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A new book from Revealer creator Jeff Sharlet
 "One of the most compelling and brilliantly researched exposes you'll ever read -- just don't read it alone at night!" --Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed [ read: ] |
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The Puritan's Dilemma What do Tea Partiers and Jonathan Safran Foer have in common? By Scott Korb One afternoon last week, I read both Ben McGrath’s recent New Yorker piece, “The Movement,” about the rise of American Tea Party activism, and Michael Pollan’s new pamphlet-book Food Rules. Both are well reported – or, for those of you who have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and/or In Defense of Food, you’re asked to think back to the reporting behind those books while reading Food Rules. If you haven’t read those earlier books, Pollan asks you to trust him; indeed, that we ask journalists to tell us how to eat is one of his great American gripes. (And yet, here he is, telling us once again.) And both McGrath’s piece and Pollan’s book are worth reading. What’s more, each should take you about the same length of time to read. Food Rules is little more than a list of 64, well, food rules – or what he calls “personal policies” – divided into three categories that will also be familiar to anyone who’s read Pollan before: I. Eat food. II. Mostly plants. III. Not too much. (This was originally formulated on the cover of the Times Magazine as “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” which has a poetry to it that Pollan himself is sensitive to when people get it wrong.) And so we find here what he calls “pieces of food culture,” pithy lines such as: “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t” (#19); or, “Eat animals that have themselves eaten well” (#27); or, most simple of all: “Cook” (#63). This is, indeed, the definition of pithy. Although in Food Rules Pollan is most concerned with returning culture and tradition to a central place in our meal planning, the needlessly complicated (in his view) questions that have shaped Dilemma and Defense – and before that The Botany of Desire – are just as often answered with a healthy serving of evolutionary science. For instance, it’s not that animal rightists such as Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer are bad guys; it’s just that when they argue – with a “deep current of Puritanism” – against eating animals and in favor of what Pollan calls a “vegan utopia,” well, those animal philosophers “betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature.” Continue reading: The Puritan's Dilemma |
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 8 February 2010 11:36 PM: Stephanie Butnick: Judith Weisenfeld writes writes that mainstream media coverage of the October 2009 "sweat lodge deaths" at self-help counselor James Arthur Ray's Arizona retreat has failed to adequately examine responses by Native American communities to the incident or discuss the commodification of Native American spiritual practices. "The significance of this story lies not in Ray's connection to Oprah or to The Secret but in what it reveals about the religious politics of contemporary self-help culture and non-Indians' relationship to indigenous people and their traditions," Weisenfeld writes.
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 Against the Black Box and the Slippery Slope Jeremy Walton: On November 9th, Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, published a piece titled 'Going Muslim' in his regular column for Forbes magazine. In it, he forwarded a deeply troubling analysis of the tragedy at Fort Hood earlier this month, in which Major Nadal Malik Hasan killed thirteen of his fellow soldiers in an unconscionable act of mass murder. Varadarajan’s argument, in essence, was that Muslims, by virtue of their very religious affiliation, identity and practice, are necessarily prone to the type of violence exemplified by Major Hasan’s actions; just as postal workers are liable to snap psychologically and “go postal”, so too are Muslims, in Varadarjan’s unfortunate coinage, candidates for “going Muslim”. [ Continue reading: ] The Corrections Sharlet: Several times now reviewers of my recent book, The Family, have incorrectly charged that I claim in the book to have exposed a fundamentalist right-wing conspiracy. In fact, I do nothing of the sort... [ Continue reading: ] Alison Des Forges, 1942-2009 Jeff Sharlet: Among the dead of Continental Flight 3407 was a 66-year-old historian and activist named Alison Des Forges. In a short essay about the media responses to Rwandan genocide for The Revealer in 2004, I referred to Des Forges' 1999 book on the subject, Leave None to Tell the Story, as "a painful masterwork." That did not do the book justice. It is a modern scripture... [ Continue