Illustration by Giselle Potter for The New York Times

By Ann Neumann

The endearing husband of my long-time hospice patient—I’ll call him Marvin—turned 90 earlier this month. His two daughters, who are roughly my age, mid 40s, organized a party for him, inviting family and friends. It was a festive gathering and I was again gratified to witness Marvin’s unflagging engagement with the world, something many aging seniors lose over time because of their isolation. Marvin needs a walker to get around, the kind that can be used as a seat when he gets tired. But he does get around, often lighting out from the apartment a few times a week for a walk in the park, a trip to the bank, or to pick up a couple boxes of his and his wife’s favorite crackers at the grocery store. These outings are vital to his sense of independence, to his mental activity and to his physical abilities. Nonetheless, a few visits ago Marvin told me that it can take him a half hour just to get his socks on. His ankles are constantly swollen. It is increasingly difficult for him to get out of low chairs. Use it or lose it means something profound to seniors who are closely bound to their homes. If they don’t make the gargantuan effort to continue any kind of physical activity, the ability to do so can quickly dissipate.

Which is why winter has been particularly difficult for Marvin. Freezing temperatures can prevent an elder, unable to quickly scurry from door to door or to move freely in bundles of clothing, from getting any exercise at all. Snowy, icy, or slushy sidewalks present a particular obstacle to those whose feet are less agile or whose eyesight may not detect changes in the surface they are walking on. Marvin’s been kept inside the past few weeks by our harsh New York weather. He fears that he’s lost some of his stamina and mobility because of it. While his lack of mobility has specific consequences, namely decreased strength, my fear of his falling has kept me on tenterhooks during the ice and snow. What if he falls on the sidewalk and breaks a hip. No number of eager and helpful New York passers-by can stave off the challenges of recovering from broken bones. Few things can set back an elder’s health or decrease their longevity like a fall.

In her recent article for The New York Times, Jane Brody highlights the seriousness of falls for seniors: “About 40 percent in this age group [65 and older] fall at least once a year; one in 40 of them ends up in the hospital, after which only half are still alive a year later.” A fall for those of us under 50 can mean simple injuries—I fell twice this winter during my own morning walks and both times had a bruised bum to show for it—but for elders, a fall can cause serious physical set-backs, including death. “Falls are the leading cause of accidental death among seniors,” notes another New York Times article today about a new senior training program in Kansas.

Brody and her friends counter falling, she writes, by slowing down, walking deliberately, and, on the advice of doctors, doing exercises like Pilates, physical therapy and tai chi that increase strength and balance. But not everyone has access to such classes or services—or even good advice from doctors. And even for those who do, classes can be a hard sell. Just the effort of getting out of the house to exercise with strangers is enough to deter most of us, let alone someone who needs half an hour to put on socks.

Last year, according to a report in Preventative Medicine, researchers looked at ways to enroll seniors in such strength- and balance-improving classes by marketing them through churches. The study started with the premise that some of the obstacles to class enrollment are lack of familiarity, high costs and lack of transportation. By embedding the classes in a community that seniors were already comfortable with, their church, researchers were able to bypass some of these obstacles.

The beauty of the study is that it addresses the needs of seniors in terms other than blame. So often we hear the medical community admonishing seniors for not walking more, not watching their diet, or not complying with doctors’ orders, shaming them for not making the necessary lifestyle changes that medicine paternally applies to them. Inherent in this “you should try harder” approach is an absence of discussion about how our social systems fail seniors, leaving them to molder alone in their homes, many without outside contact, close family or even health insurance. If the US had better home health services, seniors wouldn’t be shamed for not remaining active or for not taking all their medications on time—the responsibility to care for seniors would be on the total population, not on encumbered, declining seniors themselves. This study considers seniors’ needs where they are, in their existing environments, among the communities they’ve fostered and cared for their entire lives. It ingeniously examines their current routines and suggests ways to use it to enhance their health.

There are a host of church and senior center-based classes throughout New York that capitalize on some of the benefits that the study identified: established communities, low cost and independence. Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens, for instance, offers classes to “improve strength, coordination and balance.” (Here’s a list of their locations.)

Basing classes in churches makes great sense. A study from 2010 shows that most US churches have an older attending population (84% of churches have a population with 79% over the age of 34). Elders attending church have made communities within their congregations; aside from family and neighbors, their congregation may be most aware of their health and needs. Church can also be a hub for activities and engagement with the world. If they’re already attending regularly, creating resources for seniors within the church makes access much easier. Too, many churches embrace elder services and well-being as part of their mission; a strong and healthy congregation is their goal. More church-based programs like the one noted in the study could go a long way to increasing the health of America’s seniors—and maintaining church attendance. That’s a great outcome for everyone.

It also breaks a cycle of fear for seniors. “Older adults, particularly those who have already fallen, become more cautious. ‘They start restricting their activities, which causes reconditioning, and that gets into a vicious cycle,’” writes the New York Times today, quoting Dr. David Thurman, a fellow at the American Academy of Neurology. Those accustomed to regularly getting out the door for church services may be more willing to do so for exercise time with friends. Building senior’s strength and balance while guarding against falls is a key to longevity because it reverses the cycle of declining activity.

Marvin has so far balanced his need for continuing activity with a fear of falling, but it’s a tricky and constant task. At his birthday party, as family members ate sandwiches and drank champagne in the living room, I asked him what else, besides wandering from room to room in their apartment, he could do during the cold weather to keep his strength up. “I guess I could walk in circles in the lobby,” he told me. Indeed, on my way to the party, I had seen one elder building resident doing just that. But the circles are small, the scenery is repetitive, and, well, there are neighbors coming and going who might find a circling senior to be annoying. Where’s the fun in that?

Marvin’s lack of mobility this winter reminded me that senior health isn’t just about getting to the doctor, eating right, and taking the proper medications. It’s also about a connection between body and mind, which is something church attendance, regardless of the denomination, has always been concerned with.

***

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column that examines the intersection of medicine and religion.

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 Old Man Winter appeared first on The Revealer.

Screenshot from “Doom”

By Don Jolly 

On December 9th, 1993, Senator Joseph Lieberman laid out an ultimatum to the videogame industry. He and fellow Democrat Senator Herbert Kohl were disturbed by the increasingly violent content of games, and had brought its representatives to Washington to discuss regulation. “The best thing you can do, not only for this country but for yourselves, is to self regulate,” Lieberman said. “Unless [you] people draw some lines, the sense that [America is] out of control is gonna lead to genuine threats to our freedom — which nobody wants to see.”

That night, as the hour ticked from 11:59 to midnight in the Central time zone, a group of game developers called id Software uploaded a chunk of “shareware” levels from their newest project to a fileserver owned by the University of Wisconsin. The server could accommodate 125 simultaneous users — impressive for its day. That night, it clocked over ten thousand. Everyone with an internet connection wanted a taste of id’s new game.

It was called Doom. “Out of control” is a good way to describe it.

id Software, 1994

***

In 2014, the American videogame industry pulled in around $13.1 billion dollars in sales. Its biggest success, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, placed each player in the role of a futuristic soldier, the game’s point-of-view resting comfortably behind his eyes, with a gun bobbing in the right-bottom corner of the screen. This genre, the “first person shooter,” or F.P.S., has dominated videogame sales and culture for more than two decades. Doom was where it all began.

There had been first person games before — some of the most successful, like the World War Two themed Wolfenstein 3D, had even been produced by id. But Doom was something else. In it, for the first time, players could navigate a wholly 3D world, running up stairs and through mazes and across pits of toxic waste, seeing everything exactly as they would through the eyes of their digital avatar.

