Bill Cosby as Santa

The Huffington Post released their top 10 religion stories of the year.

In response to Aisha Harris’s piece in Slate, Fox News host Megyn Kelly assured kids everywhere of the whiteness of Santa Claus, New York Magazine reports. Following Kelly’s televised assertion which can be viewed here, a New Mexican high school teacher reportedly told an African-American student, who had dressed up as Santa for a school function, that he could not be Santa, because Santa is indeed white, CNN reports. Andy Borowitz’s report at The New Yorker, has Megyn Kelly’s responses to children’s Christmas wishes.

Pope Francis, after being called a “pure” Marxist by Rush Limbaugh, went on the defensive, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that, “Marxist ideology is wrong. But I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don’t feel offended…There is nothing in the Exhortation that cannot be found in the social Doctrine of the Church… The only specific quote I used was the one regarding the ‘trickle-down theories’ which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and social inclusiveness in the world. The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefiting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger nothing ever comes out for the poor,” the Washington Times reports.

In other papacy- news, Francis– not Miley Cyrus– was named Time’s person of the year. James Carroll recounts Francis’s “radical year” at The New Yorker.

Billy O’Reilly, keeping the “War on Christmas” narrative alive, claimed on his show this week that ‘Secular Progressives’ are attacking the holiday season out of their desires for “unfettered abortion” and “gay marriage.”

Jesus might have performed his miracles with cannabis oil, Vice reports.

Urban Outfitters Socks

Also at Vice, a story exploring queer theology, “a new ‘reading’ of classic scripture” that “recognizes and explores the gendered and sexualized underpinnings of Christianity, as well as the opportunities for examining culture via queer religious thought.”

Clashes between police and Muslim Uighurs continued in China’s Xinjiang region this week, killing at least 14, NPR reports.

Just in time for holiday gift-giving, UrbanOutfitters has released a controversial collection of socks imprinted with religious images ranging from Jesus to Lord Ganesh.

n+1 Magazine has an interesting read on the rise of “Jesus Raves” orchestrated by the NYC-based Christian hipster conglomeration “Liberty Church.” Their website is worth a visit.

Archaeologists have discovered remnants of what some experts are calling some sort of ancient tree shine, and others the earliest example of a Buddhist pilgramage shrine, National Geographic reports.

The Telegraph has a piece on a newly-formed Buddhist organization calling themselves “Monks Without Borders.”

Elizabeth Segran, at The Nation, writes on the “rise of Islamic feminists.”

See you in 2014!

– Christopher Smith, Student Assistant, The Revealer

Monks Without Borders

The post In The News: Is Santa White? Is the Pope a Marxist? What’s a Christian Hipster? appeared first on The Revealer.

A group of young men from Mt. Eruni walk between a pair of boulders that was the village’s war-time Adventist church. Photo by Rowan Moore Gerety.

By Rowan Moore Gerety

At the time of my visit, the village of Mulide had been without a store for more than 28 years. But a row of abandoned storefronts still stood on a ridge below the Adventist church, and these shops were the first thing López Ngoba mentioned when I asked him about the caves. In Mocuba, the nearest town with paved roads and any commerce to speak of—a good 40 miles off—I’d heard there were caves in the surrounding countryside where people had taken refuge during Mozambique’s long civil war. I’d come to Mulide to find them.

“It was April 15, 1983,” Ngoba said, sitting on a low stool as he tended a fire outside his house. “Before that day, we didn’t know war. We didn’t know guns. It was just silence throughout the area. And then, on April 15th—did you see the stores over there?—well, on April 15^th, those stores were set on fire and there was a lot of shooting and people ran and told us about it, and we thought, ‘That must be war.’” Sitting by the fire in a dark blue blazer and polka dot tie, a look of genuine bafflement came over Ngoba’s face, almost as though he was listening to his story rather than telling it.

By 1983, the conflict between Mozambique’s Marxist government, known as Frelimo, and the rebel group Renamo, which received backing from the Apartheid government in South Africa, had actually been going on for close to seven years. Frelimo denounced Renamo as “armed bandits,” bent only on destruction, while Renamo vowed to bring an end to the government’s record of religious repression and failed state-run farms. And yet, living out of reach of the propaganda from both sides, Ngoba’s description is a good measure of how abstract the war seemed until the violence finally intruded on Mulide. As we spoke, he offered up a plate of pigeon peas steamed in their shells, pausing periodically to tear open a pod with his teeth.

I was in Mulide as the guest of Ngoba’s youngest son, Moisés, an unfailingly cheerful schoolteacher I’d met along the road the day before a few miles outside Mocuba. Moisés had gone to town on church business and was biking back home. I didn’t have a clue where I was going, but when a friend who had agreed to take me sightseeing didn’t show, I began biking anyhow. I soon found myself keeping pace with Moisés for mile after mile. The road climbed gradually through a landscape of dry, golden meadows that yielded to mountains and vast tracts of hardwood forest in the distance. I don’t remember how we began talking; before long, though, it seemed as though we’d set out together. We passed other bikes hauling livestock, children, cases of beer, and in the other direction, bundles of thatch and sacks of produce and charcoal. Moisés had used the occasion to sell part of his maize crop in town. On the return, he carried a backpack full of sandals, new uniforms, salt, and urban necessities for his family.

For three years after the shops were destroyed, Ngoba explained, Mulide was caught between the dueling suspicions of two rival armies. Renamo had been responsible for the raid on the village stores, and though they forced people from Mulide to carry their loot most of the way back to their base, deep in the bush, the rebels spent the next several months trying to ingratiate themselves with the local population. “After that, they came and mixed with the population, just as you are now,” Ngoba said earnestly. “They sat with us, they ate with us.” That fall, Ngoba said, government operatives killed several people from Mulide while they were on trips into Mocuba, accusing the locals of being rebels themselves. In November, wary of Renamo’s creeping acceptance in the area, a Frelimo battalion came as far as Mulide and forced the village to re-locate wholesale, to an area that was secured by the army. They stayed there for two years as Frelimo gradually pushed Renamo’s militias out of the area. Then the army left, almost as suddenly as it had come. “We chased Renamo away,” he recalled Frelimo soldiers telling the community, “you can return to your homes.” Before the last soldiers retreated from the area, a popular militia was trained, and Ngoba appointed to lead it. Thirty men with guns were to protect the village.

But when they returned to Mulide, everything was gone. Their homes had been set on fire and emptied of any remaining possessions, their church reduced to a pile of clay ruins. “We suffered a lot,” Ngoba kept saying. It soon got worse, since Renamo was no longer deterred by the presence of a professional army, and now saw people in Mulide as ardent Frelimo loyalists. Ngoba saw neighbors kidnapped and mutilated, their hands, lips, ears, and breasts cut off with machetes.  “When you went to work for them, you worked as a slave. I said to myself, ‘We can’t live like this.’ And I took the population up to live in the caves.”

Seated by the fire, López Ngoba recounts his experiences living in the Mt Eruni caves during the Mozambican civil war. Photo by Rowan Moore Gerety.

Now nearing 70, Ngoba was no longer able to make the bike ride to Mt. Eruni. So the next morning, after a leisurely breakfast of cornmeal mash and curried cabbage, Moisés and I took off down an eroded, dry creek bed with loose rocks and soft sand walls; I constantly feared I would tumble over my handlebars.

It took two hours to reach the mountain, biking a route that included stretches of long, sandy flats, creek crossings, and giant slabs of granite. Moisés sent word of our destination with a motorcycle that overtook us along the way, and by the time we reached the village at the foot of Mt. Eruni, a large, all-male welcoming party had assembled alongside the path. Among them was the local Secretary—the village-level representative of the Mozambican government—who led us down a sandy trail into a snake’s tongue of a valley squeezed between steep walls of granite. Everywhere, the Secretary pointed out boulders that he said people had used as houses during the war. When one wall gave way, we climbed a short rise to the left, and stumbled through a field of tall grasses growing in clumps. The Secretary paused next to a slight depression in the ground in the shadow of a large boulder and said, “This was the exit.” Whatever cavity there once was, it had long since been covered over with sand. We scrambled down a granite face, clinging to tufts of grass along the way, until we made our way to the ‘entrance,’ about 100 yards away, now clogged with tree roots. It seemed impossibly far for a cave to extend underground. For a minute, I thought I’d been swept up in a day-long misunderstanding. Perhaps ‘the caves’ was a metaphor of sorts for hiding in plain view, living among the boulders. But several of the young men who had come along with the Secretary had spent a year or more of their childhoods in the caves, and they assured me that I had the right idea. “You can stand up inside,” one said. “There’s water inside, and small rooms so that you could go visit your friends.” In a few places, there was even natural light. But nobody had been inside in years. Why would they?

During the war, people worked in their machambas while children stood sentry atop termite mounds in the fields. They wore loin clothes, Ngoba told me, made cooking pots out of clay, and ate their food with no salt. When Renamo was spotted, everyone moved into the caves and stayed put for several days. When the rebels receded from view, the lookouts blew “all-clear” with a buffalo horn, and people emerged one by one to find their fields burnt and their cassava uprooted. But Renamo never found the caves.

We re-traced our steps and began clambering up a second, higher mountain —Mt. Eruni proper—by way of a steep rock face already warm from the heat of the sun at 11 a.m. The Secretary pointed out another pair of lapsed cave entrances, further apart than the first, then turned to face the rolling woodlands that spread out before us to the east. Before the war, the area was less forested, he told me.  “Only crops,” he said, sweeping one hand across the panorama; most people who had gone to the city to flee the violence simply never came back.

On a flat stretch of ground at the very top of Mt. Eruni, two monumental sheets of granite came together to form a long triangular passage, higher at one end than at the other. Sunlight illuminated red stains of iron running through the rock. This was the first of two pairs of leaning boulders Ngoba had described the day before as wartime churches: one for the Adventists, and one for the Catholics, both situated as far as possible from the constant threat of a raid.

