“There is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.”

—from the first line of William James’s “The Moral Philospher and the Moral Life,” an address to the Yale Philosophy Club and published in the International Journal of Ethics, April 1891.

In the title story of Jacob Appel’s Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets, Red Ziggy runs a diner that is across the street from an abortion clinic. He deftly negotiates his clientele – fiery activists for and against abortion – through breakfast and lunch services. Against his better judgment, Ziggy falls for an anti-abortion activist, perhaps because of her persistence and passion.

Miracles and Conundrums is a collection of eight stories whose characters confront ethical quandaries of the medical kind. In “Phoebe with Impending Frost,” a single mother, Phoebe Marboe, is grieving and caring for her young daughter who is dying of cancer. Marboe’s neighbor, who, in his own grief, spends his days ripping invasive plants out of his expansive property, gives her a fatal poison that she considers using to end her daughter’s pain, or perhaps her own. In “The Resurrection Bakeoff,” a young couple struggle with a cancer diagnosis as an “epidemic” of resurrections—the deceased are returning to life, surprising loved ones who may or may not want them back—threatens to change the way they consider death. “What if death isn’t permanent?” they ask with trepidation.

As a medical doctor (as well as a lawyer, bioethicist, and medical historian) Appel imbues these stories with an expert knowledge of the ethical debates surrounding each of the life-and-death situations his characters encounter. But Miracles and Conundrums also stands alongside a rich literary tradition: the physician writer. The work of literature has always been to reflect the world back to us, to explain the joys and vagaries of life, and to interrogate the numinous. What does it mean when doctors take up literary work alongside research and treatment?

The English poet John Keats was a doctor. So was the German poet and essayist Friedrich von Schiller. Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, Oliver Wendall Holmes, W. Somerset Maugham, Albert Schweitzer, William Carlos Williams, Stanislaw Lem, and Sherwin Nuland were all doctors. So are Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, Alexander McCall Smith, Oliver Sacks, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Danielle Ofri, Atul Gawande, and Abraham Verghese. I could go on. It’s fair to say that without physician writers the literary canon would be altogether different.

What then makes some physicians such good storytellers? Their professional lives are spent in the midst of the sharp details that make up life: the premature labor pains in the middle of the night, the twisted knee in the middle of soccer season, the failing eyesight, the calcium deficiencies, the faulty hearts and kidneys, the successful hip replacement, the fatal cancers. “All the elements of a story are readily available to any doctor: plot, protagonist, antagonist, setting, dialogue, and theme. Physicians witness struggle—disease, death, and suffering—all the time. They have a rich pipeline of poignant images, unforgettable language, colorful characters, and vexing irony in any single day,” wrote Tony Miksanek in 2009 at the Literature Arts and Medicine Blog, published by the NYU School of Medicine.

But doctors don’t just encounter lots of good material (their patients). They also have to craft narratives (their patients’ stories) out of these observations in order to make accurate medical diagnoses. How long has a she had pain in her lower back? Where and when does it occur? Could it be a sign of cancer, grief, a pulled muscle, or simple fatigue? Is her insomnia another symptom of a larger problem or is it caused by the back pain? By piecing together physical observation with the patient’s stories, doctors must match them up to the patient’s history and medical case histories. Doctors make a narrative out of the missing pieces. The body, then, is a dramatic story, rife with telling details both specific and universal. What to include and what to leave out isn’t simply the craft of editing; it’s an ethical and informed decision-making process that can determine the future of the patient’s life. Storymaking, then, has grave consequences, particularly in the medical setting.

“A life story doesn’t just say what happened,” wrote Julie Beck in a recent article about the power of storytelling, “it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.” When that person is a patient, the narrative becomes the joint project of both her and her doctor. The accuracy of that narrative determines nothing less than how she lives or when she dies. The practice of discerning illness—of crafting the right narrative—and making accurate prognoses is an ethical act that must weigh the value of life. It must be grounded in a foundational understanding of what our responsibilities are to each other.

Medicine has always relied on storytelling as its greatest diagnostic tool. But last century, changes in medicine strained the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors looked for a source of moral authority to help navigate new technological developments and found old dogmas unhelpful. The field of ethics was having its own problems: traditional inquiries and infighting had bogged it down and threatened to make it irrelevant. At the same time, legacy religions had begun to lose their influence on politics, law, and society at large. Out of medicine’s crisis of conscience and ethicists lull into irrelevance came a new field of study, bioethics. The story of the rise of bioethics is in many ways the story of the triumph of narrative.

***

The 1960s and 70s were a period of unprecedented development in medicine. New technologies like respirators and defibrillators were changing how we died and putting families and doctors into situations no one had experienced before. Cases like that of Karen Ann Quinlan confounded doctors. She was a young woman whose car crash left her unconscious and severely brain-damaged. Only machines kept her heart and lungs working. After years of hoping for their daughter’s recovery, the Quinlans finally accepted her state and asked that their daughter’s machines be removed. This was new territory for the courts, which were asked to define life in the face of this new medical diagnosis. Both the Quinlans and the courts looked to Catholic teaching for ethical direction.

Citing Pope Pius XII, the judge ruled in 1976 that Quinlan’s tube could be removed. The decision favored her parents’ request, one that they deemed in keeping with their Catholic faith, but it was immediately condemned by various religious entities, including conservative bishops within the Church. Quinlan did not die until1985.

The Quinlan case was not the only one to cause medicine some serious ethical soul searching in the 1960s and 70s. Research experiments like the Tuskegee Syphilis study, where mostly poor, black sharecroppers were studied from 1942 until 1972 but not informed of their illness, outraged doctors and citizens alike. As well, the rights movements of that era required that doctors move away from the paternalistic practice of making decisions for patients, particularly women and minorities, without their being informed or giving consent.

The field of medicine was glaringly ill-equipped to wrestle with these ethical challenges. In the first half of the 20th century, ethical thought had stagnated, mired in two dead-end courses: “metaethics,” a sort of disciplinary naval-gazing; or controversial indecision, a disciplinary disagreement over how to discern right from wrong.

In 1982 ethicist Stephen Toulmin published a seminal article called “How Medicine Saved the Life of Ethics,” that described this stagnation. According to Toulmin, the discipline of ethics had two primary problems that were preventing it from any practical advancement. Ethics in the early to middle 1900s concerned itself with “questions of so-called metaethics,” how to classify issues and judgments as moral or not. Rather than “take sides on substantive ethical
questions,” ethicists chose to examine their field from within. Others in the field, who were applying ethical thought to worldly issues embraced strict dogmatic lines of practice. They “appealed either to a code of universal rules or to the authority of a religious system or teacher,” writes Toulmin. A group influenced by psychology and anthropology rejected this unwavering adherence to a strict set of rules and pointed, instead, to human diversity and the challenges of making universal judgments in a world so full of difference. They became known, pejoratively, as subjectivists or relativists. Toulmin writes that these two approaches to ethics—a focus on the principals of ethics, not its application; and an entrenched schism between those who abided a “universal and unconditional character of moral principles,” and those who did not—held the discipline of ethics at a standstill that threatened irrelevance.

A handful of ethicists, like Toulmin, who were willing to step outside their discipline’s entrenched arguments, took up the challenges medicine was facing. Bioethics—“the bastard child of philosophy and, truth be told, of theology as well,” according to bioethicist Arthur Caplan—took up medicine’s ethical challenges. Toulmin writes that this new application of ethics to medical cases allowed ethicists to work like physicians, “who have reflected deeply about the nature of clinical judgment in medicine.” He reminds us that, “in traditional case study morality, as in medical practice, the first indispensable step is to assemble a rich enough ‘case history.’” Or, we might say: with the help of the patient’s stories and medical history, create a narrative. “Until that has been done, the wise physician will suspend judgment. If he is too quick to let theoretical considerations influence his clinical analysis, they may prejudice the collection of a full and accurate case record and so distract him from what later turn out to have been crucial clues.”

Bioethics “was a field whose timing was impeccable—new problems and challenges emerged one after another in rapid succession fueled by technological advances creating a demand for somebody, anybody, to provide thoughtful input into their management,” Arthur Caplan wrote in “Done Good,” an article for the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2014. Ethicists put the stagnancy of their field behind them and confronted new ethical challenges by focusing on the needs of a medical field in flux. Bioethicists asked that long-standing theoretical, theological, and philosophical principles be weighed alongside the context of a patient’s life and case; the needs of the patient, their family and their community were considered. Personal stories and medical narratives were again as important in decision-making as traditional medical principles. “The practical decisions in ethics can never be made by appeal to ‘self-evident principles’ alone and rest rather on a clinical appreciation of the significant details characteristic of particular cases,” Toulmin wrote.

Toulmin’s claim that “medicine saved the life of ethics” has been resoundingly praised since its appearance in 1982. But it is not without detractors who find his analysis a little too simplistic. Others charge that Toulmin’s pronouncement came far too soon to be definitive. Bioethics has grown from a few academic centers in the US, like the Hastings Institute and the Kennedy Center, to become an essential force in law, medical practice, research and policy making in only a few short decades. But it is still a shifting and pulsing discipline.

Reading Toulmin, I was tempted to reverse the fields in his article’s title to ask the question, Can ethics save the life of medicine? There can be no doubt that medicine needs saving. Increasingly impersonal and troubled with ethical blind spots, medical practice today attends individual needs less than it rushes patients through a diagnostic gauntlet. Futile care, the overtreatment of patients regardless of their predicted longevity or quality of life, is crippling the humane and financial aspects of the field. The rush of daily appointments leaves little time for conversation with patients. Discussions about quality of life (or plans for death) are seldom had and physicians often aren’t trained for them. Profit-driven motives have skewed doctors’ accurate collection and analysis of patients’ case histories. As a result, doctors face crippling challenges when diagnosing patients they don’t know—in windows of fifteen minutes at a time. How do you construct a patient narrative out of nothing? And what has the field of medicine done to reach those who can’t afford health care or preventative medicine? Danielle Ofri has written, “I can’t tell you exactly when it happened, but sometime in the past two decades, the practice of medicine was insidiously morphed into the delivery of health care.” The difference between “practice of medicine” and “delivery of health care” is nothing short of a crisis in patient health.

It turns out that my query—Can ethics save the life of medicine? — is not original. In a videotaped memorial at the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center that honored the work of Toulmin, who died in 2009, a former colleague of Toulmin’s asked, “Did Ethics Really Save the Life of Medicine?” The jury, he admitted, is still very much out. And yet, there is a chance that re-centering medical practice around patient narratives could reverse medicine’s current impersonal course. New developments in medical practice and instruction hint that such a change may be taking place. Movements inside and outside the discipline of medicine have refocused on the doctor-patient relationship by encouraging longer appointment times and more attention to patient narratives. “Slow medicine,” like slow food, has caught on as a way to humanize patients, to allow their stories to better direct doctors toward good decision-making.

