“Black Muslim Women, Chicago, Illinois, 1963” by Gordon Parks

Welcome to the new, weekly, religion and media news round-up! 

First up, a high stakes showdown over the legacy of Cornel West:

Many of you have probably already read Michael Eric Dyson‘s stinging rebuke of his former friend and mentor, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” in The New Republic. If not, we recommend you do. But then, we also strongly suggest that you read West’s response and Dyson’s response to West’s Response. Whether you delve deeper into the debacle after that is up to you. But if you find something good, tweet it at us, won’t you?

From Kunta Kinte to Aasif Mandvi, this week’s installment of Islam in America:

Six authors (Francine Prose, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Taiye Selasi, and Peter Carey) are declining to help host the annual PEN Foundation gala after learning that the foundation will present an award to Charlie Hebdo. According to the president of PEN,  Andrew Solomon:

“This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non Muslims, into a cowed silence.

“These six writers have made themselves the fellow travellers of that project. Now they will have the dubious satisfaction of watching PEN tear itself apart in public.”

While, according to Salman Rushdie, they are:

“…just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”

While in France, itself, “French School Deems Teenager’s Skirt an Illegal Display of Religion.”

Her case points to the difficulty in enforcing the French policy of laïcité — roughly, secularism — which strives to keep religion strictly out of government and the public sector. It has been invoked in recent years to restrict the places where Muslim women can wear clothing concealing their bodies or faces.

The case also illustrates the gap between the ways French officials and Muslims have understood the secularism rules.

And then there’s Pamela Geller whose “Pro-Israel” ads will soon start appearing on New York City buses despite a great deal of protest and have prompted a full ban on political ads by the MTA. Negin Farsad and Dean Obeidallah are fighting bigotry with humor and sweetness in their counter-campaign, “The Muslims Are Coming!”

Nevermind the fact that Luz, the french cartoonist who drew the first post-attack Hebdo cover says that drawing The Prophet no longer interests him, Pamela Geller isn’t stopping with our buses, though. She wants more, so MuslimGirl.net gave her what she wanted. “Pam Geller Wanted Us to Draw Muhammed. So We Did.”

In response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year, Pam is hosting “The Inaugural Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest” in Texas on May 3, 2015. She wants to display all the most offensive Muhammad cartoons she can get her hands on. And she’s calling on the public to compete in who can be more offensive to the Islamic religion. …

So, we thought, why not push back against the hate — with love?

Muhammad is the most common name in the world. Chances are that all know a Muhammad. So, let’s draw Muhammad. Let’s honor his diversity. Let’s celebrate his many different faces. Let’s elevate his humanity. In a bleak world where the Pamela Gellers are the ones with the mic, let’s shine some light on the good.

While The Atlantic shares videomaker Nushmia Khan answer to the question, “What does it mean to be fashionably modest?”

And Peter Beinhart writes about “The New Enemy Within: Some Republican politicians see sympathy for Islam as a liability. Why?”

This is strange. Why are conservatives more hostile to Muslims and Islam today than they were in the terrifying aftermath of 9/11? And why have American Muslims, who in 2000 mostly voted Republican, apparently replaced gays and feminists as the right’s chief culture-war foe?

In a more philosophical and historical direction, Muna Mire moves “Towards a Black Muslim Ontology of Resistance” in The New Inquiry.

At the turn of the 20th century, Du Bois mapped a conceptual understanding of the Black American subject: “One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Double consciousness signifies a subjecthood, a self whose several identities are at odds with one another. To be Black and Muslim in America today is to live a sort of Du Boisian double consciousness with an added dimension of dissonant interiority.

While Uzma Kolsy voices some reasonable concerns about “The Qu’osby Show” in The Atlantic. 

But in its effort to address years of misunderstanding, the show risks further cementing the very stereotypes it’s ostensibly trying to deconstruct. In going to great lengths to prove they’re just like every other American, Mandvi’s characters obscure their Muslim identity in the process and dilute the otherwise positive efforts of the project.

Lastly, “Swiss Artist Plans a Mosque Installation for Venice Biennale” reports Randy Kennedy for The New York Times.

“The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice,” as the project is titled, will serve as the official pavilion for Iceland, where Mr. Büchel has lived for many years. The mosque installation, created in collaboration with several groups of Islamic Venetians as well as Islamic leaders in Iceland, is intended to highlight the fact that, unlike most prominent cities in Italy, Venice – whose architecture and art have been shaped over centuries by Islamic commerce and culture – has never had a mosque in its historic heart.

“Jesus Never Tapped Out” according to Kelly J. Gannon‘s review of “Fight Church” for Sacred Matters. 

This idea of not being pushed around, whether by Satan or a person, is a theme that runs throughout the interviews shown in the film. Although the pastors legitimize their fighting clubs as an evangelizing mechanism (the mantra “Tough guys need Jesus too” is constantly repeated), the programs are also intended to help men defend themselves. “There is nowhere in the Bible where [God] says ‘I want you to be a punching bag for the rest of your life,’” states Burress.

“Punch Thy Neighbor”

According to Robert P. Jones at The Atlantic, “Religious Americans Support Gay Marriage.”

Over the last decade, though, the debate has shifted from one between religious and non-religious Americans to one that primarily pits older, conservative Christians against moderate, progressive, or younger Christians, Jews, and the religiously unaffiliated.

What do the Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist party have in common? More than you’d think, argues Jeffrey Wasserstrom in “The People’s Pope and the Chairman of Everything” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

When I arrived in Rome early in April this year, I couldn’t help but recall my last trip to China in late January. In China, the reminders and images of the Chairman of Everything were everywhere. In Rome, the likenesses of the current Pope were just as ubiquitous — and not just when I visited Vatican City late in the week. At souvenir carts and in shop windows near tourist areas linked to ancient Rome, Francis’s face appeared on refrigerator magnets, calendar covers, even atop bobble head dolls. In photographs, he is shown giving a thumbs-up sign to the viewer, reinforcing the notion that “Papa Francesco” is an informal man of the people. This imagery of a religious leader sometimes called “The People’s Pope” matches some of the portrayals of his Chinese counterpart, a man often referred to now as “Xi Dada” (Big Papa Xi).

In Rome, writes Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig for The New Republic, “The Vatican’s Solution to Climate Change: Take from the Rich, Give to the Poor”

As planned, the workshop concluded with a joint statement “on the moral and religious imperative of dealing with climate change.” If the contents of that statement are any indication of the kind of thought that might be contained in Pope Francis’ upcoming encyclical on the environment, then we may well be awaiting the Pope’s most emphatic assault on global capitalism yet.

And while he’s at it, “Pope Francis calls for equal pay for women.”

Francis said the “radical equality” that Christianity proposes between husband and wife must bear new fruit.

“We should support with decisiveness the right to equal pay for equal work,” he said. “Why is it a given that women must earn less than men? No! They have the same rights. The disparity is pure scandal.”

Meanwhile, Nathan Schneider makes a call to “Occupy the Vatican” on #GritTV.

East, West, and all sorts of in between:

Ishaan Tharoor has helpfully shown how un-helpful (nevermind colonialist, racist, imperialist, etc.) definitions of “East” and “West” are in his “Map: Where the East and the West meet” for The Washington Post.

The map below is WorldViews’ attempt at mapping places in the world that have at some point been considered “where East and West meet” or “crossroads between East and West.” The length of the list says less about the places in question and more about the flimsiness of East and West as cultural constructs.

Patricia J. Williams writes powerfully about “The American Ritual of Racial Killings” for The Nation.

What strikes me most about the recent videos of black men dying and dying and dying is the repetition. They all seem familiar—as in: We’ve heard it before, and before, and then well before even that. The scenes splashed across the news have become almost ritualistic, prayerful; they have a narrative potency that seems to move of its own accord, an agency exceeding that of the humans involved, whether police or suspects, victims or bystanders. We all know the words, we all sing along. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the death of Walter Scott began with a litany like so many before it: He reached for my weapon, a struggle ensued, I feared for my life, the weapon discharged. Amen.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones argues that “memorial altars in Los Angeles offer resistance to the digital” and includes a beautiful series of altar photographs in “A Form of Faith” for The New Inquiry. 

The tempting slippage between altar and alterity has been expanded upon by at least one scholar. As a condensed, physical unit of curation, the altar can be seen as a passive disruption in the mechanisms of capitalist visuality, one that paradoxically expresses faith in the unseen while worshipping visibility itself.

In “Confront Death by Avoiding Fritos: The Gluten Lie, Fad Diets, and Foodie Faith” religion professor Alan Levinovitz explains the religious origins of food fads to Michael Schulson, of Religion Dispatches. 

You’re a scholar of classical Chinese religions. How’d you end up writing about gluten?

Over two thousand years ago, there were these proto-Taoist monks in China who advocated strongly for a grain-free diet. [They claimed that] you could live forever. You could avoid disease. You could fly and teleport. Your skin would clear up.

I saw this countercultural rejection of grains, and then I saw almost the exact same thing, with the same kinds of hyperbolic claims, happening again with books like Grain Brain and Wheat Belly. And I thought to myself, you know, it’s funny, people are trying to debunk these fad diets with scientific evidence, but what they’re not realizing is that really these beliefs aren’t scientific at all. They’re wrapped in scientific rhetoric, but ultimately they’re quasi-religious beliefs that are based on superstition and myth.

Adam Brereton argues for the idea of “Anzac Day as Australian religion: can bloody defeat ever really be sacred” in The Guardian.

