a review of religion and media
“The Patient Body” is a monthly column by Ann Neumann about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. This month: Competing stories of why America is special and its elders are going hungry. Continue Reading →
God spends $390 million lobbying Washington every year.
Jonathan Jones writes at The Guardian about the now-iconic photo of 84 year old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey after being pepper sprayed in Seattle:
America is a religious nation and I can’t help thinking that either the people in the picture, or the photographer, consciously or unconsciously reached for an image from the iconography of Catholic faith. No movement, in its early history, recognised the power of martyrdom more thoroughly than Christianity did. Obviously, martyrdom is a Christian concept. To die for the faith, by being pinioned to the ground and beheaded – say – or crucified upside down, was to imitate Christ, to reenact the suffering of a God made flesh.
God spends $390 million lobbying Washington every year.
Jonathan Jones writes at The Guardian about the now-iconic photo of 84 year old Occupy activist Dorli Rainey after being pepper sprayed in Seattle:
America is a religious nation and I can’t help thinking that either the people in the picture, or the photographer, consciously or unconsciously reached for an image from the iconography of Catholic faith. No movement, in its early history, recognised the power of martyrdom more thoroughly than Christianity did. Obviously, martyrdom is a Christian concept. To die for the faith, by being pinioned to the ground and beheaded – say – or crucified upside down, was to imitate Christ, to reenact the suffering of a God made flesh.
We are not ourselves. We no longer know what it means to be American. We are letting our secretive government fleece us. We’re broken and we are on the wrong path, at a tipping point, we’ve lost our way. From Star Parker to Sarah Palin, from Roger Ailes to Glenn Beck, the message that the Media Right is riding is that we are a country that has forgotten itself, forgotten its exceptionalism, become too complicated, gotten too far from its values; and because of this lapse of self-knowledge, we’re about to hit dire straits. While it’s a strong, simple and compelling (and rather Biblical) narrative — we must change our ways now or soon perish — some major plot points are missing. Who are “we” for instance? And whose values are being forgotten? What is American exceptionalism and how or why should we get back to it? While the Media Right works to stage a self-help intervention for our failing country, few are talking about what really ails us with detail. This “we are going down” talk serves a distinct political purpose though; as Tony Judt writes in a new, lengthy essay,“The Disintegration of the Public Sector” for SSRC: Continue Reading →