reading: ] Pray Away the Gay; Abort the Retort Prayers for Bobby "is a film designed to teach us a lesson about religious intolerance," writes Tanya Erzen, "but in doing so it reproduces the unspoken rules for rendering gay people sympathetic or likable to a television audience: they were 'born that way,' they never have sex, and, of course, they die tragically." We thought the same thing when we saw the much bigger budget Revolutionary Road, Sam Mendes' accidental advertisement for the anti-abortion movement, a move so misogynist that it makes Underworld: Rise of the Lycans seem like a feminist parable. In the film, women are 'born that way,' of course, but in more ways than one -- they're conniving but not too bright, sex for them is a form of vengeance or control, and they often talk too much. Star Kate Winslet does have sex -- once to control Leonardo DiCaprio, once to take vengeance on him, and then never again. And, of course, she dies tragically, the wages of sin -- the result of aborting a baby Leo wanted. The movie opens with a deluded Winslet berating her husband; it ends with an old man happily turning off his hearing aid as his wife yammers on. [ Continue reading: ] Sarah Palin Goes Godless SarahPAC.com, the website of Palin's new political action committee, is notable chiefly for what's missing from it -- any mention of God, religion, or "values." Political journalists will speculate that this absence is the result of calculation -- with the religious right already neatly tucked away, Palin can afford to direct her pitch exclusively to the economic right. But it's more likely that SarahPAC is simply the real deal, a statement of the governor's priorities. That doesn't mean that her religion was a sideshow, but rather that it's woven into her beliefs about money. "Sex, death, and taxes," goes the old saying. For a biblical capitalist like Sarah Palin, each leg of that stool is a matter of ultimate concern. [ Continue reading: ] Groundhog Day, Again By Angela Zito Groundhog Day is upon us again. Having once discussed the film with Alex Kusczynski of the NYT, back in 2003, I am approached yearly by journalists who find this first interviw online for my “take” on the film starring Bill Murray... [ Continue reading: ] Family Best Sharlet: It's a New Year's treat to have my book, The Family, included on the top 10 list of 2008 books featured on "The Writer's Voice" ... [ Continue reading: ] Ignoring Their Religion Why is Rick Warren being given a pulpit at the inauguration? In large part because the press has already given him a free pass. A media establishment that defines itself as "moderate" in all things -- as if moderation wasn't a political pose -- needs religion it can define as good (read: innocuous). This, of course, is as much of an insult to believers as to those who oppose sectarianism in official life. Witness this editorial in the L.A. Times, [ Continue reading: ] Best Religion Writing of 2008 Jeff Sharlet: Links to my favorite religion stories of 2008. [ Continue reading: ] Dreaming of Oz in Mumbai S. Brent Plate: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, one of The New York Times most emailed articles last weekend was by NYU journalism professor, Suketa Mehta, entitled "What They Hate about Mumbai." Professor Mehta waxed romantically and defiantly about his city... [ Continue reading: ] Anglicans Toot Somebody Else's Horn Every major paper covered the formation of the Anglican Church of North America, comprised of 100,000 now-former members of the 2.3 million strong -- make that 2.2 million -- Episcopal Church in the United States. But only evangelical magazine Christianity Today, gushingly enthusiastic about the split -- the breakaway Anglicans seem motivated chiefly by anger over the Episcopal Church's acceptance of gays and lesbians and women priests, none of which are approved by most evangelicals -- notes that the new church declared its creation by blasting a shofar... [ Continue reading: ] Laugh Your Way to Spiritual Fitness and Financial Well-Being with Chuck Colson! By Holly Berman Chuck Colson -- Watergate felon, born again culture warrior -- thinks we need more laffs, and after more than four decades of growling threats, warnings, and what might very charitably be called "tough love" at the... [ Continue reading: ] Details Deuteronomy Reading power lists -- those loathsome magazine compilations of the best and most publicized -- is a bit like watching the sausage get made, with the "sausage" being conventional wisdom... [ Continue reading: ] Palin Marches On Sharlet: Just so I can be a shmuck and say "I told you so" later, I'm siding with William Kristol in predicting a future for Sarah Palin... [ Continue reading: ] Waiting for Lefty Too many of the recent books about the Religious Left declare easy victory, the triumph of modest faith and mild-mannered reason