Monthly archive November, 2011
Searching Herman Cain’s Soul. In Iowa.
By Andy Kopsa
Standing before a crowd of reporters at the Friar’s Club in New York, Sharon Bialek told her story. With her lawyer Gloria Allred at her side, Bialek painted a picture of an unwanted sexual encounter in a parked car in Washington DC: what she was wearing – pleated skirt, suit jacket; a pleasurable dinner and...
What Are Religious Human Rights?
Nora Connor: Water cooler talk around The Revealer offices keeps circling back to human rights these days (yes, we are a rock-and-roll lot). As in, what are they? Who gets to say what they are, and when and where? Are they “real” in themselves, out there in reality somewhere, waiting their turn to step forward,...
Muslim Drag
Amy Levin: What would Muslim drag look like? Something like this? Yesterday, the AHA Foundation shared a link on their twitter account to an article titled “Egyptian Women’s Group Calls on Men to Try the Veil.” Aliaa El Mahdy, an Egyptian university student, created a facebook page called “Resounding Cries,” which asks Egyptian...
Teaching FBI Agents Bias
Nora Connor: For a time after 9/11, the FBI seemed to stand out among the many government agencies with a hand in the intelligence/counterterrorism game. FBI agents were among the most knowledgeable on Islamic extremism worldwide; FBI agents made important discoveries and arrests in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; FBI agents spoke up forcefully...
Analogue Media and the Politics of Print Nostalgia
Angela Zito: The Bible as a book, printed, physically available for Christian devotion, remains a powerful and contested artifact in this digital age. Just winding up its US tour, a traveling exhibition of the Bible in China—entitled “Thy Word is Truth: the Bible Ministry Exhibition of the Protestant Church in China”—might have slipped my notice....
Steve Jobs’ Religious Ego
Amy Levin: How long is it appropriate to mourn the death of Steve Jobs? Perhaps we should turn to Zen Buddhism, since, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, it was the so-called religion of Jobs himself. According to Daniel Burke at Religion News Service,...
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...
Liberia’s Devils
Nora Connor: We’ve been watching PBS’s “Women, War and Peace.” Less a series than a grouping of thematically linked films, it takes women’s experiences, roles and concerns as the starting point for an examination of contemporary war, from on-the-ground experiences of privation and violence to the legal remove of places like the Hague. The project aims...
Serious Scientology
Gordon Haber reviews two recent books about Scientology at Religion Dispatches, Janet Reitman's Inside Scientology and Hugh Urban's The Church of Scientology. (Read Amy Levin's interview with Reitman for The Revealer here.) From Haber's review:
While there is something undeniably disturbing about The Church of Scientology, there’s also something fascinating about it. And maybe, if...
Our Daily Links: Real Authentic Edition
A statement on the global economy by "a rather small office in the Roman Curia" is causing some interesting commentary--by George Weigel, EJ Dionne and Talk to Action's Greg Metzger. At issue is the question: who speaks for the Pope?
Former Revealer managing editor, Kathryn Joyce, is sourced in an article...