The local government representative at Mt. Eruni lowers himself into a crevice that once served as the entrance to a network of caves where he and several dozen families lived for a year in 1987. Photo by Rowan Moore Gerety.

Of the two chambers, the Adventist church was by far the grander, solemn and high ceilinged enough that it didn’t take much imagination to think of it as a church. At the mouth of the church, what I imagined as the altar, a sparse, dappled canopy of trees framed a vista of the rolling forest below, and a river, Moisés said, that meandered all the way to Mocuba. As he’d described it the night before, Ngoba appeared to see the place before him, mapping out the stone roof line with his hands. It had been the only place, during the year they spent in the caves, where people from Mulide had been able to enjoy something like leisure, and the place where they’d gone to indulge their hopes of peace and prosperity.

The Secretary himself was a Catholic, and when we reached the Catholic church, a low shaded space where a recent visitor had set a snare for passing rodents, he crossed himself and sat quietly on a stone in the middle. “This is where we used to have mass,” he said. There was no pastor living in Eruni during the war, so locals had taken up the task instead, preaching as best they knew how.

Before independence, the Catholic Church had been the handmaiden of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, administering primary education in the colony and providing moral cover for the Portuguese government’s brutality. Accordingly, Frelimo—first as a guerrilla force and later as a Marxist government—was explicitly anti-religious; after Independence, many Catholic priests were forced to leave the country, and the Church’s property was nationalized. Even groups who’d had no formal relationship with the colonial government were subjected to Frelimo’s anti-religious policies: Jehovah’s Witnesses bore the brunt of it, interned by the hundreds in re-education camps in remote areas of Northern Mozambique. During the war and since, Renamo has used this history to cast itself as the defender of religious freedom in Mozambique. Visiting these cave churches, though, I felt like I had a glimpse of the cruel paradox people in Mulide had to live through during the war. At a certain point, the religious politics and positioning of either party was irrelevant: these two stone churches, stripped of any institutional affiliation or connection to the outside world, became the place where people fled Frelimo’s religious persecution and Renamo’s alleged defense of religious freedom. For a year, the boulders became all that a church is meant to be—a refuge and a sanctuary.

Rowan Moore Gerety is a freelance print and radio reporter based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the CSMonitor, Killing the Buddha, the Huffington Post, Marketplace, and PRI’s Living on Earth. This story was made possible by a 2011 Fulbright scholarship to Mozambique. Read more of his work at www.rowanmg.com.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post Mountains of Mulide: A Wartime Refuge appeared first on The Revealer.

Muhammad Ali, untitled digital print on canvas. Image courtesy the Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi.

By Saba Imtiaz

Amid a sea of attendees at an event marking the anniversary of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s death last year, one woman stood out. On her bright tunic in the red, black and green colors of the flag of Bhutto’s party—the Pakistan Peoples Party—she had embroidered a vivid image of his daughter, Benazir, also a former prime minister.

That form of expression—a veritable ‘wearing your heart on your sleeve’—has long been present in the country. Artists have used their work to express their anguish since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, taking their cue from the bloodshed of partition that led to this country’s formation and its divisions.

But while their anguish may always have existed on canvas, their work has now been given a new lease of life. The intense international media spotlight on Pakistan—brought on by the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war in Afghanistan and surge in militancy in Pakistan itself—has made these works the subject of discussion not just in Pakistan’s small art milieu, but around the world. In the past decade, artists like Imran Qureshi and Rashid Rana—who has exhibited at the Musee Guimet in France—have been celebrated in some of the world’s best galleries, and garnered interest from the likes of Christie’s. This summer, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York commissioned Qureshi to create an installation for the museum’s rooftop garden. His work used splatters of red paint to form visuals in the style of the miniaturists whose work is characteristic of this region. Qureshi’s own miniatures are currently on display at the Met.

While Qureshi or Rana don’t focus exclusively on violence in their work, the annual theses exhibits at Karachi’s art schools seem largely dominated by the conflict in the country. From a tree hung with grenades to car window shades beseeching muggers not to shoot, it is hard to shake off the sense that the headlines have permanently entrenched themselves in the consciousness of Pakistani artists.

Sameera Raja, who runs the contemporary art gallery Canvas in Karachi, attributes this to an awareness of Pakistani art. It isn’t just restricted to galleries anymore, images of Pakistani art have gone viral and there is far more press coverage at home and abroad.

Rashid Rana, detaila from “All Eyes Skyward During the Annual Parade”, (2004). Image courtesy the Mohatta Palace Museum. All rights reserved.

If Pakistani art is having its moment in the sun, there are still genuine concerns for the safety of artists whose work comments on religion and politics, as well as those who display it. The subcontinent’s celebrated writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s portraits of society led to a charge of obscenity and artist Ijaz-ul-Hassan used newspaper headlines and was jailed in 1977 for his work that was critical of the military regime led by General Zia-ul-Haq. In 2009, violence broke out at the Arts Council in Karachi over an exhibit depicting the late Benazir Bhutto sitting in the lap of General Zia-ul-Haq. The image, part of a cultural festival, was deeply offensive to supporters of the late Bhutto, whose father, the late prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed and executed under General Zia’s regime.

But the reaction to such images pales in comparison to the response provoked by depictions of religious imagery. Last year, Lahore’s prestigious National College of Arts found itself in the midst of a blasphemy row, when hard-line extremist groups accused the college’s art journal of publishing sacrilegious images. The journal published paintings by artist Muhammad Ali of clerics sitting with seminude men. The images evoke the numerous horrific accounts of sexual abuse perpetrated by clerics, but they are also a comment on homosexuality, a subject that is still controversial in Pakistan. Blasphemy is punishable by death in Pakistan, and even the mere accusation of blasphemy has led to pogroms, violent protests and public lynching of the accused.

Curator Sameera Raja says that there is a need to be mindful of the space where images are shown. Galleries abroad reserve rights of admission to certain exhibits, and Rashid Rana’s images of veiled women, made from pixelated pornographic images, were not shown in France because of the controversy over the veil ban in public spaces, said Raja. “In the privacy of my home, I can do what I want but when I go into a public domain I have a duty towards society.”  Similarly, Raja says, some work can be exhibited at a public space while others should be restricted to galleries.

Critic Nafisa Rizvi, a former editor of the ArtNow journal, says the episode in Lahore was “insensitively handled.”

“There is the idea of homosexuality but it doesn’t just mean that one depicts two men being together,” Rizvi said. “A very close friend of mine is going through such torture in his life – because of his choice – and he shows it in his work. But no one is paying attention. If he had been abroad right now he would have been [celebrated]… but he is completely neglected here because he doesn’t talk about violence.”

As political art gains more traction there is also a risk that artists could fall into the trap of following a tried and tested approach of depicting violence to market their work. But that may not fly. Pakistani art buyers don’t set out to buy art just because of its themes, Raja says.

But Nafisa Rizvi is more critical. “I feel that there is an idea of the bandwagon that some artists have climbed on to. It has become a very convenient theme to paint blood and gore and heads being chopped off and bomb blasts,” Rizvi said. “Some artists do it in a sensitive manner, and some don’t. With all art, there is good and bad, and there are levels of subtlety and emotional investment in the art. We have to make a difference. Imran Qureshi’s installation at the Met is startling, and has caught the attention of the world audience. But it is associated with a stereotype that is bloodshed in Pakistan. That is what the crux of his installation becomes, people being killed in Pakistan and nothing more, though he says there is a symbol of hope. I hate to say it, but people have come to see the gore. I love the piece, but after all, it becomes a stereotype. It’s something that audiences have lapped up.”

Rizvi argues that art needs to go “beyond” the violence. “There’s one thing that is talking about the issue, the other is about the psychological effects of the issue. Are you able to go beyond the physical or the metaphysical and can you incorporate that at that level? Art has to reflect a zeitgeist, a milieu – you can’t be bereft of that. Where are the other issues, where is the person who is hurt emotionally?”

Rizvi agrees that while one can depict religion – and get away with it – it is also tied to the fact that galleries are in upscale neighborhoods. “Only one kind of people can see this art and patronize it.”

Imran Qureshi’s Roof Garden Installation, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, June 2013. Photo by Natasja Sheriff.

There are few public spaces for contemporary art in Pakistan. Sameera Raja has often said that instead of asking for the government to patronize the arts, it is the private sector that needs to step up. Ironically, the iconic painter Sadequain’s best work—his large murals—were commissioned by the government to be placed in public buildings such as the central bank or on a dam in Punjab.

Karachi’s Mohatta Palace Museum—a heritage site converted into an exhibition space—has hosted several important exhibits of contemporary artists, including retrospectives of artists like Sadequain. The museum currently features an exhibit by Rashid Rana.

Among Rana’s work on display is “Desperately Seeking Paradise” (2007-2008), a large steel cube that takes up most of the exhibition room.  The piece is inspired by the Ka’aba, the pilgrimage site in Mecca revered by Muslims as the House of God and a household image across Pakistan. But this steel cube seems innocuous enough from afar until one steps closer. The steel frame is inlaid with panels featuring images of houses in Lahore and the skyline of neighborhoods in the city. This isn’t an iconic skyline: there are no skyscrapers and only a handful of recognizable monuments, so the skyline is formed of hundreds of thousands of houses meshed together. “You’re missing the best thing,” a gallery staffer calls out as I leave the exhibit. “You have to view it from a corner.”

I walk back and realize that the panels also form a skyline of high-rise buildings. As I walk around the cube, mimicking the movements of pilgrims as they walk around the Ka’aba, I can’t help but think about how Rana has interpreted the notion of pilgrimage in a modern-day context. Is this a comment on urbanization or a quick journey from the gleaming skylines abroad to the clusters of haphazardly built neighborhoods in Pakistan?