over vulgar fundamentalism. This one predicts a hard and uncertain fight, against not just a Religious Right more vital and sophisticated than commonly imagined but also the limited imagination of the Religious Left, as currently constituted. [ Continue reading: ] Who You Callin' Conservative? Sharlet: D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power, offers this helpful corrective to a recent post in which I wrongly described him as conservative... [ Continue reading: ] Haggard Speaks Preaching two years after his downfall following the disclosure of drug use and a long-standing relationship with a male prostitute, former evangelical leader Ted Haggard opens up publicly for the first time. ABC's exclusive leads with Haggard's suggestion that being molested by a man at age seven may have caused him to enjoy consensual sex with a man at age 50. But the more interesting point in Haggard's sermon, which apparently was available on his website until ABC announced it, was his view of how evangelicalism and secular media interact: I believe that he [God] gives us opportunities every couple of years to communicate the gospel worldwide through secular media and we consistently blow it. A congressman in trouble, that's the time. A family member gets himself in horrible trouble, that's the time. A preacher gets himself in awful trouble, that's the time.[ Continue reading: ] Who Will Lead Them? Jason C. Bivins, author of The Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism, and D. Michael Lindsay, author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (subtitles tell the tale),read the tea leaves. Bivins first: "As I watched Jesse Jackson weeping in Grant Park, I decided to forget the Reverend’s own campaign nastiness and thought instead of Psalms 30:5: 'Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.' And then I thought about 'Chocolate City,' the 1975 Parliament ode to my hometown: “They still call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition too.” Bafflingly, improbably, Starchild got it right... [ Continue reading: ] Submersion Journalism Upcoming events: Submersion Journalism, Ten Minutes of Palinology. [ Continue reading: ] The Audacity of Compromise The press played Obama's convention speech as MLK's dream fulfilled. A careful reading reveals the dream deferred. Obama's theological journey from liberation to liberalism, and what got left on the wayside... [ Continue reading: ] Sarah Palin's Hard Rain Leftist and liberal bloggers have been raising questions about possible connections between Sarah Palin's churches and a fundamentalist charismatic movement known as Third Wave and Latter Rain. The best of these investigations comes from Bruce Wilson... [ Continue reading: ] Blood Runs Thick Sharlet: Little did I know that my recent book, The Family, was a sort of sequel to Upton Sinclair's Oil!, recently made into the movie There Will Be Blood. At least, that's how Stephen Crittendon, host of Australian national radio's "Religion Report" sees it... [ Continue reading: ] Jonathan Edwards' Boogie Nights Jeff Sharlet: There aren't a lot of readers out there who'll be intrigued by the news that Library Journal's Nancy E. Adams considers my "evocation of the mood of theologian Jonathan Edwards’s work" in my recent book The Family "one of the most compelling this reviewer has ever read," but for a literary sinner in the hands of an angry God like me... [ Continue reading: ] [ More: ] |
 Where's the Love? The "Hindu face of the Taliban” is making trouble for canoodling couples in India. Self-proclaimed morality police, the vigilantes of the extremist group Sri Ram Sene storm bars and night clubs to attack women and men sipping drinks in mixed... [ Continue reading: ] Faith, Hope, and Revisionism Peter Manseau: When Pope Benedict XVI visited Auschwitz in 2006, the prayer service he led began with the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Words from the Psalms, they no doubt had been uttered within the prison gates before, by Jews praying as Jews in their final days. [ Continue reading: ] J.G. Ballard's Pre-Posthumous Memoir Mark Dery reviews the great J.G. Ballard’s latest and possibly last book, a “pre-posthumous memoir” titled Miracles of Life, for L.A. Weekly. “In response to my inquiry about who would be bringing out Miracles of Life in the States, and when,” writes Mark in a chronicle of his correspondence with Ballard for his blog, Shovelware, “he replied (with exasperation mellowed by resignation) that the book wouldn’t be coming out in America because—my paraphrase, not a direct quote—he was well and truly fed up with American reviewers’ middlebrow moralizing and pop-psych insistence on Deep Feelings over astringent ideas. American critics complain that his characters are crash-test dummies; that his books are plotless film loops, obsessive-compulsive meditations