The plot was simple. Players take on the role of an unnamed space marine in an indeterminate future, banished to the moons of Mars for striking a superior officer. Once there, a teleportation experiment goes awry — releasing demons from hell in the futuristic complex. “As you walk through the main entrance of the base, you hear

animal-like growls echoing throughout the distant corridors,” concludes the readme file[1] packaged with the original game. “They know you’re here. There’s no turning back now.”

In practice, Doom is an exercise in reflexes and the conservation of resources. You travel through the increasingly surreal corridors of the Martian base, collecting weapons, including a shotgun, a rocket launcher and several types of energy rifle. Grotesque demonic monsters block your path, requiring speedy movement and accurate shooting to defeat them. Ammunition, health and armor are scarce, and every encounter is a gambit on the part of the player — a challenge to survive each combat while expending a minimum of supplies.

Aesthetically, the game draws on anarchic 1980s science fiction and horror films, soaking every spare patch of floor in blood and brains and entrails. Its soundtrack, composed by sound designer Bobby Prince, approximates Metallica as closely as the hardware of the early nineties could allow.

Doom was a legitimate phenomenon — totally unconcerned with the kind of restraint and forbearance Senator Lieberman wanted for its fledgling industry. In fact, id Software didn’t care much for the industry either. Doom was released, at least partially, for free. Its first chunk of levels were uploaded as “shareware,” free to play and copy. If you liked them, more were available — directly from Id. The developers didn’t scrape and bow for press coverage, nor did they advertise. Doom was its own advertisement — and loose on the nascent Internet, it went “viral.” Nothing had ever done so before.

At the time, the success of Doom seemed to presage a new way of doing business. “Profits from the Underground,” a profile of the company which appeared in Forbes magazine shortly after Doom’s release, speculated that id’s ridiculous profit-margin on Doom made “Microsoft look like a second-rate company.” Their revenue, the piece estimated, was in excess of ten million dollars — with practically no overhead. The American mainstream took notice. Doom was optioned for a film adaptation. Microsoft used a version of the game to demonstrate the multimedia capabilities of the then-upcoming Windows operating system. The answering machine at the id offices was inundated with opportunities. “If you are calling to discuss some great idea you have on how you can make money with our product, please press five now,” it said.

***

In 1994, the science fiction writer Dafydd ab Hugh was presented with an odd assignment. “My then literary agent was overly fond of assigning me to sundry media books, especially Star Trek books,” he told me, over e-mail, when I reached out to him this year. Pocket Books had just gotten the rights to produce a series of novels based on Doom, and ab Hugh was given the commission.

“The deadline was […] crazy,” he continued. “Three weeks from dead start to finished novel for each book […] I couldn’t possibly do it alone.” He reached out to he friend and fellow science fiction author Brad Linaweaver, whose alternate history novel Moon of Ice had been given positive notices by Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and William F. Buckley Jr.. Together, they turned out four novels based on id’s bestselling game: Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky and Endgame. The result was, at the very least, a titanic work of literary embellishment. Doom’s story had already been stretched thin by the few paragraphs in its readme file.

John Carmack, the programmer responsible for creating Doom’s convincingly three-dimensional graphics, minced no words on the subject. “Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie, he said. “[I]t’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”

Given the task of filling four paperbacks guided only by a sub-pornographic plot, ab Hugh and Linaweaver felt empowered to explore ideas of their own. “We managed to turn in our manuscripts more or less on time, after which the editors underwent the grinding digestive process to remove as much true innovation as they could,” ab Hugh recalls. “Fortunately, the short turn-around precluded wholesale destruction.”

What survived is beautifully strange: a stream-of-consciousness sequence of gory action, sci-fi philosophizing and parodic nods to the original game, all rendered in prose so affectingly weird that it catches in your brain like a winter cough. Some examples:

— “No time for family background, keep him focused on how and why he became a cybermummy”

— “Old term; this guy’s in his thirties! Virtual Reality; we call it burfing now.”

— “The end of the foot fluffed out like bell-bottom pants, like my grandparents wore, like on The Brady Bunch. God, I was glad they didn’t live to see the monsters kill their children.”

Near the end of their second volume, ab Hugh and Linaweaver get reflective. “Jeez,” says their marine protagonist, “it’s like a sci-fi James Joyce.”

The story of the novels is an adventure; a cosmic odyssey undertaken by a pair of United States marines: Corporal Flynn “Fly” Taggart and Private First Class Arlene Sanders. In the first book, Knee Deep in the Dead, the pair fight their way out of the game’s demon-haunted Martian moons, only to find themselves within striking distance of Earth. The second volume, Hell on Earth, finds Flynn and Arlene back on their home planet, struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic world where demons — and willing human collaborators — have attained complete control. At this point, things take an unexpected turn.

The opening chapters of Hell on Earth track Fly and Arlene as they return to Earth via homemade rocket, landing somewhere in Utah. After a chapter of hopeless wandering, the pair spot Salt Lake City in the distance with its lights are still on. Somebody human, they figure, might still be in charge. Demons, however, aren’t their only concern.

“She was silent for a hundred paces; then she cleared her throat. ‘Fly, I have to confess something to you. Again.‘

‘Anytime.’

‘I sort of have a problem with the Mormon Church,’ she said.”

***

As Hell on Earth proceeds, Arlene’s suspicions about Mormonism become the novel’s central theme. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, ab Hugh and Linaweaver inform us, was one of the few institutions in America that openly resisted the demonic invasion. For the most part, they say, the United States “has been co-opted by the demons,” with institutions from Hollywood to the I.R.S. to the D.E.A. capitulating to demonic demands.

Prior to the war, the book continues, Mormons across America had been preparing to survive on their own, without depending on unreliable institutions. Mormons, we are told, “have a strong survivalist streak,” stockpiling foodstuffs and munitions. What’s more, they were engaged in a vast, if benign, conspiracy prior to the invasion — working their way into posts at “the FBI, in the various armed services, in the CIA, even in NASA” as a bulwark against persecution as a religious minority. While perhaps a liability in different circumstances, this paranoid and fiercely independent vision of Mormonism is exactly what Hell on Earth’s Marine protagonists require. For them, Mormons are “ideal allies against a literal demonic invasion.” About halfway through the novel, Taggart and Sanders are joined by a Mormon sniper named Albert Gallatin. His theological sparring with Arlene enlivens the proceedings considerably.

In one passage near the conclusion, Albert & Arlene debate the causes of the invasion. “‘I think we’re all sinners,” Albert says. “We all deserve to die and be damned; we earned that fate when we disobeyed the Lord. Which is why we need the Savior. I take responsibility for the blood on my hands, even if I let him wash it clean.”

Arlene disagrees. “We have a difference there, my friend … I blame God,” she says. “My only regret is that I won’t meet God when I have a rocket launcher,

“You can’t blow up God, Arlene,” Albert adds.

***

Linaweaver and ab Hugh were quick to announce their agnosticism in our correspondence. “Neither of us is Mormon, aspires to become Mormon [or] has read the book of Mormon,” ab Hugh said. They included the Mormon in Hell on Earth, they said, out of a combination of personal interests and narrative practicalities.

“Mormons are prepared for survival, and in a geographically defensible location,” said Linaweaver. They just made sense as “a last hold-out against enemies invading the United States, whether the enemies were human or not.”

Ab Hugh contributed the idea of a Mormon conspiracy, drawing on G. Gordon Liddy’s autobiography, Will, where Liddy complains about being hindered by a “Mormon Mafia” at the F.B.I.. In Hell on Earth’s context, however, the collusion is a help — a moment of pragmatic resistance to the wickedness of the mainstream. “I love putting very religious characters into my writings,” ab Hugh continued. “It gives them a transcendental source of inner strength and […] it annoys the heck out of liberals.”