Rita Charon founded one of the first Narrative Medicine program in the country at Columbia University in 2000 (the masters program was established in 2009). The Columbia program overview reads, “The care of the sick unfolds in stories. The effective practice of healthcare requires the ability to recognize, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence is a model for humane and effective medical practice.” There are now a growing number of narrative medicine programs across the country that draw on various disciplines and aim to return patient narratives to the center of medical practice.

Because Narrative Medicine focuses on the doctor-patient relationship, it can often neglect iniquities in the broader medical system. It doesn’t address problematic structural conditions, like the pressures of profit, the inadequate number of practicing doctors, the number of patients doctors see in a given day, and the great number of citizens who never have the benefit of prevention or care. Nonetheless, it’s a hopeful new area of study and one that enhances medical education in crucial ways.

While the slow and narrative medicine movements are most likely a reaction to medicine’s current speed and hyper-clinicalized nature, not the rise of bioethics, they emphasize the role of patients’ quality of life and narrative. What bioethics, as it’s developed over the past few decades, has shown is that it has the breadth and influence to go beyond the doctor-patient relationship to address larger systemic plagues within the medical field, like access to health care, the use of experimental medications, and the equitable distribution of scarce resources, treatments, and drugs. With the ear of public policy makers, media at large, and medical schools, bioethicists have placed themselves in a position to tackle the gross disparities and injustices that characterize the contemporary health care narrative.

***

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives,” wrote Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker in 2012. Sacks, perhaps the greatest physician writer of our era, who has recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer, was opening an article about the use of mind-altering drugs (and so much more), but his point that we need to step back in order to see the patterns in our lives has very much to do with creating our own narratives, whether through conversation, storytelling (storymaking!) or reflection.

This is what is so exciting about the public’s consumption of the work of physician writers, whether it be essays by doctors like Sacks, fiction by bioethicists like Jacob Appel, or general media articles by bioethicists like Arthur Caplan. “Bioethics gained social legitimacy by not following the British analytical philosophy tradition into the ivory tower, but, rather, the Socratic tradition of engaging the public in the ‘marketplace,’” Caplan wrote in “Done Good.” After the early decades of the 20th century, when ethics and the practice of medicine institutionalized themselves, dogmatically pulling away from public discourse, medicine’s advancements and changing landscape have dragged it back. Atul Gawande, Oliver Sacks, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and other writers from the medical profession are regulars on bestseller lists, engaging millions of readers with writing that tackles the larger ethical issues we face today—and from every philosophical, theological and ethical angle. The future of patient care can only benefit.

***

Past “The Patient Body” columns:

Impossible Purity

In the Blood

Pathological Sex

Choosing Childlessness

Old Man in Winter

Oh Canada!

End-of-Life Books, 2014

The Great Organ Shortage

Tending to One Another

Moral Highs and Lows

Old Philosophical Certainties

On Suicide

Reading HuffPo’s “Hospice, Inc.”

The End of Eating

Wakeful Unawareness

Faith, a Chronic Condition

A Special Sustaining Power

Your Ethical and Religious Directives

Hospitals and the Pretense of Charity

A Closely Held Business

What’s a Kidney Worth

An Irresistible Force

***

Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann‘s book, The Good Death, will be published by Beacon Press in February 2016.

The post How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine appeared first on The Revealer.

The month of Ramadan has come and gone in Egypt, and with it the annual feast of post-Iftar (fast-breaking) television serials. This year’s audience favorites included “Taht al-Saytara” (“Under the Influence”), a family drama about heroin addiction and recovery with a talented cast, high production values, and upper-class settings. Based on meticulous research and hours of interviews with users in recovery, the series realistically depicted the anguish and insanity of drug abuse but also ended with hopeful and heart-tugging scenes of family reconciliation, forgiveness, and the possibility of recovery.

In the international English-language press, the Egyptian serial that garnered the most attention this Ramadan season was “Haret al-Yahud” (“The Jewish Quarter”), a melodramatic Muslim-Jewish love story set around the time of the founding of the state of Israel.  Starring the talented and beloved Menna Shalabi, “Haret al-Yahud” was distinguished by its representation of the majority of Egypt’s mid-century Jewish community as patriotic Egyptians, rooted in their local neighborhoods and devoted to Egypt, rather than anti-Arab, Israel-loving Zionists. But the series also provided endlessly entertaining opportunities for viewers and social media lovers to ridicule its historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, as astutely described by Mohamed El Dahshan in a recent piece for The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy’s website, “The Jewish Quarter: A Missed Opportunity”. As El Dahshan also rightfully points out, the series omits entirely the state’s role in expelling its Jewish community, glorifies the Egyptian military as savior of the nation, and frames the Muslim Brotherhood as the primary source of national dissension and disunity.

For readers familiar with Walter Armbrust and Lila Abu-Lughod’s scholarship on Egypt’s long history of Ramadan television serial production, the themes and aesthetic features of “Taht al-Saytara” and “Haret al-Yahud” will strike a chord of recognition: love stories and family dramas; dangers posed by drug abuse and other social ills to family and youth; vilification of Islamists; the problem of sectarian tensions and the preservation of national unity; melodramatic dialogue and scenarios that elicit empathy and strong emotions; and clothes and sets that project an image of Egypt as clean and comfortable and modern.

But this Ramadan season I found myself drawn to another series, “Al-Ahd” (“The Covenant”), which belongs to a very different universe of tropes and aesthetics. According to its screenwriter, Mohammed Amin Radi, whom I spoke to in Cairo this summer, “Al-Ahd” is Egypt’s first fantasy television drama. Directed by Khaled Maraie, it is the pair’s third collaboration, following their much talked-about serials “Niran Sadiqa” (“Friendly Fire,” 2013) and “El-Saba’ Wasaya” (“The Seven Commandments,” 2014). As a team, Radi and Maraie have gained a reputation for creating Ramadan serials that chart new territory, and “Al-Ahd” was received with curiosity and some confusion by audiences and critics.

Set in a time and place that is mythical but that clearly invokes the landscape and dress of the Upper Egyptian countryside, “Al-Ahd” is a drama about the ruthless struggle for power between and within the ruling families that seek to control three territories: Kafr al-Niswan, Kafr Natat al-Hayt, and Kafr al-Qal’a. Thus, like many Egyptian serials, it is also a family drama, but in a skewed and perverse way. In the opening scene, a woman, Gumar, and her lover, Khalil, poison a man that we later learn is her husband and his brother. A small child, Mehib, the son and heir of the murdered man — the head of the Al-Diyaba family and the ruler of Kafr al-Qal’a — witnesses the crime and flees the scene; he will later acquire the power to kill with the mere touch of his hand and return to take his revenge on his mother and uncle. In the second episode, we witness the character Segag kill her mother with her own hands and preside over the slaughter of her brothers in her bid for power in Kafr Natat al-Hayt. And in the third episode, we watch as the beautiful Raya performs a dance for the ruler of Kafr al-Niswan that ends with her stabbing him in the heart and taking his throne for her own.

As the series progresses, plot details dizzyingly multiply, bodies pile up, and alliances are made and unmade without scruple. Men and women are equally power-hungry and strategic. Through a series of flashbacks and reminisces and prophetic visions of the future, we learn that the events depicted in the serial are but one more episode in a long struggle between these clans and their family members….there is no beginning and no end. As we are introduced to more and more characters, and as we learn more and more about them, we learn that each of them, even the most nefarious amongst them, has been wronged in some way; each of them seeks to right that wrong, to avenge their honor and their dead, and to gain or return to power in order to restore their dignity and their rightful place in their families and in the order of things. And in turn, characters that we thought of as righteous at the beginning of the series are later revealed to have played a hand in the injustice suffered by those who now do wrong in the name of restoring their rights. Here, love of power and a willingness to attain it by any means, as well as the abuse of power once attained, mingle easily with talk of lost dignity and restoring rights and avenging the dead.

The title, “Al-Ahd,” refers to an obscure parchment that purportedly contains within it a record of the ancient laws and customs of the land, as well as prophecies for the ages to come. We learn nothing about the circumstances of the revelation of this covenant, and, in-keeping with Montaigne’s idea of the mystical foundation of the authority of laws, this manuscript exerts a strange power. Although nobody seems to have read it or seen it, the people of the land believe it to be in the physical possession of the rulers, and they are waiting for one of its prophecies to be fulfilled – the arrival of a young woman, from the prominent Al-Diyaba clan, who will restore justice to the political and social order. When the guardian of the manuscript, Estamanoha, flees with it after Gumar and Khalil’s coup in Kafr al-Qal’a, this precipitates a crisis of political legitimacy. The new rulers and their allies are no longer in the possession of the parchment, and so they decide to write a new one. By the end of the series, numerous copies of the covenant are in circulation, and multiple characters claim to be in the possession of the real one. Likewise, several women have claimed to have been the fulfillment of the prophecy. In the final scenes of the series, we see characters racked with doubts — is there an authentic copy of the covenant? What does it really say? Is there truly a woman who will appear to fulfill the prophecy? And in a final cruel twist in the last episode, the satanic character Ubay visits the spirit of the now-deceased Estamanoha and reveals to her that it was actually he who wrote the covenant in order to illude the clan of Al-Diyaba and turn its members against one another.

As with the covenant, so the serial does with almost every other sacred value or principle meant to safeguard justice and rights and humane social interactions. Blood ties, family bonds of love and affection, and romantic love: these are turned into instruments of strategy and manipulation and readily discarded for the sake of political gain. Children turn against their parents and parents against their children, and characters fake tender emotions in order to manipulate or keep up appearances. Religion is a tool of the powerful, and customs and conventions fail to protect the vulnerable. “The people” can also be used as a means to acquire power, and then they recede once again into the background. Kind-hearted characters, including the beautiful Sahar, who has the power to heal with her hands, become pawns in the games of the powerful, and her miraculous gift is used as a means to bestow legitimacy on unjust rulers and keep the people oppressed. After she decides to sacrifice herself for love at the end of the series to cure her beloved Mehib, he leaves her on her deathbed to confront the ruthless al-Dawi, who immediately kills him; her romantic sacrifice has meant nothing, and both she and Mehib die without defeating their enemies.

Thus “Al-Ahd” is far from the world of conventional nationalist melodramas or series about social ills afflicting the youth. As entertaining television, “Al-Ahd” has it all: characters with superpowers, miracles and black magic, bastards and babies switched at birth, treason and betrayals and a high body count, irreverent ghosts that refuse to exit the world of human affairs, flirtatious song-and-dance numbers, and a gorgeous, star-studded ensemble cast with some of the Arab world’s most beloved actors (including Ghada Adel, Asser Yassin, Arwa Gouda, Ayten Amer, Kenda Alloush, Hana Shiha, Seba Mubarak, Sherin Reda, Salwa Khattab, and Ahmed Magdy). It is also replete with references and allusions to Egyptian folklore, Qur’anic stories, and contemporary political events (including the atrocities of ISIS). Many critics and viewers noted its similarities to “Game of Thrones,” a comparison which the screenwriter Amin Radi attributed in various interviews to the generic nature of fantasy as a fictional form. Setting aside the question of imitation or adaptation, the obvious similarity between the shows suggests that we live in a moment in which Machiavellian and mythological representations of the struggle for power convey something honest about the precarity of our time while also titillating us, in a way that we love.

