Category: Features

Long form articles, exclusive to The Revealer.

The Pope Has Left the Island

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By Nora Connor

Pope Benedict completes his pilgrimage to Cuba today, having wrapped up his “pastoral” visit to Mexico, in which he tidily summarized that nation’s struggles with the drug war-industrial complex:

The pope also addressed Mexico’s struggle against violence on the plane trip here from Rome, where he blamed the “idolatry of money” for drawing young people into lives of crime. In a brief speech at the airport here, he also said he was praying for “those who suffer because of old and new rivalries, resentments and all forms of violence.”

And yet, the pope’s approach — framing Mexico’s violence as a personal moral failing — perfectly matches that of President Calderón, a devout Catholic. That message, experts say, will help shift the debate away from policy, and complaints about how the Calderón administration has managed the fight against drug cartels that has led to 50,000 deaths since late 2006.

In Cuba, things are a bit different, if only in the sense that more people have more things to say about the papal visit to the formerly atheist island nation. Continue Reading →

Intense Friendliness: Kids, Cults and Criteria

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by Ashley Baxstrom

NYU Local reported last week that city students have a lot more to worry about than midterms and the rising price of lattes: dangerous CULTS want to steal your soul, body and money!

According to the post–less an article than a humorous piece, the author admitted to me–the Campus Safety website “warns that cult members may ‘[share] with you the answers they have found to life’s questions, they may seek to enlist your time, energy, and resources in endeavors they believe to be worthwhile.’” This comes from a section entitled “Tips for Identifying a Cult” (right under a section on “How to Avoid Common Swindles and Con Games”). Other tips include: to beware approaching strangers in Greenwich Village (um, how else am I supposed to get a date?) and to call the Center for Spiritual Life for assistance.
Continue Reading →

Identity, Crisis: Shari'a Law in Nigerian Politics

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by Alex Thurston

In 1999, Nigeria made global headlines when Northern states began re-implementing “full shari’a,” i.e. Islamic law codes that included criminal penalties for acts like theft, adultery, and drinking alcohol. The shari’a project in Northern Nigeria caused further controversy when shari’a courts sentenced two accused adulteresses to death by stoning – sentences that higher courts, under domestic and international pressure, later overturned.

As the rebel movement Boko Haram again puts Nigeria back in the headlines, the country’s relationship with shari’a is attracting new attention. Boko Haram’s overall platform remains vague. One of its few stated demands, however, is for broader and stronger shari’a not just in Northern states, but across all of Nigeria. What does this mean? And what historical factors have made shari’a loom so large in Northern Nigerian politics? Continue Reading →

Religion and Real Estate in New York City

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By Fred Folmer

Should religious groups be allowed to worship in New York City public schools? This question is at the heart of an ongoing issue involving church leaders, congregants and public officials, who are challenging a decision by the Bloomberg administration and Department of Education to evict churches that use school buildings for their worship services. Although the churches have now been evicted from their spaces, questions about the wisdom and fairness of doing so certainly remain, and legislation to overturn the evictions is still pending.

The issue may on the surface appear to be a standard church-and-state dispute, and indeed some of the questions it raises–Should so-called religious groups be allowed to worship on public facilities as paying tenants? Does such a use violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause? What constitutes a “worship service,” anyway, and why does it entail special forms of legislative restriction?–are quite familiar to anyone who has followed such cases. But the issue also suggests something that receives far less attention from media, and is much harder to map easily onto boilerplate rhetoric about “separation of church and state”  This is so because it affects certain kinds of churches and populations, but also because the decision to evict the churches—whatever its stated intentions—could have a marked effect on the kind of religion that gets practiced in New York City.  And where it’s practiced, given that it drastically reduces the space available to nondenominational and evangelical congregations in a city in which real estate is famously hard to come by. Continue Reading →

