The Faith Between Us
Now in bookstores! The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God, by Revealer contributing editor Scott Korb and Killing the Buddha contributor Peter Bebergal. Continue Reading →
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In the News: Drugs! Trump! Emojis! Important Things That Aren’t Good Clickbait!
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
In the News: Calligraphy, Coens, a Caffeinated Casket and much more!
A round-up of recent religion news. Continue Reading →
An American Muslim University
Hussein Rashid interviewed Scott Korb about his new book, Light without Fire. We’ve got the audio. Continue Reading →
Fall 2011 Revealer Reading Series
Books and more books! Join us this fall for three reading events that will feature some of our very favorite religion writers. Continue Reading →
Misinterpreting the Legacy of the 1960s
Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.
by Scott Korb
For a good part of the past four years, I met every other week with a former Ursuline nun – let’s call her “Josefa” – to talk about the life of the Church from the ’50s to early ’70s, precisely the period of time when the child sexual abuse crisis was at its worst. Josefa, approaching 80, was writing a memoir; I helped her along. Together, inch by inch and mile by mile, we paved the way for her entry, as a teenager, into the religious order known to be the first group of Catholic sisters to arrive in the new world. And together, week by week and year by year, we came to understand why exactly, at 40, she left. Continue Reading →
The Past upon Its Throne
by Scott Korb
A look at Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History
In her recent book, The Whites of Their Eyes, Harvard historian and regular New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore takes a close look at the Tea Party and calls it fundamentalist. The Whites of Their Eyes is a book almost entirely set in greater Boston: at Tea Party gatherings in Green Dragon Tavern, where in 1765 the Sons of Liberty themselves began gathering; at the Old South Meeting House, at re-stagings, by children, of the debates that led to the Boston Tea Party; on the field where the Battle of Lexington and Concord was fought, where on the morning of the annual reenactment Lepore’s family (and “some other sleepy-headed colonials”) wage their own little “battle on the green.” (One thing to note about the book is how often the facts of Lepore’s own Cambridge life enter the story—in this case, the family’s annual failure to get out of bed early enough to make it to the actual reenactment; they’re there in time for the parade that follows.)
Tea Party fundamentalism—or what Lepore calls “historical fundamentalism”—is of a different kind than the religious fundamentalism The Revealer typically notes, though the two are not mutually exclusive, nor are either particularly wholesome. Continue Reading →
Going Straight for the I AM
By Scott Korb
On its face, Marilynne Robinson’s tightly packed new book Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self may appear to be just another salvo in the ongoing war between religion (books) and science (books). And by temperament, my own sympathies typically lie with those writers ostensibly in the religion camp—Karen Armstrong, say, or Chris Hedges, or recently, even Adam Gopnik—whose books and essays and lectures usually aim to suggest, on the one hand, a common theme of compassion running through religious teachings, and on the other, a complexity and inwardness to religious belief that science (books)—or, “parascience,” as Robinson puts it—ignores, or, at the very least, minimizes. As a case for religion, Absence of Mind dutifully fires its shots. Take for instance what Robinson says early on about Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon Robinson just happens “to have in hand” as she writes. (It could, after all, be any number of these parascientific books.)
Dennett sheers off the contemplative side of faith, its subjectivity, as if the collective expressions of religion and the inward experience of it were nonoverlapping magisteria, as if religion were only what could be observed using the methods of anthropology or of sociology, without reference to the deeply pensive solitudes that bring individuals into congregations to be nurtured by the thought and culture they find there.
This Fixed, Steady Twoness
by Scott Korb
Whether he intended it or not Philip Pullman has written, most recently, a religious story. And insofar as The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is a religious story, as the title suggests it is a Christian one. (Though, it’s true, as Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has said, the Gospels—especially Mark’s—are better, even on Pullman’s own terms). In some ways, Pullman’s title, which alone suggests the book’s supposed scandal, says it all. Not Jesus Christ, or even Jesus the Christ, but Jesus AND Christ, twin brothers borne of Mary, who was, in yet another supposed scandal to Christians, seduced by a figure calling himself an “an angel,” who “in order not to frighten her … had assumed the appearance of a young man, just like the one of the young men who spoke to her by the well.”
So, enough about Philip Pullman.
By their nature, religious stories self-complicate. Take the Gospels, just for example, which all tell similar stories “according to” someone or another—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, say, names that attached themselves to the early Christian communities who wrote and kept these Gospels in the wake of Jerusalem’s destruction in 70 C.E. Continue Reading →
Praying For Prayer’s SakeOn the National Day of Prayer
by Scott Korb
Listen to Scott, contributing editor to The Revealer, talk about the National Day of Prayer on BBC4’s “Sunday.”
As defenders of the National Day of Prayer will tell you, George Washington called for our first day of prayer in 1789: “That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war.” These same people will also point out that Abraham Lincoln proclaimed three such days during the Civil War, most famously on April 30, 1863, to mark what he called a necessary “Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” because “we have forgotten God.” Victories in Gettysburg and Vicksburg the following summer occasioned the 1864 proclamation; 1865’s National Day of Prayer was held June 1, in Lincoln’s memory. Continue Reading →