There is one set of characters in “Al-Ahd” that I have not yet mentioned and that serve as foils to the ruthless power struggles of the great families. These are the ‘awalim – funny, joyful, irreverent-mouthed singers and dancers, and their poet-ally ‘Alaa, who remain humane and loving and who strive for truth and the good, even when they are persecuted and martyred for it. They are entertainers, but they alone bring to light the hypocrisy of the powerful. And this is so not only because they sometimes raise their voices against them, but because the way they live stands in vivid contrast to the narrowness and inhumanity of lives lived in the pursuit of revenge and power.

When I spoke to Amin Radi this summer, I asked him about these characters, and he told me that for his generation that came of age in the 2000s, there are no ideologies and no heroes left. Arab nationalism, Nasserist socialism, Islamism, popular uprising and revolution: none of them have any credibility any more, and nor do the intellectuals or political activists who championed them. So what is it that remains for us? A collective turath (heritage) of language, proverbs, folkloric characters, religious texts, films, songs, and images that is deep-rooted and often unconscious. This is what the artists and singers and poets and entertainers do: they take this heritage that is our collective memory, and they use it to find their own way in the world. They mess with it and play with it and rework it, and out of this they make something that feels both universal and perennial yet uniquely of their own place and time. This is what “Al-Ahd” strives to do. And curious and delighted viewers, including this one, can look forward to the continuation of this experiment when the second part of the “Al-Ahd” series appears in Ramadan of 2017.

The post Al-Ahd: A Different Kind of Ramadan Serial appeared first on The Revealer.

“Put the glasses on! Put em’ on! […] You dirty motherfucker!”

— “Rowdy” Roddy Piper (1954-2015)

The Senate first occupied its magnificent Caucus Room in 1909. Not long after, a number of well-positioned Americans lost their lives on an unfortunate White Star Line ship and a Senate subcommittee was convened.

Their Caucus Room was large, but the Senators hadn’t counted on the public filling it past capacity, and the reporters outnumbering the public two-to-one. In a huff, these statesmen repaired to another room to discuss their iceberg. Hopefully “there will be no hippodroming,” gruffed the committee’s chairman William Alden Smith, a Republican of Michigan.

But the press kept coming around.

In ’47, they swarmed in like flies when a maniac preacher of airplanes named Howard Hughes appeared to defend himself from charges of extreme waste in wartime.

In 1953 and 1954, another Republican – this one from Wisconsin – held a series of infamous hearings in the Caucus Room. He met with actors, and writers, and finally, soldiers.

John F. Kennedy announced his campaign there in 1960.

So did Bobby, in 1968.

It was in the Caucus Room, in 1974, that Nixon’s mechanics went beneath the knife.

In 1979, it was full of Moonies.

“A couple of old ghosts haunted Room 318 of the Russell Senate Office Building,” began a United Press International (U.P.I.) report filed that year. “The big ornate chamber with its green felt table” was burdened by its own history, it continued. Civil libertarians and the Unification Church of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon called it a “witch hunt,” a return to 1953.

Moon, and his “Moonie” followers, were scandalized because, on this particular occasion, the caucus room was occupied by a small group of senators interested in exploring the growing panic around “cults” in the United States – the Unification Church included. Things were getting strange, back then. Young people were dropping out of the real world and leaving their families. They’d been “brainwashed,” said the press and a growing choir of ex-members. Maybe it was time for government to get involved.

Or not. The senators found themselves facing more than a roomful of Moonies that day. Prominent members of America’s “legitimate” faiths arrived to testify, arguing essentially on behalf of the “cults.” This left the senators (including Bob Dole, the human Charlie Brown) flummoxed. Members of older, “legitimate,” religions such as Reform Judaism and the N.R.A. can be counted as more than mere individuals. In the eyes of a senator, they speak for blocs of registered voters and are, thus, accorded the respect due to any successful predator.

The U.P.I. reporter summarizes the testimony of these “orthodox religious leaders” quite vividly. They “asked […]who is to say what kind of sudden ‘life changing experience’ is truly religious[?]’” Cults, according to the popular narrative, lacked legitimacy because their members were coerced into converting. But where did coercion stop and free will begin? The matter was outside of a senator’s purview, the holy men argued. In support, “they recalled Paul on the road to Damascus and Charles Colson, the ex-White House hatchetman who found Jesus in the midst of Watergate.” The Moonies cheered.

It was more argument than Dole and his fellow statesmen had expected. They explained that the meeting was meant only as a preliminary of a preliminary — an “informal session” for the discussion of a panel’s “right […] to conduct an inquiry into religion.” It was a meeting to assess the feasibility and logistics of setting a preliminary meeting to propose a witch hunt, in other words, rather than a witch hunt itself.

“Like the early Christians, our faith has given us the strength to withstand public ridicule,” Neil Salonen, then the President of Unification Church in America, told the U.P.I.

Like the early Christians, they caught some lucky breaks too.

***

Not far from the Russell Office Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, stands another historic structure. Charles “Chuck” Colson (the inhuman Charlie Brown) found an office there in 1969, when he became Special Council to Richard Milhous Nixon, the president of the United States. Nixon, unique within the political class, bore no derivative relationship to Charlie Brown. The cartoon took after him, not vice-versa.

Colson was a thick-featured man marked by a smug certainty of expression. “If I was as useful to the President as he said I was, it was because I was willing at times to blink at certain ethical standards, to be ruthless at getting things done,” he wrote in his 1976 memoir Born Again. In 1971, a Wall Street Journal profile of Colson (“NIXON HATCHET MAN”) quoted an anonymous senatorial staffer who said “Colson would walk over his own grandmother if her had to.”

In the fifth chapter of Born Again, Colson reflects on the quote, fairly certain that its source was kidding. Then, without missing a beat, he describes his response to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. Like Colson, Ellsberg was a former marine – but to Colson “Ellsberg himself was only a name, a symbol for the villainous forces working to undermine our goals for peace in the world.” Colson smeared him in the press, leaking snippets of Ellsberg’s F.B.I. dossier. He convened a congressional investigation. Then, at Nixon’s urging, he brought in a former CIA man – E. Howard Hunt. From there, it was all down hill – ethically speaking. The President began to think of himself and his inner circle as a divine minority: an elevated class, alone against the world.

“Our fortress mentality plunged us across the moral divide,” wrote Colson.

***

The Pentagon papers leaked in 1971. A few years later, at the Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, a thick-featured man marked by a smug certainty of expression, Prisoner 23226, stewed nervously in his cell. He’d been busted – he knew it. Now it was only a question of mitigating the damage.

It got cold in Alabama. The winter had hit the camp like a cold gavel, and all the prison system had provided for the inmates were threadbare field jackets. They had some warmer stuff, green coats meant for officers, but prison regulations required that inmates dress in brown. The field jackets were ripped to shreds, but they were the right color. It was their form that counted, not their function.

This gave 23226 an idea. He started a small conspiracy, smuggling brown dye into the prison and applying it to the officers’ vestments. But it had gone wrong, somehow – one of the conspirators had been busted, his dye confiscated. Or so 23226 thought, for a few panicked hours. In the end, it turned out that Alabama prison guards didn’t give a shit about brown fabric dye. 23226’s friend had been searched for narcotics – and nothing more.

“It was a lesson learned,” 23226 later recalled. “How easy it is to backslide, to succumb unknowingly to temptations of the moment.” In perpetuating the dye scheme, he continued, “I was concerned only with helping other men – or so I thought – but in part it was the old Colson.”

By this phase of his incarceration, Chuck Colson had found God. “Chuck will get it done was the phrase I so loved to hear in the White House,” he remembered ruefully. There were more important things, he realized – like obedience. The prison’s law for brown clothing was worthy of respect, he now realized.

In 1975, soon after his release, Colson met with Norman Carlson, the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Colson asked to bring some inmates out of prison so that they might be discipled “as I had been discipled.” Carlson responded by asking a question of his own. He’d been in a prison service, Carlson said, where one of the inmates prayed for him and his family. It made no sense. “I’m the one keeping him in prison,” said the administrator.

“That man is a Christian, and we’re taught to pray for those in authority,” Colson explained. “That man prayed for you because he loves you.”

“Strange are the workings of a prison,” he wrote, in Born Again.

***

It was Easter, 1936, when the risen Christ appeared to the reverend Sun Myung Moon. For nine years after his first revelation, the Reverend was in communication with other religious luminaries, including Moses and the Buddha. In 1946, he was called by God to Pyeong-yang, North Korea, where the communists, freshly Godless, despised him. Moon was arrested and beaten. In October, 1950, United Nations forces freed him from a labor camp and returned him to South Korea. In 1954, while the Caucus room was struggling to contain the meltdown of that famous Wisconsin Republican, Moon’s first Unification Church began operation in Seoul.

Moon’s theology was not radical by the standards of new religious movements in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his Divine Principle, the Reverend’s sacred writing, the world is described as fallen and corrupt. God had meant human beings for a life of divine regimentation – but Lucifer had seduced Eve and she had seduced Adam. The order had gone screwy, and even though the heroes of the Bible had tried to put the world back on track, it had never worked out for long. For taking the trouble, Christ was crucified. Moon, born sinless, was the next in line.

For the reverend, a divinely sanctioned family was one of the three essential blessings of human beings. Hence the mass weddings (or “blessings”) that would win the reverend and his Moonies so much unwanted fame.

To Moonies, life in the Unification Church is a kind of return to the divinely sanctioned order for which human life was originally designed. Bound tight by their “brothers and sisters” in the Church, and led by the “parents” of its leaders, Moonies locate themselves within a divine family where expectations, goals and proper behaviors are clear. To them, this meant freedom – but to others, it seemed the opposite. It didn’t help that the Church, like the American prison system, was immensely profitable.

By 1977, the reporter David Goldberg, of the San Bernardino County Sun, could say that “few sects have received more attention or evoked deeper hostility” in the United States than the Unification Church. “If [their] recruiters haven’t turned every kid on the block into a Moonie, they’ve turned a large contingent into street vendors of candy and flowers and put others to work in church-affiliated businesses.”

In San Francisco, he reported, the church operated a cleaning service called “International Exchange Maintenance,” whose “contracts include one with the federal government to clean rugs” of outfits similar to the Senate’s Russell building but with considerably less class. Their routes stretched from Monterrey to the Sacramento branch office of the F.B.I.

Moon’s followers “pulled in “$24 million in profits last year,” wrote Goldberg. They were a cult, as far as we was concerned. All that money had been made on the backs of kids who had no idea what they’d gotten mixed up in.

