteness is a moral choice. We can try to make different choices.

That’s a lot to read, now somethings to listen to: Kendrick Lamar’s Holy Spirit by Hua Hsu for The New Yorker

Religion is often invoked in hip-hop in a metaphorical way, a method of dramatizing one’s struggles against temptation or judgment. Two of last year’s most acclaimed releases, Kanye West’s “The Life of Pablo” and Chance the Rapper’s “Coloring Book,” turned spirituality into a kind of gilt-edged aesthetic. Those artists’ songs were radiant and euphoric; you wanted to see the light that they saw.

Until “god.,” the album’s penultimate track, Lamar’s version of faith feels heavy-handed and wearying: far from the megachurch’s spotlit pulpit, he’s more like a street-corner preacher whom people go out of their way to avoid. God is invoked not merely to lend texture to his triumphs. Lamar’s faith reminds him of the possibility of judgment, of an old-fashioned belief in the discrete categories of good and bad. Where others might simply bow to self-contradiction as inevitable, Lamar remains drawn to the idea that we will be judged by the path we walk, and by the work we leave behind. “I don’t love people enough to put my faith in men / I put my faith in these lyrics, hoping I can make amend,” he raps, over Steve Lacy’s slowed-down, jingle-jangle guitar, on “pride.”

And Alice Coltrane’s Ashram Recordings Finally Have Wide Release reports Mike Rubin for The New York Times.

The newly remastered recordings feature Ms. Coltrane singing for the first time on record, leading a large choir through Eastern-influenced devotional music, with lyrics chanted in Sanskrit but shaped by the African-American church tradition. “That touch of gospel feeling in there never existed with the Hare Krishnas, I can promise you that,” said Baker Bigsby, a Los Angeles audio engineer who worked with Ms. Coltrane for over 30 years. “It’s a little bit of Detroit inserted into this Indian music.”

Promotional image for Kendrick Lamar’s new album “Damn.”

Keep your headphones on for Najam Haider answering See Something Say Something‘s questions in their latest podcast episode Why Is Alcohol Banned In Islam?

And Josef Sorett’s appearance as a guest on Tell Me Something I Don’t Know‘s episode on Music

Then, back to the page for Judith Weisenfeld reading of the film “Moonlight” using Sorett’s book, Spirit in the Dark in The Spirit of Black Modernism in Public Books

Sorett’s goal in Spirit in the Dark is to illuminate the entanglements of religion and literature in 20th-century African American history; he makes a strong and persuasive case for the significance of religion to the language that black artists and intellectuals used to talk about race. The book also offers new ways of thinking about the history of secularism by identifying the spirit of Afro-Protestantism embedded in black theories of culture, thereby challenging the notion that American secularism is a uniform phenomenon. The concept of racial aesthetics offers a key term for understanding how African Americans used the arts to ponder the meaning of blackness. In this way Spirit in the Dark does indeed offer a rich set of tools for understanding the power of a work like Moonlight, and should serve as a model for future work attending the long history of the entanglement of religion and art in black life. 

In fact, there was a lot of good writing about race and religion this month, which also included:

Reverend Resistance: William Barber’s Progressive Christianity by Tommy Tomlinson for Esquire

The opposition to Trump so far has been powerful but leaderless—millions of bodies but not many faces. But Barber is working his way toward the middle of the frame. He’s a regular on MSNBC and on Roland Martin’s show on TV One. He has a PR advance team and a video crew to livestream his sermons. He has traveled to New Jersey to speak to union workers and to a church in Flint to preach about the water crisis there. He helped lead a march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on the anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march of 1965. He went back to Raleigh for a civil-rights rally that drew tens of thousands of people. And the day before the House was supposed to vote on a health-care plan that would cut benefits for millions, Barber led a group of clergy and activists to the Capitol to protest. One by one, they placed a pile of holy books outside Paul Ryan’s office. People talk about swearing on a stack of Bibles, but it’s not often someone is confronted with a literal stack of Bibles. Ryan later pulled the plan from the floor before it came to a vote. Maybe the Lord really does work in mysterious ways.

And The Heart of Whiteness. Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black in The Stranger after which it’s worth reading Oluo’s public Facebook post in response to some of her critics (here).

I am beginning to wonder if it isn’t blackness that Dolezal doesn’t understand, but whiteness. Because growing up poor, on a family farm in Montana, being homeschooled by fundamentalist Christian parents sounds whiter than this “silver spoon” whiteness she claims to be rejecting.

Dolezal feels she is different from others who would genuinely compare their hardships to slavery: “But those people are not aware, they haven’t been black history professors,” she says with a voice trembling with indignation.

I want to remind Dolezal that she is a former black history professor who has degrees in art, not black history, African history, or American history, but I don’t. I’m trying to not get kicked out of her place early.

It’s only been an hour, and I still need to ask The Question.

A still from the film “Moonlight”

The month also had a  few good new installments of everyone’s favorite ongoing series: “What’s the deal with Evangelicalism?”

The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society by Molly Worthen for The New York Times

Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones who think that an authority trusted by the other side is probably lying. But they believe that their own authority — the inerrant Bible — is both supernatural and scientifically sound, and this conviction gives that natural human aversion to unwelcome facts a special power on the right. This religious tradition of fact denial long predates the rise of the culture wars, social media or President Trump, but it has provoked deep conflict among evangelicals themselves.