Our politicians talk about our defeat there in religious terms: as a so-called sacred sacrifice, a baptism of fire or a crucible for a newly federated nation. Perhaps religious language is the only way to properly express the scale of suffering experienced during the first world war; more cynically, to sacralise Gallipoli is to give it scale and moral significance it perhaps does not deserve, and to place it outside criticism. As the poet Les Murray says, when we glorify Gallipoli we find ourselves as the celebrants at a human sacrifice. In one of his war poems, The Muddy Trench, he puts this whole theology in the mouth of a terrified soldier: “The true god gives his flesh and blood. Idols demand yours off you.”

Molly Solomon reports for NPR, “Construction of Giant Telescope in Hawaii Draws Natives’ Ire.”

In Hawaii, a battle is going on over the future of a mountaintop. Native Hawaiians say it’s sacred ground, while astronomers say it’s the best place in the world to build a massive, 18-story telescope.

While on another mountaintop, “Tea Tuesdays: Tea, Tao and Tourists – China’s Mount Hua is Three-Part Harmony.”

Most tourists come to scale the precipitous peaks and take in the views. But that hasn’t abated Mount Hua’s religious significance. Its five peaks create the shape of a lotus flower, revered by Taoists for its wisdom and openness. The mountains, which were a place for pilgrimage for emperors of past dynasties, are still dotted with several influential temples. Mount Hua is one of the five sacred mountains in China, and it is the site of many legends involving deities and immortality.

Jassim Matar of Al Jazeera reports on “Siberia’s resurgent shamanism.”

“When the USSR collapsed, a lot of different religions revived and Tengerism – our religion – was among them,” said Barir Djambalovich, head shaman of the Circle of Tengerism, an organisation comprising more than 100 shamans in Ulan Ude, a city 5,600km east of Moscow.

And, lastly, Rembert Browne “Going Way Too Deep Down the Rabbit Hole With Nicki Minaj’s Recent Bar Mitvah Appearance” in Grantland. 

You’ve had 18 months to prepare for the moment when it’s NBD to hold Nicki’s hand. In a matter of months, you will be at the bottom of the food chain, as a ninth-grade boy, so these are your glory days. And you know every action you take, the younger boys will watch, will be amazed by, will talk about, indefinitely.

***

Still not feeling fully caught up on what’s been happening? Past links round-ups can be found here:

Talal Asad, Taylor Swift, Turbans, and more! (April 2015)

Passover, Prison, Pop Music, and more! (March 2015)

The Crusades, Anti-Vaxxers, Chocolate Gods, and  more! (February 2015)

Paris, Witches, the CNN Apocalypse, and more! (January 2015)

#black lives matter, #Illridewithyou, TL;DR Bible Stories, and more! (December 2014)

Hasidim, Mormons, Borges and more! (November 2014)

Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza, and more! (August 2014)

Prison Churches, Museums, and, of course, Hobby Lobby (July 2014)

***

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Pamela Gellar, Prophesy, PEN, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

“The other day I was remembering everything we used to do. Just getting them up and dressed and in the car… Oh I hated it.”  So said a 50-something woman at the restaurant table behind me last night as I blissfully devoured my meal in solitude. I’ll admit to getting some satisfaction from hearing parents talk about the challenges of parenting. It’s not one of those raging satisfactions, accompanied by a wicked or smug cackle. More like the feeling you get when you turn onto an unfamiliar street and note that there are indeed parked cars facing the same direction you’re headed in. Ok, you tell yourself, it’s all right to go this way.

There’s a spate of media at the moment extolling childlessness, giving those who never became parents (or have decided not to in the future) the sense that we are not the only ones. While much of the commentary, like Susan Shapiro’s essay this week at the New York Times blog “Motherlode,” shakes a finger at women, warning, “do it now or you’ll regret it,” a notable set of articles takes an alternate tone: we never had children and we’re quite happy, thank you very much. In an article for Longreads, Sabine Heinlein writes, “Spoiler alert: I don’t have a change of heart at the end of this essay. This is a story about not changing my mind and not having regret.” Heinlein, 42, avoids her regular deli after the owner urges her to become a mother. “But one must,” he tells her. The next time they need milk, Heinlein sends here husband for it, knowing that the owner is unlikely to impose his family imperative on a man.

Last month Michelle Huneven wrote at the New York Times, that she was never really ready for children, thanks to a childhood that left her reeling emotionally. A new book, from which Huneven’s essay is adapted, Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids, was published on March 31st. The volume’s editor, Meghan Daum, has given several interviews that are drawing hundreds of comments, like one at Huffington Post, in which Daum says she wanted talented writers and thinkers to tackle the subject of childlessness. (The interview was liked 3.9 thousand times on Facebook.) The book’s title pokes fun at the unfair but usual attributes ascribed to those who don’t want to parent: selfishness, shallowness, self-absorption. “It’s funny because those kinds of accusations or just labels, they often come from people who have kids, but more often I hear them from people who’ve chosen not to have kids!” says Daum. “It’s almost like it’s easier somehow to say that you’re selfish or want to buy expensive shoes than it is to say, ‘Hey, this just isn’t for me. This isn’t something that I want to do.'”

More than 15 percent of women between 40 and 44 do not have children, a number that has doubled since the late 1970s. The U.S. is not the only country experiencing a decline in birth rates; countries, from Japan to Germany to France, have seen a similar decline over the past few decades. In 2008, Kathryn Joyce (The Revealer’s former managing editor), noted that some of the fear surrounding birthrate declines stemmed from racial panic. “It’s ‘the baby bust,’ ‘the birth dearth,’ ‘the graying of the continent,’” wrote Joyce for The Nation, “modern euphemisms for old-fashioned race panic as low fertility among white ‘Western’ couples coincides with an increasingly visible immigrant population across Europe.” In subsequent years Joyce went on to write about the Quiverfull movement—American Evangelicals who shun birth control in order to produce as many Christian children as possible… for the wellbeing of “traditional” families and the religious future of the country—and the related adoption boom that has captivated Christian churches across the country. Pope Francis may have sounded like a counter to those who support large broods when he suggested Catholics not “breed like rabbits,” but he and his church have failed to lift Catholicism’s burdensome restriction on birth control, leaving husbands and wives, if they still want to follow the Pope’s reproduction advice, sleeping in separate rooms.

Proud childlessness, as espoused in Daum’s book and Heinlein’s article, is a counter to racial and religious concerns. It engages ideas of choice, environmental sustainability, and, if not explicitly, it works to take the shame out of abortion and other modern methods of birth control. All moves I support in theory. Yet, there is something to the tone of the recent “childless and proud” media blitz that is disconcerting to me.

My own baby clock never ticked. At 46, I’m perfectly (even quite thankfully) happy with my decision to not become a mother. But living through decades of fertility without having a child has not been easy. I’ve been on birth control, of one form or another, since my early 20s. Without regret, I’ve had two abortions, one while happily partnered-up. I’d hate to calculate the costs of remaining childless and of course I never will, not least because I’m happy with how things have turned out and because I know my health care measures were still cheaper than 18 years (or more!) of parenting plus college fees.

Compare my life and career to that of my sister. After five years of marriage, she and her husband decided to have children. More than 13 years—and two gorgeous, un-self–conscious amazing daughters I couldn’t imagine life without—later, my sister, who has two master’s degrees and lives in semi-rural Pennsylvania, is working as a part-time nanny, unable to find work that employs her skills. We’re both very happy with our choices, but I’ve managed to sidestep the financial challenges and career pitfalls that accompany motherhood in this country. It breaks my heart that my smart and wise sister has had to choose between being a good mother and following her own career.

I know that it’s a privilege for me to be childless. Only because of my class and financial and health care resources have I had a healthy and rich sex life that didn’t lead to motherhood. Sure I’ve had family members chide me for my decision to not become a mother. Particularly when traveling in foreign countries, where more traditional ideas of women’s roles in society are deeply entrenched, I’ve been criticized for my childless lifestyle. But I know that it’s no coincidence that most of the women (and men) currently extolling childlessness come from a segment of society, like I do, where making that decision is possible. (A 2014 post at New York Magazine quoting 25 famous women on their decision to remain childless includes only three or four women of color, including Condoleezza Rice, Oprah and Margaret Cho.) Choice is easier for women of some demographics than others.

And that’s what makes me a little uncomfortable about the recent spate of articles. The tone sometimes smacks of protesting (the curious deli man’s comments, for instance) a bit too much. Yes, I think, go on about your fortuitous ability to make a choice. But at least acknowledge that you’re only able to do so because of class and privilege.

“This country has a way of not supporting women no matter what choice they make,” journalist Helaine Olen told me by email. “Women without children feel judged. Women with children feel overwhelmed. We turn on each other instead of demanding a just society that offers support for all of our choices and offers help and care when we need it.” Olen’s comment is astute. Support for women’s choices, no matter what they are, and the will to provide the resources necessary to make choice possible somehow get lost in the babble about lifestyle. It’s one thing to avoid the oppression of your kindly grandmother asking where the kids are; it’s an entire other thing to avoid the sexual and financial oppression of your government. Lack of basic family planning services, unequal pay for women, inadequate or nonexistent child care programs, and tax policies that favor “traditional” families all pressure women to conform to the mothering role that the likes of Daum and Heinlein have been lucky enough to avoid. Leavening the recent spate of “childless and proud” with a dose of activism is helpful. I suggest Lizz Winstead’s “Lady Parts Justice.” “Behind every successful uterus is a man calling her a whore while cutting her pay,” said Winstead  in a recent spoof on the state of the union address, the “state of the uterus address.”