The Unification Church has often been accused of “brainwashing” by grief-stricken parents who felt they had “lost” their children to the movement, accusations that echoed loud and long across the great American dailies. Shady “deprogrammers” lurked at the fringes of the cult scene, rough-and-tumble contractors paid to abduct church members at the behest of their alienated families. If the Moonies and other cult members had been forced into their new lives, it was only right that they be forced out of them.

On July 22^nd, 1979, the Bloomington, Illinois Pantagraph published a story under the byline of Jan Dennis: “Cults ‘major threat’ says former ‘Moonie.’”

In the story, Dennis interviews a man named Chris Carlson – a former Moonie nine years out of high school who had been recently retrieved by a deprogrammer. According to Dennis:

“Carlson’s rescue from the cult came about 7 p.m. one day last November while he was playing baseball with another ‘Moonie’ behind their apartment. He said a car containing his mother and three men pulled up into the parking lot and the men got out and grabbed him. His friend swung the baseball bat at the men, but was restrained.”

“The first phase of brainwashing, which begins immediately […], involves ‘love bombing;’ Carlson told the journalist. At days-long workshops, Moonies bombarded their potential recruits with such fine and effusive praise that it became difficult to disagree with them. As the Moonies expanded on their theology, Carlson felt the bombardment increase. This time, it was a deluge of new concepts – delivered too quickly for reflection.

“Recruits are given about an hour of ‘think time’ a day, not enough to decipher the contradictions [in Unification preaching],” the ex-Moonie reported. In a motel room, Carlson and his mother’s goons had a frank discussion about the virtues of his newfound faith. Three days later, he had returned to the mainstream. “The change was so distinct,” he said to the reporter. “On the third day I had my first thought […] and it felt really good because it was the first real thought I’d had and could admit to in 1½ years.” He’d been saved – liberated – born again.

Chuck Colson would be proud.

***

England had its own variation on the Moonie scare, and it was through it that Eileen Barker first became aware of the movement. Barker, a whip-smart woman with a slyness at the corners of her mouth, published her scholarly masterpiece The Making of a Moonie in 1984, after years spent carefully observing the Church. In it, she interrogates the concept of conversion with the Unification Church serving as an intricate and eccentric example of a social phenomenon widespread in both “religion” and elsewhere.

In finding the behaviors of the majority repeated in a reviled minority group, Barker opened herself to criticism. England’s Unification Church, in the middle ‘70s, was “accused of all manner of nefarious beliefs and practices, most of which they considered to be the raving fabrications of a ‘Fallen’ media,’” she wrote. In response, they’d taken to wearing the worst Moonie rumors on their sleeves. Some could be seen “wearing large buttons declaring, ‘I am a Moonie and I love it,” or sporting T-shirts with the legend ‘BRAINWASHED ZOMBIE,” Barker continued.

“It was not, in fact, I who initially sought out the Unification Church,” she explained, in the opening pages of Making. Instead it was “they who, in a number of ways, sought out me.”

In 1974, Barker received an entrance to a seemingly prestigious event, the Third International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences. “A colleague, who had also been invited, subsequently noticed the name of the founder of the [organization behind the conference] was Sun Myung Moon,” she wrote. “We both had a vague recollection of having read something not quite nice about him.”

From there, Barker began to research Moon and his followers. “A visit to a newspaper-cuttings library revealed the information that Moon was a Korean millionaire who led a ‘bizarre religious sect’ and way thought by his disciples to be the Messiah.” The news unnerved her family, but it didn’t deter Eileen. “I was a sociologist of religion,” she wrote. “Nothing could have stopped me from going.”

Barker knew, of course, that breaking bread with the Moonies meant breaking both popular and scholarly taboo. To give a “cult” the consideration and legitimacy of serious (and to a degree, sympathetic) study is, perhaps, a lapse on par with sneaking brown dye into an Alabama prison camp. In Moonie and its succeeding publications, however, Barker expressed no remorse.

The lesson in all this being, I suppose, that few are blessed with the moral fortitude of a Watergate conspirator.

***

The Making of a Moonie begins with one question: “Why should – how could – anyone become a Moonie,” given the social, cultural and economic disincentives for doing so? Barker provides a number of interconnected solutions for this conundrum. None confirmed the ravings of deprogrammers. The Moonies, she learned, were largely genuine – their behaviors were not coldly calculated to stifle thought or snuff out free will. Instead, they were the logical expressions of the idiosyncratic reality proposed by Moon. Those who found themselves giving up their agency to the movement, Barker argued, were predisposed to do so – and, to the extent that such things can be quantified, such exchanges were freely performed.

Accusations that potential recruits were manipulated by lack of sleep and poor diet were bunk, she said. “The cuisine at Unification workshops is not exactly cordon bleu, but it is no worse than that in most college residences.” According to Barker’s observations, Moonies were allowed to come and go from Church functions on their own volition. A detail which rendered the achievements of the “deprogrammers” something more akin to kidnapping than heroic liberation.

In addition, Barker revealed that the actual number of Moonies present in any given region was almost always far lower than either the pride of the Church or the paranoia of its opponents dared admit. In a 2011 paper for the journal Methodological Innovations, she recalled that during one particularly histrionic swing of the controversy “there were less than one hundred and fifty [Moonies] in the country,” a fact she was careless enough to say out loud on talk radio, only to be shouted down by an angry public. People were certain there were more Moonies than that – hadn’t Barker seen them, milling about at busy intersections?

The Unification Church’s “brainwashing techniques,” were supposed to be hyper-effective – something like the foolproof hypnotism from The Manchurian Candidate. But Barker’s study found that 90% of those who attended Unification Church workshops were able to resist the pitch. “Furthermore, of those that did join, the majority left of their own accord within two years,” she continued. Far from being an all-or-nothing, life-destroying commitment, a stint in the Unification Church was most likely to be a few years diversion for a certain breed of man.

Barker’s surveys revealed that the typical English Moonies at the close of the 1970s were “predominately male,” with members generally falling “between the ages of 18 and 28.” They were middle class and for the most part, reasonable. “I must have spoken to about a thousand Moonies, but none has ever claimed, or appeared to have, a different view of empirical reality from that of the rest of the population,” she wrote. What differed was their religious system – the values and meanings they applied to empirical reality. And variance in that, Barker figured, was something society could afford to tolerate.

“If one comes from the advantaged middle classes, one can afford the luxury of denying oneself luxuries while following idealistic pursuits,” she mused, in the conclusion of Making. For a certain kind of person with a certain kind of exhaustion, life in the Unification Church seemed a viable alternative to the nightmare of life outside it.

“In caricature, the potential recruit can see the non-Unification world as a divisive, turbulent, chaotic society, characterized by racial intolerance, injustice, cut-throat competition and lack of direction,” she wrote. “A society which seems to be out of control and headed for imminent disaster.” If this potential recruit sees coercion anywhere, Barker continued, it is in the “fallen world” beyond the community of Reverend Moon:

“[The recruit] can see an amoral (possibly amoral) society which no longer recognizes absolute values and standards; everything is relative to the utilitarian interests and desires of a pleasure-seeking, money-grubbing, power-hungry population; the pathetic eyes of skeletal children stare accusingly out of Oxfam posters – which are placed, with Kafkaesque humor beside glossy advertisements for color television sets, luxurious automobiles and exotic wines.”

Where “conventional society” offers secular detachment, Unification offers religious imminence. Where “conventional society” offers a decayed and “unhappy” family, Unification offers a model of reality with family at its core. “In theory,” Barker continued, middle class “young people find themselves in a society of opportunity […] The world is their oyster. But in practice only a few can prise open the oyster and find anything of value inside.”

For some, being made into a Moonie makes sense.

            For stating this in print, Barker has been accused of being a Moonie herself – or at least an “apologist,” a victim of brain-rinse rather than a full wash.

“There are methodological risks inherent in living with a religious community,” she wrote, in 2011. “One of these is ‘going native’” Gradually, she said, one may become accustomed to even the most wildest excesses of society and ritual. “It is […] easy enough not to notice what was is learning,” Barker continued. For this reason, she recommended keeping a careful diary – a record not just of observations, but of experiences. “It is through recognizing one’s changing perception of what is unusual and what is normal that one can hope to communicate the different perceptions to others,” she concluded.

The boundaries of reality are always shifting. A scholar’s current location must be carefully tracked, lest they lose themselves in the chaos.

Barker, however, never worried about becoming a Moonie herself. “I have always found the [Unification] movement eminently resistible,” she wrote, in Making. “But this is a personal response, and it does not follow that I might not feel that I can understand how others could find themselves wanting to join.”

There are a lot of people – partisans of conventional society – who don’t buy that last point. To them, “cults” like the Moonies are so socially destructive that they must be shut out, shouted down and blown apart. If you aren’t accusing the cults, the logic goes, you must be excusing them.

And that’s an order of magnitude worse than smuggling die.

***

Our present venue leaves much to be desired. Has that video finished loading in the next tab?

There’s probably something new for you on Facebook.

How much “thinking time” are you allowed per day?

***

The workings of a prison are, indeed, strange. Not all of them have concrete walls and guarded walls and dour dress codes. Don’t ask Chuck Colson about it – just watch how he behaves.

There are prisons of faith, of patriotism, of love. You can lock yourself in anywhere – even in a rich, finely furnished caucus room buried in the guts and finery of a Beaux-Arts office building. It was there, in 1974, that Prisoner 23226 set himself on the path to Christ and the Maxwell Federal Camp.

Around that time, not far away, a crowd of 610 Unification Church members assembled on the steps of the United States Capitol. They fasted and keep vigil, pledging their support to an embattled God.

“I am praying for Richard M. Nixon,” read the signs they held.

“I am praying for Mrs. Richard M. Nixon.”

Moon never forgot those commies kicking the shit out of him, in Pyeong-yang. He thought Richard Nixon was one of the best commie hunters around.

They fought dirty. So did he.

***

This is the final installment of The Last Twentieth Century Book Club. The rest can be found here:

The Second to Last Twentieth Century Book Club

Our Glorious Brothers

Jazz Goes to Church

Area 51: The Alien Interview

Hell on Earth

Helps for the Scrupulous

Religion in H.P. Lovecraft

Orson Welles’ The Life of Christ

Dark Dungeons (Dungeons & Dragons, Part II)

Deities and Demigods (Dungeons & Dragons, Part 1)

Sulamith Ish-Kishor

Salem Kirban, Part 2

Guide to Survival (Salem Kirban, Part 1)

Monster in My Pocket

The Power of Source 

Carman, Part 2

Carman

Speak Out!

Fear of Death Removed

Good Ol’ Job

***

Don Jolly looks human but isn’t. His work has appeared on Boing Boing, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The Ampersand Review.

The post The Making of a Moonie appeared first on The Revealer.

