OWS Reads

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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Give Us This Day Our Daily Links

Should astrophysicist Martin Rees have accepted the Templeton Prize he was awarded last week?  ||  This is what blasphemy looks like:  A group of French Catholics has defaced Serrano’s Piss Christ.  ||  Nickelodeon premiered a new children’s TV show on Sunday, “Freedom to believe…or Not.”  ||  The death of God is so over:  Jon Meacham puts Rob Bell on the cover of Time and asks us, “Is Hell Dead?” (Read Revealer Becky Garrison’s take on the Bell & Piper show here. Watch Chris Matthews’ panel — with Andrew Sullivan, Norah O’Donnell, Joe Klein and Becky Quick — here.)  ||  “A professor of religious law at Benghazi’s Garyounis University, Osama el-Salladi, says that under the 41-year rule of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, religious institutions were as controlled as political life.”  ||  A truck carrying 3,888 bibles was stolen outside Moscow this holy week.  ||  Fraudulent churches, heal thyselves:  Senator Chuck Grassley’s three-year investigation of church financial fraud has produced a commission (from the likes of Oral Roberts University President Mark Rutland, Campus Crusade for Christ President Stephen Douglass and megachurch pastors Joel Hunter and Bishop Kenneth Ulmer) but no charges of misconduct.  ||  The presidential campaign to appear convincingly Christian is working.  ||  Mega Churches have turned away from the bible and it’s all Peter Drucker’s fault.  || Doomsday Capitalism! The 500-year cycle is coming to an end!  ||  “This budget deal is at least $1.1 billion sin against the poorest of this nation. And no one who voted for it deserves the appellation ‘pro-life.’Continue Reading →