What articles and books extolling childlessness inadvertently highlight is not how acceptable it is today to not have children, but how difficult it is to develop an environment where everyone has access to the resources necessary to make an informed and satisfying decision on parenthood. The broad existence of childless pride is not proof that we’re on the road to progress; in fact the challenges for women have been coming hard and fast the past few years. And from a minority faction in our country that nonetheless exercises great influence over public policy: social conservatives.

The notion that a “traditional family” is superior to other social formations—particularly for women and children—still has powerful influence in our culture. Bolstered by state-level restrictions on abortion and contraception that limit women’s access to family planning and by the use of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to give institutions and corporations inordinate control over individuals’ life choices (like the Supreme Court’s ruling last year on Hobby Lobby, which allows employers to determine whether health insurance covers their employees’ birth control) women’s autonomous decision making is often crudely sacrificed for the righteous or inaccurate belief that there’s a right way to be a (Christian) family.

If you live in a part of the country where those ideas are less “closely held,” if you have the financial resources to get the health care access you need, if your community supports women’s equality, you’re able to get around the laws and pressures that enforce a limited women’s role. Unfortunately, disastrously, if you don’t have those benefits, as many in lower class or minority groups in this country don’t, you’re left without many options. Amidst all the ink spilled about the joys of childlessness, it would be refreshing to see more thrown at the support of women’s choices, regardless of what they are.

***

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 January 2016.

The post Choosing Childlessness appeared first on The Revealer.

“black is space

well, sometimes”

— Sun Ra

Area 51: The Alien Interview is an 86-minute “documentary,” first released on VHS tape in 1997 by a small film producer and distributor called Rocket Pictures. It starts like this:

Fade in on a New Mexico highway, stretching to the horizon across a landscape of level sand. Enter actor Steven Williams (Fox Mulder’s angry informant from the second season of The X-Files). He’s wearing a tan leather jacket, buttoned up. His expression is grave.

“Interest in U.F.O.s and Area 51 is at an all time high,” he says, to the camera. “Last year a highly rated T.V. special and best selling home video purported to show an actual autopsy of an alien being from the famous Roswell, New Mexico crash of 1947.” Williams takes a breath and paces away. The camera tracks him, framing the man against low mountains. “Many people, and even some experts, believe that autopsy footage was genuine,” he says.

“If that was indeed the body of an alien being from another world, could the footage in this program be the first hard, visual evidence of an actual living and breathing alien being? An alien being communicating in an interview with a highly covert arm of the U.S. government?”

Steven Williams

The shot moves close. Williams fills the screen. “If the footage we’re about to show you is genuine,” he says, “then this could very well be the most important video in the history of mankind.”

The tape makes you wait for half an hour before showing the actual “interview.” In the interim, it builds suspense: cutting from talking heads to military stock footage to bargain basement “reenactments” of extraterrestrial encounters.

Finally, the reveal is made — a puppet, clearly.

“Genuine” can be a complicated word.

On December 10th, 1946, a Curtiss Commando C46 took off from the El Toro marine base in San Diego, headed for Seattle’s Sand Point Naval Air Station. All in all, it held 32 men — 29 marine privates and three crew. Like the C46s used for marine transport, it was unpressurized. It flew low.

A storm kicked up. At 4:13 that afternoon, the aircraft’s pilot made radio contact with a Civil Aeronautics Administration station in Toledo, Washington. The C46’s wings were icing up, he said.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, the plane went down. Snow on the mountains and rain in the valleys stymied the first round of search parties. By February 1947, the military’s effort to find their missing vessel and its men was winding down. Desperate, the families of the dead marines pooled their money into a cash reward, payable to anyone who could locate the wreck — five thousand dollars. By Summer, it was still available.

Kenneth Arnold was 32 that year. He had his own business and a private plane. The former was Great Western Fire Control Supply, the latter a Callair A-2, a twin-engine craft Popular Mechanics had dubbed “the Mountain Dodger.” On June 24th, Arnold took his A-2 out from Chehalis, Washington, headed for a job in Yakima. On the way, he spent an hour scouring the peak of Mount Rainier, searching for the vanished transport.

He didn’t find it, but he did find something. According to next day’s issue of Portland’s East Oregonian newspaper, Arnold “sighted nine saucer-like aircraft flying in formation,” while circling above the mountain. They were, continued the Oregonian, “extremely bright — as if they were nickel plated — and flying at an immense rate of speed […] about 1200 miles an hour.”

“It seemed impossible,” Arnold told the paper, “but there it is — I must believe my eyes.”

Kenneth Arnold

The pilot’s “saucer-like aircraft” were soon buffed and blunted by their tumble through the national press. By the end of the year, “flying saucers” had arrived on the American scene. Anomalous, almost supernaturally “advanced” aircraft filled the country’s skies, screens and souls. It was a phenomenon perfectly calibrated to its historical moment. Extraterrestrials and advanced aircraft had been zipping across the covers of pulp magazines and through the panels of comic strips since the 1930s, and theosophists had been receiving revelation from other planets in various forms since the 1880s. After 1947, Arnold’s “bright” saucers found their way into the center of both discourses.

According to one of its founders, the strange genius Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, modern Theosophy is a religious philosophy predicated on advancing “the Universal Brotherhood of

Humanity” through engagement with scriptures originating in a wide variety of traditions, with a special emphasis on the “Brahmanical, Buddhist and Zoroastrian.” Blavatsky, along with former seeker Henry Steel Olcott, founded their Theosophical Society in 1875, while living in New York. Together, they did much to advance knowledge of Hindu and Buddhist thinking in the West, setting the stage for the explosion of experimental religious collage that would come to characterize America’s twentieth century. In 1888, Blavatsky produced her most significant work: The Secret Doctrine, a three-volume summary of the wisdom she claimed to have received from a secret order of spiritual masters. Her teachers, she claimed, were human beings that had perfected their souls by traveling between many bodies, achieving almost divine mastery of morality, spirituality and, implicitly, the physical sciences. For the most part, Blavatsky located these elevated beings in Tibet. Several of their orders, however, were operative on the planet Venus. In 1912  Theosophist Charles Leadbetter elaborated the concept of these extraterrestrial “Lords of the Flame” by positing that the masters dwelling off-planet were, in fact, the highest ranking.

In 1953 George Adamski, the founder of a spiritual order heavily influenced by theosophy, published The Flying Saucers Have Landed, with co-author Desmond Leslie. In it, Blavatsky’s ascended masters become Adamski’s “space brothers,” a race of enlightened Venusians in command of fantastic spiritual technology. While some of these “brothers” were earthmen of remarkable religious accomplishment in the manner of Blavatsky’s “Lords,” The Flying Saucers Have Landed vastly expanded the scope of this conception. Life on Earth, argued Adamski and Leslie, began in the stars.

“Venus,” they wrote “is ‘Home of the Gods.’ From Venus in the year BC 18, 617,841 came the first vehicle out of space to alight on our planet.” At that time, human beings were little more than apes. “Evolution had gone so far but could go no farther,” they said. “And so from our nearest neighbor came the greatest of Venus, ‘the Sanat Kumara’, ‘The Lord of the Flame’, the highly perfected humans from an older branch of the planetary family.” It was this august group which elevated humankind above the animals, providing prototypes of every world mythology in the process. 

As the twentieth century wore on, a great array of “U.F.O. Religions,” organized and otherwise, sprouted from the wet soil. Some, like Raëlism or George King’s Aetherius Society, were recognizably “religious,” and thus concerned with the production of canonical doctrines or the organization of church hierarchies. For the most part, however, U.F.O. religion is defined by the religion of U.F.O.s — the vast, contradictory and heterogeneous enterprise of investigating and analyzing flying saucers and their tributary phenomenon. At the core of this activity, the basic conceptions of Blavatsky and Adamski remain, filling out the interior of Arnold’s mystery aircraft as surely as he had noted their “nickel plated” skin.

In general, the alien beings at the heart of U.F.O. culture are held to be technologically superior to human beings, and often spiritually superior as well. Their hand is seen in legend and history; their spaceships have been spotted in the prophet Ezekiel’s majestic image of God’s chariot-throne and in the Hindu writings revered by Blavatsky. Often, their unearthly influence is responsible for raising humanity from the evolutionary muck. Just as often, the aliens seem terribly concerned with the human race’s yearn for suicide. That flying saucers first appeared in the immediate aftermath of the atomic bomb has seemed significant to many in the U.F.O. community.

Saucer culture, in other words, provides a space for rumination about humanity’s spiritual beginnings and its relationship with superior beings. Often, it functions as a coat of science-fictional paint, disguising the “religious” mechanisms implicit in speculation about the moral fate of humankind and its relationship to a larger cosmos. Its prophets murmur in paperback books, and chant of their abductions on late-night radio.

Occasionally, they issue videocassettes.

***

The night of May 23rd, 1997, found Art Bell in unsually high spirits.

“It is going to be a ve-r-r-ry interesting morning,” he said, addressing his listeners. For Bell, the original host of the paranormal call-in and interview show “Coast to Coast A.M.”, they numbered in the millions. That night, he said, would feature an appearance by a very special guest — a guest with no last name. “The mysterious ‘Victor.’”