Evangelicals and the New Urbanism by Abram Lueders in the Marginalia Review of Books

In the last few decades, however, evangelicals have changed their tune on the city. This is largely due to the work of one man: Tim Keller, the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York. Due to Keller’s success in planting evangelical congregations throughout the supposedly-secularized metropolis, the city looms large in evangelical conversations. It’s now common for evangelical churches to proclaim that they are “in the city, for the city.” City Church has joined the ranks of Christ Church, First (Insert Denomination) Church, and Church of the Good Shepherd as a go-to church name. However, this new-found infatuation with the city is often skin-deep. As the cultural cachet of all things urban has grown in the culture at large, claiming the mantle of “the city” allows certain congregations to set themselves apart from their less hip forebears, without actually engaging with the urban realm in any meaningful way.

Eric Jacobsen’s The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment is an attempt to bring evangelicals back to the bricks and mortar of the city itself. Rather than using “the city” as a marketing buzzword, Jacobsen’s goal is to plot a course toward a distinctively Christian way of interacting with and shaping the physical patterns of development that define the cities we live in. Ultimately, it’s a much-needed exercise in thought, hampered by a failure to carve out a practical path toward thoughtful engagement.

What Would Jesus Disrupt by Mya Frazier for Bloomberg Business Week

For Crossroads, embracing the gospel of Silicon Valley isn’t solely about money; it’s also about bringing the next generation into the church. Ocean Accelerator offers a way to reckon with two converging trends: growing anxiety about jobs and a decline in church attendance among young people. “Up until the millennial generation, there was inherent faith in large corporations, social enterprises, and governments to drive employment,” Weiss says. “But this millennial group has come along and said, ‘No, no. It’s actually my responsibility to create jobs.’ ”

Refreshments at the main church. Photographer: Josh Anderson for Bloomberg Businessweek

And in a different sort of conservative Christian mood altogether, there’s Joshua Rothman superb profile of Rod Dreher’s Monastic Vision for The New Yorker

For a decade, daily and at length, Dreher has written about his obsessions—orthodox Christianity, religious freedom, the “L.G.B.T. agenda,” the hypocrisy of privileged liberals, the nihilism of secular capitalism, the appeal of monasticism, the spiritual impoverishment of modernity, brisket—while sharing candid, emotional stories about his life. Dreher writes with graphomaniacal fervor and ardent changeability. He is as likely to admire Ta-Nehisi Coates’s dispatches from Paris as to inveigh against “safe spaces” on college campuses, and he delights in skewering the left and the right simultaneously—a recent post was called “How Are Pope Francis & Donald Trump Alike?” Because Dreher is at once spiritually and intellectually restless, his blog has become a destination for the ideologically bi-curious. Last year, his interview with J. D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” was largely responsible for bringing the book to the attention of both liberal and conservative readers. He gets around a million page views a month.

…

From the porch of a rented house, he began to codify his intuitions. He had long been fascinated by Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century monk who, convinced that it was impossible to live virtuously in a fallen Roman Empire, founded a monastery where the flame of Christianity might be tended during the Dark Ages. This March, Dreher published “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” which David Brooks, in the Times, has called “the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade.” It asks why there aren’t more places like St. Francisville—places where faith, family, and community form an integrated whole.

Dreher’s answer is that nearly everything about the modern world conspires to eliminate them. He cites the Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe a way of life in which “change is so rapid that no social institutions have time to solidify.” The most successful people nowadays are flexible and rootless; they can live anywhere and believe anything. Dreher thinks that liquid modernity is a more or less unstoppable force—in part because capitalism and technology are unstoppable. He urges Christians, therefore, to remove themselves from the currents of modernity. They should turn inward, toward a kind of modern monasticism.

We imagine Dreher would have a lot of respect for Emma Morano, whose story Elisabetta Povoledo tells in Remembering the World’s Oldest Person, in the Objects She Left Behind The New York Times

The few times she was ill, she refused to set foot in a hospital. She kept rosaries by her bed.
CreditGianni Cipriano for The New York Times

She was devout, wearing her rosaries for decades, though she did not wear them recently because her nieces, her principal caretakers, were afraid she might choke on them. She hung the rosaries next to her bed, near a photo of her only child, a son who lived from January to August 1937.

That photograph was buried with her, according to her wishes.

From some much younger folks, a few final items:

 How Meme Culture Is Getting Teens into Marxism by Hannah Ballantyne for Broadly

“I mean obviously memes aren’t the be-all and end-all of political engagement, but they can often help explain and engage young people in a discourse that they get shut out of. I once saw this great meme from Sassy Socialist Memes that epitomized a really thoughtful criticism of economic rationalism.

How kids in Germany are using Playmobil to reenact the Protestant Reformation

The scene looks like this: There’s a dark, stormy-looking landscape with a picture of lightning in the background. In the foreground, there’s a forest with a path wandering through it. There are also signs around, with the names “Stotternheim” and “Erfurt” printed on them. Trees abound, with a big rock planted among them. One of the trees no longer has branches, with a flash of lightning 25 centimeters long hitting the tree and running into the ground.

In front of that stands a Playmobil figure dressed in black, with its hands held upward. It is the moment in which Luther makes his vow. Looking more closely, one discovers a small family of hedgehogs who are searching for shelter. Crows and owls sit in the trees; rabbits sit in the brush. Everything has been rendered in as much minute detail as possible.

And lastly, Witchmoji exist.

See you again soon!

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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

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