Politically, ab Hugh and Linaweaver are best charted on libertarian end of the American right. “Dafydd and I are both odd ducks in the entertainment field because we are not part of the Liberal Democrat Mindset,” Linaweaver wrote to me. “Whereas Dafydd is more optimistic in the short run, I’m more pessimistic.” Both are skeptical of mass institutions — especially governmental ones.

“I see the future as an explosion of freedom,” ab Hugh wrote, to me. In the future, he continued, “I see the demise of transnational institutions [such as] corporations, political bodies [and] NGOs, followed by the collapse of nationalism [and] regionalism.” In the end, he said, we will be left with “small and temporary social bonds, often renegotiated.” Before that, presumably, will be years of trial and trouble.

The Mormonism of the Doom novels is, at first glance, bizarre. But in context, it makes a certain romantic sense. Playing Doom is actively engaging in a fantasy of armed, masculine independence. It’s easy to see in the gunfighting, of course — but just as active in the conservation of resources in which such combats are ensconced. In Doom there are no allies, no friends. The player, seeing through his or her character’s eyes, must learn self reliance if they are to advance. The Doom novels stretch this concept as far as it can possibly go — until the ideas of self-reliance and rugged survivability are expanded into the religious and the political. All roads lead to ab Hugh and Linaweaver’s post-apocalyptic Salt Lake City, and its isolated community of believers; An idealized enclave of America under siege. God and first person shooters make strange bedfellows, but ab Hugh and Linaweaver make them into a natural fit — even if one of their main characters wants to blow up God with a rocket propelled grenade.

On December 10th, 1993, Doom fired the first salvo of the Internet’s attack on traditional methods of media distribution, promotion and monetization. Senator Lieberman may have succeeded in getting the videogame industry to settle on a universal rating system (Doom 2, released in 1994, received its very first “Mature”) but Doom proved that the balance of power had shifted. The world of the digital was elusive, it announced, and could be neither predicted nor contained. Doom spread because it was allowed to, given away for free. It stayed around because its themes, while simple, were enduringly appealing and exquisitely communicated: the world is out to get you, trust yourself. Keep your weapons loaded.

“Maybe [Joseph Smith] was a madman,” Linaweaver wrote to me, “but we made the character Albert eminently sane, and one of our heroes.” It was an interesting bit of storytelling, sure — but in 1994, when he co-wrote Hell on Earth, the Internet was metastasizing, day-by-day. The future was in flux, and full of possibility.

It was a good hour for madmen — especially in licensed paperbacks.

***

[1] A “readme” is a file containing information about the other files in an archive or directory that is often distributed with computer software.

***

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 Hell on Earth appeared first on The Revealer.

This is the third in a series of articles that Laura McTighe will be writing for The Revealer over the next year about issues at the intersection of race and religion. She will be writing about incarceration, activism and organizing, reproductive justice, and more, with an eye to questions of history, violence, and justice. 

This month, Laura speaks with Hakim ‘Ali in anticipation of the NYU event, “Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons” on April 10, 2015. More information about this roundtable conversation can be found here.

Hakim ‘Ali

It is shortly after the Fajr morning prayers and snow is falling as big as fists. Hakim’s deep laughter punctuates the steady chug of the steam radiator in the corner, as he launches into another tale of a Philadelphia long since passed. I smile in knowing recognition. Hakim has an unparalleled gift for storytelling. We have been talking for almost an hour.

Colloquially, folks often speak about incarceration as “doing time.” What Hakim and I have been discussing is the idea of “making time.” Can we better understand the everyday work of building geographies of confinement, as well as the complex strategies for transforming our darkest of institutions, if we think about time as “made” rather than “done”? Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it? Hakim knows the world of prisons far better than most: he spent forty years of his life behind bars. “And it is only, ONLY by the grace of Allah that I am sitting here having this conversation with you,” Hakim reminds me, with a sudden somberness. “I am a Black Muslim man, 71 almost 72 years of age, and I understand fully what that means in this day and time, in this country, and in the world.”

Hakim and I met in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. Our connection was one of intention as much as coincidence: in 1978 – the year I was born – he had been transferred to the federal prison in Lewisburg, PA – the town I lived in as a teenager. Over the years, we have built a relationship of closeness and reciprocity, as beloved friends and comrades. Through our work together, I have come to know Hakim as a poet, an educator, a revolutionary, a father, and a confidant. He rarely talks about how he survived the hell of the local, state and federal prisons that held him captive, and I know better than to ask. Those silences in his life story have been built up because of too many small abuses to count, because of great and incomprehensible ones.

But this morning, under the guise of “making time,” with the snow showing no sign of relenting, Hakim began to speak about his conversion to Sunni Islam, his work with the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Baltimore bank robbery that catapulted him into the caverns of justice in America. The year was 1972. The date was February 23^rd.

* * *

When we got popped, the Baltimore cops told us the folks in Philly were calling a citywide holiday. The “Philly 5” they called us in Baltimore. Of the five, three of us were Sunni Muslim and one of us was Nation of Islam. And the other one, because of his association with us, was sympathetic to Islam, even though he wasn’t Muslim. So Islam was our point of unity as we were doing what we were doing, existing before the trial, and even during the course of the trial in the way that we were referred to, you know.

A National Guardsman watches detainees in the Baltimore city jail on April 10, 1968, six days after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. (Weyman Swagger/Baltimore Sun)

So one day while we were in the city jail, we were in the yard – something had just happened, a dude had tried to escape earlier – and they had everybody out of the buildings and we were in the yard, with the police around us. I saw this brother walking down the yard, and he had this paper rolled up in his back pocket. And I saw different parts of words – something about Islam, and the some parts of the Arabic… So I approached him, and asked him, “You mind if I look at that?” and he said, “Man, you can have it.” And he gave me the paper. So I opened up the paper, I was reading it, and it was in fact a newsletter coming from this masjid in West Baltimore. It had an address and contact information, so I got together with the other brothers and showed them the paper and we decided to see if we could get some materials sent in for us to read.

Just to be clear: Sunni Islam was not in Maryland. Anything related to Islam was the Nation of Islam, or this little small group of dudes who were Five Percenters. At the start, we didn’t have intentions of establishing anything in the jail. We were just seeing if we could get some materials, something to read, or a contact. But eventually this effort on our part led to us establishing traditional, orthodox Sunni Islam in the Maryland system.

First, we started with the city jail, where we were awaiting trial. Eventually we got somebody to come out. The first visit was a personal visit – the Imam, Ali Akbar, came out and met with one of the people in our group. Then Ali came back again, and we created an opportunity for him to meet not only with ourselves but also with a couple of other brothers that we found out were there and were Sunni Muslim. They had been existing under the radar, you know what I mean? Because the Baltimore jail is transitional, and folks were focusing on their case.

So we got to the point – and I’m really, really, really summarizing this – that we were able to get this brother Ali from the masjid to come in and meet with the Superintendent of Baltimore city jail and we literally got jummah started there. It was the first time that the dude had heard about jummah, it was the first time that Muslims from the community had even entertained the thought of coming into the city jail. And from that, later on down the line, a position was created where Ali got appointed as the community Imam – the representative of Islam for the Baltimore jail.