To wish one were reading a novel rather than an academic monograph is an all-too-frequent desire; it is a much more peculiar experience to wish for a novel to turn into a monograph instead. Julia Kristeva’s sprawling, 600-page novel, Teresa, My Love, an “imagined life” of the 16^th century mystic of Avila, Spain, first published in French in 2008 and recently translated into English by Lorna Scott Fox, presents a rare example of the latter. Throughout the book, a thinly veiled alter-ego of Kristeva herself—a psychoanalyst named Sylvia Leclerq, an atheist and author of a book on Marguerite Duras—becomes obsessed with Teresa’s inner and outer lives.

A literary critic, a linguist, a philosopher, and a psychoanalyst, Kristeva is better known for her theoretical work than for her fiction, although she has written a number of novels. Born in Bulgaria, she emigrated to France in 1966 and became an active member of the group that
published the influential avant-garde magazine Tel Quel. Often identified in American academic circles as one of the so-called “French feminists” alongside Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, Kristeva’s work has often eluded neat categorization; she moves deftly from theoretical musings to clinical case material to literary analysis. But while heedless of conventional generic boundaries, her work, ranging from the early Revolution in Poetic Language to the trilogy of the 1980s, Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun, to her more recent trilogy on “female genius” (which includes volumes on Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette), has always been preoccupied with the role of bodily drives within language. Kristeva’s oeuvre has also been marked by a fascinated ambivalence about religion, and particularly Christianity.

Kristeva’s fictional Sylvia shares these fascinations. In Teresa, My Love, Sylvia serves less as a character than as a device, a way for Kristeva to bring Teresa into today’s world and put her on the analytic couch. The novel is a multi-pronged attempt to do so, undertaken in a mélange of genres, and it creates a thoroughly disorienting experience for the reader. There are close readings of Teresa’s writing; a narration of Sylvia’s pilgrimage to key sites from Teresa’s life; snippets of Sylvia in Paris with her patients; e-mail correspondence between Sylvia and a Cervantes scholar about “Teresa and Miguel”; highly technical psychoanalytic explorations of the “beaten father” of Christianity itself by way of a detour through Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten”; a four-act play set at Teresa’s deathbed with surprise cameos by Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Voice of His Majesty the Lord; and finally a letter from Sylvia to Diderot, all interspersed with historical, biographical, and psychobiographical material, frequently written in the second person and addressed to Teresa herself, although it is Teresa’s own life that is being thus narrated.

The “Teresa, my love” of the title is Sylvia’s continual, incantatory refrain. It is a refrain she adopts as she takes Teresa in as a “roommate” who increasingly takes up all of Sylvia’s own psychic space. She sounds Teresa’s depths in contrast to what she takes to be the shallowness of modern culture, for which the contemporary French literary scene functions as a convenient synecdoche. In so doing, Sylvia allows Kristeva to advance several theses, some explicit, some less so, some controversial, some less so.

First, there is an argument about Teresa herself as a sort of precursor to Freud or to psychoanalysis itself, and particularly as a metapsychologist of no mean powers. In properly Freudian fashion, Sylvia is ambivalent about this argument, which is alternately advanced and disavowed throughout the book. “Teresa expresses herself like an analyst, or at least that is how I translate her,” writes Sylvia. A clinician like Kristeva herself, Sylvia compliments Teresa’s ability to write about herself “with the precision of a clinical description.” Most important, however, is Teresa’s elaboration of her “interior castle,” the title of her 1577 book that figures the soul on its path to union with God as a castle with many mansions, which Sylvia heralds for its “extravagant originality,” casting Teresa as an “inventor” of “brand new psychic spaces.”

Second, there is an argument for understanding Teresa qua mystic as a grand and subtle metaphysical thinker, who manages to combine intellect and imagination, thought and feeling, in ingenious ways, a figure to whom the overwhelmingly male cast of the Western philosophical canon would do well to listen. Kristeva also treats Teresa as a thinker par excellence of intersubjectivity, who chooses “union” above “rapture,” which preserves even in extremis the distinction “between two distinct entities, Him and me.” Sylvia writes, “But what if you were the precursor of a way of being, already obscurely sought in those days and still being sought—through writing among other means—between self and non-self, self and other, self with others?”

The least explicit but perhaps the most insistent of the arguments of Teresa, My Love, is along the lines of a plea for what Teresa represents for Kristeva: an argument for more reflection, more interiority, more room for psychic space and introspection. This is a reworking of a longstanding Kristevan position, which understands psychoanalysis as taking up the place which religion once occupied, and frets about the absence of meaning that seems to plague so many people. We need Teresa now, Sylvia knows this with unhesitating intuition: “Why do I feel so sure that this Carmelite nun has slipped the leash of her time and her world, and stands beside us in the third millennium?” She writes to the Cervantes scholar: “Yes, that’s it, I’m talking about the inner life of our contemporaries, about you and me….this psyche and this humanity, ours, are in crisis, increasingly sapped and enervated, clones or no clones, take a look at American Idol if you don’t believe me….”

It’s hard to quarrel seriously with the first two of these theses, or with the impulse to insert the 16^th century mystic retroactively into the respective lineages of psychoanalysis and the Western philosophical tradition. For Kristeva is not making historical claims in either case; she is essentially at play in the imaginative realm, setting Teresa into conversation with a variety of interlocutors, sometimes to happy effect, as with the provocative claim about Teresa as intersubjective thinker, sometimes less convincingly. For instance, in the argument about Teresa as prefiguring Freud, Kristeva is most persuasive when she confines her argument to Teresa’s own writing. At times she allows this claim to slip uncomfortably into an argument about mysticism more generally, the purest expression of which she finds in Christianity, and thence to be elided into Christianity itself, for which she claims a unique and universal status as a “laboratory for modern psychology and even psychoanalysis.” This move is even more discomfiting in light of Kristeva’s treatment of Islam via a few throw-away lines about “suicide bombers” who “twist their alleged faith into murderous nihilism,” along with an early walk-on role for a pretty young IT engineer whose insistence on wearing a head scarf to symbolize her union with God is pathologized by Sylvia’s secular colleagues and dismissed by Sylvia herself as wholly different from Teresa’s faith. In the case of the third thesis about the contemporary need for what Teresa represents: without disdaining either the desire to cultivate psychic space or the worry about its impoverishment, the form in which it is expressed strikes me as somewhat disingenuous, evoking a nostalgia for a time that never was. I am prepared to agree to Teresa’s merits, but not to concede that we today are so shallow as all that.

Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa

I wonder if Teresa, My Love, is intended as, if not precisely a magnum opus, then a culminating work of sorts: it gathers together a series of preoccupations that span the many years of Kristeva’s theoretical writing. Yet it also contains a degree of self-referentiality that is first amusing, then ludicrous, and finally off-putting. Kristeva’s own life and work are name-checked throughout, both tacitly, as phrases (“the black sun of melancholia,” “new maladies of the soul,”) and explicitly: Sylvia took a course with Julia Kristeva at Columbia University; Sylvia mulls the relationship of Teresa’s visions to Kristeva’s notion of “the semiotic”; even the work of Philippe Sollers, Kristeva’s husband, makes an appearance.

I remain convinced that Kristeva is one of the most important of the twentieth century French theorists; I find much of her work indispensable, from her early writing on the semiotic and the symbolic to the “trilogy” of the 1980s on horror, depression, and love, which includes brilliant analyses of a variety of medieval and other Christian sources in her Tales of Love. Thus Teresa, My Love arrives as a disappointment and, indeed, as a source of confusion, as it adds nothing to ground that has been already well-trodden, whether by Kristeva herself in the ‘80s or, more recently, by figures like Amy Hollywood, who thoroughly explored French intellectuals’ peculiar obsession with female medieval Christian mystics in her 2001 book Sensible Ecstasy.

Nor is Teresa, My Love redeemed by its merits as a novel. Stylistically, it is both overwrought and overwritten in a manner that clearly strives toward performativity but stops well short of it, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of didacticism. Sylvia as a character is so undistinguished that she will live forever in my memory characterized by a single detail—she has been so thoroughly psychoanalyzed that she has forgotten the name of her former long-term romantic partner—a detail I flagged, fascinated, on page 24, that never came up again. And most peculiarly, despite the length of the book, its degree of detail, and Kristeva’s obviously meticulous research in multiple languages, the character of Teresa never truly comes to life here on the page.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan famously told the audience of his twentieth seminar to go to Rome to see Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa to understand the truth of feminine jouissance through mystical experience: “she’s coming, there’s no doubt about it.” Luce Irigaray later quipped that in order to learn about her pleasure, it might be of more use to read the work of “the Teresa in question,” a remark that is likewise applicable in the case of Teresa, My Love. Indeed, the best outcome that I can imagine for the book is that it might prompt readers to go read Teresa herself, whose own writing, cited liberally throughout, is all the more pellucid in contrast with Kristeva’s endless sea of modifiers and second-person soliloquies. Kristeva quotes Teresa, herself quoting Psalm 102, reflecting upon the desire for God in his absence: “Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto [I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop].” By the end of this hectic novel, such a solitude, monastic or otherwise, would come as a profound relief.

***

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 Review: Teresa, My Love appeared first on The Revealer.

Joseph Massad. Islam in Liberalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Joseph Massad’s new book, Islam and Liberalism, traces how liberal thinkers and policy makers have historically produced an image of Islam as an immanent antonym. From their inception, European liberal discourses on citizenship, democracy and political freedom have evolved over and against a constructed image of Islam that served as their wholly other. As Europe has defined itself as a propagator of democracy, liberal freedoms, and equality it has pitted itself against an image of Muslim societies that it sees as despotic and condemned to servitude.  For Europe, Islam served as an internal constituent element that had to be exorcised and set apart.

Massad presents a genealogy of Islam’s projected image tracking how it continues to operate in liberal and Orientalist imaginaries. In order to accomplish this task, he engages with vast bodies of literature that are devoted to the study of a so-called Islam. He reads from the history of Western feminism, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, only to suggest that these literatures tell us more about Europe and its historical disavowals and displacements of self more than they ever do about Islam itself. Massad exposes a certain European jouissance in projecting its own anxieties, disappointments and expulsions on to Islam and Muslim societies in order it appear to itself as the paragon of superiority.     

A central preoccupation of the book revolves around the politics of translation. Translation is not rendered as a benign and apolitical act of finding equivalent terms between two languages, but an act that is embedded in a network of power relations (relations that reflect the grave geopolitical and cultural imbalances in the present world order). The (un)translatability of certain conceptual terms is determined and structured by power dynamics that render some languages ‘stronger’ than others. This becomes all the more evident in the last three chapters of the book where Massad interrogates the politics of translation underlying certain problematic terms such as those involved in the study of ‘Islamicate  sexualities’ as well as the nascence of ‘queer’ studies that focuses on the Middle East.

