Category: Timely

Web Illumination

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Amy Levin: Still think religion and technology don’t mix? It might be time to visit Sharper FX, Inc., a website design company specializing in “churches, ministries, and corporations.” Peruse through their sites and prepare to be dazzled by the flash animation and digitized sonorities, creating a sensual experience that is almost otherworldly. After all, “The Kingdom deserves a greater presence on the web.”

Check out some favorites, including K&K Mime – a curious combination of ministry and miming – or the International Congress of Churches and Ministries, featuring an elaborate display of textual animation, blazing fire, and deep-toned voice over. As Shaper FX proclaims, “Our goal is illustrating the virtue of Kingdom Excellency” by “exceeding the perceived limits of design.” Indeed, these websites do more than illustrate, and we might suggest that they attempt to exceed mediation itself to create an intimate, fearful, or devotional experience of the divine via cyberspace. Continue Reading →

Numbers Lie: Hacking at Islam

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Numbers never tell the whole story–which is why liberal pleas to rely solely on science and facts carry so little weight.

Internet years are like dog years.  Way back in 2003 when The Revealer was founded as a joint project between NYU’s Journalism Department and The Center for Religion and Media, we placed a more traditional emphasis on educating future journalists about how to report about religion: with links to academic and reporting resources, explicit examples of how journalists get religion right and wrong, and by debunking hypocritical or imbalanced, precious or erroneous reporting.  While our emphasis on that aspect of our mission has varied over the past eight years, we’ve always paid close attention to what tools institutions use to school journalists in religion’s means and ways.

For instance: there’s a cool new online course about Islam, created by Washington State University and Poynter News University.  Designed by Lawrence Pintak (who will be speaking at an event co-sponsored by The Center for Religion and Media on October 5th), the course is meant:

as a tool for journalists who want to be accurate in educating their audience about the religion and culture of Islam, Muslim communities in the U.S., and the distinctions between Islam as a political movement and the radical philosophies that inspire militant Islamists.

Smart and necessary!  But that’s not what the Culture and Media Institute (CMI, part of Brent “that’s indecent!” Bozell’s family of non-profits) has to say about the project. Continue Reading →

Yet Another Lifestyle for Ted Haggard

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Amy Levin:If you haven’t heard the recent Ted Haggard news (due to living in your closet, or Ted Haggard’s for that matter), the “disgraced pastor” has one more shameful sin to add to his long list: Celebrity Wife Swap. Ex-pastor of New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, Haggard is infamously known for his three-year sex scandal (2003-6) with former male prostitute Mike Jones (not to mention purchase of methamphetamines).  The scandal cost him his job, home, and reputation. Charges of hypocrisy swelled the media as sources invoked Haggard’s public decries of homosexuality and his belief in the sanctity of marriage. Continue Reading →

Qu’est qui ce passe en France?

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Ashley Baxstrom: What’s up with France?  President Nicolas Sarkozy of France joined President Barack Obama here in New York last week to celebrate the 125th anniversary of France’s gift of the Statue of Liberty to the US. The statue was originally dedicated on Oct. 28, 1886 in recognition of the French-American friendship established during the Revolutionary War.

Both leaders hailed the statue as a symbol of freedom. “It is not simply a statue,” Sarkozy said through a translator. “It is a notion, an idea, an emblem. It is for all people of the world.” But while the French were proud to offer America “The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (full titles, please), they seem to be having more trouble balancing the values of la liberté and l’éclaircissement in their own country. Continue Reading →

Yoga's Bondage

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Amy Levin:  For most of us, it’s hard to wrap our heads around yoga – yes, this thing everyone is talking about, but also the details about how it got here, where it came from, and what the big deal is. Yoga has become such a part of our vernacular, and yet we seem to stumble over describing it.
Continue Reading →

Yoga’s Bondage

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Amy Levin:  For most of us, it’s hard to wrap our heads around yoga – yes, this thing everyone is talking about, but also the details about how it got here, where it came from, and what the big deal is. Yoga has become such a part of our vernacular, and yet we seem to stumble over describing it.
Continue Reading →

Is the Left Behind?

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Diane Winston tells us what’s missing from “Whatever Happened to the American Left?,” an opinion piece by Michael Kazin, the editor of Dissent Magazine, which appeared in Sunday’s New York Times.  (I pointed a finger at it on Sunday.)  Winston explains that Kazin neglects three important issues in his diagnosis of the invisible, hamstrung Left:  the conservative movement didn’t start in the 1970s; the American Left is not MIA, just underreported; and that he better not leave religion out of the conversation or he’s missing an essential part of the political story. Continue Reading →

A Lexicon of Morality: Before Nature and Magic Went Separate Ways

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A review of Gregory McNamee’s translation of On the Nature of Animals (Trinity University Press, 192 pp., July 2011).

By Peter Bebergal

July saw the publication of Claudius Aelian’s On the Nature of Animals translated by Gregory McNamee. Aelian was a Roman teacher whose proficiency in Greek made him famous. Aeilan (ca. 175 – ca. 235) was also a collector of quotations, legends, and lore of the ancient world, and his On the Nature of Animals originally consisted of 17 volumes. McNamee’s version is a slight, one-volume book, intended for a popular audience. Still, its thoughtful curation teaches important lessons about the intersection between magic, natural history, and morality as well as the evolution of superstition toward what was thought to be a more rational form of theology.

We are governed, it was once thought, by a vast and complex system of correspondences. Plato taught that human beings are a microcosm of the cosmos, both containing a system of spheres that govern the motions and, as it were, emotions. It was also thought that the aspects and personalities of the planets correspond to certain plants and animals. Knowledge of these relationships would inform what is commonly called sympathetic magic where “like produces like.” Continue Reading →

Pictures at an Exhibition

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By Abby Ohlheiser
Photos by Merel van Beeren

“Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and the Hartmanns perish??” –Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

I was sitting in a French-style chain cafe (sorry America), finishing my croissant, talking to Merel, when we heard the opening notes of “The Star Spangled Banner.” It was a restrained, beautiful choral rendition, and we listened. It was all kind of a relief: we were just blocks from Ground Zero, at around 8:30 AM on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001, but the only signs we’d seen of something solemn going on were the expressions on the cops’ faces as they watched us leave the subway at Fulton Street, as they told us to keep walking in a no-gawking zone, as they told confused spectators no, not that crosswalk, you have to go around the block. This moment, listening, would be the closest we would get to the ceremony at the memorial plaza finally established on top of the former World Trade Center site. Instead, we spent the day in the blocks around the site, in the throngs of tourists, New Yorkers, missionaries, and protestors. We watched as a block’s worth of people waited to move one block forward, in front of St. Paul’s.  Merel said, “I wonder what this would look like as painted by Norman Rockwell.”

Here is what I, and the rest of the crowd, saw on the outskirts of Ground Zero during the ceremony, on the other side of the police checkpoints and “you can’t go theres” between us and the heartbreaking, mourning substance of the official ceremony. Continue Reading →