That was sort of our first political/religious statement, with all the other stuff we were doing prior to coming to Baltimore and getting locked up. We believed that we were in the course of revolutionary action, taking from the government, supporting the people… It was the same sort of concept as what the Black Panther Party was doing, but we had not been building institutions. We mostly just focused on meeting the community’s immediate needs – helping folks with rent, paying their bills, getting food… So this was the first real thing that we literally did in an institution, and to this day what we started still exists.

So that was a real spiritual change for me. Now, I was already a Muslim when I got popped, I had just taken Shahada, I was rolling on the reputation of another Muslim brother in our Philly network, what I saw in him and his character and what led me to want to convert to Islam. But I was not well read. I had not at that point had real – other than knowing what I should be doing – I had not had a spiritual conversation, wasn’t following through on all the tenants of what I should have been following up on… But that experience of getting Islam established in the city jail, and ultimately in the state of Maryland, was a real transitional time period for me as a Muslim.

That beginning that I just shared with you – the other side

Because of overcrowding, officals at the city jail in 1976 were forced to use recreation areas like this dayroom to house detainees. (William Hotz/Baltimore Sun)

of that beginning is that a focus had been placed on us both from the perspective of the community and the prison administration. We had a lot of support from the community, tablighing in the community. Inside the institution, the community started to grow. We were recognized as people you wanted to speak to in case you wanted insight about Islam. We did a lot of unifying, because we found out more about who was actually there. And as a result of our efforts, other people started to come to the forefront – the Ahmadiyya movement, the Five Percenters, the Revolutionary Guard, which was a collective down there… All these different entities started to raise their heads a lot more, because of what we were able to accomplish. And we sort of, like, set the bar for people to get stuff done.

On the other hand, the prison administrators – the guards and the captains – were really upset with us. We had started this momentum, and they were dealing with stuff that they had never dealt with before, you know what I mean? A lot of the guards and captains had been used to leaning on religious institutions to keep control in the jail – getting the chaplain to preach from the pulpit about jail rules like tucking in your shirts, or watching noise while walking by the library… Having Sunni Islam recognized really threw a wrench in the way they’d been used to manipulating religious institutions, you dig? It was also one of the most eye-wakening things that I ever experienced in my entire life – the kind of power that these people have over you when you’re locked up.

So it was this dual thing that was happening. And because of the kind of stuff that was happening on the inside, and this brother Ali getting this kind of position that was brand new in the city of Baltimore, our work started reaching out of the prison and being topics in the community. And Ali started participating in various community groups, representing what was going on in the jail, because he was our voice on the outside. We even helped to get him appointed to a board of community leaders working on policy issues in the city. It was the first time when someone representing the Islamic community was allowed to sit on that board. Ali was a really progressive brother, involved in the community – as opposed to just dealing with Islam as making salat and functioning in the mosque.

And so, you know, making a long story short, he was able to make some contacts with people that were involved with this effort to create a moratorium on prisons being built, not only in Maryland but specifically in Baltimore. At that time, there were some ideas about building more prisons – and the penitentiary was, you know, was right in the heart of the city, right there on Forrest Street, right downtown. The argument was that it was so close to the waterfront that was supposed to be being built and people had different positions about “do we want this atrocity in the middle of something that,” you know, “we’re trying to create a different vibe…” So that whole conversation was taking place. More people was starting to get involved – not only on the prisons, but on the whole political climate surrounding incarceration, you know, and what should be done.

In 1975, a meeting of the “Inmate Council” is held at the Baltimore City Jail. (Ralph Robinson/Baltimore Sun)

So as this progressed, I became more of a voice. First and foremost, I was the oldest among the five of us. I started gathering a lot of respect from people because of that factor. The wardens on the inside, and the social workers and the religious people, would always ask me different things. And it made me do a lot more reading and a lot more research, and it made me be a lot more conscious of what I should be aware of. And eventually, a couple of things started happening where programs started coming into the city jail and the penitentiary, and different things was happening from both locations. Then I got a visit from this sister representing the black social workers’ network in the city. She wanted to interview somebody on the inside to get some perspective on life and all this kind of stuff, and what did she believe would have changed the direction I was going in and all this kind of sociology-type conversation that she was having, which I didn’t have no problem participating in. But what that eventually did was… the kind of respect and inquires that was being made of me on the inside started getting to these groups that I didn’t even really know about on the outside.

So, making a long story short again, I started getting mail, and would be responding to stuff in my letters. They were asking for my views about stuff. I would send my position or what I thought to these particular organizations. And I found out later on – again, I’m leaping forward a little bit – that there was a mass movement of a multitude of different community organization that was a part of this moratorium in terms of prison construction and developing alternatives to incarceration. They had some leaders in the community involved with this thing, including judges and lawyers. One particular judge incorporated some ideas that came out of this coalition. Any first time offender that came through his courtroom was eligible, no matter whether they had a felony or a misdemeanor, so long as it wasn’t a homicide charge or rape. Community organizations would be present at the trial and they would make recommendations, being aware of the different cases. It was like a referral thing where guys would be sent to one of the organizations that supported this effort and would be assigned to stay there and do certain jobs, fulfilling obligations, whatever the case may be. And if a guy participated in the program, and if he was successful in it, his record would be immediately expunged. He would never go into the system. Never ever go into the system, you dig it? So that was one of the major things that was accomplished as a result of this. And as a result of this, I started getting a lot of play… I think that they wanted me to reap the benefits of it. I became eligible for a whole lot of stuff.

The Superintendent of the Baltimore City Jail at the time – who ultimately became the Head of Corrections for Maryland – was

A corrections officer at the city jail locks a barred gate behind a detainee as he moves from one section of the crowded jail to another in 1976. (Irving H. Phillips/ Baltimore Sun)

aware of my activities, and my work. When they started having regular meetings about the alternatives to incarceration work, he offered to hold them at the City Jail. And he created an agreement with the Warden of the Penitentiary, where I got moved to after being sentenced, so I could attend these meetings. And get this… Officers from the city jail would literally, literally come down and officers from the penitentiary would handcuff me and escort me down in these tunnels between the jail and the penitentiary, and right at the middle they would exchange me. They would literally exchange me – had paperwork where one officer would sign me over to the other officers, they would change handcuffs take the penitentiary handcuffs off me, put the city jail handcuffs on me, and then they would escort me into the city jail, take me into the room, take the cuffs off and I would participate in the meeting! You know, I mean, it was unheard of, and it was something that could never be put in the public, because it was completely, completely off the books. I mean, there were a whole lot of things that would be at risk for the Warden of the penitentiary and the Superintendent of the city jail if this stuff had gotten out. So there was a stated trust level from both the officers that were escorting me and the community people that participated. They couldn’t voice this stuff, you know?

So that was a key political education for me, during the course of that period I stayed in Maryland in the penitentiary. It was really, really key to my growth and development, understanding the system and who the players were, what could be done, what the challenges were… I mean, I just got an instant education without trying to get an education. My involvement sort of like put me on the right track as far as my thinking – thinking things through and what the possibilities of things were and are. So that was real deep. And it all started with our work to bring Islam into the Baltimore jail, and with my own work to get deeper into my own spirituality.

A city jail detainee looks out through locked windows smashed during a riot in 1971. (George Cook/Baltimore Sun)

There ain’t no doubt in my mind what religion, belief, spiritually should do for people who are incarcerated – not necessarily what it is doing and the way that religious institutions are set up inside these prisons, but what it should do. Even if people are not staunch believers in any religious perspective – not just Muslims, but Christians, orwhatever the case may be – there still should be some measure of spirituality in people’s lives, so that they can make whatever kind of change would be emotionally beneficial for them… so that they can think clearly about whatever next steps they need to take in their life. For any kind of progression to take place, there needs to be something there, so that they can really become cognizant of “what the hell did I do to end up in this place?” And

the majority of the time, religion does that, or some measure of spirituality does that, for people. And that’s what it should do. It’s not necessarily functioning in that way.