Most importantly, he asks why certain Arabic terms remain untranslatable on the grounds of their ‘foreignness’ to the European sensibility while others are perfectly translatable leaving the rich conceptual history of certain terms in their own native context. As an example, Massad – and Talal Asad before him – examines the Arabic word din, which, in English, is usually translated into ‘religion’. For Massad, the word din has far richer connotations for its speakers-believers than the definition ‘religion’ can capture. The Arabic term would designate not only faith as disseminated by Prophet Mohamed but a complete way of life that is lived in accordance with Islamic scripture and tradition.    

Another example of inadequate and politicized translation comes in the fourth chapter, where Massad charges Fathi Ben Salama, the Tunisian-French psychoanalyst, with transliterating the word Allah in his psychoanalytic study of the prophet’s biography to an exotic effect while it should have been simply translated into the French, Dieu (since the Arabic word circulated among Arab Christian tribes even before the appearance of Islam).

The more problematic aspect of translation rests in translating Western conceptual terms into Arabic. Massad criticizes how certain anthropologists and historians falsely take ‘identitarian’ categories of gay, lesbian and queer to be universal without knowing that such categories are mostly native to Europe and North America. A case in point involves the translation of the term “queer” into Arabic. In their attempt to translate the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic culture from English into Arabic, two Egyptian translators have lamented that they could not find an Arabic equivalent for the word ‘queer’. The blame is shifted to a certain lack on the part of Arabic language, culture and ‘sexuality’ since it could not offer a proper equivalent. Through this example, Massad highlights how some languages are perceived to be weaker (or perhaps in this particular context, more heterosexually-centric) than others are believed to be. The ‘lack’ is treated as some kind of malaise on the part of one language and its community of speakers (Arabic in this case) over and against another more ‘open’ language with liberatory potentials (English).

In the last chapter, Massad examines how a number of European philosophers have attempted to transpose certain conceptual terms into the Arabic lexical terrain by means of ‘provincializing’ them; by claiming that their conceptual terms have roots in Islamic scriptural traditions or at least maintain conceptual affinities to them (or in the formulation of these concepts, the philosophers have drawn inspiration from Islamic sources). A case in point is the way Louis Massignon, Jacques Derrida, and Gil Anidjar invoke the name of Prophet Abraham in their attempts to salvage the lost threads of kinship between Jews, Muslims, and Christians beyond a long history of religious animosity between them. According to Massad, when Massignon, invokes the prophet’s name, in his essay The Three Prayers of Abraham, he invokes him as a symbol of unity among the three monotheistic traditions in an attempt to establish some common theological ground between them. Massignon invokes the figure of Abraham as the site of such unity and common origin claiming that it is in accordance with the ways in which the prophet’s name is invoked in Islam.  Massad contrarily argues that the Quran does not contain the term ‘religions of Abraham’ (‘adyan Ibrahim’, the Arabic plural of the word ‘din’) whereas the more correct term would be the Arabic ‘Millat Ibarhim’ (loosely translated as ‘ways’,‘traditions’ or ‘path’ of Abraham). The term ‘din’, as outlined above, has different connotations for Muslim speakers-believers. ‘The point’, argues Massad, ‘is simply that neither the notion of “religion” (let alone “religions”) nor “din” is attributed or attributable to Abraham, even while he is recognized as the first prophet to worship the one god by heeding his call’.    

According to Massad, the turn to the ‘Abrahamic’ exhibits other potential dangers for the political reality of the Palestinian question. What he fears is that Massignon – and Derrida after him – unintentionally turned the ongoing occupation of Palestine to an image of a historical fraternal feud among Abraham’s descendants; each with his own messianic claim to the ‘holy land’ (as well as God). This image, Massad suggests, is only a shadowy variation of the European liberal discourse that treats the Arab-Israeli conflict as a battle among equals not as a case of outright colonization. Along this line of thought, Massad sees Massignon’s (as well as Derrida’s) messianic depictions of the conflict as an attempt to avoid the present reality of the Israeli state and its colonial practices. He writes, “The problem with the deployment of the Abrahamic, however, is that it (mis)places the religion, eschatological messianism, and, finally, theory over and against, or at the expense of the political.” For Massad, seeing the Palestinian question through a messianic lens runs the risk of sidetracking the grave political realities of Israeli occupation, which Palestinians have to confront on daily basis.

In his critique of the Abrahamic turn, Massad condemns the shift from the political to the theoretical as an attempt to ‘rise above’ political reality of the Palestinian people in the name of common ancestral roots, messianism or eschatological claims. In such shifts, he also traces how political reality is disfigured and redefined in accordance with the theoretical edifice of the philosophical projects that speak in the name of the Abrahamic.

I wonder if I could further push Massad’s continual emphasis on the necessity of uncovering the political reality behind certain conceptual terms by inquiring about the place of the Arab revolutions in his book. As an Arab reader, I was a little agitated by the fact that the Arab revolutions passed almost like shadows in the book. Of course, Massad’s book is chiefly devoted to examining and uprooting liberal illusions about Islam. He even goes so far as to announce in his introduction that he is uninterested in examining Muslim resistances or responses to such fictive constructions over history. Despite the fact that Massad wrote, revised, and finalized the book between 2008 and 2013, even spending some of that time in Cairo. Yet, war-torn Syrian cities and tear-gassed Egyptian streets of those same years seem to have but spectral presences in the book. I would argue that this silence impoverishes Massad’s book by converting it into an enclosed dialogue between orientalist depictions of Islam and refutations of such representations. In the midst of this dialogue, nothing is heard from the outside.  It becomes a dialogue only in the corridors of Middle East studies departments in the United States.    

Massad never uses the word ‘revolution’ in his book but instead he chooses to focus more on how the term ‘Arab spring’ was coined in Western media and political circles. Taking up Massad’s own line of inquiry about the politics of translation, I wonder how would engage with the translation of ‘revolution’? Have Arab revolutions already failed because of their suspicious cross-over from a foreign lexical landscape to our own or are such terms already always faithful to their original European contexts including their tragic ends. I am asking this question because ever since the Arab uprisings had began, Western media chose to focus on how those events were only the passive iterations of past European revolutions that occurred in the nineteenth century (affirming that the Arab ‘uprisings’, in sum, were belated replicates of the European political upheavals of 1848 also known as the ‘spring of nations’). If we follow Massad’s line of inquiry, it comes awfully close to aligning with this European view of the ill-fated Arab uprisings.

I would venture to say that views, the media’s and Massad’s, are symptomatic of a very conservative view of translation. Because of its foreign roots, the Arabic equivalent of the word ‘revolution’ (thawra) will never have a different life of its own in another landscape. It is already prone, almost fated to be a shadowy version of the original.

***

Fouad Halbouni is a PhD candidate at the Anthropology department, Johns Hopkins University. He currently resides in Cairo, Egypt. His present research project focuses on the modern history of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

The post Review: Islam in Liberalism (Part 2) appeared first on The Revealer.

Now, the links!

First up, we highly recommend checking out the latest issue of Cross Currents, “Creative Nonfiction: A Genre Made for Religion Writing,” edited by S. Brent Rodriguez Plate and Brook Wilensky-Lanford, with contributions from our friends Nathan Schneider, Patton Dodd, Peter Manseau, Mary Valle and many other excellent writers.

Next, who doesn’t love spending some time with “The Late, Great Stephen Colbert“? Here, in conversation with  Joel Lovell for GQ.

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

Speaking of funny men, “Watch John Oliver Satirize IRS’ Lack of Church Oversight.”

And, you know who else has the name “Oliver” (cut us some slack, segues are hard): Oliver Sacks. Here, he considers the meaning of “Sabbath” in his latest piece for The New York Times. 

And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.

We’ve been waiting all week to share this one with you: “Discarded celebrity waxworks given new life at BibleWalk museum in Ohio.”

Elizabeth Taylor wax statue repurposed for a scene in a biblical museum in Ohio. Picture: James Cheadle/Solent News

In other, less silly news:

“Skyping with spirit: Chaplains use computers to support the seriously ill” reports Reuters.

“This provides more people access and resources to end of life questions, faith questions and prayer,” said Eric Price, spiritual care manager at Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, who is not affiliated with the tele-chaplaincy service. “However, many hospitals may see this as a more valuable alternative than live face-to-face contact, because it is cheaper than a chaplain. At its best, it will offer another tool for the staff chaplain. At its worst, it may replace the profession.”

“MuslimGirl Is Dismantling What a ‘Good Muslim’ Looks Like” says Fariha Roisin in Broadly.

Amani is out here trying to dismantle what a “good Muslim” looks like. “The best way to do that is by not staying silent on these stories,” she says. “As soon as we share the stories, tell our experiences to other people and put them out there, that’s how you dissipate the judgment. We have to talk about what’s taboo–we have remain authentic to our experience.” Talking about smoking weed, talking about sex, or talking about abortions as a Muslim is revolutionary. Hirsi Ali might think it’s a product of being in the West, but really it’s a product of the times. Being blasphemous, and speaking openly about it, allows for dialogue. Asserting authority over these topics, allowing movement, and eliminating the intense obsession with purity creates real change.

Amani Al-Khatahtbeh founder of MuslimGirl.net

“The Ethics and Politics of Responsible Belief” by Michael Quirk for Public Seminar.

When a Christian fundamentalist refuses to acknowledge the challenge that natural selection poses to a scriptural literalism that places the language of faith on the same plane as the language of science, or when a radical Islamist reflexively understands Christians and Jews to be “infidels” even as he or she accepts the canonical status of the Tanakh and the Christian New Testament in Islam, or when a “New Atheist” blasts “moderate believers” as enablers of theocrats without even attempting to understand charitably the theological sources for this moderation in Tillich, or Heschel, or Rahner, they are all joined together in a common malady of thoughtlessness. The special problem faced by the religious is not dogma per se (which merely means “things taught,” shared beliefs and practices). It is the steadfast refusal to think these beliefs and practices through. To embrace such thinking is a tough challenge to religion in the contemporary world, indeed its chief challenge. But it must be met. Whether it can be consistently met by all who believe, remains to be seen.

“U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice, and Salvation” a discussion with Kelly Denton-Borhaug speaks with Bob Wintermute about her new book.

Denton-Borhaug considers how sacrificial rhetoric has suffused American perceptions of conflict and our military institutions, creating a cultural dynamic that has come to accept war as a normative state in keeping with our notions of an exceptionalist identity. Drawing on Denton-Borhaug’s training as a religions scholar, U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation takes a different, more philosophical and theological based, approach to issues of concern to students of military history. Her book, and our discussion, is a departure from the usual New Books in Military History fare, but we hope our listeners will find her comments provocative and insightful; a true representation of the potentials for our field in inter-disciplinary study.

“Christian moviemakers opt for black cast after glut of whitewashed faith films” by Jonathan Merritt for Religion News Service.

“War Room” arrives at a time when racial tensions in America have intensified as a result of police brutality cases and the racially motivated slaying of black worshippers by a white shooter in Charleston, S.C. Those involved with the film say they don’t believe the timing of its release is a coincidence, and they think that the message of “War Room” might have the power to usher in reconciliation in America.

