About

The Revealer is a daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion. We’re not so much nonpartisan as polypartisan — interested in all sides, disdainful of dualistic arguments, and enamored of free speech as a first principle. We publish and link to work by people of all persuasions, religious, political, sexual, and critical. The Revealer was conceived by Jay Rosen of New York University’s Department of Journalism, and created by journalists Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce.

We begin with three basic premises: 1. Belief matters, whether or not you believe. Politics, pop culture, high art, NASCAR — everything in this world is infused with concerns about the next. As journalists, as scholars, and as ordinary folks, we cannot afford to ignore the role of religious belief in shaping our lives. 2. The press all too frequently fails to acknowledge religion, categorizing it as either innocuous spirituality or dangerous fanaticism, when more often it’s both and in between and just plain other. 3. We deserve and need better coverage of religion: sharper thinking; deeper history; thicker description; basic theology; real storytelling. – Jeff Sharlet, 2003

EDITOR

Ann Neumann, a tenth-generation Lancaster County, Pennsylvanian, can trace her roots to the early Anabaptists in Europe’s Low Countries. Her father shook the Mennonite church for her, so, as any good seeker would, she completed Catholic catechism in college, then kept going. Neumann has written about religion and health care for The Nation,  AlterNet (where she also blogs), Religion Dispatches, and Killing the Buddha. A hospice volunteer, she keeps the blog otherspoon, devoted to issues surrounding religion and end of life care. Neumann has been a visiting scholar at NYU’s Religious Studies Program. She is currently working on two books: a memoir about grief, and travel; and an investigation of how Americans die.  She can be reached (and pitched!) at editor@therevealer.org.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Jeff Sharlet created The Revealer for New York University’s Center for Religion and Media in 2003 and edited it through 2008. He is the author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power(Harper, 2008), a national bestseller, and What They Wanted a forthcoming collection of essays (W.W. Norton, 2011) that takes its title from work Jeff did for The Revealer. Jeff is co-author, with Peter Manseau, of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press, 2004) and co-editor of Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith (Beacon, 2009), both of which sprang from KillingTheBuddha.com, an award-winning online literary magazine about religion co-founded by Jeff and Peter in 2000. A contributing editor for Harper’s magazine and Rolling Stone, Jeff is currently working on an anthology of literary journalism about American religion for Yale University Press. From 2003-9, Jeff was an associate or visiting research scholar at the Center for Religion and Media, which sponsors and houses The Revealer. In 2010, he joined the English Department of Dartmouth College.

LUCE DIGITAL RELIGION INTERNATIONAL EDITOR

Nora Connor

BOOKS EDITOR

Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us and associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, winner of the American Historical Association’s 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. His latest book is Life In Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine (Riverhead, 2010). He currently teaches religion and food writing at the New School and New York University. Read his tumblr at lifeinyearone.tumblr.com.

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS

Ashley Baxstrom is a graduate student in the Religious Studies Program at New York University.

Amy Levin is a graduate student in Religious Studies at New York University.

THE CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA

In the early ’80′s, just as the Cultural Revolution was ending, Angela Zito, Co-Director of the Center and Publisher of The Revealer, spent three years in Beijing doing historical research on the social and political importance of rituals performed by the emperor. During that time, she also worked as dayside editor for The China Daily, China’s English-language newspaper, and then as a “newstaster” for the Reuters‘ bureau. Zito received her Ph.D. from University of Chicago and now teaches anthropology and history of Chinese religions at NYU, where she directed the Religious Studies Program from 2002-2008. She has worked in very old media: bodies, paper, and stone as the author of Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China.  Since founding the Center, she has curated independent Chinese documentary screenings in New York and worked in video for a current project on “Writing in water:  Of calligraphy, cadres, and ways of performing yourself in public in China.” Read her online at The Revealer: “Religion is media.” And at her wesbsite http://www.angelazito.com/.

C0-Director Faye Ginsburg is the David Kriser Professor of Anthropology at NYU, where she is also the founding Director of the Center for Media, Culture, and History. Prior to coming to the academy, she worked as documentary producer, as an independent and for WCCO-TV. Recipient of MacArthur, Guggenheim, and other awards and fellowships, she is the author/editor of four books, including Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, and most recently the edited collection, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. She is currently finishing a book entitled Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media in a Digital Age.

Associate Director Barbara Abrash is an independent producer, teacher and writer with a special focus on independent and documentary film. She is the also Director of Public Programs at the Center for Media, Culture and History. Her publications include 9/11 and After: A Virtual Casebook, about the uses of media in Lower Manhattan in the days after the attack on the World Trade Center, and a special issue of Wide Angle, “A Festschrift in Honor of George Stoney,” as well as many articles on social issue documentary film. Her current research for the Ford Foundation and Kettering Foundation focuses on the evolution of public media in a digital communication environment.  She is a fellow at the Center for Social Media at American University.

DESIGNERS

This site was originally designed by a collaborative team of William Drenttel, Betsy Vardell and Kevin Smith. William Drenttel is a partner in Winterhouse, president emeritus of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and a co-editor of DesignObserver.com. Betsy Vardell is a partner in RubyStudio. Kevin Smith was a partner in Giampietro+Smith and now has his own firm, And Smith.

The 2010 redesign was completed by D. J. Waletzky, the Lead Developer at SuperMango Media. His first foray into religious studies on the Internet was at 15, when he created the legendary “Bill Gates Is Satan” page (now defunct). He is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal and an avid student (if not practitioner) of world religions. His political and philosophical writing can be found at Casual Asides and he will fix your website, if you ask nicely.