The religious institution – and I’m always adding that word “institution” – becomes part of the system, you know. Like how the guards used to get the chaplains to preach about prison rules from the pulpit. They tried to coopt me, too. If something went down in the facility, the guards would come to my cell all respectful, calling me “Imam,” asking me if I would talk to the dudes who got in a fight. I’d do it, because I cared about the dudes and didn’t want them to spend any more time in the hole, but not because the administration asked. I knew exactly what kind of time they were on. In the everyday running of the jail, religion was a measure that the guards and captains used to stop people from being as progressive as they should be. It was a measure that they used to calm progressive activity and movements in the jail. It was their way of quelling any kind of what they would call “subversive” activities that would go against the orderly running of the jail, you know. It was part of the system when it was supposed to be part of people’s souls and spirits.

That was what was so powerful about my time in Baltimore. Here I was, a Muslim dude, growing in my belief in Islam by doing some serious progressive work to stop prisons from being built and to keep people from ever entering in the first place. I wouldn’t have been invited into those meetings if I hadn’t been working in the community and with brothers inside. And I wasn’t there on institutional time. The Superintendent asked me to participate because I had become a respected voice for bettering our community. It’s like we say in Philly: “Changing Ourselves to Change the World, Uniting the Many to Defeat the Few.” That’s what religion was for me when I was in Maryland.

* * *

Join us Friday April 10, 2014 from 3:30-6:30pm for Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons, a conversation with Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.), Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU), moderated by Laura McTighe (Columbia University).

* * *

Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Through her dissertation project, “Born In Flames,” she is working with leading Black feminist organizations in Louisiana to explore how reckoning with the richness of southern Black women’s intellectual and organizing traditions will help us to understand (and do) American religious history differently. Laura comes to her doctoral studies through more than seventeen years of direct work to challenge the punitive climate of criminalization in the United States and support communities’ everyday practices of transformation. Currently, she serves on the boards of Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia. Laura’s writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications.

The post Making Time: Religion & Black Prison Organizing, with Hakim ‘Ali appeared first on The Revealer.

Louis Waynai and his wife with the complete King James Bible they hand printed in Los Angeles, CA, in 1930

FRIENDS OF THE REVEALER

At The Marshall Project (By the way, are you reading The Marshall Project? You should be.) Maurice Chammah asks, “Who Told the Truth? A hearing in San Antonio will revive the ghosts of hte satanic abuse trials and questions about the testimony of child victims.”

But the hearing will have larger ramifications. Since the satanic abuse scandals died down, there has been a lingering intellectual battle between lawyers, journalists, and activists who have mostly succeeded in getting these cases overturned, and a small community of opponents who say the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of defendants that actual cases of child sexual assault are being papered over.

Kathryn Joyce reports on “The Worst Adoption Therapy in the World” for The Daily Beast. 

An awful story has been unfolding in Arkansas. On March 5, Benjamin Hardy of the Arkansas Times published an explosive investigation about how State Representative Justin Harris “rehomed” his young adoptive children, leaving them in the care of a former employee, who was later convicted of raping one, a six-year-old girl. …

The Harisses’ attorney denied that the couple’s strong evangelical faith supported exorcism or demon possession and instead said the family had relied on the teachings of a woman named Nancy Thomas, a self-styled expert on RAD attachment therapies and author of the bookWhen Love Is Not Enough: a Parent’s Guide to Reactive Attachment Disorder.

Josef Sorett was interviewed on the “Listen Up!“ podcast by Sylviane Diouf, Director of the Lapidus Center for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Dr. Josef Sorett proposes that two of the most pressing social issues confronting black churches are sexuality and class divide. He discusses the key ideas of “Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics;” why conversation at the intersection of religion, race, and sexuality is important now; and the phenomenon of Christianity in hip-hop.

Peter Manseau argues that “America is not a Christian Nation” on Fox News.

Yet both today and in a past far more religiously diverse than usually remembered, the insistence that America is a Christian nation has too often encouraged incidents that might be described not only as un-American, but un-Christian as well.

In a useful complement to Suzanne Schneider‘s Revealer article from a couple of months ago, “The Reformation Will Be Televised: On ISIS, Religious Authority, and the Allure of Textual Simplicity” Ed Simon has written, “ISIS is the Islamic ‘Reformation‘” for Religion Dispatches. 

How we use words like “medieval,” “reformation,” and “modern” must be exact if we’re to make any sense out of what the Islamic State is, and how we are to defeat it. Graeme Wood’s controversial Atlantic cover essay “What ISIS Really Wants” has opened discussion in the press about what language we use to describe the Islamic State. It may be politically expedient to deny that the Islamic State is Islamic (and of course the majority of the world’s Muslims find it reprehensible) but it’s also to commit the “No True Scotsmen Fallacy.”

It may be a little presumptuous to call Father James Martin our friend, but after Becky Garrison‘s interview with him here a couple of months ago  we like to think of him as our pal. Here’s Father Martin interviewing everyone’s friend, Stephen Colbert in: “Colbert Catechism: Stephen Colbert Professes His Faith to Fr. James Martin.“

RELIGION IN AMERICA’S PRISONS

In the lead-up to the NYU Center for Religion and Media’s upcoming event, “Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons” (April 10 at 3:30pm — more information here), we wanted to share with you some recent articles about prison religion. 

Sarah Morice-Brubaker reports for Religion Dispatches “Theologians Claim Death Row Inmate as One of Their Own.”

I don’t want to diminish the real promise here. For one thing, someone awaiting death found words of hope and blessing in the words of an academic theologian. And they did so because other academic theologians—and theological institutions—partnered with people in prison.

Rebecca Onion writes for Slate about “The Pen: Inmates at America’s oldest women’s prison are writing a history of it — and exploding the myth of its benevolent founders.”

What happens when inmates write a history of their own prison? In this case, the perspective that the group brought to the project took what inmate Michelle Jones, writing in the American Historical Association’s magazinePerspectives on History, calls “a feel-good story” about Quaker reformers rescuing women from abuse in men’s prisons and turned it into a darker, more complicated tale.

 Statistics more your thing? Mona Chalabi of FiveThirtyEight answers the question: “Are Prisoners Less Likely to be Atheists?” with all sorts of numbers and charts.

Overall, almost 1 in every 1,000 prisoners will identify as atheist compared to 1 in every 100 Americans.

So what explains these discrepancies between religious affiliation inside prisons and outside them? I’ll set out a couple of possible theories.

JUDAISM

First, RIP Leonard Nimoy. Here’s a video of Nimoy explaining the Jewish origin of the Vulcan greeting.

Alix Wall has a nice profile of Daniel Boyarin in J. Weekly, “Daniel Boyarin — the Talmudist, feminist, anti-Zionist, only-in-Berkeley Orthodox Jew.”

Today Boyarin, 68, is a world-class authority in his field — one of the true giants, in this country as well as in Israel. But he’s far from the typical Talmud scholar. He has a kippah on his head, yes, and is shomer Shabbos, but he’s also a confirmed anti-Zionist, a serious collector of fine kosher wines, and has an abiding interest in feminism and queer theory.

Gabe Friedman looks into the phenomenon of “Europe’s Undercover Yarmulke Journalists” for The Jewish Daily Forward‘s Forward Thinking blog.

Sending a yarmulke-wearing man out with a hidden video camera to document anti-Semitism on the streets of Europe, particularly in Muslim neighborhoods, is quickly becoming a journalistic trope.