on the pathologies of everyday life in postmodernity. Ballard’s point exactly... [ Continue reading: ] National Jewish Book Award Sharlet: It's a treat to be able to announce that Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, by Revealer contributing editor Peter Manseau, is the winner of this year's National Jewish Book Award for fiction. You can hear Peter talk about his novel with NPR's Scott Simon here. You can read an excerpt from the book -- and my review -- here. [ Continue reading: ] Travel the Spaceways And Oxford Americanize your ears. By Jeff Sharlet Every year I plug the annual Oxford American Southern Music Issue here on The Revealer because A) I love it; B) I usually have a piece in it, which is independent of me loving the only music magazine that always cares as much about the words on the page as the notes in the song. Editor Marc Smirnoff created the first Southern Music issue ten years ago as the anti-Rolling Stone. What that meant to Smirnoff was “music writing that tried, perhaps foolishly, to tap into the cosmos, much as the music we love does.” Tap into the cosmos? That sounds like some kind of religion. Feels like it, too—the only religious writing I’ve ever done, I think (as opposed to writing about religion)—was about music, and most of it was for Oxford American. In fact, editor-at-large Paul Reyes—a Cuban-American from Miami, which is to the South as Motown is to the Midwestern sensibility—first recruited me after he read something I’d written about religion. He asked me to write about Al Green, once the sexiest man who ever sang bare-chested, now besuited and addressed as “Reverend.” This year, I got Dock Boggs, who pawned his banjo and spent thirty years hiding out from his music in church until it finally caught up with him and took him to his grave. “It’s not altogether surprising,” writes Peter Guralnick in his cover story on Jerry Lee Lewis for this year’s double-CD, 10th anniversary special music edition, “that Jerry Lee Lewis’ art should ultimately rest on the same act that he has carried on his whole life, the same one on which so many other prodigious artists from John Donne to Little Richard have been suspended: a teetering balance between the sacred and the profane. Clearly the music of the church was a source of inspiration to him: it is at the heart of rock & roll.” It’s there in the blues, too, and jazz, in country by the bucketful, rounding out hip hop, all over soul, the blood of R&B. It was Pythagoras who figured it all out, according to Van Dyke Parks, the master musician who contributes a foreword to Oxford American’s giant new Book of Great Music Writing: “How we could sing to the Gods and each other by codifying the modes. Some modes were rosy (‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ Ionian). Some were blue (‘My Yiddishe Mama,” Aeolian, now the modified Hungarian minor’).” And some are simply cosmic, not for the Gods or us, but by self-declared gods, such as Sun Ra’s “Travel the Spaceways,” from Oxford American’s 2006 sampler, or “Heat,” by Betty White, who with her 30-years-younger partner Elton reinvented herself in old age as a near-naked goddess of sex singing, replicating as purely as she was capable of – metaphorically, that is – the essence of orgasmic true love. “They were so horny,” writes novelist Kevin Brockmeier of Betty and Elton, the hedonistic saints of the Little Rock of his youth, “and they were so beautiful, and you never know if somebody is falling.” That last phrase means something deep about Betty and Elton, and sex and love and probably religion, too, but you’ll have to tune in to find out. (That means buying it – the magazine’s accountant embezzled $100 k, and now they need to make some money.) There’s a lot of religion in this issue and on the two CDs that come with it, from Jerry Lee’s tightrope to the demons of Dock Boggs, a country blues singer from the 1920s whose music was so dark his songs would cast a shadow in a coal mine; from those who left religion for the rewards of soul, such as The “5” Royales (“The Slummer the Slum,” 1958) to those who never felt like they had to choose, such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (“Rock Me,” 1941). If you know who these artists are, you need this magazine for the stories by writers such as Greil Marcus, Ron Carlson, Clyde Edgerton, and Patricia Spears Jones; if your first response to names such as Furry Lewis, Snookum Russell, The Insect Trust, Cousin Emmy, and Love… With Arthur Lee is “Who?” you need it first for the CDs, a guided tour through the spaceways of forgotten (or never really known) Southern sounds. “Everybody—believers in the Book of Revelation, the elderly, atheist Jews—is welcome to come,” as Mike Powell writes here of Sacred Harp singing. “No experience necessary, with singing or God.”
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