Victor, Bell explained, “claims he smuggled a video — out of Area 51 — of an interrogation, of a questioning, of an actual alien.” The experience had made him paranoid. “Victor will be using a voice changer,” said Bell. “As you can imagine … he does not want his, uh, voice recognized.”

Later in the program, Victor appeared, his voice a growl of static.

Victor

“I cannot say, specifically, how I came into possession of this tape,” he said, to the A.M. airwaves. The general circumstances surrounding the acquisition, however, were institutional. “Area 51 is now defunct as an operating location for the government’s alien program,” he said. As part of relocating its resources, Area 51‘s analogue records were digitized en masse — placing highly secure files, temporarily, in less secure locations. Victor snagged the interview and then delivered it (for a fee) to a small film and television production company called Rocket Pictures. Area 51: The Alien Interview was released later that year.

On “Coast to Coast,” Victor seemed flummoxed by his dealings with Rocket. They demanded too much of him, he said. Too much time, too much disclosure.  They couldn’t stick to a schedule to save their lives. He took similar exception to Bell. Their conversation was tense and argumentative.

At one point, however, the informant grew emotional. Although determined to keep his involvement (or lack of involvement) with military’s “alien program” obscure, Victor did admit to, at one point, meeting an extraterrestrial in person — although he refused to specify where and when the event occurred. “What did you feel when you were in its presence?” Bell asked. “Can you describe that at all?”

Victor paused. He took few rough breaths, almost panting, then spoke:  “I suppose I felt sorrow. I felt anger. I, like everyone who has ever come into contact with these beings, felt an intense presence within me that was utterly foreign to my experience before that time.” He paused again.

“I must say that this has changed me,” he said. “It-it has had an effect that I did not choose.” Bell changed the subject.

“The video, of course, is incredible,” he said, directing his listeners to view still frame excerpts on the “Coast to Coast” website. More incredible still was the religious context Victor provided for it. The aliens, he said, were only representatively biological: their bodies, as pure mechanisms, were non-functional. To the beings themselves, the physical form was only a “vessel” — inseparable from any other external technology, and as easily exited as hatchback car. Humans were the same way, he implied: pure spirit, though largely unaware of it. They can trade their vessels, too.

The beings in government holding suffered from chronic illness, he continued. The one depicted in the Interview had recently died. “I believe that these beings cannot be harmed by us in any significant way,” Victor explained. “But at the same time I believe they are setting us with a sort of test… I don’t want to make too many religious allusions, but for some reason … my mind keeps coming back to the story of Jesus.”

  The similarity, he told Bell, went farther.. “I believe […] these beings have been here before, and the program that they are performing upon the human race is as old as the human race — certainly as old as consciousness.”

Bell interjected. “What you’re saying might lead some to believe that they are, in fact, the architect of the human race,” he said. “Is that…?”

“‘Architects’ is not a term that I would use, but in the sense that you mean it I believe I would agree, yes.”

Like Adamski, Victor’s aliens are far superior to human beings both spiritually and technologically. Like Blavatsky’s masters, their spirits travel easily from body to body — their “vessels” being an historically nonspecific riff on reincarnation. Although Victor is vague on the exact year, his ascended masters are responsible for igniting the human flame in our pre-conscious ancestors.

Victor’s religious claims grow darker on the tape of The Alien Interview itself. Appearing with his face in shadow and his voice still electronically disguised, the informant discloses a world of secrecy and stupidity; of revelation disguised.

The alien, Victor explained, has been voluntarily speaking to covert elements of the military since 1989. Its degree of spiritual and scientific advancement, however, makes these interviews seem more like a judgment than a boon.

“The physicists and engineers are, frankly, frustrated,” said Victor. “Possibly concepts are getting lost because all the information has to come through a telepath, but also it may be that the bulk of their scientific knowledge is just too advanced to be translated into our primitive conceptual framework. It’s analogous to a human scientist [trying] to translate quantum mechanics into the grunts and screeches of a chimpanzee.”

The mismatch was demoralizing. “There’s a high attrition rate for scientists in the program,” he continued. “You’d think they’d be energized by the challenge, but a lot of them take the ego deflation very hard.”

The being, he said, was unable to differentiate between the spirit and technology. For it, the concepts were united. For human beings, only its “spiritual concepts” could be easily comprehended. It was a fact that brought Victor no comfort.

“You’re not going to have much luck making your dog understand calculus,” he said. “But if you pet him on the head and say ‘good dog’ aren’t you communicating spiritually? And doesn’t the animal control officer say ‘good dog’ when he comes to put some poor stray to sleep?” The aliens, Victor implied, were making some obtuse judgment of the human soul. “When you’re dealing with beings whose intellect is so far beyond your own, I don’t think it’s safe to assume they have your best interests at heart,” he said.

Further complicating matters is the government of the United States, under whose auspices the alien interviews have been conducted. “The government’s motive is control,” Victor explained. “The people at the top of this program are intellectually very average. They’re not capable of making proper use of what’s been handed to them, but they have no intention of letting anyone else ever get a chance to solve the puzzle.” The result has been, apparently, disastrous. Whatever transcendence the beings might have offered ended up shredded by human ignorance, their “vessels” dying, one-by-one, in an unlit bunker in Nevada.

In 2008, Rocket conducted a follow-up interview with Victor for the Interview’s DVD release. In it, the disguised informant expanded on his theme of human failure. “My contempt for the viewers of [this] documentary over the last eleven years knows no bounds,” he said. “They’ve been like children, mocking it or, on the other hand, credulously accepting it with no attempt to evaluate the material on its own merits or to discover any new material to support or debunk it!” Again, the revelation had fallen on deaf ears. Now, he implied, it was already too late. “The end” was coming.

The interviewer from Rocket was taken aback. “So, what you’re saying is that the biblical end times are upon us?” he asked.

“It’s rather childish to call them biblical,” said Victor, “the Bible is just a smokescreen […] a deliberate misinformation campaign started by those who first encountered the aliens and first kept that knowledge to themselves.”

By the end, he’s babbling. “My head is a beehive,” he says. “Aprés moi, le déluge, le déluge solaire.” In part, it’s a quote often attributed to Louis the XV: “After me, the deluge.”

***

The tape Victor claims to have snuck out of Area 51 is about twelve minutes long. It consists of a single, unmoving shot of a dark interrogation room containing a metal table, a shadowy man in the foreground and a scattering of electronic equipment. It has no audio. In a spotlight at the center left of frame, bobs the bulbous face of the creature. Its movements are slight at first — almost avian. As the silent interview continues, however, the being begins to wretch, spasming uncontrollably. Instantly, it’s surrounded by doctors. One of them jams a flashlight in its small jaws.

End of footage.

It’s a hoax, of course. Victor’s acting is little better than the alien’s puppetry, and Rocket’s lack of tact and production value does little to convince viewers of the Interview’s veracity. Still, there is something “genuine” about the tape — an expression of modern woe and anxiety. In The Alien Interview, paranoia suffocates Blavatsky’s hopeful esotericism, point by point. Victor’s “space brothers” are punished for their enlightenment; their wisdom wasted on stiff-necked thugs, credulous believers and unthinking bureaucrats. The spiritual achievements of Victor’s beings serve only to remind him, and his viewers, of their degradations. His apocalypse comes with no millennium attached, no promise of rebirth — just final violence, as the aliens put right the mistake they made in trusting humankind with some portion of divinity.

It’s a straight-to-video philosophy, and fitting for the final years of the twentieth century. Here, behind time-codes and distortions, is a portrait of God in 1997. Beaten and sickly, it beams its truth to uninterested Air Force personnel, whose interest extends only to engineering principles of flying saucers. All revelations classified.

***

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 Area 51: The Alien Interview appeared first on The Revealer.

By Ed Simon

“Thus saith the Lord, I inform you, that I overturn, overturn, overturn.”

– Abiezer Coppe (1649)

“I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist…”

– Johnny Rotten (1977)

On June 7^th 1977 the recently signed Sex Pistols chartered a boat to cruise down the Thames past the Houses of Parliament, planning to play their single “God Save the Queen.” Cynics have long pointed out that the band was more media creation of producer Malcolm McClaren than they were a spontaneous outcry of disaffected youth. Yet the Debordian spectacle of Johnny Rotten snarling out “God save the Queen/She ain’t no human being” across the placid summer Thames only two days before Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee river procession would traverse the same waters was undeniably anarchic. Whether or not the Sex Pistols were more commercialism than revolutionary is of secondary importance to how shocking the planned (and failed) event was. It’s been noted that the week the song hit number one the BBC left the title blank. Even if more media event than anything, one must admit that McClaren had absorbed whatever influences – performance art, American rock and roll, anti-establishment fashion and attitude – to generate a potent combination.

Readers who are familiar with Greil Marcus’ magisterial rock music critique Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20^th Century may have heard of another group that were, if not an influence, at least a spiritual ancestor to the group. Always idiosyncratic and expansive in his interests, Marcus fingered an obscure seventeenth-century religious group with the descriptive name of the “Ranters” as being a type of early modern punk movement. Much as the punks refused to see anything as off limits – spewing obscenity, blasphemy, and political incorrectness all in the interest of challenging the mores of a suffocating and corrupt society – the Ranters paradoxically saw the road to salvation as being paved with the actions of sin. Much as Rotten and Sid Vicious would offend the middle-class sensibilities of a British public on the verge of Thatcherism, the Ranters addressed a public who had survived multiple civil wars and the execution of their King only to find themselves ruled under the increasingly conformist Commonwealth government of Puritan Oliver Cromwell.