Ella Habiba Shohat, an esteemed professor here at NYU, recently published her “Reflections By An Arab Jew” in Bint Jbeil.

When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded. This piece is written with the intent of opening up the mulitcultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census’s simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as “whites.”

It’s also written with the intent of multiculturalizing American notions of Jewishness. My personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts.

Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post reports that “Justice Ginsburg has released a new feminist take on the Passover narrative.”

“In Exodus, darkness attends the accession of a new Pharaoh who feared the Israelites and so enslaved them. God alone lights the way out of the darkness in Genesis. But in Exodus, God has many partners, first among them, five brave women,” says the essay by Ginsburg and Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt of Adas Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Northwest D.C.

You can read Justice Ginsburg’s essay here.

Speaking of Passover, according to Anne Cohen of The Forward, “Nothing Says Passover Like a Modern 10 Plagues Manicure.”

Rabbi Yael Buechler’s modern ten plagues include everything from Ebola to NFL scandals, to the war on women. And the parents among you may be happy to see that “Frozen”s Olaf is duly represented.

“[I’m] always looking for new and meaningful ways to help people engage with the Haggadah,” Buechler wrote in an email. “How can we in modern times connect with the concept of the ten plagues that afflicted the Egyptians? What plagues are we experiencing in modern society? From the lighthearted plague of Frozen paraphernalia, to the serious and deadly plagues of Ebola and gun violence, [I] want to expand the conversation at Seders worldwide.”

By Rabbi Yael Buechler

CHRISTIANITY

At Vice, Grace Wyler writes that, “Ted Cruz Wants to Lead an Evangelical Ghost Army in 2016.”

“It’s time to decide if we are a pagan nation, or if we’re going to get on with it. Ted Cruz decided to get on with it,” he added. “Now it’s up to the 65 million evangelicals living in America if we are going to restore America to a Biblically-based culture.”

Wondering about some of the other likely presidential candidates religious lives? According to Michael Paulson of the New York Times, “Jeb Bush, 20 Years After Conversion, Is Guided by His Catholic Faith.”

Twenty years after Mr. Bush converted to Catholicism, the religion of his wife, following a difficult and unsuccessful political campaign that had put a strain on his marriage, his faith has become a central element of the way he shapes his life and frames his views on public policy. And now, as he explores a bid for the presidency, his religion has become a focal point of early appeals to evangelical activists, who are particularly important in a Republican primary that is often dominated by religious voters.

Enough of politicians. Let’s talk about Kendrick Lamar (I mean, everyone else is, right?) “Kendrick Lamar on His New Album and the Weight of Clarity” from Joe Coscarelli in the New York Times. 

For many fans, “I’m the closest thing to a preacher that they have,” Mr. Lamar, 27, said from the couch of a Santa Monica studio where he recorded much of the new album. “I know that from being on tour — kids are living by my music.” However, he added: “My word will never be as strong as God’s word. All I am is just a vessel, doing his work.”

Brie LeRose of the Toast shares, “Freaks and Geeks: Christians on TV and Me.”

Sure, Millie could have been just another clueless TV Christian for us to laugh at, but Feig and the Freaks writers were too thoughtful and respectful of their characters to make it that simple. Millie is a good friend who is defined by her love for Jesus. She’s not a parody. She’s a confident Christian, and growing up I certainly knew plenty of those.

Carmen Maria Machado also reflects on her Christian adolescence in her beautiful piece, “A Girl’s Guide to Sexual Purity” in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

I had made a forest of my own beliefs, and lived in it. Here’s how I left: I stripped away the trees.

My first god was a mishmashed Frankenstein of my imagination, made up of scraps from the Methodist kids and the Evangelical kids, of my upbringing and my worst fears. Later, when Sam abandoned me, I tried to believe in a God who loved and still left his creations. I could not. For a while, God was a faint, hazy presence, and then even that evaporated.

In time, the trees scrolled back. I’d made that forest up. Perhaps I’d needed to go through it, to be the person I became. But to realize that it wasn’t real? That took living.

Now, I was still alone, but at least I could see in all directions.

And while we’re on the subject of gender and Christianity, check out, “The Failure of Macho Christianity“ by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at The New Republic.’

Mars Hill’s self-enumerated four pillars: reformed theology, spirit-empowerment, and a missional purpose are listed alongside gender complementarianism as the church’s core beliefs. True to form, Though professedly Calvinist, matters of justification and salvation always seemed only secondarily important to Driscoll, who focused instead on the notion that contemporary American men are sissified, Jesus has been misconstrued as a “a Richard Simmons, hippie, queer Christ,” and good Christian wives need to “serve [their husbands] and love them well” by giving performing frequent acts of oral sex. To refuse, Driscoll averred, is a sin.  

Meanwhile, in Texas (as so many great sentences start): “Texas approves textbooks with Moses as Founding Father” reports Michael Stone at Patheos. 

Christian conservatives win, children lose: Texas textbooks will teach public school students that the Founding Fathers based the Constitution on the Bible, and the American system of democracy was inspired by Moses.

For more background, we recommend Zack Kopplin‘s Slate article, “Moses and the American Constitution.”

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

Whereas, “Utah Passes Antidiscrimination Bill Backed by Mormon Leaders” reports Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times. 

The vote was an extraordinary moment for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is opposed to same-sex marriage, but sent two of its leading apostles to a news conference on Capitol Hill in Salt Lake City last week to endorse the anti-discrimination bill. Legislators and gay rights advocates said having the blessing of the church leaders turned the tide in the Legislature, where most members are Mormons.

 Well worth the long read is Patrick Radden Keefe‘s “Where The Bodies Are Buried” in The New Yorker.

Belfast has ostensibly been at peace for two decades, but the city remains acutely divided. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods are inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called “peace walls” that progress like fissures across the city. These towering structures maintain some degree of calm by physically separating the city’s populations, as if they were animals in a zoo. The walls are tagged with runelike slurs—K.A.T., for “Kill All Taigs,” a derogatory term for Catholics, on one side; K.A.H., for “Kill All Huns,” a reference to Protestants, on the other—and dwarf the squat brick houses and the unlovely council estates on either side, throwing them into shadow.

Also in The New Yorker is Paul Elie‘s lovely reflection on “Thomas Merton and the Eternal Search.”

Here ends the book, but not the searching. His search set the terms of the modern religious search for readers of three generations—postwar Catholics, nineteen-sixties pilgrims, progressive contrarians in the age of Reagan and John Paul II—who made his search their own. And yet the exhibit of books and papers that Columbia (his alma mater) has put up to mark his centenary suggests that the search is ended—that Merton, for so long a forerunner or proxy for other seekers, has passed over into history at last.

I guess we read a lot of The New Yorker, last month, because there’s no not recommending Eric Schlosser‘s “Break-In At Y-12: How a handful of pacifists and nuns exposed the vulnerability of America’s nuclear-weapons sites.”

Before long, the former principal of a Catholic high school and one of her former pupils were dancing atop a nuclear-weapons bunker at Wurtsmith Air Force Base, singing, “Jesus Christ has risen today!” They later prayed at the gates of the base every day for three years. The fact that millions of people could be killed by nuclear weapons, at any moment, demanded that something radical be done. They broke into a Minuteman complex in eastern Colorado and, during Gods of Metal Plowshares, hurled blood onto the bomb-bay doors of a B-52 at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland. Sister Ardeth and Sister Carol chose the protest’s name to convey the idolatry of nuclear weapons—the blind faith that they somehow keep us safe.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Gordon Haber asks, “Why Does the Pope Love This Trippy Dsytopian Novel from 1907?”

