Search Results for: Jeff Sharlet

In Lieu of Hobbits

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An interview with Jeff Sharlet about his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithless, and the Country In Between. Sharlet is the bestselling author of  The Family and C Street and a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone. Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, he taught literary nonfiction through New York University’s Center for Religion and Media from 2006-8 and created The Revealer for the Center in 2003.

by Ashley Baxstrom

The only reason I write this stuff is because I’m a nerd whose heart was broken when he discovered there are no hobbits.  ~ Jeff Sharlet, author of Sweet Heaven When I Die

Jeff Sharlet is best known for The Family and C Street, a pair of books about what he calls “the avant-garde of American fundamentalism,” a religious and political movement that fuses conservative evangelicalism with a laissez-faire, expansionist vision of American power. But really, Sharlet he has been writing about the people in whom belief lives, and the meaning that comes during – and out of – their experience of faith. Over several years, while writing those two books, Sharlet wrote the stories of those he met and their experiences with belief, with causes, with struggle and survival. In his latest book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Sharlet gathers these stories together to explore an American landscape that is at once a whole country and yet a world apart. He writes about friends and about strangers who become less strange. Continue Reading →

Sweet Heaven

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My predecessor, founding editor of The Revealer, Jeff Sharlet, has a new book out that you should all run to buy, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithless, and the Country In Between (W.W. Norton & Company, 264 pages).  The thirteen essays that make up the book examine varieties of faith, however vastly defined by the people Jeff profiles in each.  From philosopher Cornell West to anarchist Brad Will, from metaphysician Sondra to, well, me (“You Must Draw A Long Bead to Shoot a Fish”), Sharlet leads us through the “borderlands of belief and doubt.” Continue Reading →

Inferiority Complexes

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From “Fundamentalism Spring Eternal for GOP,” at Washington Post by The Revealer founding editor, Jeff Sharlet:

Social conservatives, particularly of the Protestant variety, want out of 2012 what they’ve wanted since H.L. Mencken handed them a shellacking at the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925: respectability. Christian conservatives have either dominated American politics or shouted loudest in opposition for three decades, but the movement’s inferiority complex runs deep. Eighteen years after the fact, fundamentalist pundits still cite a description of fundamentalists in The Washington Post as “largely poor, uneducated, and easily led.”That the characterization is snobby — and inaccurate. It’s also old. But as a movement, these religious social conservatives can’t seem to win enough validation – also known as power – to make them feel better. Exhibit A: The sense of wounded grievance fueling Michele Bachmann’s campaign.

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Analyzing Oslo

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Some fantastic reporting is finally debunking what initial reports told us about the bombings in Oslo, specifically about the suspect, Anders Breivik.  Islamic terrorist?  Not at all.  Here are some links to great reporting:

Sarah Posner at Religion Dispatches

Charlie Brooker at The Guardian

Chip Berlet at Talk to Action

Michelle Goldberg at Daily Beast

Also, Jeff Sharlet (our founding editor) is tweeting his reading of Breivik’s Manifesto.  You can follow him at  @jeffsharlet Continue Reading →

The Revealer Family, Published

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It’s been a great week for readers, thanks to a suite of articles by members of The Revealer‘s family of writers.  Covering issues from reality-based food to women’s travel, from the health care crisis to Zionist activism to religious compounds in Missouri, we’re proud to have such talented and diverse writers’ names to drop!

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has an important article, “Escape from Missouri,” in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.  Read more about it here.  Buy it on newsstands today.

Our books editor Scott Korb has a new piece in the special food issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “It’s What’s for Dinner.”  You can read the article here.  Read Nathan Schneider’s comments on the article here.

Former managing editor Meera Subramanian has contributed to a new book, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011.  Get your copy here.

Kiera Feldman–and we admit it’s a stretch to claim her as one of our own, but we will–has an article at The Nation this week, “The Romance of Birthright Israel.”  Read it here; read Jeff Sharlet’s comments on it here.

Your editor truly has a piece at The Nation this week on the Catholic Church’s renewed focus on aid in dying and the implications for health care in the US.  Read it here. Continue Reading →

Terri Schiavo Goes to NASCAR

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The Revealer‘s founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, wrote in our mission statement in 2003, “Belief matters, whether or not you believe. Politics, pop culture, high art, NASCAR — everything in this world is infused with concerns about the next.”  Almost as if to prove the continuing pertinence of Jeff’s statement, The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network (formerly the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation) is asking supporters to vote for their design to be featured on a Toyota car at the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Race.