Oh, yeah, and in case you skipped it when your college professor assigned it, maybe now that Mark Zuckerberg is giving it a go it’s time to read some William James.

William James in Brazil, 1865

The post In the News: Wax, Wits, William James, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

Michael Taussig writes on “The Mastery of Non-Mastery” for Public Seminar.

“In the Women’s House in Kobane, I got to thinking that the issue in play amounts to a re-working of Hegel’s famous Master-Slave chapter, such that a new concept emerges: ‘the mastery of non-mastery.’ It was not that women replaced men by becoming masters.

The man with the furrowed face © Michael Taussig

Mastery of non-mastery would very much include a new magic, transforming the way by which the magic of the state is spliced into forms of kinship and sentiment that bind women into stately forms as well as familial ones. (‘Women! The first colony!’ Back to Gilgamesh.)

“Humanism Unshackles” by Ed Simon for Tikkun.

The immediate cause for celebration is that men and women in our federal prisons who adhere to humanist beliefs are now able to freely exercise their right to act as a participant in their religious community. But perhaps more importantly, the decision helps to complicate and enrich Americans’ understanding of what constitutes religion, something that benefits all of us, whatever religious position we hold or community we belong to. Rather than viewing humanism and atheism as simply the absence of faith and belief, this decision acknowledges that they are also metaphysical positions on ultimate reality, just like monotheism or polytheism. Indeed, the fact that some humanists choose to arrange themselves into communities that mark life with rituals demonstrates precisely that they are a religion and are deserving of the same federally recognized rights that other religions are accorded.

“Learning to Speak Lingerie” by Peter Hessler for The New Yorker.

But on the whole this subject doesn’t interest Chinese dealers. Few of them are well educated, and they don’t perceive themselves as being engaged in a cultural exchange. On issues of religion, they are truly agnostic: they seem to have no preconceptions or received ideas, and they evaluate any faith strictly on the basis of direct personal experience. “The ones with the crosses—are they Muslim?” one Chinese dealer asked me. He had been living for four years in Minya, a town with sectarian strife so serious that several Coptic Christian churches had been damaged by mobs armed with Molotov cocktails. During one of our conversations, I realized that he was under the impression that women who wear head scarves are adherents of a different religion from that of those who wear the niqab. It was logical: he noticed contrasts in dress and behavior, and so he assumed that they believe in different things; a monolithic label like “Islam” meant nothing to him. In general, Chinese dealers prefer Egyptian Muslims to Christians. This is partly because Muslims are more faithful consumers of lingerie, but it’s also because they’re easier to negotiate with. The Copts are a financially successful minority, and they have a reputation for bargaining aggressively. This is what matters most to Chinese dealers—for them, religion is essentially another business proposition.

CHRISTIANITY

We recommend reading Ann Neumann‘s “The Patient Body: In the Blood” written for our June 2015 issue before diving into the first installment of Amanda Schaffer‘s three part series “Medicine Without Blood,” “How Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Changing Medicine.”

Though Witnesses accept virtually all other medical interventions, the stricture against transfusion can affect their care. Patients may need donor blood when they lose their own blood rapidly, as a result of a car crash or surgery, or when they develop severe anemia—for instance, during cancer treatment. In the past several decades, specialty programs in “bloodless medicine” that cater to Jehovah’s Witnesses have grown up at dozens of hospitals.

Also very well worth a read: “When Our Truths Are Ignored: Proslavery Theology’s Legacy” by Yolanda Pierce for Religion & Politics.

We often fail to deconstruct how proslavery theology still influences American Christianity. But simply put: Theological arguments upheld the institution of slavery long after every other argument failed. American Christian theology was born in a cauldron of proslavery ideology, and one of the spectacular failures of the Christian church today is its inability to name, interrogate, confront, repent, and dismantle the cauldron which has shaped much of its theology. We are daily living with the remnants of a theological white supremacy, coupled with social and political power, which continues to uphold racist ideologies. 

And lastly, “At War in the Garden of Eden: Christian fighters, ISIS invaders, and the fight for Iraq’s Nineveh Plains” by Jen Percy for The New Republic. 

NAEL MARCUS NISSAN sat smoking with his legs spread on a burgundy couch in an abandoned home in the village of Baqofa, 15 miles from the Islamic State front lines. Nissan was a fighter with the Dwekh Nawsha, one of the three primary Assyrian Christian militias founded in the Nineveh Plains in northwest Iraq’s Kurdistan, in the months after the ISIS invasion in June 2014. The Dwekh patrolled Baqofa in a black pickup truck with a small crucifix scratched on its side and a Russian machine gun mounted in the bed. They spoke Aramaic, the ancient language of Christ. Nissan was 25 years old, with high cheekbones and a trimmed goatee. He wore aviator sunglasses, a floppy camouflage hat, baggy fatigues, and an ammunition vest stocked with grenades and cigarettes. He preached gospel at the evangelical church in Dohuk, and since he learned English from listening to ’90s-era rap, he quoted Scripture in the cadence of Ja Rule. “I’m from New York,” he sang. “No, I’m from Baghdad!” His favorite song was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

ISLAM

Speaking of ISIS, this extremely disturbing report, “ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape” comes from  Rukmini Callimachi for The New York Times. 

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

And, helpfully, Hussein Rashid reminds us that “‘Islam’ is Not a Person” in Sacred Matters.

As long as we continue to see Islam as a living being, rather than a religion composed of individual human beings, we rend the diverse fabric of the nation. It is not just about addressing religious illiteracy, or knowing the history of our own country, but about seeing another person’s humanity. A person does things, believes things, and she lives next door. She is the one who speaks, not Islam.

JUDAISM

Masha Gessen memorializes an important scholar in “Postscript: Svetlana Boym, 1959-2015” for The New Yorker.

Svetlana had a private theory that after one emigrated, the pre-emigration self lingered, perhaps even lived on, inaccessible to the émigré. In the last few years, she looked for those other selves. In an unpublished story, she described the lives she might have led. She also went back to find a refugee camp in which she and other Soviet Jews were housed in Vienna in 1981; its location had been secret, and most other residents had diligently forgot its existence. At the time of her death, she was finishing a film about the camp and her search for it. It was not her first film: she was a filmmaker, an artist, a writer, a teacher; she was Svetlana, Susana, she was a bit of Zenita—the name her father had wanted to give her in honor of his favorite soccer team—and she was also Olga Carr, a self that seemed glamorous and unfamiliar but maintained a Facebook presence and occasionally sent e-mail messages referring to Svetlana in the third person, like some sort of virtual assistant.

You can listen to the Marginalia Review of Books’ books podcast “First Impressions #44: Ranan Omer-Sherman” for a very interesting discussion with the author about his new book Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film.

ART

So much religious art news this week that we gave it its own category.

“Saintly Collages of Everyday People” by Allison Meier about the artwork of Rodríguez Calero in Hyperallergic. 

These often large-scale, mixed media pieces interpret contemporary culture with the reverence of Catholicism. That’s not to say the work is religious, but harnesses the spiritual history and heritage of Catholicism that’s embedded in the artist’s Puerto Rican roots and makes ordinary people into these “urban martyrs and latter-day santos.” The gold flourishes framing faces, and angels lurking in the corners, recall Byzantine paintings; yet instead of those old world works which turned every biblical figure into a European, Calero’s are people of color, and the symbolism is a mix of consumer media fragments and the sacred.

Rodríguez Calero, “Saint Anthony” (1999), acrollage painting, 24 x 18 inches

“Unreleased Holocaust Film by Jerry Lewis Acquired by Library of Congress” reports Haaretz.

Lewis, now 89, decided after completing the movie that it should never been seen, even after his death. The reason is not known, though the comedian said in a 2009 interview that “It’s [either] better than ‘Citizen Kane’ or the worst piece of shit that anyone ever loaded on the projector.” 

“Why Did Islam Disappear From Hip-Hop?” asks Adam K. Raymond for Vocativ.

The best known rappers affiliated with the Nation of Islam, the Five Percent Nation and more traditional Islam include Brand Nubian, Nas, Rakim, Gang Starr, Mobb Deep, Poor Righteous Teachers and several members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Many are still recording and performing in their 40s, but they don’t hold much relevance to hip-hop’s young fan base. Islamic and Islamic-sympathizing rappers are older, less prolific and, in the case of Ice Cube, too busy making bad family movies to preach the gospel of Muhammad or Farrakhan. In their place is a generation of rappers who grew up during a time when the influence of the Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation was on the wane. They also grew up in a time when hip-hop wasn’t confined to the inner cities where those groups were strongest, meaning religious views in hip-hop have begun to better reflect those of America at large.

Slate published a “Not a Crime: A Gorgeous, Stirring Cartoon About the Status of Trans People in Malaysia” by Kazimir Lee Iskander.

When cartoonist Kazimir Lee Iskander learned that 17 Malaysian trans women had been arrested by the Islamic police in June 2014 for the crime of “impersonating women,” he was both riveted by the case and inspired to write about it. He wanted to show how trans people are harassed in Malaysia but also how effective LGBTQ organizing can be. “I didn’t want everyone to hear the story and assume Malaysia’s some fundie hell-hole (even though it can be),” he told me. “I also wanted to show a little bit of the activism happening on the ground.” —June Thomas

The Los Angeles Review of Books shines their “Photographer Spotlight“ on the work of Markus Brunetti.

Anyone who has traveled in Europe has marveled at its abundance of ornate churches, from Romanesque and Gothic to Renaissance and Baroque. Photographing them is nothing new, but Markus Brunetti has for 10 years now brought the most advanced digital-imaging techniques to the task of revealing their facades with a comprehensive clarity. By painstakingly compositing many high-resolution shots of these magnificent edifices — while scrubbing them of blemishes and superfluous add-ons (pigeon defenses, lightning rods, cables, etc.) — Brunetti transforms them into the most exquisite of time capsules, laden with the coded iconography of bygone centuries. We see them as their architects conceived them, in their most pristine form. At the same time, Brunetti takes ancient structures and sees them through modern eyes.

The post In the News: Saints, Slavery, Celibacy, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

We’re very excited about this new book out from the University of Chicago Press, Politics of Religious Freedom edited by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Peter G. Danchin with chapters (originally published on The Immanent Frame) by each of the editors as well as Revealer favorites Elizabeth Castelli, Courtney Bender, Samuel Moyn, Ann Pelligrini, Michael Lambek, Wendy Brown and tons of other brilliant scholars.

Speaking of fantastic scholars, we recommend reading this interview with Anthony Petro in Religion Dispatches, “How AIDS Changed the Way American Christians Talk About Sex.”

For readers interested in religion, my key message is that the AIDS crisis changed the way American Christians talked about sexuality. Sex was by no means a new topic for Christians, but the AIDS crisis brought discussion of gay sex and of various sexual practices, like oral and anal sex, into virtually every household in the country.