Now lay-readers have a new resource for reading the Ranters directly in Nigel Smith’s fascinating anthology A Collection of Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution. A Princeton professor of English Smith has long elucidated the politics, culture, religion and literature of the seventeenth-century, writing foundational works on Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and the explosion of print at the end of the civil wars. This is Smith’s second edition of this anthology, the first appearing in 1983 when he was, amazingly, still just a graduate student. Following the advice of the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill, Smith edited the works of Abiezer Coppe, Laurence Clarkson and others into the first popular anthology of radical non-conformist religious writings from the English civil war. It is an important contribution not just for scholars, but for the general public as well. Smith has provided an invaluable servxice, a collection of fascinating religious writings that most people are scarcely familiar with, yet whose study can provide important elucidation not only on a particular time period, but also wider contemporary issues of religion and politics.

As Smith writes “The literature that is still read today from the seventeenth century is incredibly rich in its originality and its enriching value: the later Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Donne, Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Milton, Marvell, Margaret Cavendish to name a few. The Ranter writings, in their outrageous way, are right up there with them.” In reading through Smith’s anthology all of the authors are fascinating, but Coppe stands above the rest as the true prophetic genius of the group. In the tradition of all great prophets from Elijah and Ezekiel to Muhammad and Joseph Smith, Coppe found his initial theophanic experience to be terrifying. Journeying to hell, beset on all sides by demons, forced by the Godhead into painful bibliophagy, Coppe subverted and altered the expectations of the English language to convey an experience of the ineffable.

In his works we see an attempt to push English to its limits. If as Ludwig Wittgenstein says “Whereof we cannot speak thereof one must be silent” Coppe attempted to bring voice to a quite chamber. Coppe writes “If I here speake in an unknown tongue, I pray that I may interpret when I may.” He distinguished between the literal and the allegorical in scripture, the physically resurrected Christ is less important that the internally resurrected Christ of the human heart. He performed seemingly satirical and extreme pastiches of the scriptural idiom of the King James Bible, but like poet-prophets after him such as William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg he attempted to take mere language to its very limits, to apply signifiers to signifieds that exist in a transcendent realm. In his mimesis of scriptural language we see chiasmus, tricolons, and repetitions. And always he writes with a relentless logorrhea. As an angel tells him “Go up to London, to London, that great city, write, write, write.” At some points Coppe alters the very structures of syntax and grammar, words run backwards, and sideways, English letters transform into Hebrew, a sentence alters into an Aleph and then the Latin letter “O,” while Cope provides gloss on his mystical etymology explaining it represents the divine. At one point Coppe gives us dueling concurrent panels of passages, with paratextual glossing that challenges readers to construct their own official textual certainty. In brilliantly executed writings that would be easy to boringly dismiss as mere products of a diseased intelligence we see experiments with language that we wouldn’t see again till the avant-gardes of the twentieth century with the decadents, the symbolists, the surrealists, and the Dadaists.

The anarchism on the page reflects the anarchism of the era. This period saw a veritable Cambrian Explosion of unique religious sects and denominations, and I would argue that alongside the dozens of gnostic groups which flourished in the first centuries of Christianity as well as the American Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth-century, this period is one of the most creative in Christianity. It’s a matter of historical debate if the incredible flowering of unique religious groups with names like the Seekers, Brownists, Grindletonians, the Familists, the Muggletonians, the Levellers, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchy Men and of course the Ranters merely used the disorder of the English Revolution to emerge from the depths where they had already existed, if the chaos of the civil wars generated these movements, or as is most likely some combination of the two.

The two classic works of history that reinforce the idea that apocalypticism is merely the working-man’s utopianism are Norman Cohn’s 1957 The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages and Christopher Hill’s 1972 The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution. It is these two seminal academic works that reintroduced the Ranters, and though the Ranters’ reputation was so notorious that some conservative historians argued that Hill was misreading the record to invent the group, an honest reading of the record shows the Ranters were very much real (if small). Cohn argued (as indeed Marcus did) that the Ranters were representative of a certain chthonic force that operates within the oppressed human soul and that must burst forth every so often to challenge the hegemonic structures that control and order our lives. The Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin called this phenomenon the “carnivalesque,” and while identifying it in history and literature he was agnostic as to whether it represented a legitimate means of rebellion or whether it was simply a pressure valve utilized by the ruling classes and then appropriated into a means of oppression (as every Sex Pistols t-shirt sold at Hot Topic evidences). If the Ranters are part of a chain of the carnivalesque it is one that goes back to the medieval Brethern of the Free Spirit and which looks forward to the anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth-century. For them the central commandment is that which Rabelais carved above his antinomian abbey at Thelema (and which the Satanist Aleister Crowley coopted as his personal motto): “Do what thou wilt.”

The Ranters taught, believed, preached and supposedly lived an antinomian – that is, in complete rejection of the Law – gospel. As their greatest proponent Abiezer Coppe wrote in 1649, the year of regicide, “And all man’s preachings, hearing, teachings, learnings, holinesses, righteousnesses religions, is as Theft, Murder, and Adultry.” Their hermeneutic may have been one of rejecting literalism and embracing allegory, or casting off the chaff for the kernel as one of their favorite images had it, but if anything they took Christ’s radical words not just literally but to their logical conclusion. Not only that, but they fully embraced Luther’s doctrine of sole FIde and sole Gratia to the most radical possible understanding. Catholic polemicists had long accused Protestants inaccurately of antinomianism but Coppe, Laurence Clarkson, Joseph Salmon, Joseph Bauthumely and other Ranters embraced the radical implications of faith alone. If we are to believe their critics like Thomas Edwards in his massive 1646 Gangraena, the Ranters’ antinomianism was a type of sacred libertinism which embraced ranting (surely), blasphemy, fornication, perversion, drunkenness, and whore-mongering as sacraments in a world were sacraments did not exist. Not only that, they were politically radical as well. If, as Christ taught, “the last shall be first” than the Ranters fully embraced a radically egalitarian if not communistic prophetic vision that warns the entrenched 1% of the mid-sixteenth-century that a reckoning shall soon be upon them. “Behold, behold, behold, I the eternall God, the Lord of Hosts, who am that mighty Leveller, am coming (yea even at the doors) to Levell in good earnest, to Levell to some purpose, to Levell with a witnesses, to Levell the Hills with the Valleyes, and to lay the Mountaines low” as Coppe writes in his prose masterpiece A Fiery Flying Roll.

Coppe’s reference to that “mighty Leveller” would not have been lost on his audience. In 1649, the year of A Fiery Flying Roll’s publication, a group calling itself the True Levellers (or Diggers) led by Gerard Winstanley occupied a plot of land outside London named St. George’s Hill which would be used for collective farming, producing free produce to be shared by the common people. In a series of brilliant pamphlet’s Winstanley argued a radical economic policy using the rhetoric of scripture – a theology that had at its core the idea that the Fall occurred with the invention of private property. Reacting to the enclosure of common lands which had been increasing at a rapid pace since the late fifteenth century, the Levellers took their name not just from the Coppeian image of God making all inequities level, but from literally levelling the hedges which separated private estates. And while the Levellers have not unjustly been compared to the Occupy movement of the modern day, they operated much closer to the sources of power with several prominent officers in Cromwell’s New Model Army having Leveller sympathies and with their revolutionary politics playing a central role in the Putney Debates that tried to establish the parrameters of an English Republic. The Ranters arguably emerged in reaction to the violent suppression of the Levellers; when seemingly possible political reform was eliminated Ranters like Coppe forged an even more radical ideology.  While Ranters used the occasion of the collapse of licensing laws in the English Republic to embrace a type of free speech which had been unknown in the Western world, they still had to battle official censure and punishment from an unsympathetic Parliament.

Marcus’ comparison to the punks of the 1970’s is interesting, but perhaps not as revelatory as it seemed when Lipstick Traces was first published. Indeed reading Smith’s anthology with its prophetic, incantatory, mystical language bolsters the arguments that the Ranters were far more radical than a few rock bands signed to a major record label more than thirty years ago. Rather the Ranters held a truly emancipatory theology and politics that were able to take biblical rhetoric and language (the “Great Code” of Western civilization as critic Northrop Frye had it) and to use these traditional tools of oppression in a subversive way.

The Ranters were not just political or social revolutionaries, they were religious ones as well, and they intuited a fundamental critique that radical politics has forgotten and traded in for an insipid materialism. This insight that the Ranters naturally understood was that the only means of resistance is at its heart religious, but the paradox is that the only systems ever worth resisting are, in themselves, also religious. That is to say that the mark of God and the mark of Cain are everywhere, even if they’re secretly hidden behind a faux-secularism. For the Ranters the oppressive systems of government, the market, and organized religion weren’t profane, they were their own types of sacred system, albeit one that is corrupt and that must be abolished – Mammon is a god after all.

And this is the same as it ever was – in a country and a world that sees the increasingly obscene concentration of fabulous wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer oligarchs, where the gulf between the mass number of people and these benknighted few becomes more and more extreme, where wooly-minded Libertarian utopians project their nightmares onto legislators’ paper, the insight of the Ranters that the very thing we’re resisting is somehow “religious” is more important than ever. Our system of oppression wants us to see it as rational, objective, material, scientific, but of course it is anything but. As Charles Baudelaire (that later “Ranter”) said “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist,” and so it is with the Cult of the Market. The Invisible Hand is a pagan idol as any other, and Coppe, Clarkson and the rest would have understood that the means to resisting corrupt religion is through reformed ritual.