Founded by Terri Schiavo’s family in 2001, the network is dedicated to promoting a “Culture of Life” and “embraces the true meaning of compassion by opposing the practice of euthanasia.”  The Schindlers — and their church, the Catholic Church — maintain that Schiavo was “starved to death” or “killed” by her husband Michael Schiavo when he won a series of high-profile court cases to have her feeding tube removed, resulting in her death in 2005.  Artificial nutrition and hydration, the tube inserted into her stomach, they claim, was not medical treatment but “comfort care.”  The highly publicized attempts of the Bush Administration to interfere in the Schiavo lawsuit were soundly disapproved of by a majority of Americans.

In November of 2010 the Catholic Church changed it’s laws that govern 624 hospitals in the U.S. to impede removal of patients like Schiavo from artificial nutrition and hydration.

That the Life & Hope Network is appealing to the NASCAR crowd for support for their cause is not insignificant and speaks to the demographic divide in the U.S. regarding broader issues on the “pro-life” platform, including abortion and end of life choices. Continue Reading →

Thanks, Dennis Dutton

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by Jeff Sharlet

Head over to Arts & Letters Daily and scroll down the left column to this sad item: links to a couple of dozen obituaries marking the death, on December 28, of A&L founder Denis Dutton. You can find details of Dutton’s wonderfully generous contrarianism there; here, I’ll point to the obvious, which is that The Revealer’s three columns, Today, Timely, and Timeless, are a riff on the format established by A&L in 1998. I was hardly alone in copying A&L; future historians of internet journalism and criticism will surely credit Dutton with tremendous influence. What makes that all the more remarkable is that he shaped the internet not by rushing breathlessly into the future but by emulating the design of an 18th century broadsheet and by clinging to vocation of “public intellectual” even as he opened the doors of his highbrow salon to countless unknowns and troublemakers. I was one of them, and it’s no exaggeration to say I owe something of my career to him. Starting in 1998, when I was a senior writer on the humanities at The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dutton began picking up my features with some regularity. That impressed my editors, and encouraged them to encourage me to keep messing with The Chron’s turgid formulas. Dutton provided the cover that allowed me to go from writing dull reports on trends in diplomatic history to stories about the fringes of academe, portraits of “gypsy scholars” and meditations on the utopianism of scholarly books that can never be completed. I never communicated with Dutton, but I suspect I fell into his favor because of a feature I wrote on the resurgence of Ayn Rand in the academy; Dutton was no “Randroid,” as the objectivist’s disciples are known, but his contrarianism led him into a sympathy for libertarianism with a conservative tinge. Continue Reading →

Killing the Buddha Tin Anniversary Spectacular, Dec. 7

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It’s a Tin Anniversary Spectacular!  Our sister site, Killing the Buddha, will celebrate their tenth year of Buddha-killing on December 7th.  Meet founders Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet (also founder of The Revealer) and the whole extended family.  Music, performances, silent auction and more.

8:30 – 11:30 p.m. (doors at 8:15)
Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO
16 Main Street, Brooklyn, New York
Suggested donation $5 – $50
Ages 21+ Continue Reading →

Teavangelicals

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Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition is enjoying the fruits of a successful midterm election, claiming the Tea Party for his evangelical own and hanging that claim on a new poll that queried Tuesday’s voters.  There’s a strong overlap between the Tea Party and what Reed would call his party; he calls them Teavangelicals.  But how come we still need to be concerned with evangelicals when they’re supposedly old and white and powerless?  Laura Flanders of GRITv asks that question of The Revealer founder, Jeff Sharlet.  Enter “gatekeeper” Jim DeMint and the theology of helping the poor by serving the rich.  So where’s the press?

Click here for the video. Continue Reading →

The Tea Party Finds Newt's God

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This week Digby wondered if Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, is making a move to appear more Godly in order to get the Tea Party nomination for president in 2012.  It’s a worthy question, now that a multitude of observers (read Jonathan Kay, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Sarah Posner, David Dayen, Laurie Lebo, Ari Melber, Jeff Sharlet) have concluded that the religious right has successfully got its firm grip on the Tea Party.  Gingrich will appear at Liberty University’s convocation today —  the title of his talk is “Rediscovering God in America” — and then meet with Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. and others after the talk.  Which all would induce a giggle — Gingrich, motivated by God?! — if we didn’t remember how skilled Gingrich is at mongering fear for power.  And money.

But a more important question is this:  How was it so easy for tax-loathing, live-free-or-die discontents to cede their “leaderless” movement to the long-standing insiders who have worked for self and corporate interests in the name of a “family values,” “pro-life” God?  Perhaps they are not discontent with what they think they are discontent. Continue Reading →