Even though the idea of the Ka’aba is staring right at me it doesn’t feel controversial. In Pakistan, we are often told the cautionary tale that attempting to create your own version of heaven will incur God’s wrath, or that pilgrimage is the only way one can feel closer to God.

Rashid Rana’s “Desperately Seeking Paradise” (2007-2008) at Mohatta Palace Museum.
Photograph by Akbar Khushik, 12 Nov 2010. Image courtesy Mohatta Palace Museum.

But the idea that art in Pakistan can be controversial must have inculcated a sense of self-censorship in the community. I put the question to Raja, who says while it does exist, she doesn’t agree with it. “That should not be a reason to curb your creativity,” she said. “The fact is that nowadays artists don’t work for the heck of working, they’re thinking about ‘where should I show it?’, ‘who will buy it?’”

For some artists, this isn’t a question. Instead of exhibiting within the confines of art galleries and exhibit spaces, they’ve taken their work to the streets.

There is an expression in Urdu: “even walls have ears”. But in Pakistan, the walls don’t just have “ears”; they have their own history to tell.

Walls in this country—from shops to graveyards—usually feature hand-painted political party slogans with their one-line manifestos, hate speech against religious minorities, and advertisements from self-proclaimed “spiritual sages” promising cures for black magic curses to homeopaths claiming to have the answer to impotence. If the paint were scrubbed away, decades of this rhetoric, and a history of pop culture, would reveal itself in reverse as each layer came off.

So for some artists, the walls are the perfect canvas. One of the most well-known artists who used graffiti as a form of protest art was the late Asim Butt, who spray painted eject symbols on the walls of Karachi in 2007 as calls grew for General Pervez Musharraf to step down amid countrywide protests. He also defaced containers that are often used to block streets so protestors can’t pass through.

Graffiti artist Kala Boss (not his real name) says that “Living in Pakistan means you are constantly being exposed to some form of injustice or violence that is out of your control. I think that in this kind of environment it is very easy to become apathetic and turn a blind eye to everything as long as you are not directly involved. I saw this happening to me and wanted a chance to speak up. Not knowing how to go about it, I turned to the streets.”

While Rashid Rana’s exhibit depicting veiled women wasn’t shown in France (it was however, exhibited in Pakistan), Kala Boss took the veil to the walls. His work in recent years has included a woman in a burqa that was flapping up à la Marilyn Monroe, an image that went viral on the internet and now features on a line of t-shirts. It is also fairly ironic that the image appeared on public walls in some of Karachi’s most upscale neighborhoods, where many of its residents would deride a woman wearing a burqa as a ‘ninja’ or a hardliner. The image, for all of its shock value, also highlights that there is an actual, real, living and breathing person underneath the veil, not just another woman sheathed in black. His images have routinely appeared on the same walls only to be repeatedly painted over. One of the artist’s most talked about pieces of street art was a silhouette of a pregnant woman with a bomb in her belly; another featured the country’s map as a dinosaur.

Asim Butt, “Something Rotten in the State,” (2009), unfinished. Spray paint graffiti. Sunset Boulevard, Karachi. Photo courtesy Mohatta Palace Museum.

While Kala Boss’ work has disappeared off the walls, replaced with advertisements and fresh coats of paint ready for more political party slogans, he said, “people are less likely to accept something on a roadside as art and therefore are less likely to treat it with any kind of respect. I personally don’t expect every single person to understand my work nor do I expect it to last very long. When putting something up in a public space you have to accept that it is no longer yours. The public will decide to do with it what they please. Some part of me actually likes it when my work is removed or vandalized because it means somebody saw it, understood it, and felt strongly enough about it to do something!”

Artists are now trying to promote graffiti and street art. This November, students at the Karachi University’s Visual Studies department took over several streets in a part of the city that is home to government buildings, the legislative assembly and court houses to paint murals on public walls, spray paint stenciled images depicting guns being thrown into trash cans, and put up posters in the central parts of the city depicting paintings of barbed wire, as part of a festival curated by a group of artists called ‘Pursukoon (Peaceful) Karachi’. The attempt, however, seems self-contained and lacks the spontaneity of work done by Butt or Kala Boss, a fact that organizer Nafisa Rizvi acknowledges. “This is also an art form,” she said. “What we did was simulated visual expression,” referring to the fact that there was an agenda attached to the graffiti and it was done in a controlled environment.

But while the work of street artists is routinely painted over, thanks to Kala Boss it lives on in a line of t-shirts. “Growing up in Karachi makes you very aware of the differences in classes, sects, religions and ethnicity’s of everyone living around you,” he told The Revealer. “I liked the idea of producing something that everyone could wear regardless of the differences that separated them; hence the decision to keep the number of designs limited and simple.” Over the past few years, scores of t-shirt companies have popped up in Pakistan offering designs that highlight their own, often sarcastic, interpretation of life in this country. Like the woman at the rally, perhaps there is a stronger desire to wear some form of political expression on one’s sleeve.

But apart from t-shirts and the odd coffee table book, there is little being done to document Pakistan’s contemporary art. In a country where archives are routinely dumped and thrown out, there is little hope that decades of art and political expression will be remembered once the walls are whitewashed again.

Saba Imtiaz is a freelance journalist in Pakistan. She reports on politics, culture, human rights and religion for local and foreign publications and is currently working on a book about the conflict in Karachi. Her work is available on her website, http://sabaimtiaz.com and she can be contacted at saba.imtiaz@gmail.com.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

Featured image: Muhammad Ali, “Evanassence.” Image courtesy Canvas Art Gallery, Karachi.

The post Hitting the Wall: Art in Pakistan appeared first on The Revealer.

Second Life’s Tower of Meditation. Image via Secondlife.com.

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth of an ongoing series of interviews about the study of religion and media around the world. The first part appeared in summer 2012.   In his introduction then, Plate wrote:

Over the next several months, I will be interviewing scholars who are investigating the places where religion and media meet. Since The Revealer itself began alongside NYU’s Center for Religion and Media, this seems a logical venue. The hope is that these intersections will provide a forum for a broad range of scholars, but also make scholarly work accessible to a general public interested in such topics. After all… they are inescapable even if we don’t think of them in terms like “religion” or “media.”

By S. Brent Plate

Can you really meditate in Second Life? How is a video game like a magic circle? Is “real life” just one more window in our multitudinously screened lives? In this interview, recorded earlier this year, I talk with Gregory Grieve about such questions, and about hacking, video games as art, and the narrative constructions possible in and out of various realities.

Grieve has been playing (and I use that term deliberately) with new media and religious practice for most of his life, as you’ll hear here. Currently, he is an associate professor in the religion department of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. He researches and teaches in the intersections of Asian religions, digital media, popular culture, and ethnographic approaches to the study of religion. He’s published a number of books and articles on these topics, and is the author of Retheorizing Religion in Nepal and the co-editor of the edited volume Historicizing Tradition in the Study of Religion. Several works are forthcoming, including the co-edited (with Heidi Campbell) Playing with Religion in Video Games, and (with Daniel Veidlinger) Buddhism, the Internet, and Digital Media: The Pixel in the Lotus. He is working on Digital Zen: Contemplating Buddhism, Virtual Worlds, and the Mindful Use of Media which concentrates on Buddhism in the virtual world of Second Life, a 3D interactive world of over 20 million residents in which users interact with one another through animated avatars. In 2004-05 he was a fellow at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media.

More about Greg Grieve and his projects can be found here.

S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. His recent books include Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World; and Blasphemy: Art that Offends. With Jolyon Mitchell he co-edited The Religion and Film Reader. He is co-founder and managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.

The post Intersections: Plate Interviews Gregory Grieve appeared first on The Revealer.

Still from WGAL News 8 Broadcast on September 27, 2013.

By Ann Neumann

“The Patient Body” is a monthly column about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. You can read the October column here and the November column here.

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. –2 Peter 1:20, KJV

In August, when I learned that Conestoga Wood Specialties, a family-owned business that makes custom wood cabinets, had lost their challenge to the “contraception mandate” in the Affordable Care Act, I called Charles Proctor, their lawyer. Conestoga, a Mennonite-owned company based in my hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was preparing to appeal their case to the US Supreme Court. I wanted to know if Norman Hahn and his family, Conestoga’s owners, would agree to an interview. Proctor was skeptical. “They’re very private,” he told me.

I never did hear from them. But the idea of privacy dogged me as I watched the US Supreme Court accept their case last week, along with that of the craft store Hobby Lobby. The Conestoga court petition states that the Hahns, “a family of five Mennonites and their closely-held, family-run woodworking corporation, object as a matter of conscience to facilitating contraception that may prevent the implantation of a human embryo in the womb.”

“Closely held” is used thirteen times in the appeal (which you can read in full here, posted online at the ACLU’s Challenges to the Contraceptive Coverage Rule page, along with updates on all such cases). The repeated use of “closely held” to describe Conestoga is intentional, and done with an eye to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that ruled corporations had a right to free speech. “If you have First Amendment protection for free speech, then you should have religious freedom as well,” Proctor told the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal.

Conflating Conestoga Wood Specialties with the Hahn family, which the repeated use of “closely-held” means to do, is a way to erase the separation between the family and the corporation. Non-profits are exempt from some general laws that are otherwise meant to protect the rights of workers. Why aren’t “closely-held” corporations? The real question before the US Supreme Court then, despite the other many arguments for and against the “contraception mandate,” is this: whose beliefs are more important, an employer’s or an employee’s?

The Conestoga appeal states:

The question presented is exceptionally important. Our nation was founded on freedom of religion, and our free-enterprise system allows entrepreneurs to pursue profit while also serving the common good. But the decision below puts these two foundational principles at odds. Must religious believers check their consciences at the door of their businesses, or may they generally live integrated lives of faith at work?

