a review of religion and media
Jeff Sharlet: More like the church basement, I imagine. This Sunday, September 24th, I’ll be speaking at Grace Church (802 Broadway at 11th, in New York City) at 10:00 am as part of the church’s “Varieties of Evangelicalism” series. I’ll be giving a preview of a Harper’s piece I’ve forthcoming… Continue Reading →
Jeff Sharlet presents an excerpt from his 2008 book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, to explain what Stonewall Jackson monuments look like to fundamentalists who tell themselves “it’s not about race.” Continue Reading →
By Jeff Sharlet Rick Warren’s real conribution to American evangelicalism is the perfection of the humble-brag. Continue Reading →
By Jeff Sharlet Just as the election blinds the press to the bigger, enduring story — reality — of massive and growing inequality in the U.S., so the Pew study of the Nones has distracted many from what I think are the most interesting numbers. Continue Reading →
By Jeff Sharlet Just as the election blinds the press to the bigger, enduring story — reality — of massive and growing inequality in the U.S., so the Pew study of the Nones has distracted many from what I think are the most interesting numbers. Continue Reading →
Our founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, was on NPR this week talking about religious freedom, what it means to assign the Christian label to the American population, and the long history of Christian persecution rhetoric in U.S. politics. Listen here.
“There were never school shootings when prayer was in school.” The Ohio school shooting, some believers have pointed out, comes on the approximate 50th anniversary of 1962’s Engle v. Vitale, a Supreme Court decision that ended school prayer. I would like to add that a few other laws have changed since 1962.
I’m not a done-sold Melissa Harris-Perry fan but I’ve been enjoying watching her new show, oddly named MHP, on MSNBC. Here’s a clip of MHP, a professor at Tulane, taking on The Help, a feel good movie about the Jim Crow South.
“Debbie does Radical Muslim Fundraiser.” Really. Stephanie Butnick points us to the sexualized headlines Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Jewish Democrat, was subjected to last week.
“D’oh my God: faith in The Simpsons,” a piece at The New Humanist by Andrew Mueller, examines what The Simpsons, TVs longest running show, really never got right. (h/t David Farley)
“A nihilistic dictatorship of relativism.” Mark Silk quotes Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete to get us closer to the real nature of the culture wars.
Analyzing Santorum’s “Meet the Press” back-track–he recently accused the President of having a “phony religion” and has some face to save–The New Yorker‘s James Wood, theology aside, finds something particularly secular and even–gasp!–rational humanistic in the Republican Presidential candidate’s words!
Note, too, that all this talk about making man the objective sounds quite like the supposed heresy of rational humanism. If you took away the theological context of Santorum’s screed, you would have a program for secular politics: Since we are here to serve man, then we should start getting busy with projects of political salvation, like universal health care, environmental protection, the alleviation of poverty, and so on.
Our founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, has two new articles out on the Occupy Movement: at Bookforum and at Rolling Stone. Here’s an excerpt from the former:
I’m not sure when I first felt that joy, but I know when I named it for what it was: one night lying on a sleeping pad beneath a thin blanket, hemmed in by my just-met friend Austin, a teacher of autistic children who leaves the park for work every day at 7:30 AM, and his girlfriend and her girlfriend, reading my newly acquired copy of The Pagan Rabbi by the yellow sodium light of the city’s permanent illumination. Purists call that light pollution, but filtering through the feathery leaves of Zuccotti Park’s honey locust trees, it was lovely. More than lovely; bathed in its amber glow I felt like one of five hundred little Christs, if by “Christ” you’ll allow me to refer not to divinity itself but to one of its more wholly human representations, Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Piss Christ. Appreciating what’s happening in Zuccotti Park requires a mental shift akin to the one necessary to see Piss Christ—an image of a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine—as not blasphemous but beautiful. And I don’t mean ideologically beautiful—a baroque idea one admires for the complexity of its inversions. I mean gorgeous, breathtaking and breath-giving at the same time.
The Revealer founder Jeff Sharlet hustled up a list of writers who support the Occupy movement on Wall Street and around the world. Read it here: www.occupywriters.com Continue Reading →
An excerpt from Heather Hendershot‘s new book, What’s Fair on the Air: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago, 2011).
Hendershot, a professor at Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center, will be reading from What’s Fair TONIGHT, Friday, September 23 at 5 pm at the NYU Bookstore. Our founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, will be there to talk with Hendershot about her book. Click here for more details.
Two recurring arguments of this book have been that the broadcast ultras were the embarrassing nuts who had to be left behind for a more legitimate and effective conservative movement to emerge in the 1970s and ’80s, and that contemporary conservatives, while sharing some of the anxieties and presumptions voiced by the cold war extremist broadcasters, are generally much better at couching right-wing ideas in more moderate-sounding rhetoric. The first claim would be hard to deny, but the latter contention may seem a bit more open to debate, especially in the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008 and the ensuing rise of “Tea Party” conservatives in 2009. The Tea Party, a most immoderate (and certainly not unified) group, initially grabbed headlines by marching with picket signs portraying President Obama as Hitler (or the Joker, or a Muslim), calling for a new American “revolation,” and decrying abortion as an American “Hollowcost.”
Angry, white, and mostly male and over forty-five years old, this group—egregious spelling errors aside—has somewhat higher education and income levels than the average American. Tea Party supporters are adamantly opposed to government bailouts specifically, and federal spending in general, although by hollering things like “keep your government hands off my Medicare check!” they sometimes reveal a shallow understanding of what federal spending actually encompasses. There are, of course, also people involved in this grassroots uprising who know how to organize, strategize, and fundraise. This new movement is no laughing matter: it is potentially a powerful force to be reckoned with. Continue Reading →