Boko Haram in National Perspective

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By Alex Thurston

Violence by Boko Haram, a rebel sect in Northern Nigeria that claims to be waging an Islamic jihad against the Nigerian state, has killed over 900 people since 2009, including over 250 in 2012 alone. Domestic and international analysts warn that pervasive insecurity in the country’s Northeast, and periodic strikes by Boko Haram in the capital Abuja and major cities like Kano, are weakening the legitimacy of President Goodluck Jonathan, who like many of his fellow Southern Nigerians is Christian (the North is primarily Muslim). Near-daily commentary speculates that Nigeria is “on the brink” – of civil war, of state failure, or of just plain being a mess. And yet in the South, where much of the country’s economic activity is located, business is going on more or less as usual. Oil is flowing at around two billion barrels per day. Citibank plans to double its investments in Nigeria, to $2 billion, in 2012. Growth, though down slightly from last year’s 7.7%, is projected at 7.2% for the year. The South has its own problems, but the different trajectories of North and South do raise a question about Boko Haram – is the movement just a Northern problem, or is it a national one?

The answer to this question will depend on the movement’s military and organizational capacity, but it will also depend on how the movement’s violence affects existing ethnic, religious, and regional fault lines in Nigeria. These fault lines exist both within the country’s two halves and between them. Continue Reading →

Gray Barker, the Men in Black, and North Carolina Amendment One

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By David Halperin

You are David Halperin.

It’s 1960, and you’re twelve going on thirteen, and although you’ve noticed for a while now that there are exciting differences between girls and boys, it’s only recently you’ve begun to grasp that this fact might have some relevance to you.  Your mother is sick with heart disease—slowly dying, though no one in your little suburban home dares to talk about that.

You and a friend are doing a project about flying saucers for science class.  You go to your local library and check out a book you’ve never heard of, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers by a man named Gray Barker.  It looks like any book you might find in your school library.  It’s got an index, and even a bibliography, the entries composed the way you’ve been taught bibliography entries ought to be.  You take it home and begin reading.

Soon you’re riveted with fear.

You read about a seven-foot monster “worse than Frankenstein,” with glowing green face and red eyes, that landed on a West Virginia hilltop in 1952.  You read about a Connecticut man named Albert Bender, who in 1953 solved the flying saucer mystery and was visited by three men in black, who terrified him so he never would reveal the awful secret he’d discovered.  You pray God to protect you from all these horrors, seen and unseen; and it never crosses your mind to doubt what you’ve read, partly because it’s written in a LIBRARY BOOK and you trust library books, but also because you know first-hand that life has secrets and shadows so dreadful no one will speak of them.  You see them every day, as your mother withers away. Continue Reading →

America's Muslim Anxiety: Lessons from The Third Jihad

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The past week has witnessed an escalating political crisis within the New York Police Department, sparked by the revelation that over a thousand officers viewed an Islamophobic film as part of a training exercise.  The Third Jihad (view trailer here) was produced by the Clarion Fund, a New York-based non-profit that first gained notoriety during the 2008 election season when it mailed thousands of unsolicited DVD copies of an earlier, similar film, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (view trailer here), to voters in swing states, presumably in the hope of influencing electoral college votes.  New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had denied earlier rumors concerning the widespread screening of the Third Jihad; more shockingly, Kelly himself makes a cameo as a talking head in the film, although he claims that he was not apprised that footage of the interview would be used in the film.   In the wake of the report concerning the screening of the film—Tom Robbins of the Village Voice first broke the story on January 19th—Kelly issued an unprecedented public apology; while Mayor Bloomberg rushed to the commissioner’s defense, a variety of groups, including several Muslim organizations, continue to call for Kelly’s resignation.  Meanwhile, the film’s producers have vigorously redoubled their advocacy of The Third Jihad’s message, claiming that it only presents “the facts.”
The NYPD’s Third Jihad controversy presents many questions for those who track the politics of and about Islam in the contemporary United States.  For instance, one wonders what the airing of such a film in a “training”—presumably a context for teaching tactics and strategies in preventing crime—says about the institutional cultures of American police forces more generally. Continue Reading →

Books Among Righteous Men

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By Matthew Shaer

Last June, a federal judge in Washington ordered the Russian government to return to the Lubavitch-Chabad Hasidic movement a sizable library of religious texts and documents which had been seized by Bolshevik authorities in the 1920s. The library was later obtained by the Nazis, before finally ending up—in 1945—in the hands of the Red Army. By that point, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, had fled to the United States, where he set about rebuilding his court on American soil.