Perhaps Pope Francis’s enthusiasm shouldn’t be so surprising. Benson, a Catholic priest, was a popular writer in his time, and his dark vision of a world destroyed by secular humanism still resonates with a small but loyal following. In a 2013 homily, Pope Francis spoke of Lord of the World “almost as though it were a prophecy.”

ISLAM

“Harvard recognises Quranic verse as one of the greatest expressions of justice” reports Cii News.

Harvard Law School, one of the most prestigious institutions of its kind in the world, has posted a verse of the Holy Quraan at the entrance of its faculty library, describing the verse as one of the greatest expressions of justice in history.

Randy R. Potts documented anti-anti-Islamophobia protesters in “Standing With The (Wrong) Prophet” on Medium.

I asked Eric Pattison, holding “DON’T BEHEAD ME BRO!!” above, a couple questions: “Why are you here tonight, sir?/To protest this meeting./And what kind of meeting is it?/Stand with the Prophet. A muslim get together./Some kind of ceremony?/There’s several key speakers and they’re coming to talk about Mohammad and how the media portrays them and I just want to stand against, what, you know, I don’t believe — this was a Christian nation founded on Christian principles and with what’s going on with Paris and all those types of things I just want to make sure that our voices are heard, that we really don’t want this type of thing going on here.”

Sahar Ishtiaque Ullah has a thoughtful piece on Medium, “Villains, Heroes, and Other Fantasies: Imagining Muslims On and Off-Stage.”

As creators of cultural capital, we must consider how the process of racializing, demonizing or idolizing our communities are all processes that ultimately dehumanize and have real impacts on how we live in the world.

At The New Inquiry, Grayson Clary has some interesting thoughts on “Fear of a Muslim Planted: The micro-genre of ‘Islamophobic futurism’ in fiction unites Western liberals and conservatives.”

Islamophobic futurism is, in this respect, an effort towards bipartisanship. If conservative readers experience a certain attraction to this vision of Islam, admiring and fearing at once, it gratifies that impulse – doubly cathartic. If readers on the left are especially vulnerable to the aesthetic’s fearful side, that fear is solicited and sharpened. On that second front, Ferrigno mines a rich vein of unease that surfaces in both liberal-popular and left-intellectual culture. Though ultimately — the trilogy argues — left and right fears are branches of one instinct: that neither, if candid, can really stomach Islam.

Speaking of which, Mark Lilla reviews Michel Houellebecq‘s new book, Soumission, “Slouching Toward Mecca.”

There is no doubt that Houellebecq wants us to see the collapse of modern Europe and the rise of a Muslim one as a tragedy. “It means the end,” he told an interviewer, “of what is, quand même, an ancient civilization.” But does that make Soumission an Islamophobic novel? Does it portray Islam as an evil religion? That depends on what one means by a good religion. The Muslim Brotherhood here has nothing to do with the Sufi mystics or the Persian miniaturists or Rumi’s poetry, which are often mentioned as examples of the “real” Islam that radical Salafism isn’t. Nor is it the imaginary Islam of non-Muslim intellectuals who think of it on analogy with the Catholic Church (as happens in France) or with the inward-looking faiths of Protestantism (as happens in northern Europe and the US). Islam here is an alien and inherently expansive social force, an empire in nuce. It is peaceful, but it has no interest in compromise or in extending the realm of human liberty. It wants to shape better human beings, not freer ones.

Also on the subject of France, The Boston Review hosted an excellent forum on “France After Charlie Hebdo” with contributions from Joan Wallach Scott, Joseph Massad, and Haroon Moghul and opened by John Bowen, who argues:

…France’s long-term political project can encompass a different view, which strives for inclusivity by making good on the promise of the equality of citizens, celebrating their right to freely and publicly associate in all their religious and ethnic diversity, and accepting immigration as integral to modern France. Inclusivity is the only realistic and moral path toward healing France’s divisions, but it faces high political hurdles: it is easily denounced as multiculturalist weakness in the face of terrorism. Some will argue that the French republic was built on a strong Jacobin state, with little room for visible diversity or value pluralism.

However, while Jacobinism is one tendency of the republic, it is not the whole story. Pluralism, too, has deep roots in the French political tradition.

We at The Revealer are avid readers of the Los Angeles Review of Books, so you can imagine our excitement when we learned that they are now producing a The Marginalia Review of Books, “an international, open access review of literature and culture in the nexus of history, theology, and religion.”

We got even more excited when we caught wind of their new podcast, “Contemporary Islam Considered,” hosted by Sarah Eltantawi, Assistant Professor of Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies at Evergreen State College. “Contemporary Islam Considered” promises to bring “high-level analysis to issues affecting the Muslim-majority world, in conversation with some of the world’s leading experts in their fields.” The first episode is about the upcoming Nigerian elections. Do check it out.

We also really appreciated this Marginalia item, “ISIS: What’s a Poor Religionist to Do?“ by Aaron W. Hughs.

What do we do with those social actors who appeal to a version of religion that we find uncomfortable? How are we to react to groups that operate on a completely different moral and theological level from ours? The study of religion gives us little to draw upon. This is why we see limited nuance and instead are bombarded by secular scholars of religion — and many scholars of Islam, in particular — who simply accuse members of ISIS of takfīr, that is, of being unbelievers or apostates. This, of course, is not unlike what such groups do to Muslims with whom they disagree.

Lastly, but importantly, “Beyond Authenticity: ISIS and the Islamic Legal Tradition” by Sohaira Siddiqui.

By situating ISIS within the Islamic tradition on the basis of their mere utilization of it, Wood’s article and others like it overlook the fundamental issue which stands at the heart of the debate—ISIS’s juridical understanding and its relationship to the classical Islamic legal tradition. Mapping ISIS onto a dichotomy of Islamic versus un-Islamic is far too simple an approach when trying to understand the phenomenon of ISIS. The parameters of the debate ignore the amorphous nature of law, that law is paradoxical in that it is both fixed and flexible and that the validity of law is dependent upon the framework and system of law issuance that is created. Indeed, if we step outside of the cyclical authenticity debate in order to understand ISIS’s methodology in relation to the Islamic juridical tradition, we will see that ISIS represents a very fundamental rejection of both its principles and its parameters of operation.

HINDUISM

Julie McCarthy reports for NPR, “For India’s Widows, A Riot of Color, An Act of Liberation.”

“…when the widows of Vrindavan ignore the social taboo and join in the fun, Holi takes on a whole new dimension. Cavorting in the chaos of color, women young and old stand in showers of rose petals and marigolds and playfully smear each other with fuchsia, green and gold powder. With this act of joy, the women fight back against restrictions that have ostracized them.”

Susannah Ireland for NPR

BUDDHISM

“China’s Tensions With Dalai Lama Spill Into the Afterlife.” reports Chris Buckley at The New York Times.

Officials have amplified their argument that the Communist government is the proper guardian of the Dalai Lama’s succession through an intricate process of reincarnation that has involved lamas, or senior monks, visiting a sacred lake and divining dreams.

Party functionaries were incensed by the exiled Dalai Lama’s recent speculation that he might end his spiritual lineage and not reincarnate. That would confound the Chinese government’s plans to engineer a succession that would produce a putative 15th Dalai Lama who accepts China’s presence and policies in Tibet.

SCIENTOLOGY

“I took a Tour of Scientology’s Los Angeles (And It Was Pretty Creepy)” says Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice.

I decided to explore as many of Scientology’s properties in the city that are open to the public as I could (with the exception of the standard Scientology centers that every city has, because I refuse to believe there is a single person reading this who hasn’t gotten drunk, stumbled into one, then giggled their way through a ” personality test“).