In other words, you own the business, you decide what “lives of faith” look like there. In a dissenting opinion of the district court decision Judge Kent Jordan wrote, “The government takes us down a rabbit hole where religious rights are determined by the tax code, with nonprofit corporations able to express religious sentiments while for-profit corporations and their owners are told that business is business and faith is irrelevant. Meanwhile, up on the surface, where people try to live lives of integrity and purpose, that kind of division sounds as hollow as it truly is.”

But what of Conestoga employees’ “integrity and purpose?” What must they check at the door? While contraception–and abortion, for that matter–are legal, and discrimination against employees for race, gender, disability or religion is clearly illegal, the question of an employee’s rights is swept away in the structural details of the case. Corporations pay part of an employee’s salary in medical benefits, the argument goes, and business owners like the Hahns who contest certain contraceptions shouldn’t have to pay for them. (The Catholic Church religious non-profits have successfully argued the same thing with regard to contraception coverage for their non-profit employees.)

From the website of Conestoga Wood Specialists

Additionally, opponents of the “mandate” like to note that an employee who doesn’t have contraception coverage can pay for it herself, out of pocket, or can independently purchase insurance that does cover it. But “up on the surface,” that’s easier said than done (just ask America’s 45 million uninsured). As we’ve seen with abortion restrictions across the country, limiting access to providers, instituting notifications and wait periods has proven more effective than attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade. If you make it impossible for an employee to access contraception it might as well be illegal.

It’s important to note that the Hahns’ opposition to “contraception that may prevent the implantation of a human embryo in the womb” is a wildly radical and minority view. As Lindsay Beyerstein writes at In These Times, “Medically speaking, a pregnancy begins when the woman’s body takes on life support for the embryo. This makes sense if you think about it. If a woman is undergoing artificial insemination, she doesn’t become pregnant the moment the eggs are inserted into her body. She has to wait and see if she gets pregnant from the insemination.”

It’s also important to note that these cases against the “contraception mandate” are ideological and political, employing a very narrow interpretation of who and what the right to religious freedom was established to protect. They challenge diversity, they privilege a specific type of belief, and they aim to uphold power structures that stifle protective laws. The Hahns are represented by Independence Law Center whose about page reads like the lawyers’ ads you see on the subway. “If you are a landlord and have religious objections to renting to unmarried couples….” The Affordable Care Act will not end the nation’s health care woes (insurance companies and employer-provided health care are part of the problem, not the solution), but as with the formation of any new law, the ACA gave anyone with a religious superiority complex the chance to shape policy according to their own views.

Conestoga has 930 employees. Hobby Lobby has 18,000. The other sixty-eight cases the ACLU has charted represent thousands more workers who stand to have their medical decisions dictated by their employers. What employee rights are next? Blood transfusions? Vaccines? (Cohabitation?)

The 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling was made on the basis of privacy–that women had the right to make their reproductive decisions without outside interference. Subsequent cases have affirmed that right, including the 1990 Cruzan v. Director, which established that individuals may make their own medical decisions, even if they mean certain death. Rulings in favor of Conestoga and Hobby Lobby won’t end privacy, they’ll just make it impracticable. Yet it is this privacy, of belief or body, that we all consider our own closely-held business.

Ann Neumann is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University and contributing editor at The Revealer. She’s written for Guernica magazine, New York Law Review (forthcoming, January 2014), Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Nation, among others. Her chapter on class and hospice use will appear in Living with Class: Philosophical Reflections on Identity and Material Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2013), edited by Brian Seitz and Ron Scapp. Neumann is currently writing a book about a good death.

The post A Closely-Held Business appeared first on The Revealer.

This thing is going around the internet again. People like to comment that it really makes them pause and consider their own demise for a moment. Excuse me while I break out a Jiminy Cricket-sized violin and stick my lower lip out, sadwy, at the gawkers. Which I wouldn’t have to do for long because a moment later the looky-loos will go back to their games, porn or shopping, not paying attention in med school or congressional hearings, anyway.

How are picture’s of a strangers end “awwwww” worthy? Have these illness-porn loving folks never been exposed to disease or death? I guess it’s possible, or else these images might not be so enticing.  We hide illness and death behind closed doors, and dress up the eventual corpse so as not to scare the living. I frequently thought of prisons, slaughterhouses and mental institutions while spending a few years in cancer wards. Cancer (and other human maladies) are things that people like to feel all bad about, but the TV (or “beautifully photographed” ) version is nothing like reality. Jennifer Merendino’s husband set these free to circulate — perhaps, understandably, as a bracing counterpoint to all the pink-ribbon rah-rah breast cancer awareness/”cure” lies. I’m not sure that these photos accomplish that goal.

The ostensible purpose of such images is to teach us something about life and death, but I think there’s a weird sort of triumph implied.

Women are never good enough as we are, no matter what we do. Dying bravely seems like the only perfect option for us. As Sylvia Plath wrote in her poem, Edge:

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment

Consider the innumerable movies and television shows about scores of usually young, pretty female murder victims. These plots are so normal, we don’t even notice them any more. It’s built-in to the cultural narrative: martyrs are something that we like young and pretty. Women, especially. Suffering and dying young is a totally acceptable outcome for the fairer sex — after all, we were born to it. Witness all the young and beautiful martyr saints — who were generally killed for refusing sex but probably getting raped and chopped up or hung or eaten by lions anyway. Today we would surely have smart-phone video of martyrs’ rapes and murders, and Facebook would debate whether it was appropriate to let people “share” the footage since they might be doing it for “religious” reasons or to raise “awareness” of bodily sacrifice for Christendom.

Martyrs often met their doom because of haggles over their bodily integrity, and then their bodies were snuffed out. In these images of Jennifer Merendino’s death, a woman is reduced to the mere fact of her body. Perhaps someday, women might be raised to the category of “human,” but we are still a subspecies, an animal with uses, like cows, who are tied to rape racks, forced to give birth, then killed when they reach a certain age, which, when you think of it, is not all that different an agenda from certain elements in our society. Hunting and gang-raping girls and women remains a fun global pastime by all reports.

The “nothing but gross yet enticing sacks of flesh” theme is, of course, played out through history, especially since the beginning of agriculture and bronze-age monotheism. Nature-subduing includes controlling women, who are mankind’s designated livestock: useful but need serious restraints/punishment and continually “gross” due to the necessary reproductive functions.

For example, Ms. Mary (her first name is “Virgin”) had to be presanitized for Jesus’ convenience — she was the only human in history born without the stain of original sin on her soul. Original sin, of course, came from Eve, who just wanted to know stuff. Who can blame her? I would have totally picked that apple. Mary was famously impregnated without losing her precious virginity. Her “Yes” to God is supposed to be a moment of transcendence, but what was she going to say? No? To an angel? I doubt it. Women are conditioned to say yes, even when some guy you don’t know comes up to you and asks to “motorboat” your breasts on camera in the name of “breast cancer awareness.” “Yes” comes automatically, especially when you’re pre-accused of being a bitch if you say no.

Mary wasn’t good enough as a woman to give birth to the Lord. That casts the rest of womanity in a less-than-flattering light. Our bodies and ourselves just don’t measure up. A Sack of Flesh was necessary to beget the Son of God, yet said Sack was effectively sidelined from the Big Three while given a vanity position as the chick who gets to hang out with the cool guys, while never really becoming one of them. Anybodys, you’re never really going to be a Jet. Why not set up your own franchise or simply refuse to play their reindeer games? There’s a lot more to life than being a voluntary second-class citizen. (Note to self: note to self.

Apparently, it’s also supposed to be empowering when women pose for pictures in their underwear to show “real” beauty; show off their mutilation; show off their “real post-pregnancy bodies” etc. And, yes, to show what real dying looks like. All of these “awareness” campaigns only make me aware that we are still only considered bodies. Said bodies are never adequate, and photographs of “regular” folk only seem to hammer that message home. We’re subhumans whose only value lies in the shape and appearance of our bodies, even if we protest it.

It’s understandable, after all, we women are all caught in a classic, all-encompassing double bind. Being this and that simultaneously all the time without ever showing the effort to maintain the impossibly inadequate facade and squelch one’s ever-present cognitive dissonance takes up a lot of brain space that could be used for other kinds of thoughts. Or, thoughts. We are the unthinking “material.” We must be “cheerful” and “smile” in the face of anything. Here’s another tidbit making the internet rounds.Re: this. I’m tired. To each her own, for sure.

Courtesy Karenrme via YouTube

Here’s what happened before I had a mastectomy. A volunteer appeared and said she would wheel me in to surgery, which was several indoor blocks away from the meat locker where I gave up my worldly goods, gowned and surgically-socked. The volunteer was chatting away about her daughter who was my age, and she had long red fingernails and a hairdo and I sat there, mutely, hating her. I thought that Chatty Cathy had no right to hold me hostage at this particular moment so she could feel good about her cancer and stupid daughter and whatever else she was going on about.

Then we made an unscheduled stop. I was in a room and a doctor I had never met before appeared, older, handsome, olive-skinned, wearing Henry Kissinger glasses. He told me that he was going to have to give me a shot. The shot was going straight through the areola of my bad one. The needle was large and there was no anesthesia, topical or otherwise. I heard Chatty Cathy say “It’s all right, I had it done too,” and Dr. Kissinger came towards me with the needle. “Terror” is a word that is thrown around a lot, but this was, in fact, the real McCoy. I squeezed the life right out of Cathy’s hand, and outside, down the hallway, my husband heard me scream. It was 5:30 in the morning. And this was just the warm-up act. Yay! (PS, thank you, Cathy. You were, in fact, a desperately-needed gatekeeper.)

