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.

The Revealer founder Jeff Sharlet hustled up a list of writers who support the Occupy movement on Wall Street and around the world.  Read it here:  www.occupywriters.com

An interview with Jeff Sharlet about his new book of essays, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithless, and the Country In Between. Sharlet is the bestselling author of  The Family and C Street and a contributing editor to Harper’s and Rolling Stone. Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth College, he taught literary nonfiction through New York University’s Center for Religion and Media from 2006-8 and created The Revealer for the Center in 2003.

by Ashley Baxstrom

The only reason I write this stuff is because I’m a nerd whose heart was broken when he discovered there are no hobbits.  ~ Jeff Sharlet, author of Sweet Heaven When I Die

Jeff Sharlet is best known for The Family and C Street, a pair of books about what he calls “the avant-garde of American fundamentalism,” a religious and political movement that fuses conservative evangelicalism with a laissez-faire, expansionist vision of American power. But really, Sharlet he has been writing about the people in whom belief lives, and the meaning that comes during – and out of – their experience of faith. Over several years, while writing those two books, Sharlet wrote the stories of those he met and their experiences with belief, with causes, with struggle and survival. In his latest book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, Sharlet gathers these stories together to explore an American landscape that is at once a whole country and yet a world apart. He writes about friends and about strangers who become less strange.

My predecessor, founding editor of The Revealer, Jeff Sharlet, has a new book out that you should all run to buy, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithless, and the Country In Between (W.W. Norton & Company, 264 pages).  The thirteen essays that make up the book examine varieties of faith, however vastly defined by the people Jeff profiles in each.  From philosopher Cornell West to anarchist Brad Will, from metaphysician Sondra to, well, me (“You Must Draw A Long Bead to Shoot a Fish”), Sharlet leads us through the “borderlands of belief and doubt.”

From “Fundamentalism Spring Eternal for GOP,” at Washington Post by The Revealer founding editor, Jeff Sharlet:

Social conservatives, particularly of the Protestant variety, want out of 2012 what they’ve wanted since H.L. Mencken handed them a shellacking at the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in 1925: respectability. Christian conservatives have either dominated American politics or shouted loudest in opposition for three decades, but the movement’s inferiority complex runs deep. Eighteen years after the fact, fundamentalist pundits still cite a description of fundamentalists in The Washington Post as “largely poor, uneducated, and easily led.”That the characterization is snobby — and inaccurate. It’s also old. But as a movement, these religious social conservatives can’t seem to win enough validation – also known as power – to make them feel better. Exhibit A: The sense of wounded grievance fueling Michele Bachmann’s campaign.

Books and more books! Join us this fall for three reading events that will feature some of our very favorite religion writers.

A giant congratulations to The Revealer‘s founding editor, Jeff Sharlet, recipient of the Molly National Journalism Prize, named for Molly Ivins and sponsored by The Texas Observer.  The award is for Jeff’s Harper’s article on how US evangelicals contributed to the “Kill the Gays” bill in Uganda.

He beat out Maureen Dowd of The New York Times and Joshua Kors of The Nation.

A week after David Kato, a rights activist, was killed in Uganda, President Obama attends the National Prayer Breakfast.  More on Kato at the New Yorker.

At the last minute Friday night, Brenda Namigadde, an activist from Uganda, was granted a reprieve by the UK from deportation.  She had already boarded a plane bound for Uganda.

Targeted by the Ugandan paper Rolling Stone as a lesbian, along with one hundred other gay and lesbian activists — one of which, David Kato, was brutally killed last week — Namigadde is in danger should she return to her home country.

For more on Namigadde and the Rolling Stone (not affiliated with the U.S. magazine) article and on Uganda’s “kill the gays” bill and the influence American religious organizations have had on anti-homosexual violence there read here, here, here and here.

This week veteran journalist Seymour Hersh came under fire for having delivered what Foreign Policy calls a “conspiracy-laden” speech in Doha, Qatar.  Speaking of some members of the Joint Special Operations Command, Hersh said, “”They do see what they’re doing…it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”