And our awesome Alt-Ac friend Brook Wilensky-Lanford made a very smart appearance in The New Yorker this week to tell us about “An Awkward Adaptation of Kahlil Gibran’s ‘The Prophet.’“

The movie’s juxtaposition of poetry and drama makes for an oddly jarring viewing experience, as if a Lebanese grandfather were lecturing a satori-seeking college student. But it may also be a fairly accurate dramatization of the strange cultural space that “The Prophet” occupies, poised awkwardly between utmost seriousness and sheer whimsy. The book is a best-seller with a largely forgotten author; it was written for adults, but has been adopted by teen-agers; it is dismissed as lightweight, but remains dogged in its longevity. It even produces conflicting reactions in its fans, people like Allers, who seem both nostalgic for and possibly embarrassed by how the book made them feel. “The Prophet,” as this odd adaptation helps to demonstrate, may be both “very meaningful” and too ridiculous to talk about.

Still from “Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet”

The Atlantic has been publishing a series of pieces about Ta-Nahisi Coates‘ new book Between the World and Me in a book club. This week’s installment, “Not Trying to Get Into Heaven” by Tressie McMillan Cottom was especially good.

He is not the first to articulate a black politics without churchiness, but it is a particular moment for Coates to do so. The consensus seems to be that millennials are less religious than previous generations but that they maintain cultural beliefs rooted in religion. They may not go to church—but like black agnostics and atheists, they hold onto its linguistics and ritual. But I have been struck by the sight of youth organizers gathering under the “Black Lives Matter” banner, who seem to also be articulating a post-black church political language. Even as they welcome elders like the theologian and academic Cornel West as foreparents of the movement, some organizers are speaking without explicitly religious themes. … I also think that the book is an entry in a long conversation about the role of religion, especially western Christianity, in the articulation of black people’s lives.

And Philip Perdue reflects “On Light, God, Photography… and That Moment Just Before the Bad Thing Happens.”

The point isn’t that photography is God, or that God is a photograph—at least not literally. But we are in fact dealing with a mode of communication that freezes time and space, obeys its own laws, is both visual and grammatical, and does more to generate meaning—and generates more meaning—than we can fully understand.

How unsettling, then, that this brief meditation on photography as a play on light is sparked by a gruesome scene of religiously-inspired hatred? Taken just moments before Ultra-Orthodox Yishai Schlissel whips out a knife and stabs six people at Jerusalem’s annual gay pride parade, this photograph is striking in part because it captures the crime scene before the crime even happens.

Ultra-Orthodox Jew Yishai Schlissel walks through a Gay Pride parade and is just about to pull a knife from under his coat and start stabbing people in Jerusalem Thursday, July 30, 2015. Schlissel was recently released from prison after serving a term for stabbing several people at a gay pride parade in 2005, a police spokeswoman said.(AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

ISLAM

Speaking of art and religion, Bilal Qureshi launches a series of stories about Islam and art, “Muslim Artists, Now” with “Opulent and Apolitical: The Art of the Met’s Islamic Galleries.”

But at a time when the meaning of Islam is so fraught and the debate over Muslim values is so charged, what exactly constitutes Islamic art? Is it a religious definition, an ethnic category or a political statement?

Hannah Ellis-Peterson reports on a “Controversial Isis-related play cancelled two weeks before opening night” for The Guardian.

“The whole point was that it was more of a kaleidoscopic exploration of the treatment of homegrown radicalisation and to explore the breadth of opinion that is out there, and that the young people find themselves subject to. To cancel it is to undermine that entirely – what message does that send these young people about the environment of fear and politics we live in?”

Thanks to The Atlantic, you can watch a video of Arsalan Iftigkhar, Dalia Mogahead, and Reza Aslan discussing “Struggles of the Muslim Pundit: Islam and the Media” from the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival.

As various news outlets reacted to the attacks on the office of Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher, a Kosher deli in Paris, producers across America picked up their phones, looking for people to speak for the global Muslim community. When jihadists take lives, Muslim public intellectuals are often asked to explain, make distinctions, or even apologize. Arsalan Iftikhar,Dalia Mogahed, and Reza Aslan share their stories from years spent answering for Islam. They reflect on the media’s role in distributing images of violence and propaganda, and the editorial decisions around when to publish—or not to publish—images of the Prophet.

And Rafia Zakaria takes on Ayaan Hirsi Ali‘s latest for the Los Angeles Review of Books in “Defining the Dissident.”

If Luther had the printing press, Hirsi Ali has Google. As she says: “Without the assistance of Google it would have been far harder to write this book.” It is this confession that best sums up her book; Heretic reads like a well-Googled assemblage on Islam and reform, put together with little attention to either historical context or philosophical complexity. Hirsi Ali seems unaware, for instance, that her central prescription — that Islam should have a “reformation” — is rooted in the evolutionary precepts of Western colonialism toward their colonized populations. As Bernard Cohn has written in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, “[T]he application of social evolutionary theories to India by a wide range of British officials and scholars yielded a crucial ruling paradigm; the Indian present was the European past.” The trick was a useful one for colonizers past; in the subcontinent it permitted the British to characterize their presence as benevolent and progressive, diverting attention from its exploitative and extractive reality. Hirsi Ali simply repeats the formulation here.

CHRISTIANITY

“Christians under pressure: from bigotry at school to imprisonment and murder” by Jared Malsin, Saba Imtiaz, Tom Phillips, and Peter Beaumont for The Guardian.

Faith leaders warn of a rise in persecution around the world. Here we focus on four countries where Christian believers face official discrimination and threats of attacks by militants – sometimes at the same time.

Andrea Smardon reports for NPR, “In Utah, ‘Book of Mormon Strikes a Chord.”

 As for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s running ads in the playbill promoting the actual Book of Mormon. You’ve seen the play, one ad says; now read the book. For NPR News, I’m Andrea Smardon in Salt Lake City.

Speaking of Mormonism, “Revealed: The stone that ‘translated’ the Book of Mormon.”

The church has always possessed the stone, which was transported across the country during Mormon pioneers’ trek from Illinois to Utah in the mid-1800s, but it decided to publish the photos now to allow people who prefer visuals to words to better understand the religion’s roots, said Richard Turley, assistant church historian. The stone will remain in the vault.

Naomi Shavin explains “Why an Indie Press in Brooklyn is Publishing the Pope” for The New Republic. 

Indeed, for the Melville House team, which usually plans books at least a year in advance, publishing a book this quickly can only happen if there is significant enthusiasm for the project. “I’m not particularly interested in preaching to the choir, you have to expand an author’s readership,” Johnson explained. “The Pope has become an activist figure, a beloved figure… We are salespeople for the Pope. We want people to buy the book, we want them to get the message, we want them to read it.” According to Johnson, “This is what the Vatican realized [this] publication could do for them. We’ll get it out to a much wider audience—otherwise, they’d read about it in a newspaper and that would be that.

Emma Green asks “What would the American culture wars look like if they were less about ‘values’ and more about Jesus?” in “The Freakishness of Christianity” for The Atlantic.

This word, “freak,” is both jarring and effective: It’s a high-school-hallway diss, all hard-edged consonants and staccato contempt. Christians have reclaimed this word before; the 1960s-era “Jesus freaks” mixed gospel teachings with hippie counter-culture. In many ways, Moore wants to capture a similar mentality, one of standing against and apart from culture, rather than trying to win it over. This is not quite the same as “the Benedict option,” as Rod Dreher has called it—a strategic retreat from culture and fortification of communities that share similar values. As Moore pointed out, the core of being an evangelical is evangelism, spreading the good news of Christ; there’s no low-church history of monastic retreat like there is in the Catholic or Orthodox traditions. But it is a strategic reorientation: to see the world through the eyes of the outcast, rather than the conqueror.

And, speaking of “freaks,” Nathan Rabin takes us to the “2015 Gathering of the Juggalos: Children, a wedding, and Juggalos for Jesus” in the A.V. Club.

The first form of family that I encountered surprised me. It was less the traditional Juggalo surrogate family than the brotherhood of Christ. In the upside down world of the Gathering, however, what’s shocking isn’t extreme behavior but piety. So I was not expecting to enter the camp grounds of Legend Valley in Thornville, Ohio, and immediately encounter a group of fresh-faced, smiling Christians manning a “Juggalos For Jesus” booth.

….

What made the Juggalos For Jesus so oddly charming was the soft-sell nature of their appeal. They weren’t hectoring Juggalos or condemning them (at least overtly) but rather offering up simple kindness, along with Faygos and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

JUDAISM

Talia Levin goes “Off the Path of Orthodoxy” for The New Yorker.

There are many terms for people who have left Orthodox Judaism: apikores (an ancient Hebrew term for “apostate”); chozer b’she’elah (a decorous Israeli term, which translates roughly to “one who returns with questions”); frei (Yiddish for “free,” usually used in a derogatory fashion); and “O.T.D.,” or “off the derech” (“derech” is Hebrew for “path”). The last term, once a dismissive way to describe Orthodox youth who sought to explore drugs and sex, has been reclaimed by some ex-Orthodox Jews. Using this term says: Yes, I have left your path—and now I must find my own way.

Monika Zgustova takes us to “In the Unlikeliest of Places, a Museum Dedicated to Jewish Life” for The Nation.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a Canadian scholar specializing in Jewish studies and the program director of the museum, gives me a tour through several of the many spaces the building offers. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett repeatedly insists: “There are several Holocaust memorials in the world focused on the Shoah. However, this museum is different—it’s about life. About Jewish life in Poland, about the Jewish tradition and culture that have been enriching Polish life for a thousand years. It’s a celebration of the important role the Jews played in the development of Polish cities.”

Illustration by Amos Biderman

And Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt brings us “Inside the World of ultra-Orthodox Newsrooms: Haredim in Their Own Words“ for Haaretz.

So – who are the people behind these papers, these powerful opinion-makers? And is journalism still journalism when stories are censored by the all-powerful rabbis? When the editors and reporters who were interviewed for this article requested to review their own quotes before publication – a breach of mainstream journalistic ethics, certainly – what does that say about the definition of a controlled “Pravda” here?

And, from Kimberly Winston at Religion News Service, “African American revives the songs of the shtetl.”

“The potential for personal connection that performing in Yiddish provided was very attractive to me as a performer,” Russell said from his office at Netivot Shalom, a Conservative synagogue in Berkeley where he is an educator. A reprint of an old black-and-white photo of African-American children learning Hebrew letters is one of the few personal decorations he has added to the office’s white walls.

…

Russell, 35, discovered Yiddish music through the Coen brothers’ film “A Serious Man,” which featured a song performed by Sidor Belarsky, Ukrainian-born Jewish singer who brought Yiddish songs to Carnegie Hall after World War II. He taught himself Belarsky’s repertoire, writing out the Yiddish lyrics, translating them and practicing his pronunciation.

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