I wonder what feelings the casual or career misogynists of the world are offshoring onto women’s bodies? What is it about themselves that they fear or repress? What anger is being misdirected? If public acts of humiliating and violating females seem to bolster one’s same-bro reputation, one is behooved to wonder about the quality of one’s company. Is being a sociopath or, possibly worse yet, a sociopath’s minion, something to be proud of? These are the types who go on canned hunts and/or feel pretty good in uniforms conducting genocides: cowards, in other words. If “manliness” requires the constant abuse and subjugation of fellow humans, maybe “manliness” as we understand it, is flimsy. People like to talk about the brain being “hard-wired” a lot, but that’s mostly nonsense. Human cultures have taken many shapes and forms and the brain is actually a dynamic place. Come out of the dark, women-haters, and see what else life has to offer besides displacing one’s own self-hatred onto one’s own species. Who knows? Oz might explode into color.

Should I die of a disease, I wouldn’t want to be photographed while dying or have those images tossed into the internet’s maw — when I think of people I know who are dead, the way they died is not what I remember. It’s the person. It’s not their body, or what it looked like in various stages, except for the fact that their bodies are dead so I can’t see or talk to them any more. I miss their faces and their laughter. I recently told my daughter to put this under her cap for future reference: “Hating your body is bullshit.” Why waste your time? It’s limited, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s also bullshit to hate anyone else’s body or reduce people to mere automatons. We persist in doing so, though.This is all nonsense. It. is. nonsense.

Do you know what a “perfect” body is? One that is alive.

Mary Valle is a contributing editor to Killing the Buddha. Read her poetry here maryvalle.tumblr.com

The post Death Porn Body Nonsense appeared first on The Revealer.

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson was an author of conversion — uniquely empowered to capture the emotional and intellectual currents of a shift in religious identity. In his first novel, The Light Invisible, for example, conversion is never confined to the skull of the convert. For Benson, the strength of such a shift explodes into the outside world, manifesting sounds, sights and textures with both convincing physical embodiment and potent allegorical meaning. In The Light Invisible the immaterial takes on material form.

The book is structured as a series of vignettes, ostensibly the supernatural visions of a pious priest, each occurring in a different phase of life. In one episode, Benson’s narrator recalls shooting a bird unnecessarily, only to catch a fleeting glimpse of a bloodless face between dark branches, smiling. In another, Benson records his priest following a shock of brilliant cloth in a wood and finding, inexplicably, the rich garment God has sewn from history. Each vision is striking, poignant and powerfully sensual. Overall, the work gives off the impression of having been composed with great feeling and excitement — as, indeed, it was. The Light Invisible was written in 1903, the same year that Benson himself was accepted into the Catholic Church. This was no small step. Benson’s father, Edward White, had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, head of the Anglican Church. Benson himself was ordained, by his father, in 1895. After converting, he continued to write, emerging as a prominent catholic theologian and English popular author.

Over the course of his brief career, Benson wrote ghost stories, plays, devotionals, historical novels and even speculative works which later critics, appraising them from a midcentury perspective, have labeled science fiction. Of particular note is Benson’s 1909 novel The Necromancers, a cautionary tale addressing the dangers of spiritualism. Spiritualism, it is to be recalled, is a ragtag body of practices, very much in vogue in the early twentieth century, which held that the dead were able to communicate with the living by a variety of means, most often through a “medium” — a person of exceptional spiritual sensitivity. In the same year as The Necromancers, Benson expanded the topic for the Dublin Review. According to him, many a Catholic theologian “has stated [… ]that in his opinion the enemy to be faced in the future is no longer the old materialism of twenty years ago, [but] spiritualism itself.”

Spirit phenomena, Benson believed, were a combination of deliberate fraud, demonic possession and, perhaps, the exercise of a psychic faculty as yet unmapped. Under no circumstanced were they legitimate communications from the dead. He was suspicious of trance messages, scandalized by seances and hostile towards the unconscious, or automatic, writing by which mediums claimed to give up control of their hands to visiting specters, allowing for the composition of whole manuscripts from across the veil. This was an opinion Benson later reversed. Returning to The Necromancers in 1954, he declared:

“I now wish that I had never written it. It was a distorted narrative, where the facts, as I had really known them, were given unfair treatment, and where the truth was suppressed […] With the truth before me, I had deliberately set it aside to place in its stead falsehood and misrepresentation.”

The text surrounding this quotation, Life In the World Unseen, is a kind of technical manual for the afterlife: a description of the next world’s geography, social construction, physics and culture. The system is striking in that, time and time again, it mocks the “misconceptions” of the “orthodox Church,” presumably Catholicism, while arguing for an accessible and self-directed spirit world largely in concert with the general spiritualist conception. The honorable Monsignor had, between 1903 and 1954, experienced a second conversion, perhaps even more radical than his first: he had died in 1914.

Life In The World Unseen is, ostensibly, a book written by Benson through the assistance of medium named Anthony Borgia, whose name graces both the spine and cover of the volume. Borgia, according to his preface, was a close friend of Benson’s beginning “five years before his passing into the spirit world.” This would place the time of their meeting in 1909 — the year   saw print and the height of Benson’s anti-spiritualist fervor. Borgia’s biographical details are remarkably elusive, and the matter of his living acquaintance with Benson relies wholly on the medium’s report. I find it likely, however, that if Borgia knew Benson at all, the relationship was a rocky one. Borgia admits, in any case, that Benson’s death improved things considerably. “We are old friends,” Brogia wrote, “and his passing hence has not severed an early friendship; on the contrary it has increased it and provided many more opportunities of meeting than would have been possible had he remained on earth.”

During the fifties Borgia and Benson were frequent and enthusiastic collaborators. Life In the World Unseen contains two discrete and lengthy parts: “Beyond this Life,” which recounts Benson’s death and acclimation to the spirit world and “The World Unseen,” which expands on various questions in even more detail, such as the composition of spiritual soil and the nature of ghostly music and drama. Odhams Press was the initial publisher, releasing an English edition in 1954. This was followed by a companion volume in 1956, More About Life in the World Unseen and a two-book set for the American market in 1957, courtesy of New York’s Citadel Press. This version of the work was sold by mail order, through advertisements such as this, from a 1959 issue of Fate Magazine:

As a religious document, Life in the World Unseen is fascinating. Benson, speaking through Borgia, lays out a spirit world which is, he contends, purely the product of individual spirits’ conceptions of themselves. Those who are significantly “advanced” through good works and right attitudes on Earth find themselves in a sphere of infinite delight, complete with genteel English country houses, thought-directed boats and music which manifests an automatic and preternatural light — like Laser Floyd. The less accomplished, such as “those whose earthly lives have been spiritually hideous though outwardly sublime; whose religious profession [was] designated by a Roman collar,” find themselves trapped in lower spheres, forced to live out their errors in bodies literally deformed by self pity. The bottom line is, according to Benson, “Whatsoever a man soweth […] so shall he reap.” No ghostly condition, however, is permanent — even the most abject monstrosity may be educated and advanced to the highest level of spiritual achievement. One’s earthly life, and death, simply define the place where this work begins.

Thought, we are repeatedly told, is the driving force of the spirit realm, responsible for the torments of the damned and the triumphs of the enlightened. That said, Borgia’s world is a remarkably physical one — spirits are “incarnate” in that they continue to have bodies, and a great deal of time is devoted to the description of the various material advantages and institutions supplied them. Benson’s home after death, the subject of much discussion in “Beyond This Life,” provides a representative example:

“The furniture it contained consisted largely of that which I had provided for the earthly original, not because it was particularly beautiful, but because I had found it useful and comfortable, and adequately suited to my few requirements. Most of the small articles of adornment were to be seen displayed in their customary places, and altogether the whole house presented the unmistakable appearance of occupancy. I had truly ‘come home.’”

The idea of a “home in heaven” is a common one in Christian discourse, but what marks Life in the World Unseen is the utter lack of transcendence in the concept. Benson’s “home” after death is, for the most part, just as it was in life — it’s still a house, still stocked with the same furniture and curios, still possessing of the “unmistakable appearance of occupancy.” There are little improvements, of course: no kitchen, for spirits never feel hunger, no drafts, no chills, no lack of “fresh air.” The garden is considerably improved. In total, though, there is no improvement in Benson’s lodging after death that could not be approximated by an increase in his affluence while living. His reward for a good life is, in slightly garbled form, just a well-appointed mansion with a full service staff: the dead may not eat, but the rich do not cook. Neither one sees the inside of a kitchen.

A similar circumstance is visited on the damned. During a visit to an abode in a lower sphere, Benson describes conditions thus:

“We found ourselves in the poorest sort of apology for a house. There was little furniture, and that for the meanest, and at first sight of earthly eyes one would have said that poverty reigned here, and one would have felt natural sympathy and the the urge to offer what help one could. But to our spirit eyes the poverty was of the soul, the meanness of the spirit…”

The model throughout Life in the World Unseen is to take the economic advantages and disadvantages of the living and redistribute them among the dead according to a perfect meritocracy of spirit. Even the “powers” Borgia ascribes to the unearthly body — such as communication at vast distances, instantaneous travel and access to diverse entertainments — are equivalent to the rapid technological advances of the twentieth century, the zeitgeist of rails, radios and airplanes which H.G. Wells termed “the abolition of distance” in 1928.

Life in the World Unseen went through many reprints in the 1950s, and is available in multiple editions today, many of them online. An argument could be made, that the enduring popularity of Borgia’s work can be derived from the accessibly material nature of its system, the assurance that death serves as the confirmation and extension of the economic realities of twentieth century Western life. The essential facts of the thing are still overabundance and privation. All that changes is the method by which such pains and pleasures are bestowed. Every soul has the capacity to improve their lot, according to Borgia. Hard work and study guarantee and increase in ones’ immaterial estate, the trade of damned poverty for exalted wealth. The result is a moral capitalism — a gospel of Horatio Alger. In a way, it even reflects the materialized miracles of Bensons first conversion text, 1903’s The Light Invisible. Where the earlier work was sensual and brief, however, Life in the World Unseen is extensive, shallow and gushing. His second conversion seems to have transformed Benson from a poet to a writer of catalogs.