Angel of The Revelation by William Blake

Much as some critics from a few years ago saw Winstanley in the Occupy movement, we should see Coppe in the possibilities of a new antinomian politics. There must be a call for a “Blakean Left,” for if there is any true inheritor to the ethos of the Ranters it is not commercialized rock music but William Blake. Indeed in Coppe, Clarkson and Salmon’s prose one sees the raw material that Blake would fashion into his own system (so as to avoid being enslaved by another man’s) slightly more than a century later. Historical contingency has had Blake categorized along with the Romantic poets, but where they saw an aestheticized art for art’s sake Blake made no such distinctions between poetry, art, life, and religion. Blake more properly belongs to Coppe and the Ranters than he does to Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Romantics. As an inheritor of the great non-conformist dissenting traditions of the seventeenth century Blake absorbed and encapsulated their teachings into his own heterodox bible. And like the Ranters he understood that the manipulation of religious language, texts, images, and ideas was the greatest means of resistance to Moloch’s armies, against the “dark satanic mills” of today’s modern day all-encompassing pagan religious, capitalism.

But as Coppe, and Blake understood, to rebel against these systems one must be honest enough to be a subversive. Like Abraham in his father’s workshop we must smash all idols of the mind. To rant, curse, swear, and blaspheme one declares independence from social tyrants and obedience to the higher God. It is to reject the Demiurge that is the Market, the Church, and the State and to return to a God who lives not within heaven but as allegory within every human’s heart. It’s a perilous and dangerous journey, especially for the individual. But as Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Smith has assembled for us the minutes of some of those meetings in the many mansions of our Father’s palace, it behooves us to read them and reapply their wisdom anew.

***

Ed Simon is a PhD Candidate in the English department of Lehigh University. His research focuses on religion and literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. He has been previously published in Salon, Religion Dispatches, the Revealer, the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, and the Public Domain Review among others. Currently he is the assistant editor of the Journal of Heresy Studies, and one of the founding members of the International Society for the Study of Heresy.

The post Preachers from the Palace of Wisdom, or: Ranterism in the UK appeared first on The Revealer.

It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood by Frida Berrigan, O/R Press, 2015.

A book cover with the words Berrigan and radical on it would certainly attract a Sixties loyalist like me.  As soon as I started to read news reports about the first Plowshares action on September 9, 1980, at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, I was hooked. After intensive spiritual preparation, nonviolence training, and community formation, eight activists armed only with hammers and vials of their own blood broke into the plant where the nose cones for the Mark 12A nuclear warheads were manufactured and enacted the biblical prophesy of Isaiah 2:4 to “beat your swords into plowshares.” For the next twenty years I was an admirer and sometimes protester. I’ve never had the courage to risk a long prison sentence though.

The US Plowshares movement coalesced around three charismatic leaders, Phil Berrigan a Josephite priest who died in 2002, his brother, the Jesuit priest and poet Dan Berrigan, who at the age of 93 is no longer active in the Movement, and Liz McAlister, a former Sacred Heart of Mary nun who continues to protest the US worship of the “gods of metal.” The Berrigan brothers’ and McAlister’s faithful leadership was guided by the principles formulated over their years at Jonah House, the Baltimore resistance community Liz and Phil founded in 1973. Jonah House,  a world-renowned Gospel-based community of peace activists devoted to ending the use of death-dealing weapons, still exists today.

The US Plowshares groups break into military bases and weapons production sites to call for disarmament and the abolition of war.  Activists have faced significant repression and lengthy prison sentences. Phil Berrigan spent about 11 years in prison for various actions. But their commitment to the work has never been diluted. While many of the Sixties peace groups disbanded after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, the Plowshares activists persist, quietly, dedicated to reminding citizens and politicians that nuclear weapons continue to pose a devastating threat to all humanity.

On Thanksgiving 1983, at the Rome Air Force Base, the group known as the Griffiss Plowshares hammered on “a god of metal,” the B-52 bomber. Liz left Phil and their three children in Baltimore, and, along with three women and three men, committed a dramatic act for the children of the world. As punishment for this act, she spent three years at Aldersen Federal Prison.  Today, McAlister and other Plowshares people are committed to ending the use of the newest god of metal, the drone.  Many people scorn these actions. “Do they really think they can destroy them all t ?” they ask.

But physically destroying all the weapons of war has never been the focus of this group’s nonviolent direct action.  Rather, their purpose is a combination of the service to the Gospel and to suffering people, an assertion of each community member’s faith and the desire to act out that faith by resisting warfare, and other state-sponsored forms of killing: capital punishment, lack of medical care, proper housing and nutrition for the poor, and the prisons, which Phil Berrigan described as places designed to silence dissent.  “We torture men and women in order to make them kinder and more productive,” he told his audiences. “We execute human beings to teach our children respect for human life.”

As in all things the old order changes, yielding place to new.  In the last thirty years, the gods of metal have continued to proliferate with the invention of new and more efficient killing machines. At the same time, a second generation of committed radicals, following a Gospel-inspired nonviolent way of life, has come together, in a loosely coordinated network of intentional communities, many of them members of Catholic Worker houses. Continuing a general pattern of prayer, reflection, and nonviolent direct disarmament actions connected to the Plowshares teachings, the new activists focus on the same goal, to end warfare before the nuclear winter descends upon the earth, and to make the world a place for all children to thrive.

As US militarism changed focus after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, some of the new radicals have also shifted their attention, standing witness for the prisoners at Guantanamo, who are not able to speak for themselves, possibly influenced by Liz McAlister’s weekly witness against capital punishment in front of the Baltimore Courthouse.

Liz McAlister holds onto a banner with her teeth while being arrested at the White House in 1979. (Elmer Maas Plowshares Collection)

Once again a Berrigan is in the thick of the nonviolent direct action. Phil and Liz’s eldest child Frida is a founding member of Witness Against Torture, a nonviolent direct action group focused on shutting down Guantanamo and ending torture.  She has walked the ground at Guantanamo with a group of committed activists trying to bring a glimmer of hope to the men who are still there, stripped of their humanity.  Frida stands for these men every year in the cold of the winter and the heat of the summer in front of the White House, to remind those with eyes to see and ears to hear that more than one hundred men are still caged in our names.  As her parents stood at Air Force bases and munitions’ manufacturing plants, Frida Berrigan witnesses, speaks and writes about these helpless prisoners, most of them not charged with a crime, another violent action committed by the US government.  Clearly the radicalism is as steadfast in the second generation as it was when the community of Jonah House was founded. As they say, “You can make it legal, but you can never make it right!”

Frida Berrigan and her siblings were raised at Jonah House in one of the poorest neighborhood of Baltimore. She went to protests with her parents and her younger siblings, Jerry and Kate, from the time she was old enough to hold a hand-lettered sign or her restless sister Kate. The Berrigan children lived a unique life in a peace and resistance community in which one of their parents was often away in prison, in which clothes were second hand, and dumpster diving was a game.

Frida Berrigan speaking at an anti-torture demonstration outside the White House in January 2010. (Facebook / Pax Christi)

Since her childhood at Jonah House, Frida Berrigan has been at countless demonstrations, has often risked arrest, and tooled herself for the Lamb’s War. After graduation from Hampshire College, she served as a researcher at the New American Foundation’s Arms and Security Initiative in New York City, writing and speaking about militarism.  A member of the Board of the War Resister’s League, she clearly gets it done.

But mothering? A book on child rearing braided together with Berrigan and radical? Of course Frida Berrigan has the credentials: she is a Berrigan radical and the mother of two children, stepmother of one. But why would resistance devotees be interested in reading a how-to about mothering?  Theories of toilet training, tantrums, toys that teach? What an odd combination, I thought, eager to read the part about living radically, but doubtful that mothering could be radical. Surely the preachy goblins of motherhood, “teach kids ambition, push  them to succeed in preschool” are not tantalizing the radical left?

Berrigan handles both parts of her book like a true journalist. She interviewed her mother Liz McAlister at length about childbirth, her own at Jonah House, and her mother-in-law, Joanne Sheehan, about the home birth of her son Patrick, Frida’s husband.  Gathering information and filtering it to form a narrative that would become her own, Berrigan writes about her decision to follow the examples of both these women and have a home birth.  This decision is the solid link between the world of nonviolent direct action and possibly the most direct action of all, bringing a life into the world as gently as possible.   

“As I thought about labor and birth, I also thought a lot about nonviolence—about how nonviolence demands that we are responsible and educated, and apply our beliefs to daily activity.  Nonviolence at a demonstration can look really different from nonviolence in our personal relationships or even how we treat ourselves, but it is all part of the same package.  Patrick and I envisioned a nonviolent birth experience, similar to our parents, a home birth that would be empowering, on our own terms, natural, and cheap!”

In a recent interview with Truthout, Frida explained her view of nonviolent direct mothering.  “I am trying to mother without fear and with hope. I am trying to mother without a lot of money or possessions or acquisitiveness. I am trying to mother with a lot of time for my kids, for friendships and for work for peace and justice – and that seems pretty rebellious in this society.”

