Tag: bookforum

OWS Reads

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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.

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Playing Religion

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From Peter Manseau’s review at Bookforum of Robert Bellah’s new book, Religion in Human Evolution:

Bellah searches for a commonality that may give some indication of where and when the uniquely human activity of religion was born. What he finds is as intriguing as it is unexpected: They all like to play.

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

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