Or, perhaps, all that changed with Benson’s death was his ability to speak for himself. It is not unusual for spiritualists to receive apologetic messages from one-time opponents of the practice (Harry Houdini has a long career in this regard), but what sets Life in the World Unseen apart is the length and nature of Benson’s protestations. The Catholic Church, to which Benson was so explosively attracted, is never named by the text. The word “catholic” never appears at all. Instead, Borgia’s Benson laments his association with “the orthodox church,” and finds it easy and uncomplicated to view it with flippant disdain. Benson’s work on spiritualism, which also passes unnamed, is a thorn in the author’s paw — his determination to “make up” for the embarrassment of its writing conditions Benson’s return in the first place. There are, we are told, still spirits practicing their earthly religion in the realm of the dead, operating under the same delusions which impacted them in life. Benson, speaking through Borgia, feels a sad compassion for such souls, and expresses no temptation to join them. As Benson was, in life, an accomplished Catholic theologian and a supernumerary private chamberlain to Pope Pius X, such details give Borgia’s work the appearance of cynicism. It’s a complicated cynicism, however, and one bound up in the tensions between materiality and immateriality which always swirled around Benson.

In 1903, Benson used material imagery to depict the Catholic faith as irresistibly real. Life In The World Unseen follows this logic only halfway, using the material as an end in and of itself rather than a rhetorical tool. For proof, just refer to the advertising and the packaging of the book. Its attractive presentation and branding as a “de luxe edition” seem clearly intended to confer a certain authority and reliability to the text. The theme follows into the content of the work, where the extension of Western material reality into the afterlife is presented as a comforting, common-sense solution to mortality’s angst. Finally, and most disturbingly, the material comes between Benson and Borgia, where the views of the dead author can be read as violently hemorrhaged by his still-living collaborator. The work defeats itself, in a way — whereas Benson’s materialization of his Catholic conversion serves to cleverly map and unnamable transcendence, the many-tiered materialism of Life In The World Unseen makes the work appear shallow and self-interested. On Earth, Benson was intrigued by glimpses of a world beyond. In that world beyond, he’s mostly interested in the quality of his furniture.

What’s interesting is that now, with the text presumably out of copyright and the private dramas of Robert Hugh Benson’s attack of spiritualism forgotten, The World Unseen has found a new life — or afterlife — on the internet. Go ahead and google it — there’s plenty of versions and a lot of discussion on various message boards. There’s a chance, I think, for this digital version of Life in the World Unseen to achieve an importance in the lives of readers far beyond its initial printing. In the half-century since Borgia’s initial publication, capitalism has only become more hegemonic, more “natural,” more “common sense.” Spiritual capitalism makes more sense now than ever — and shorn of its two other materialities, Life in the World Unseen stands ready to argue for such a system. Life is a job, death is a shopping spree.

As Benson says, through Borgia: “Religion is not responsible for all mistaken ideas!” Just don’t tell Max Weber.

NEXT TIME:

The post Fear of Death Removed appeared first on The Revealer.

“How does that 12th-century French monk’s view of the nature of God affect the way he sees himself, his relationship with others, his relationship with the natural world, his relationship with his own mortality? How does that Byzantine mystic conceive of space and time in a world he envisions as imbued with the sacred? To find such questions integral to any study of the past is not restricted to those who agree with the answers. To study theology well requires not faith, but empathy.”

Diego Robles for The New York Times via The New York Times.

Fernanda Santos of the NYTimes has an interesting ethnographic read this month on the rise of American Navajo conversions to Mormonism. Santos not only examines numerous socio-communal reasons for such conversions, but also reminds us of the complicated history between American Indians and Christian missionary groups. “What set the Mormons apart from other missionary groups is the role they ascribed to American Indians in their holy scriptures as descendants of the Lamanites — rebellious nonbelievers whose conversion could help the Mormons build God’s kingdom on earth.”

Columbia anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod explores the rise of the Western trope of the “abused Muslim woman” in her new book out this week entitled Do Muslim Woman Need Saving? You can read an excerpt of the book at the dailybeast here.

It seems that the works of Kierkegaard have seen a recent uprise in artistic appropriation, as seen by Arcade Fire’s new album titled Reflektor, which has clear lyrical allusions to “Kierkegaard’s ideas about a “reflective age,” when passion and story line have been replaced by ambiguity and passive contemplation.” Rap artist Childish Gambino (the stage-name of 30 Rock/Community actor Donald Glover) also noted in a recent interview with Vice that he’s “really into Kierkegaard shit now” as it makes him “happy” by feeling “less alone.”

Somdet Phra Nyanasamvara, the Supreme Patriarch of Thailand’s order of Buddhist monks, passed away on October 24 at the age of 100. He held the position of Supreme Patriarch for more than twenty years.

In a recent speech delivered in the predominantly Muslim region of Bashkortostan, Russian president Vladimir Putin accused foreign forces of utilizing radical Islam as a means of undermining the Russian state.

New Marvel superhero Kamala Khan.

Marvel Comics launched a new series entitled Ms Marvel, which will feature Jersey City-born, Muslim girl-superhero Kamala Khan and her battles against injustices.

Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the culture minister of the Vatican, immortalized Lou Reed this week by tweeting lyrics from Reed’s “Perfect Day.”  Reed, who had an ambiguously unclear relationship with his Jewish roots, once said in an interview that his “God” was “rock n roll.”

The Guardian has a piece on Islamic conversions amongst British women this month.

In Christian Right news, American evangelical David Barton attributed Global Warming to God’s wrath, pastor Kevin Swanson warned us not to purchase “Communist Lesbian Girl Scout Cookies,”and Evangelist Pat Robertson attributed homosexuality to molestation on the 700 Club, using the charmed circle to link the forms of “unnatural” sexual acts.

Vice has an alarming piece on abhorrent violence inflicted on gay Druze men within Syria:

“Even between the plush sofas and mood lighting of one of Beirut’s hippest bars, Ram shook with fear as he relived his ordeal. He turned his large green eyes from me to the translator and then back to me again, speaking in a low voice, even though we were the only people in the room. ‘I think I was targeted for two reasons: because I’m a Druze, and because I’m gay,’ he said. ‘They told us, ‘You are all perverts, and we are going to kill you to save the world.'”

A group of Uighurs in Urumqi via The Telegraph.

A prominent Chinese paper attributed the violent unrest amongst Uighurs in Xinjiang to “uncultured youth” who subside themselves to “religious extremist forces.”

Debates surrounding Quebec’s proposed “secularism charter,” formerly known as Bill 60, have heated up recently Al-Jazeera reports.

The number of Muslim prisoners in England and Wales has doubled in the past 10 years, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian also has a story on a devout Muslim family who has lost a right-to-life case surrounding their desire to keep their elderly relative, who became minimally conscious after a stroke, alive. According to the publication, the family argued that the relative would “regard his suffering as bringing him closer to God.”

South Africa has an Occult-Related Crime Unit (ORCU).

Last, but certainly not least, here’s a picture of the penis Church.

– Christopher Smith, Student Assistant, The Revealer

The post In The News: A Muslim girl superhero, Navajo Mormons, Uighurs, Pat Robertson, and more! appeared first on The Revealer.

By Jared Malsin

Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman (Touchstone, September 3, 2013)

Stand in awe of Associated Press journalists Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman’s feats of reporting. The pair won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for a series based on leaked documents exposing the New York Police Department’s secret spying program targeting the city’s Muslim communities. The DOJ seized AP phone records over the duo’s report on how the CIA’s foiled an al-Qaeda plot in Yemen.  Their new book, Enemies Within, released in September, combines stark revelations about an abusive government program with an engrossing narration of law enforcement’s race to stop an al-Qaeda recruit’s plot to attack the New York City subway in September 2009. But the book’s most salient contribution is its insight into the larger set of controversies defining the new American security state: drones, detention, global surveillance, and domestic spying.

The revelations about the NYPD’s approach to counterterrorism are startling on their own. In 2002 police commissioner Ray Kelly, appointed by newly-elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg, substantially expanded the department’s intelligence arm. Apuzzo and Goldman remind us that Kelly, in his first stint as commissioner in the 1990s, under Mayor David Dinkins, was derided as soft on crime for his championing of community policing. In his new term, Kelly brought in a former CIA official, David Cohen, to spearhead efforts to build a true intelligence operation inside the NYPD.

In the security-conscious years following 9/11, Cohen vastly expanded the department’s surveillance operations, seeking to remake the department “in the CIA’s image.” But instead of only pursuing investigations into specific terrorist plots, he cast a net over the city’s entire Muslim population, sending informants, dubbed “rakers” and “Mosque crawlers” into practically every Mosque and Muslim-owned business in the metro area, collecting data on Muslim residents’ political and religious views. Agents from the department’s “Demographics Unit” photographed wedding guests, secretly recorded sermons, and infiltrated student groups across the northeast. The program, which continued even after AP revealed its existence, amounted to the systematic monitoring of an entire religious group.

Police officials and Mayor Bloomberg have defended the department’s actions by claiming success in combatting terrorism (though at first the department’s spokesman, Paul Browne, denied the existence of the program, lying outright to Apuzzo and Goldman). After all, the program’s defenders say, New York has not suffered a deadly attack since 9/11. Apuzzo and Goldman point out that this is a fallacy: post hoc, ergo propter hoc, “after this, therefore because of this.” The two reporters show that there is little evidence to connect the absence of successful attacks since 2001 with the NYPD’s indiscriminate spying on Muslims.

In the book, a former NYPD officer who once headed the Demographics Unit says the spying program did not generate or follow leads, instead compiling files on innocent Muslims simply because of their religious affiliation. The same official, after reviewing his detectives’ receipts, realized that some of the agents gravitated to the same businesses multiple times because they served the best food.It was unprecedented for a police department to spy on houses of worship and keep files on residents’ political and religious views. As an approach to counterterrorism, Apuzzo and Goldman say, it was also ineffective.