The books have remained contested property ever since. In his ruling, the federal judge, Royce C. Lamberth, called the seizure by the Red Army discriminatory and pointed out that the Lubavitch leadership had received no compensation from Russia. The Russian government, for its part, has refused to participate in the legal proceedings, arguing that the library is “part of the Russian State Library’s collection, which… is indivisible.”

In a tersely worded statement this month, Russian Culture Minister Alexander Avdeyev called the claims of the plaintiff—Agudas Chasidei Chabad, the Crown Heights–based organization that oversees the entire Lubavitch movement—“provocative,” and hinted that further action could have real diplomatic consequences. The request by the plaintiff “aims to spoil the bilateral relations between our countries and to undermine the political reset,” Avdeyev said, according to Interfax.

Interestingly, this is not the first major court action involving a Lubavitch-Chabad library. In the mid-1980s, the Lubavitch community in Brooklyn was consumed by a different fight over a very different collection of texts—and unlike the case adjudicated last year by Judge Lamberth, this one pitted one descendent of Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn against another. Continue Reading →

Shifting Politics in the World's Newest Nation

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By Alex Thurston

South Sudan, though less than six months old as an independent nation, already faces challenges to its political and cultural unity: rebels abound, opposition groups denounce the ruling party, and ethnic tensions simmer. Christianity has provided a powerful platform for political mobilization in the region’s past, and churches continue to represent the strongest force in Southern Sudanese civil society. As the new nation grapples with ethnic and political tensions, Christianity may help build unity – yet the power of the churches has limits.

Colonial Legacies and Christianity in South Sudan

British colonial rule did not introduce Christianity to present-day South Sudan – there were Christian kingdoms in East Africa prior to 1500, and Catholic missionaries were active in the region in the mid-nineteenth century – but colonial policies left a lasting impact on the character and social role of Southern Sudanese Christianity.

After the British pieced together the colony of Sudan from 1898-1910, colonial rulers treated the Southern provinces as a culturally and religiously distinct enclave that needed to be isolated and administered differently from the Arab Muslim North. While missionary activities were restricted in the North, missionaries had a freer hand in the South. Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican missionaries made limited conversions during the colonial period, but they had a lasting impact on education. When the British conjoined North and South Sudan under one administration in 1946, university-educated Northerners dominated politics and the civil service, but the few Southerners with advanced educational credentials were largely products of these mission schools. Continue Reading →

Shifting Politics in the World’s Newest Nation

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By Alex Thurston

South Sudan, though less than six months old as an independent nation, already faces challenges to its political and cultural unity: rebels abound, opposition groups denounce the ruling party, and ethnic tensions simmer. Christianity has provided a powerful platform for political mobilization in the region’s past, and churches continue to represent the strongest force in Southern Sudanese civil society. As the new nation grapples with ethnic and political tensions, Christianity may help build unity – yet the power of the churches has limits.

Colonial Legacies and Christianity in South Sudan

British colonial rule did not introduce Christianity to present-day South Sudan – there were Christian kingdoms in East Africa prior to 1500, and Catholic missionaries were active in the region in the mid-nineteenth century – but colonial policies left a lasting impact on the character and social role of Southern Sudanese Christianity.

After the British pieced together the colony of Sudan from 1898-1910, colonial rulers treated the Southern provinces as a culturally and religiously distinct enclave that needed to be isolated and administered differently from the Arab Muslim North. While missionary activities were restricted in the North, missionaries had a freer hand in the South. Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican missionaries made limited conversions during the colonial period, but they had a lasting impact on education. When the British conjoined North and South Sudan under one administration in 1946, university-educated Northerners dominated politics and the civil service, but the few Southerners with advanced educational credentials were largely products of these mission schools. Continue Reading →