As ever, there’s no talking about Scientology without talking about Tom Cruise. Marlow Stern writes, “Tom, Katie, and Suri: A Scientology Story” for The Daily Beast.

Indeed, Gibney’s eye-opening documentary-exposé may do plenty of damage to Brand Cruise, with its entire final half-hour dedicated to the actor’s alleged actions within the Church of Scientology. It will be interesting to see how Cruise responds.

“I don’t see how Tom Cruise can remain silent,” says Rinder. “I think he has got to get engaged in this, and as soon as that happens, it’s a slippery slope. Because he’s got problems. If he opens his mouth, it’s going to turn into an avalanche on him.”

MISCELLANEOUS

Wishing there was a little more religion in your March Madness? Vote for your favorite Christian theologians in the Logos Bible Software tournament.

Wishing there was a even less religion in your March Madness? Vote for your favorite Marxist in the Marx Madness Tournament. 

Respected professor of religion John Modern joins us in rolling his eyes at New York Times Op-Ed buffoonery, “My God, David Brooks” in Religion Dispatches. 

Despite Brooks’ self-deprecating worry about “totally butchering” Taylor’s answer to what it “feels like to live in an age like ours,” there is a brutal edge to Brooks’ anti-intellectualism. He belittles the presence of critical thinking in the public sphere even as he defines critique, thinking, and civic responsibility as matters of personal choice. Here we encounter the gospel of David Brooks (and a metaphysical strain of American civil religion) as he doubles down on the reach of his own cultural sway, disseminating, far and wide, the message that we are at our best when we choose to receive watered-down versions of crusty tomes full of abstractions (easier to digest according to the recent discoveries of neuroscience, or something to that effect).

Trust your gut and David Brooks, whose common sense is both yours and mine.

At New York Magazine‘s Daily Intelligencer, Adrien Chen asks a question we at The Revealer, as Brooklyn dwellers ourselves, would very much like answered: “Why do Severed Goat Head Keep Turning Up in Brooklyn?”

“Basically it’s one of three things,” Quinones said. “It’s Santería, or Vodou, or Palo Mayombe.” Santería, Vodou, and Palo Mayombe are the three most prominent Afro-Caribbean religions. All three descend from African religions, brought to the Caribbean by slaves who preserved them, often in secret, despite slave-owners’ best, brutal attempts to Christianize them. Santería and Palo Mayombe originated on the sugarcane plantations of Cuba, while Vodou developed in Haiti. All three religions are practiced in the U.S. by immigrants who have large communities in Brooklyn, and contain a component of ritual animal sacrifice. Quinones’s conclusion made intuitive sense, but then I considered the journalist’s warning to me: Wasn’t it self-serving for an expert in the occult to see animal sacrifices wherever he looked? I wanted more proof. I asked Quinones how he would start looking into the goat heads himself.

Lauren Bans investigate, “Om-ing on the Beach With Andrew Keegan, Former Teen Idol Turned Spiritual Guru” for Vulture.

“There’s probably a book here. You want to write a book?” Andrew Keegan, ’90s teen heartthrob, asks, only half-joking, before launching into the story of how he came to be a spiritual torchbearer. Here’s how he tells it: In the spring of 2013, Keegan, best known for playing the slicked-hair popular jerk in 10 Things I Hate About You, got down on his knees and dug a small hole in the front yard of a 110-year-old church, formerly occupied by the Hare Krishna. The building, situated at a busy intersection in Venice, California, was at the time housing a New Age group called the Source, whose mission is “raising the collective consciousness of humanity.” Keegan had joined the group early on, when it was known as “God Realization Church,” but he’d distanced himself after coming to understand that the Source’s philosophy was “not in alignment” with his own beliefs. He did, however, feel especially aligned with its place of worship. So in the hole, Keegan placed a small rose-quartz crystal, and as he dropped handfuls of dirt upon it, he made a solemn promise. “I was clear that if there was ever an appropriate time to be in the service of the temple, I would be,” Keegan says as he gazes out at the Pacific Ocean from a bench on the beach less than half a mile away from the church

“Mayor de Blasio Emerges as an Unexpected Champion of Religion“ according to Michael M. Grynbaum and Sharon Otterman at the New York Times.

In Mr. de Blasio’s New York, public prekindergarten classes will soon be able to include a midday break for observant students to pray. Schools will be closed citywide for two Muslim holy days. He is poised to relax health regulations governing a controversial circumcision ritual that is favored by some ultra-Orthodox Jews. And the mayor says he is intent on finding a way for church groups to continue holding services in public schools on weekends, even as the United States Supreme Court could decide as early as next week to take up a case about whether the city has the right to prohibit the practice.

In other New York City news, Tatiana Schlossberg reports in The New York Times that, “New York Fire Dept., Diversifying Ranks, Is Set to Swear in First Lesbian Chaplain.” Right on, NYFD.

Maybe it is her short, spiky hair, or the cigarettes, which she gives to the men repairing the wiring in her Brooklyn apartment. Maybe it is because she swears. For whatever reason, the Rev. Ann Kansfield does not fit the stereotype of a minister.

Not that she is worried about meeting anyone’s expectations for what a clergywoman should say or do.

“God is a Terrifying Monster” according to Jess Peacock at Religion Dispatches. 

In some sense, I am making an argument that, in order to survive, contemporary religion must continue to adapt and evolve, moving beyond the antiquated laws, orthodoxy, and dogmas that prevent modern audiences from fully embracing it, and develop into a vital medley of transforming narratives.

As absurd as it may sound, the traditional vampire narrative in popular culture has a lot to say about this very thing.

Laura Turner has smart things to say about “Fireworks and Brimstone: The Personal God of Katy Perry” at Buzzfeed.

When Perry talks about her relationship with God, it always sounds both personal and somehow refreshing. No other pop star talks about God so regularly and sounds so candid doing it. “I do not believe God is an old guy sitting on a throne with a long beard,” she once told GQ, and it shows. Her God is deeply interested in the details of her personal life, from her Super Bowl performance to her relationships to her cup size.

Allison Meier at Hyperallergic gives us a look at “Five of the World’s Largest Religious Manuscripts, from Devil’s Bible to Buddhist Labrynth.”

The “Codex Gigas” at the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm is, according to the library’s site, “reputed to be the biggest surviving European manuscript.” Its name means “giant book,” and its more nefarious nickname — the “Devil’s Bible” — comes from the full page portrait of the devil that lurks amidst the 13th-century text. Measuring 36 inches tall, 20 inches wide, and 8.7 inches thick with a heft of 165 pounds, its creation required an estimated 160 donkey skins.

Half of a stereoscopic image of the “Codex Gigas” from 1906 (via National Library of Sweden)

Sold out, but still too amazing not to mention: “COMPLETE SET: Golden Girls Prayer Candles”

Oops! “Christian Singer let Fifty Shades Use His Song, Thinking It Was a Comedy.” (Thanks go to Jay Hathaway at Gawker for this one.)

I knew it was a book, but I had no idea what it was. So I was like, sure, big movie, good exposure. I’ll be in this romantic comedy. Which is what I thought it was: a romantic comedy. It’s a good way to make money in the music business, you know. Then I saw a preview for it, and I was like, “Oh, shit. Oh, no. What have I done?”

Lastly, CAUTION! “Applebee’s not liable for N.J. man burned while praying over fajita skillet.”

-Kali Handelman, Editor, The Revealer

The post In the News: Passover, Prison, Pop Music , and more! appeared first on The Revealer.