Don’t miss in media res‘ fantastic series of events, “Religious Representations on Television,” from today through Friday.  See here for details.

Kathryn Joyce, The Revealer‘s first managing editor, interviews David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) on the Catholic Church’s new tactic for silencing the group in court.

Rick Santorum pals around with a preacher who thinks non-Christians should get out of the U.S.

Scott Korb, our former books editor, writes at The Chronicle of Higher Education about the first Muslim liberal-arts institution in the U.S., Zaytuna College:

Not a Muslim myself, nor a believer in any appreciable way, I’ve spent much of the last 18 months with these scholars and their students: at a venerable mosque in Brooklyn and a storefront mosque in Oakland; at fund raisers in Washington, D.C.; New Brunswick, N.J.; New York City, and throughout the Bay Area; in online forums and open houses; in classrooms and in the basement of a Roman Catholic church; and in Muslim community centers located in low-rent business parks. When I asked Sheik Hamza recently whether he was surprised to see his name in the [NYPD surveillance] report, he said no. Although he added, “A lot of these young Muslims born here are not always aware of the history of real persecution of other communities. They would do well reading more history.”

Catch The Revealer books editor Scott Korb moderating an event tomorrow night at Gallatin (Jerry H. Labowitz Theater for the Performing Arts, 1 Washington Place) at 7 pm.

The panel will include Alia Malek, editor of Patriot Acts, Adama Bah, Noor Elashi (daughter of Ghassan Elashi, who’s been placed in a “Communications Management Unit”), Ebadur Rahman, a student at NYU’s Gallatin School, and NYU’s Imam Khaled Latif.

For more information, see the Gallatin event page and the Voices of Witness page.

A Q&A with biographer Deborah Baker, author of The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, released last month by Greywolf Press.

by Ashley Baxstrom

When biographer Deborah Baker came across a collection of letters at the New York Public Library, she opened a window into a particularly complex life. The letters told the story of Margaret Marcus, a Jewish woman raised in post-World War II upstate New York. Peggy, as she was known to her family, lived in search of community.

Marcus was a “social misfit” with a passion for National Geographic articles who found distressing the Israeli treatment of Arabs. She painted and wrote but couldn’t hold a job. Her parents sent her to a psychiatrist and, for a time, a mental institution. She exchanged letters with a noted Pakistani Muslim intellectual, Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Mawdudi, who would become a leader of the radical political Islamic group Jamaat al-Islamiyya. In 1961, under Mawdudi’s tutelage, Peggy, then 27, converted to Islam, changing her name to Maryam Marcus. Then she packed her possessions and moved to Lahore to live as a guest of her mentor.

Maryam’s writings on Islam have been widely read in conservative Muslim circles, and may have played a role in the rise of militant jihad over the past half-century. As narrated in The Convert, just as interesting, however, is Maryam’s personal life – particularly as we, and Baker, come to realize that she may not have been as honest, or perhaps even as sane, as we first thought.

It’s been a great week for readers, thanks to a suite of articles by members of The Revealer‘s family of writers.  Covering issues from reality-based food to women’s travel, from the health care crisis to Zionist activism to religious compounds in Missouri, we’re proud to have such talented and diverse writers’ names to drop!

Former Revealer managing editor Kathryn Joyce has an important article, “Escape from Missouri,” in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.  Read more about it here.  Buy it on newsstands today.

Our books editor Scott Korb has a new piece in the special food issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, “It’s What’s for Dinner.”  You can read the article here.  Read Nathan Schneider’s comments on the article here.

Former managing editor Meera Subramanian has contributed to a new book, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011.  Get your copy here.

Kiera Feldman–and we admit it’s a stretch to claim her as one of our own, but we will–has an article at The Nation this week, “The Romance of Birthright Israel.”  Read it here; read Jeff Sharlet’s comments on it here.

Your editor truly has a piece at The Nation this week on the Catholic Church’s renewed focus on aid in dying and the implications for health care in the US.  Read it here.

Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.

by Scott Korb

For a good part of the past four years, I met every other week with a former Ursuline nun – let’s call her “Josefa” – to talk about the life of the Church from the ’50s to early ’70s, precisely the period of time when the child sexual abuse crisis was at its worst. Josefa, approaching 80, was writing a memoir; I helped her along. Together, inch by inch and mile by mile, we paved the way for her entry, as a teenager, into the religious order known to be the first group of Catholic sisters to arrive in the new world. And together, week by week and year by year, we came to understand why exactly, at 40, she left.

With commentary from FRANCES KISSLING, AMANDA MARCOTTE, ELIZABETH CASTELLI, SCOTT KORB, MARY VALLE, PETER BEBERGAL, JACK DOWNEY

Scott Korb on what life was like in first century Palestine. Life in Year One, now in paperback.

by Scott Korb

A look at Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History

In her recent book, The Whites of Their Eyes, Harvard historian and regular New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore takes a close look at the Tea Party and calls it fundamentalist. The Whites of Their Eyes is a book almost entirely set in greater Boston: at Tea Party gatherings in Green Dragon Tavern, where in 1765 the Sons of Liberty themselves began gathering; at the Old South Meeting House, at re-stagings, by children, of the debates that led to the Boston Tea Party; on the field where the Battle of Lexington and Concord was fought, where on the morning of the annual reenactment Lepore’s family (and “some other sleepy-headed colonials”) wage their own little “battle on the green.”  (One thing to note about the book is how often the facts of Lepore’s own Cambridge life enter the story—in this case, the family’s annual failure to get out of bed early enough to make it to the actual reenactment; they’re there in time for the parade that follows.)

Tea Party fundamentalism—or what Lepore calls “historical fundamentalism”—is of a different kind than the religious fundamentalism The Revealer typically notes, though the two are not mutually exclusive, nor are either particularly wholesome.

Ann Neumann: Haaretz interviews Revealer contributing editor Scott Korb about his new book, “Life in Year One: What the World was Like in First-Century Palestine” and the challenges of writing history, particularly a history that has divine significance for so many. His objective, Korb says, was to do for Jesus’ contemporaries what Agee did in [...]