If anything, the book suggests, the NYPD Intelligence Division’s approach actually hindered law enforcement when the stakes were the highest. The rationale of the Demographics Unit was to spot the next Mohamed Atta before he became an attacker. But in 2009, when a young Afghan-American named Najibullah Zazi drove from Colorado to New York with a container of home-brewed explosives in the trunk of a rental car, the NYPD surveillance, even though they had spied on Zazi old neighborhood in Queens, had failed to notice Zazi or detect the bomb plot. With federal agents closely pursuing Zazi, Apuzzo and Goldman recount, a ham-handed move by the NYPD threatened to wreck the entire case.

Though it focuses on the NYPD and the tensions between the department and the FBI (FBI officials were deeply skeptical of Cohen’s department, even refusing to accept files generated by NYPD detectives), Enemies Within is really an assessment of the complexities of US counterterrorism writ large. In Apuzzo and Goldman’s treatment, the NYPD intelligence brass comes across as a crew of zealots and bunglers. By contrast, the FBI officials profiled in the book appear as dedicated investigators. The book does note, in passing the FBI’s own uneasy relationship with American Muslims and the moments when its own methods tested constitutional limits. However, Apuzzo and Goldman tell us, when the NYPD was compiling files on thousands of innocent Muslims, and the CIA was rendering suspects to secret prisons,  the FBI held fast to the old-fashioned method of following leads, building cases, and ultimately convicting criminals in civilian courts.  Though there is evidence that this portrayal is far from the complete story. Muslim New Yorkers questioned by the FBI have reported similar treatment to that delivered by the NYPD.

The conflict between the FBI and the NYPD’s approaches defines the book’s overarching narrative. But two other controversial programs—the CIA’s drone killings and the NSA’s global surveillance—also enter the story at pivotal moments. It was an NSA intercept of an email Zazi sent to his alQaeda contact in Pakistan that initially tipped US authorities that he might be planning an attack. When whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the NSA’s sweeping collection of phone records and warrantless email surveillance, the Obama administration pointed to the Zazi case in its defense of those programs. However, in their reporting for AP, Goldman and Apuzzo established that while Zazi’s email was intercepted under one of those programs, neither program was necessary to make the intercept.

Drones make an even more ominous cameo in the Zazi saga. Apuzzo and Goldman report in their book that, while training with alQaeda, Zazi and his two companions initially resisted their handlers’ urging of them to become suicide bombers. What ultimately changed their minds? Drone attacks. “Everywhere they looked, unmanned warplanes patrolled the skies,” Goldman and Apuzzo write. “That was the issue that finally broke their resolve.”[1]

Devastating as the book is in its indictment of the NYPD’s spy program, it is also cautious. The authors are charitable to the police, taking the time to explain the rationale for NYPD’s approach to counterterrorism. They emphasize the criticism that the NYPD’s programs are counterproductive in the fight against terrorism. However the book does not develop a robust picture of what is perhaps the most devastating consequence of the NYPD’s surveillance programs: the climate of fear and suspicion among New York’s Muslim communities. As researchers from the CUNY School of Law documented in a recent report, police surveillance causes New York Muslims to be suspicious of one another, to silence their own legitimate free speech and activism, to attempt to avoid appearing Muslim. In both the legal and the moral sense, these effects are chilling.

Enemies Within is nevertheless an important contribution to two interlocking groups of debates. The first set of debates has to do with how New York City approaches policing, a question that should be of central importance as the city appears set to elect Bill de Blasio as its first left-leaning mayor in years. The second, larger group of debates is related to the larger set of controversial American counterterrorism programs: Not only surveillance but torture, rendition, and assassination. Goldman and Apuzzo’s approach is unflinching. Their approach acknowledges that real security threats do exist. It also exposes the danger posed by the zeal of our own protectors.

The post Enemies Within: AP reporters versus the state appeared first on The Revealer.

The centrality of Lebanon to the global Diaspora is particularly true in the area of religious life. Although almost exclusively Christian, the Armenian community is in fact split into three denominations, with the majority Apostolic Church coexisting uneasily with much smaller congregations of Armenian Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. All three have established centers of global importance in Lebanon.

By Irina Papkova

The idea that Middle Eastern Christianity is threatened with extinction has been gaining ground of late, as the Christian communities of Iraq, Syria and most recently Egypt have shrunk visibly due to the ongoing violent turmoil in their respective countries.   The issue has even garnered the attention of BBC and CNN, while politicians both in the US and elsewhere have attempted to seize on it as an example of the dangerous consequences of politicized Islam.

When I moved to the Middle East, I wanted to learn more about the region’s Christian communities, and to find out for myself if they are declining and, if so, why? As a resident of Beirut, Lebanon was the obvious place to begin my journey. The country is home to twelve different Christian denominations, reflecting the religion’s extreme fragmentation even in its historical heartland. The Armenian community, in particular, had caught my attention. I had visited Armenia and I wondered how the life of Lebanese Armenians differed from that of their compatriots.

The very presence of the Armenian community in Lebanon contains in it the story of unexpected resilience in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.  At the turn of the twentieth century, approximately one and a half million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, of whom only a few thousand were located on the territory of today’s Lebanon.  In 1915, however, the Turkish government embarked on a genocidal policy that claimed the lives of most of the original population of Ottoman Armenians, leaving perhaps 100,000 surviving refugees. The survivors streamed desperately towards safer borders; by the 1920s, a substantial majority settled in what was then the French Mandate for Lebanon and Syria.

The altar inside the Genocide memorial chapel, Antelias. Photo: Irina Papkova.

The fact that the fleeing Armenians were Christian proved crucial to the entrenchment of the population in Lebanon. The French government in charge of the territory in the early 1920s governed with the support of the local Christian inhabitants, pitting them against a minority Muslim population that opposed French rule.  In order to boost Christian numbers, the government granted all arriving Armenians Lebanese citizenship in 1924, giving them a stake in maintaining Lebanon as the only country in the region where Christians were not in a clear minority.

After Lebanon achieved independence in 1943, the constitution granted each religious group on the country’s territory the right to manage large portions of its members’ affairs according to its own rules. Buoyed by constitutional guarantees that the community’s interests would be protected by the state, Lebanon’s Armenians built churches and schools, founded benevolent associations, radio stations and medical facilities, and established political parties. The scope of the national revival was such that the Levant soon became the political and cultural center of the global Armenian Diaspora.

A street scene in Bourj Hammoud. Armenian flags fly on top of the building. Photo: Irina Papkova.

Several generations later, Armenians still constitute an important part of Lebanon’s social fabric. Armenian jewelry shops line the streets of Muslim West Beirut, also home to Haigazian University, the only Armenian institution of higher learning outside the Armenian Republic.  The municipality of Bourj Hammoud, a ten-minute drive from Beirut proper, hums with Armenian businesses, its streets adorned with Armenian flags and graffiti excoriating Turkey.   For decades, Bourj Hammoud has been home to the all-Diaspora offices of the three main Armenian political parties, and of international Armenian benevolent associations and print media.

The centrality of Lebanon to the global Diaspora is particularly true in the area of religious life.  Although almost exclusively Christian, the Armenian community is in fact split into three denominations, with the majority Apostolic Church coexisting uneasily with much smaller congregations of Armenian Catholics and Evangelical Protestants.    All three have established centers of global importance in Lebanon. For the Apostolics, spiritual life revolves around the Beirut suburb of Antelias; for the Catholics, the name of the mountain village of Bzoummar has similarly sublime resonance.  The Evangelical hub is somewhat more diffuse, but the main institutions are concentrated in West Beirut.  I spent some time exploring all three localities, in an effort to better understand their symbolic and practical importance for Armenian Christians, both in and outside Lebanon.

Since the eleventh century AD, the Armenian Apostolic Church has had two administrative centers, known as Catholicosates. Historically, the Catholicos of Etchmiadzin was located in the Caucasus, while the Catholicos of Cilicia resided in what is today Turkey.  The Genocide wiped out the institutions of the church in Cilicia, forcing its Catholicos to flee to Lebanon.  There, the American Committee for Relief in the Middle East (a charity working with Armenian refugees in the region) leased the Catholicos an orphanage in Antelias, allowing for the reestablishment of the Apostolic Church’s administrative structures and making Antelias one of the most important global spiritual centers for Armenians of the Apostolic faith.  It remains so today, second only to Etchmiadzin.

The chapel in Antelias, with the cathedral in the background. Photo: Irina Papkova.

The reverence with which the Apostolic Armenians I met tended to pronounce the word “Antelias” led me to imagine a place far removed from the hustle and bustle of Beirut, possibly on a hill but definitely surrounded by lush greenery.  But as my taxi sped along the dusty coastal road barely two miles north of the capital, I soon spotted a fortress-style red wall jutting out from a sea of concrete apartment blocs and, behind it, the traditional cupola of an Armenian Apostolic church. A few minutes later, I stood in the heart of the Catolicosate’s power, a compound clearly built to impress. A giant courtyard laid out in black and pink stone opened up in front of me, girded on the left by a soaring pale pink cathedral framed by palm trees and on the right by the Catholicos’ residence, a two story building adorned with intricately designed columns. Facing me was a solid looking building of light-colored bricks housing administrative offices and a museum dedicated to the Armenians of Cilicia; behind me, a sort of cloister built into the wall that I had seen from the road.

But the most poignant structure of them all stood humbly to the left of the cathedral: a tiny chapel built in memory of the Genocide victims. The Antelias memorial is a somber sanctuary, a narrow space barely big enough for five people. As I walked in, the dark interior lit up automatically, a soft light accompanied by peaceful choral music pumped in through hidden speakers.  My eyes were drawn to the marble altar, which is mounted over a glass case displaying neatly arranged skulls and bones.    Built in 1938, the chapel has become an integral part of the annual Genocide commemorations that take place in Antelias each year on April 24th, the day traditionally understood by Armenians as the start of the Genocide in 1915.

