Timeless
Women’s Bodies, Mediating the Revolution
From Khaled Fahmy's article, "Women, Revolution, and Army" in the Egyptian Independent:
Ibrahim [Samira Ibrahim, Egyptian woman who successfully sued the army for "subjecting her to a 'virginity test'"] may not be aware that the humiliating virginity test she was subjected to last March in the Hykestep military prison was not the first of its...
Party of the Kingdom of Heaven
An excerpt from Kathryn Harrison's op-ed in the New York Times on Friday about Joan of Arc, the subject of Harrison's forthcoming biography:
Like all holy figures whose earthly existence separates them from the broad mass of humanity, a saint is a story, and Joan of Arc’s is like no other. The self-proclaimed agent of God’s...
Getting There Too Quickly:
Aldous Huxley and Mescaline
By Peter Bebergal
Between his 1932 vision of a sterile dystopia in Brave New World and the 1962 novel Island about a spiritual utopia, the author Aldous Huxley experienced two things; the Hindu religious philosophy known as Vedanta and psychedelic drugs. In Brave New World, people are addicted to Soma, a hallucinogenic that artificially simulates a...
Hey, Most Powerful Military in the World
In just 140 characters at a time the Taliban is talking back to the US Military:
The New York Daily News reported that the account @isafmedia wrote: “How much longer will terrorists put innocent Afghans in harm’s way?” To which Abdulqahar Balkhi, a "mouthpiece" for the Taliban, rebutted: “I dnt knw. U hve bn pttng them n...
Celebrity Relics
From "On the Religious Roots of Celebrity Worship" at Philly.com (Philadephia Inquirer/Daily News):
"There's a kind of cultural fascination with special people who are marked out for greatness but who die young and often in tragic or violent circumstances," says Geary, author of Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2008). Just...
Anorexic Republicans, Starving Our Body Politic
From Eric L. Santner's essay "The New Idolatry: Religious Thnking in the Un-Commonwealth of America," currently posted at The Chicago Blog:
...one might think about the similarities between the attitude of Republicans to taxes and that of anorexics to food. For both, less is always better, and nothing would be best of all. Republicans have...
This is Manhood
A excerpt of the prayer delivered by coach Ron Brown to the Penn State football team on November 12th, at the start of the first game after sex abuse charges against former assistant coach Larry Sandusky ended Joe Paterno's coaching career:
There are a lot of little boys around the country, today, who are watching this...
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,...