Frida Berrigan is keeping up her own family’s tradition of being a beacon of contradiction. Other families’ ways of valuing time may not look like hers. But in our culture of 24/7 online shopping, constant social media, and streaming movies it is ironic that living a simple life is enough to make one seem like a radical. In all that she does at home and for creating a nonviolent world, Berrigan’s choices are intentional. She left a job at a think tank to live at the Catholic Worker, a community that scoffs at the false prospect of having everything. She made the choice to value time over money, relationships over recompense. When she moved from New York City to New London, Connecticut, she continued to choose the Jonah House way:  a life of divine obedience over the capitalist journey.. “It is a humbling, human, hard choice,” she writes. Instead of shopping for new clothes, she makes new friends. She has time to help out at her local food co-op and work in the community garden and write a book. With less worldly success, she can achieve what is more important to her. Giving love and creating peace for her family and for her community is her enactment of Dorothy Day’s patient reminder to Catholic Workers.  “Our goal is not to be successful.  Our goal is to be faithful.“

In this book, Frida argues that most parents try to keep their children safe by shielding them from the harshness of the world, cocooning them in the home, when kids really need street smarts. Berrigan advocates real world lessons in sharing and caring and helping and accepting help. Berrigan and her husband feel the call of both purpose and place. “We can raise our kids to be kind and fair and to stand up for one another if they see us doing that too.”  Their home is a place of nonviolence, a place of peace and laughter for them, their children, and friends. The furniture is more simple than chic; the toys are crayons and paper, not digital playrooms.

On a personal note, when Frida came to Cleveland to give a book talk, she brought along her young son Seamus and baby daughter Madeline, the living proof of nonviolent direct mothering. Meeting these two children was an awakening experience for me.  What Berrigan writes about actually exists! Seamus is less than three years old, yet he remembers the names of people he meets. He addresses cats by their names as he strokes their fur.  He notices everything in a room and asks sensible questions about what he sees.  An animated Frida chats with people after her talk, while Madeline sleeps comfortably in her infant sling and Seamus plays with other children.  Her children are at the center of her life, but they are not the domineering and domineered children whose mothers brag of their latest accomplishment, the proof of their parents’ success.  Madeline’s sling is practical:  it leaves Frida’s hands free to touch the hands of people asking questions about her talk. Madeline is not a necklace of achievement slung around her mother’s neck.

Frida Berrigan, Patrick Sheehan-Gaumer, and their children.

Frida and Patrick, a second-generation peace activist himself and a social worker, have found a way to live radically. Highly educated people, they have turned away from the society of acquisition.  They are not fixed upon an upward climbing graph that indicates more, much more, most.  Instead they exult in the time that they have to tend children and calm our violent world.  They have unbound themselves from the culture of ambition that entangles most of us.  At this point, I should issue a warning:  If your goals are deeply entrenched in the ambition culture and you might restate the principles of It Runs in the Family to read “Ambition drives people forward. Too many relationships and too much community hold people back. They will never succeed,” this is probably not the book for you.  But if you are willing to fight the fear of not rising to the top of the working world, you might want to investigate how some people have found a different kind of success.

I shall give Frida Berrigan the final words.  As a skilled writer, she paints a luminous picture of the joy she has found in motherhood, while linking that joy with the understanding of her responsibility in the world that she learned from the Jonah House in which she grew up.  “After having Seamus, I relished, reveled in, and rollicked with having created a demanding, wholly cuddly, and delightful reason to say “no” to just about everything outside of my front door.”   

As a writer she is successful.  As a mother and activist, she is faithful.

***

Alice Bach is a biblical scholar and political activist, who writes about the use of the Bible upon contemporary politics in the United States and upon the ongoing Occupation of Palestine.  She is Archbishop Hallinan Professor of Catholic Studies Emerita at Case Western Reserve University.

The post Review: It Runs in the Family appeared first on The Revealer.

Corita Kent

Welcome to this month’s round-up of religion and media news. Can’t get enough links? Good news! Starting next month, we’ll be running these round-ups weekly. All links, all the time, starting May 2015.

First up, Religious Freedom:

So, probably the biggest religion news story this last month was controversy over religious freedom legislation in Indiana.

If you need a summary/ refresher, check out The Atlantic’s, “What Makes Indiana’s Religious-Freedom Law Different?” by Garrett Epps.

Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”  

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Also from The Atlantic, “Gays, Religious Traditionalists, and the Feeling of Being Under Siege” by Conor Friedersdorff.

What everyone ought to be able to understand is why some members of both groups feel under siege—and why members of both groups understandably don’t always empathize with one another. It is due to the fact that there is no such thing as a fully shared American culture: Life here is an amalgam of lots of subcultures that only partially overlap. People pay disproportionate attention to what affects them personally.

Also, Nascar weighed in.

For further elaboration, on religious freedom and the problem of pluralism there’s “Wiccan Prayer in Iowa House Highlights Religious Freedom Problem” by Joseph Laycock for Religion Dispatches.

At stake in the response to Maynard’s prayer is a theoretical problem about what religious pluralism is and ought to be. How can you include faiths that do not value inclusion? And if you exclude these faiths, how can you claim to be inclusive? This is the paradox of pluralism.

Finally, lest you think that the United States is the only country struggling with these issues, note, please, the plight of this British Pastafarian:

Ian Harris, 51, is a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster Photo: Brighton Argus/Solent News & Photo Agency

Never not in the headlines these days, here’s this month’s installment of articles about Islam we think are worth reading:

Talal Asad, perennial intellectual crush of this publication, has bestowed us with “Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today” by way of Critical Inquiry.

I have already argued against the claim that religious disagreements are typically inconclusive and therefore should be excluded from the rational debate that democracy requires. I might add that theological disagreements are themselves resolved—which is one way that religious traditions evolve. It is true that such resolutions presuppose certain assumptions that others may not share, but that is a problem common to all situations where opponents are unable to reconcile their fundamental values. This impasse doesn’t in itself inevitably lead to violence, and not all eruptions of violence draw on “religious” values. However, my aim in this essay is not to “defend religion”; it is to explore a problem that remains generally obscured in the secular hostility to what is assumed to be “religion.” I argue that the problem with “political religion” is not religion but the politics that derives from the sovereign state.

Can’t get enough Asad, he’s spoken out recently about his support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement. You can read his comments on the subject here.

In case it seemed like maybe we were learning the lessons of Edward Said and his Asadian heirs, J.S. Marcus of The Wall Street Journal reports that, “Orientalist Art Makes a Surprising Comeback.”

In contrast to many Western curators and scholars, Shafik Gabr, an Egyptian businessman and Orientalist collector, does not view the works in his collection as patronizing or fantastical. Mr. Gabr, the chairman and managing director of Cairo-based holding company Artoc Group, says he thinks of artists like Deutsch and Gérôme as chroniclers of his culture before the rise of mass media.

More optimistically, Mike Hale writes for The New York Times that, “Aasif Mandvi and ‘Halal in the Family’ Test the Sitcom Family Formula.”

This all-American clan is the Qu’osbys (pronounced like Cosby with a slight hitch) — Aasif, Fatima, Whitney and Bobby — and it’s that rarest of things in popular entertainment, a sympathetic Muslim family at the center of its own show. They’re the heroes of “Halal in the Family,” a web series that went live last week at Funny or Die. A broad parody of the classic family sitcom, it’s the brainchild of the actor and writer Aasif Mandvi and his writing partner from “The Daily Show,” Miles Kahn.

While The Huffington Post has a collection of animated videos about what it’s like to be “Muslim in America.”

Writing on an entirely different problem of representation, Hussein Rashid helpfully explains “Images of Muhammed” for Sacred Matters. 

While Muslims do not use images in worship, they do live in a visual world and engage that sense in worship.

And Anver Emon does a thorough and thoughtful job of asking and explaining, “Is ISIS Islamic? Why it matters for the study of Islam” in The Immanent Frame.

Rather than asking whether ISIS is Islamic or not, the better question is why it matters so much and to whom. To ask this question, though, requires that “we” (i.e. producers of knowledge on Islam) interrogate our understandings of religion, politics, law, reason, and the state, and the consequences that follow when we encounter others whose different understandings appear to be the inverse of our own. 

While we’re at it, please, “Forget what you’re hearing. The civil war in Yemen is not a sectarian conflict” by Ishaan Tharoor for The Washington Post.

The conflict on the ground in Yemen is very much a political one, fueled, as most conflicts are, by competing battles over turf, influence and power.

Lastly, a couple of good lists: Patheos‘ “Top Muslim Twitterati” and the Goat Milk Blog‘s “My Top 30 Dos and Don’ts for Covering Muslims and Islam in the Media.”

“What’s new in Christianity?” you ask…

Michelle Lady reports for WLOX13 that “Judge offers essay option for minors caught alcohol”

“A 1,000 word essay on The Book of Revelations and also the effects from drinking alcohol,” Fountain said. “I don’t force them to do that. It’s their choice. That’s just my recommendation. They can write it on anything they want to.”

Candace Chellow-Hodge interviews Rachel Held Evans about her new book Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church for Religion Dispatches in, “LGBT People Have a Lot to Teach Christians.”

Especially as religion in America changes and the demographics are changing and people aren’t really going t

o church anymore, I think it’s more important than ever to get down to what a faith community is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, at Vice, Kelsey Lawrence interviews DiShan Washington in “The Ex-Wife of a Southern Pastor is Writing Bold Erotica for Christians.”

As far as the Christian erotica part of it is concerned, my books definitely resonate with women—church women particularly—because there’s no one standing up being the voice of sexually oppressed women in the church. Nobody talks about it.