Archbishop Nareg Alemezian, a gregarious and welcoming man with a full grey beard met me in his office in the Catholicosate’s administrative building. As we sipped coffee (an inevitable accompaniment to any formal visit in Lebanon), he launched into a detailed exposition of Antelias’ role in the life of Apostolic Armenians. He told me how the commemoration of the Genocide is an important yearly event, drawing thousands of pilgrims from across Lebanon and abroad for two days of prayer. But Antelias is more than just a location for outpouring the nation’s grief over its losses; it hosts other pilgrimages, including one to commemorate St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia, whose relics are housed in the complex along with many other relics brought from Turkey.  The Catholicosate also has a seminary at Antelias, training priests for parishes of the Armenian Apostolic Church under its jurisdiction worldwide, excluding only the territory of the former Soviet Union.  Antelias, in short, has functioned as the heartbeat of the Armenian Apostolic Church for the past 80 years—a place both of remembrance and of practical administration.

The Armenian Catholic monastery at Bzoummar is of much older provenance. Built in 1749, the convent stands at an elevation of some 3,000 feet, at the right hand side of a steep winding road leading from the Mediterranean coast up into the wilds of Mount Lebanon.  Upon arrival, I stood for a few minutes admiring the uniquely Lebanese vista of green valleys and limestone cliffs visible for miles around Bzoummar, interrupted from my reverie by the appearance of my host, eighty-year old Father Antranig Granian. We spoke in French as he guided me through the monastery, pointing out elements of architectural significance and expounding on the history of the Armenian Catholic Church in Lebanon.

An interior courtyard of the monastery in Bzoummar. Photo: Irina Papkova.

In sharp contrast to Antelias, where the architecture is self-consciously Armenian in style, Bzoummar struck me immediately as a typically Lebanese environment, with thick brick walls sporting red tile roofs and rounded arches.  A few minutes into my conversation with Father Antranig I understood the source of this distinction.  Unlike Apostolic Armenians, who arrived en masse in Lebanon only in the 1920s, the Catholic Armenians first came to Mount Lebanon in the late seventeenth century, fleeing persecution by Ottoman authorities. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Pope permitted the establishment of an autonomous Catholic Armenian patriarchate, with its seat at the Bzoummar monastery. Since then, Bzoummar has been home to an administration that covers all Armenian Catholics dispersed around the world and, more than that, functions as an intellectual center with a seminary and a library of rare Armenian manuscripts.

After showing me the monastery’s main church and talking with me for a while on a low, brocaded sofa, Father Antranig passed me on to his assistant, Father Moses, a large and much younger man who led me through the Bzoummar grounds.  “Voila, there is the monastery winery,” he said with visible pride, pointing to a vine-covered brick building.   “And here—the museum.”  The three rooms he showed me hold perhaps one twentieth of Bzoummar’s collection of ecclesiastical and secular antiquities, some of them Armenian but also Byzantine, Roman, and even Phoenecian, fragments of the culture that first settled Lebanon eight thousand years ago.

The sense of rootedness in Lebanese history permeates Bzoummar, bolstered by its role in the survival of the Armenians post-Genocide.  Father Antranig’s eyes glittered with pride as he related that, when the Genocide survivors streamed towards Lebanon’s borders, the reigning Catholic patriarch was able to convince a reluctant French governor to grant them refuge.  “He told the French, you know the fathers of Bzoummar as good and useful members of Lebanese society,” said Father Antranig.  “’We are Armenian. The refugees are Armenian.  Let them in.’ And the French  did.”

A discrete number of the arriving refugees were members of the Armenian Evangelical church. Within a few years, they had joined the pattern established by the Apostolics and Catholics in transforming the Lebanese space they inhabited into an important spiritual location, if on a somewhat different scale. The structure of the global Armenian Evangelical communion is highly decentralized, meaning that there is no administrative “center” in the manner of Bzoummar or Antelias.  Instead, there are several geographically based Armenian Evangelical Unions. Lebanon is important in this context in as far as the executive committee of the Union of the Near East is based in the country, while the Near East School of Theology, located in West Beirut, trains pastors for Evangelical churches in seven countries in the region.

Still, if one were to identify a single location as embodying the essence of the Protestant Armenian community in Lebanon, it would not be the Near East School of Theology, but rather Haigazian University, also in West Beirut.  Sprawling over several blocks of tree-lined rue Mexique, Haigazian is the only Armenian institution of higher learning outside Armenia itself.  Visiting one day in late spring, earlier this year, I had to pick my way through crowds of students, most of them identifiably Armenian and speaking English, which also happens to be the language of instruction.

“The university welcomes students from all backgrounds, including non-Armenians,” the university’s president Reverend Paul Haidostian told me as we chatted in his book-lined office in the university’s ornately decorated administration building.  But the president is always Evangelical Armenian, and always a theologian with impeccable scholarly credentials. This is because Haigazian owes its establishment in 1955 to the global Evangelical Armenian community, and depends for its existence on Evangelical donors, largely outside Lebanon.  Paradoxically, then, while Antelias and Bzoummar can be thought of as centers of Armenian Christian activity with missions directed out towards the Diaspora, Protestant Armenians from the global Diaspora pool their resources to support Christian mission inside the country, in an attempt to shore up the declining Armenian community.

An interior view of the Bzoummar monastery. Photo: Irina Papkova.

For the reality is, outside the pleasantly bustling confines of Antelias, Bzoummar and Haigazian, the Armenian community in Lebanon is on the decline. At its height, prior to the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990, the Armenian population numbered around 250,000.  But the war and the political and economic instability that has plagued Lebanon since the end of hostilities have taken their toll.  Reliable statistics are difficult to come by, but the best estimates place the current population of Lebanese Armenians at somewhere between sixty and one hundred thousand, suggesting that the community has shrunk by at least half over the past forty years.

The fate of parishes and schools tells a similar story.  In 1973, the Apostolic Armenian Church ran a network of twenty-three elementary and secondary schools; at present, there are 11.  Prior to 1975, the Evangelicals could boast of twelve parishes in Lebanon, each with its own school. That number has decreased to five. Across the board, Apostolic and Catholic priests and Evangelical pastors alike complain about low and declining church attendance, particularly among young people.

The apparent decline can be attributed in part to the assimilation of Armenians into the predominantly Arab Lebanese culture.  Archbishop Nareg told me, during my visit to Antelias, that the last decade has seen the active integration of Armenians into wider Lebanese society, as rates of both mixed marriages and of Armenian youth for whom Arabic is the language of choice have increased dramatically. For Archbishop Nareg, this process is sad but inevitable, as more and more Armenian families choose to send their children to non-Armenian schools in order to provide them with better employment opportunities in the long-run if they are to have any future in Lebanon.

This observation points to a profound irony at the heart of complaints about the decline of the Lebanese Armenian community. During much of the twentieth century, the internal energies of Armenian religious leaders, teachers, politicians and activists of all stripes were focused on preserving and strengthening an Armenian nation that would some day be capable of returning to territories lost during the Genocide.  Like the Palestinians currently residing in camps in Southern Lebanon, the Armenians dreamed of going home.  Some still do.  In the course of my wanderings through the world of Lebanese Armenians, I encountered a politician who informed me that “we are close, very close to an agreement – the Turkish government WILL return the lands to us. Soon. Very soon.”   He told me that, in anticipation of this restoration of justice, the role of Armenian schools and churches in Lebanon is to reinforce the Armenian identity of young people, to ensure that they “continue the struggle.”   But the evidence suggests that the young generation is no longer interested; they are perhaps more concerned with economic survival in the midst of global financial instability.

In short, lamentations about the decline of the Lebanese Armenians are not so much about the loss of a Christian community in Lebanon per se, but about the waning likelihood that future generations will use Lebanon as a launching pad to reclaim a lost homeland.  The increasing assimilation of Armenians might actually be interpreted as a positive development, as proof that the population has been able to take full advantage of economic and social opportunities offered by the Lebanese state; the decline of the Armenian Christian population means only the slow loss of ethnic specificity but not the death of a religious community—assimilated Lebanese Armenians merely become Christian Lebanese without the ethnic marker. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on one’s point of view.

Yet, despite the evident decline in numbers, the Armenians of Lebanon are by no means a dying community.  Archbishop Nareg shared his impression with me that emigration of Armenians has slowed since 2008, for the simple reason that previously attractive destinations such as the United States or France are no longer seen as attractive alternatives to escaping Lebanon’s economic malaise.  Both the archbishop and Reverend Haidostian pointed out to me that there has actually been a fairly significant influx of Armenians into Lebanon from neighboring Syria since the start of that country’s brutal civil war.

The assimilation process may also not be as inevitable as it seems.  After all, the political security the Armenians enjoy in Lebanon is predicated precisely on their identification as Armenian—being a member of the community means having guaranteed representation in Parliament, as well as a quota of government jobs, among other privileges.  The continued existence of Armenian schools and especially of Haigazian University still partially counteracts the trend.

Finally, the fact that Lebanon is the site of spiritual centers of great importance for all three Armenian denominations scattered through the Diaspora suggests that the Armenian Christians here will survive in one form or another for a long time to come. As long as Apostolic, Catholic and Evangelical Armenians view the country as a hub of pilgrimage and theological education that benefits the Diaspora as a whole the community, even if reduced in size from its glory days, will remain vital.

Irina Papkova is a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center For Religion, Peace and World Affairs. She received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University and has previously taught at Georgetown and George Washington Universities. Her book, “The Orthodox Church and Russian Politics,” was published by Oxford University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press in 2011.Irina’s current research includes religion and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Lebanon. She is a regular contributor to The Revealer.

With support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.

The post From Antelias to Bzoummar appeared first on The Revealer.