Search Results for: Kathryn Joyce

The Revealer has become awfully opaque of late, a static page of rarely renewed writing. That’s because I’ve turned my energies back toward my first internet love, KillingTheBuddha.com. I hope Revealer readers will join me there. It’s like The Revealer-plus, and then some.

I’ll continue to occasionally blog about religion and media, along with KtBlogger Nathan Schneider, but the main attractions are feature essays and stories, published every Monday and Thursday (and sometimes Saturday), by writers, artists, and photographers covering the religious, political, and aesthetic spectrums. Michael Muhammad Knight writes on the man he calls Allah; Nina Burleigh investigates the unholy world of the Israeli antiquities trade; Meera Subramanian reports on the “100 Unspoken Rules” of a Hindu mangili pondu ceremony; Nathan Schneider compares Al Qaeda recruitment imagery with Donald Rumsfeld’s “Full Armor of God”; Revealer editor Kathryn Joyce accepts the 2009 “Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award”; novelist Ilana Stanger-Ross investigates the “Perfect Breasts” of orthodox Brooklyn; and I chip in with “Naked and Guilty,” on the eros of evangelicalism and a hell house in Texas.

There’ll be more news on the future of The Revealer soon. In the meantime, why don’t you read a book, for chrissakes.

Hey, here’s an affordable one: my NYT bestseller, The Family, out in paperback this week! So is its lovely review in the Journal of American History, which breaks from academic form to declare that The Family “does for fundamentalism what Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century did for punk.”

And here’s an even better book: erstwhile Revealer editor Peter Manseau’s Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, also out in paperback this week! It’s a beautiful novel about pogroms, poetry, and the death of print — literally — but what makes it really unique is that it won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction.. Peter is the first goy to take the prize in half a century.

Back in 2004, Peter and made a book together called Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible. Amazon apparently loved it so much that lately they’ve been attributing all sorts of books to the Manseau & Sharlet team. Our latest collaboration is a book we traveled back in time to write, Calvin and the Reformation, published in 1962 by “Peter and Sharlet, Jeff Manseau.” But that’s really kind of a specialized work. For the general reader, we recommend our other latest collaboration. Here’s the premise: An elven witch, a bar mitzvah cheater, and a Bible camp saboteur walk into a bar… and nine years later they walk out with a book: Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith, an anthology of KillingTheBuddha.com coming from Beacon Press on July 1.

The advance reviews are in:

LIBRARY JOURNAL

STARRED REVIEW Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith. Beacon, dist. by Houghton. Jul. 2009. 263p. ed. by Jeff Sharlet & others. ISBN 978-0-8070-7739-9. $16.

From Beacon comes a book that, if not a beacon, is certainly a message from the vanguard of popular spirituality. This extremely diverse set of essays is the second to come from Killing the Buddha, an online religion magazine “for people made anxious by churches” and the ideal home for the “spiritual but not religious” and all the other great unchurched believers in America. Here you’ll find a Jewish adolescent who hopes she is the promised Messiah, an elven witch, a Zen A.A. memoir, and much more. Shocking, exhilarating, and never dull, these essays sometimes give off the self-conscious, twee air of modern memoirs Continue Reading →

Smart religion writers have been complaining for awhile that exit polls don’t ask Democratic voters about their religious affiliations. Now “Faith in Public Life,” a center-left outfit, has done something about it. Robert P. Jones reports at Religion Dispatches. The implications are huge: In Missouri and Tennessee, one-third of white evangelical voters voted in Democratic primaries. And, more surprising, in both states they favored Hillary over Obama by overwhelming margins: MO: 54% to 37%; TN: 78% to 12%. That blows a hole in the conventional wisdom that Obama represents a “third way” a lot of white evangelicals will follow, but it may confirm an argument about Hillary’s long, slow outreach to Christian conservatives that Kathryn Joyce and I made in Mother Jones last fall.

The survey also finds that a majority of evangelicals want an agenda that goes beyond abortion and homosexuality. Faith in Public Life, and partners like center-leftist Jim Wallis and center-rightist Randy Brinson, announce that finding like it’s news. Not to anyone who’s spent time with ordinary evangelicals and knows that they care as much about poverty and suffering as anyone. The difference was never a matter of what people cared about; it’s an issue of how you want to respond, and on that score, these new numbers may reveal a growing evangelical comfort with big government.

Or maybe not — as intriguing as this survey is, it’s just a beginning to the project of understanding the relationship between evangelicals and the contemporary Democratic Party. Progressive optimists see this growing relationship as the great liberalization of evangelicalism. Progressive cynics see it as the conservative conversion of the Democratic Party. Mainstream media favors the former interpretation, but only because mainstream media still views evangelicals as “out there”; it doesn’t occur to them that the establishment could gravitate around religion, rather than the other way around.

–Jeff Sharlet Continue Reading →

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce makes her Newsweek.com debut with an account of “The Other Jamestown Party,” an ultra-right Christian celebration of the colony’s 400th anniversary:

Fifteen miles from Williamsburg, Va., in Charles City County, on a country road dominated by plantations turned bed-and-breakfasts, 4,000 ultra-conservative, largely home-schooling Christians gathered to correct a month-old mistake: to do Jamestown right. The women wore hoop skirts, bustles, bonnets and mob hats. The men wore tricorn, feathered “Musketeer” or top hats; they carried swords. “Maidens,” that is, girls, wore aprons, while “heroes” Continue Reading →