Yolande Knell of the BBC explains “Why St. George is a Palestinian Hero.”

With its associations of courage, gallantry and honour, the Christian name, George, remains one of the most common in the Palestinian Territories.

PBS’ Religion and Ethics News Weekly reports on “Church Mass Mobs.”

Using social media to organize participants, the goal of a Mass mob is to fill empty pews and collection plates, inspire parishioners to return to church, and support significant sacred sites and houses of worship that have helped define their cities. 

Israel is very hot with the reality TV set these days. Cases in point: “Jill Duggar Named Her Baby Israel” and “Kim Kardashian and Kanya West have toddler baptized in Jerusalem.”

And the digital is hot with religionists. We highly recommend reading The Immanent Frame‘s series on “Religion and Digital Culture” which includes excellent work by the likes of journalist Nathan Schneider, professors Kathryn Lofton, Kathryn Reklis, and tech-chaplain Shamika Goddard.

Boy did we love looking through these photographs of “Corita Kent, Warhol’s Kindred Spirit in the Convent.”

Corita Kent at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, 1964.

Finally, two takes on Christianity and coming out.

Braileen Hopper‘s “Praying in the Closet” for The New Inquiry,

But queer straight Christianity is not always camp or callous or open and affirming. It can be subtly, subliminally queer as well; coolly and quietly queer at heart. At least this is the case with the pop phenomenon Are You Running With Me, Jesus?, a 1965 book of prayers that sold over a million copies to people across the Christian spectrum and beyond, got rave reviews from church publications and the New York Times, and was written by an Episcopal priest who didn’t come out of the closet till over a decade after its publication.

And Ellen Muehlberger‘s review of Douglas Boin‘s, Coming Out Chrsitian in the Roman World for Marginalia, “The Limits of Metaphor.”

The limits of the coming out metaphor become even more clear when we think beyond the religious expression of a single person and begin to think of the rise of Christian tradition over time. Despite the intimate view of Constantine’s subjectivity that it seems to give us, the metaphor of coming out does not explain how the presence of closeted, moderate Christians in the first three centuries motivated Constantine to grant them the status of a legitimate religion. Did such Christians do their work behind the scenes, organizing deftly to change the emperor’s mind? Was Constantine impressed by their quiet, almost Roman, decorum? And what can account for the next hundred years after Constantine, in which emperors and other Christians really do convert their neighbors when they can and advocate the use of compulsion to do so?

As for this month in Judaism:

First up, “The Jewish Daily Forward Is Neither Jewish, Nor Daily (But Still Forward). Discuss!” by Brook Wilensky-Lanford for Religion Dispatches. 

The renaming seems to me a recognition not only of journalistic realities but of cultural ones. Here my best example is also an item of full disclosure: The Forward published my personal essay about how not-Jewish I am, despite my Jewish heritage, and what other Jewish publication would do that? I am a prime example of the audience that the Forward relaunch is designed to appeal to, that is, cultural Jews, or half-Jews, or converted Jews, those collectively known as “Jew-ish” or, as I call myself in the story, “a Jewish none.” I’m part of that statistical group discovered by the 2013 Pew Center study that rocked the Jewish community, the one that reported that one in five of those respondents identifying as Jewish, also now describe themselves as having “no religion.”

Marlon Brando reading The Forward

And from The Forward, Asaf Shalev on “When Israel’s Sephardic Black Panthers Used Passover To Decry Jewish ‘Racism.'”

Inspired by secular leftist ideology, the Black Panthers left God out of their quest for redress. Instead, this Haggadah confronts the oppression of Sephardim by inflicting 10 plagues of protests, hunger strikes, and solidarity rallies upon the government, until it is compelled to change policies that favor Ashkenazi Jews. Redemption is the moment when the socioeconomic gap between the two communities is finally closed.

The fight for fair treatment of non-Ashkanizim isn’t over, though. +972 has a helpful guide on “Mizrahi struggle 101: A beginner’s guide for Ashkenazim.” For example:

Remember: We are not offended, we are struggling. One of the most disturbing aspects of these discussions is the tendency that many Ashkenazim have to talk about the Mizrahi discourse in terms of feelings and insults. “The Mizrahim are always offended.” Actually, we aren’t offended — we are struggling. Our emotional world is no one’s business, and if we want to deal with our emotions, we have our own safe spaces to do so. But in the public realm, our struggle is a political one. We struggle for recognition of our culture and history, we struggle against our oppression, againstour ridiculing, against exploitative and unfair resource distribution, against the fact that our children are sent to vocational schools, against our erasure. We are not interested in your psychological treatment. We are interested in our piece of the cake.

On a brighter note, “California Jewish school Marks 8th grader’s gender transition” reports Renee Ghert-Zand for The Times of Israel.

Lastly, “What Felix and Meira Gets Right About Leaving Hasidic Life” by Shulem Deen for The New Republic.

Felix and Meira is the story of one Hasidic woman, not Hasidic womanhood; this is not a woman’s rebellion against religion, but the story of a wife and husband badly paired, who simply want different things out of life. Shulem wants the life he was born to live. A typical Hasidic young man, he wants to study, pray, raise children, and maintain his good standing within the community. His wife wants more, but he does not understand her.

April is an important time for Sikhs:

Simran Jeet Sing explains “The Meaning of Vaisakhi, the biggest Sikh celebration” in The Daily Beast.

In the Sikh spirit, Vaisakhi celebrates the integration of the spiritual and temporal worlds, and it provides practical avenues for bringing these to bear through shared values and practices. Vaisakhi is fundamentally about community, celebration, and progress, and these values are at the forefront of the collective consciousness as Sikhs gather together to mark the occasion.

And Vogue (yes, we read Vogue) has this amazing video on “How to Tie a 200-Pound Turban — Sikh Style!” made by photographer Mark Hartman, whose Instagram account is a favorite around here.

Scientology, beyond the clickbait:

Abraham Riesman writes about “That Time the Avengers Battled Scientology” in Vulture.

The turn of the millennium was a weird period for superhero comics; an era when financial desperation opened a path for wild experimentation. Marvel Comics was particularly hard hit, plunging into bankruptcy and emerging as a wounded giant. The company welcomed bold, weird ideas: Punisher became a zombie, Spider-Man and the X-Men got rebooted series where they were all angsty teens again, and … a Scientologist joined the Avengers. And then the Avengers teamed up with the evil super-powered leader of Scientology. And they all flew in a spaceship powered by the souls of Scientologists. And they fought a giant alien pyramid.

Okay, let’s take a step back. Technically, the religion in question wasn’t the Church of Scientology; it was an extremely thinly veiled stand-in for it called the Triune Understanding.

Okay, well, actually, maybe it’s all just clickbait.

Gawker has “A Comprehensive Updated List of Every Celebrity Linked to Scientology” and “Audit This: The Most Disturbing Scientology Stories of the Last Decade” by Gabrielle Bluestone.

Celebrity Scientologists, According to Gawker

And Jezebel (the Gawker family is really into Scientology these days) shared “Doug E. Fresh’s Long-Lost Scientology Jam ‘The Joy of Creating.”

Which leads us nicely into a bit of religion and pop culture: 

Meredith Graves writes about “The Rapper Heems on Sticking to His Roots, Eschewing Stylists and His Signature Hermès Scarf” for T.

“The reason I wear a bright orange Hermès scarf often is because it looks like a Hindu priest’s scarf. When I brought that home, my dad was like, ‘That was three dollars, right? You’re wearing a sadhu scarf.’ A sadhu is a wandering ascetic who is a devotee of Shiva. I was like, ‘Yeah … three dollars.’ It’s a little joke with myself that the H for ‘Hermès’ actually stands for ‘Hindu.’ Coming from this immigrant background helps me keep my money and fashion in check.”

Kelly J. Baker, the author of Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America (Kansas 2011), writes about, of all things, “The Altar of Taylor Swift” for Sacred Matters.

Taylor Swift is not my religion. I’m a devoted fan to her music. Yet, she dominates the untold moments of my ordinary life. She is part of how I make time, a constant presence of my days and nights.

And last, but not least, miscellanea too good not to share, but too weird to categorize: 

Our perennial Favorite Person on the Internet Mallory Ortberg graced us with “Women Praying Furiously in Western Art.”

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our lobster

“Jedi Master Yoda spotted in 14th-century manuscript” reports Max Knoblauch at Mashable.

And lastly, for our legal and philosophy wonks: “Study Casts Doubt on Kantian Link to Bulgarian Law” says Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal.

Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in eighteenth-century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar. — Chief Justice John Roberts, C-SPAN, June 25, 2011

It’s been nearly four years, but legal scholars haven’t forgotten Chief Justice John Roberts’ smirking critique of legal scholarship. Some law professors took umbrage at his glib tone, while others defended his facetious lament as a spot-on recognition of the fading relevance of law reviews. For one law professor, it was a source of comedic inspiration. “The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria” is the title of a self-published essay by George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr. Seldom has legal humor reached such ambitious heights or displayed such deadpan commitment.

…

Law Blog doesn’t doubt the conclusions drawn by the professor. But in the spirit of peer review, Law Blog checked in with historian Frederick B. Chary, a professor emeritus at Indiana University Northwest and author of “The History of Bulgaria.” If any Bulgarian at the time was familiar with Kant, it would be Paisii, a Bulgarian monk from the Hilendar monastery who wrote the first modern book on the history of the Bulgarian empires. “It’s possible. It was a learned community,” said Mr. Chary.

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-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

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