Dear Revealer readers,

While talking about the state of the world, my neighbor recently told me that she feels overwhelmed most mornings as she opens her phone and scrolls through news headlines, a feeling I’m sure many others share. She went on to explain that she checks three news sites each day by scanning the headlines and then, upon feeling dread, forces herself to get out of bed rather than to read any of the articles. Another friend told me she starts her day in the same way: she reads headlines from one news agency and then goes to another in the hopes that something on the second will help her feel better, usually without any luck.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

I shared these encounters with my doctor at my annual exam and she conveyed a story about her grandmother. As she aged, her grandmother’s eyesight deteriorated significantly. Eventually, even with glasses and a magnifying glass, her grandmother could no longer read small print, so she had to give up her morning routine of reading the newspaper with her coffee. But she wanted to remain informed about what was going on in the world and was relieved that she could still see all of the headlines scattered throughout her newspaper. Yet, that created a new problem. According to my doctor, when her grandmother only read headlines, she developed a much deeper anxiety about the world than she had previously possessed. Headlines, after all, rarely say such things as “Everything Is Going Well.” Instead, they highlight drama and tension. The articles might be much more nuanced and offer differing voices and stories of how people are resisting unpopular policies, for example. But the headlines usually can’t do that. And, so, my doctor’s grandmother started to live with increased angst when headlines became her only source of news.

Today, many of us are like my doctor’s grandmother: headline-only readers. We see something on social media or on one of our preferred news sites and the headline is all we consume, especially when it triggers disgust within us. Why should we read more when the headline itself makes us feel sickened by the workings of the world?

But like my doctor’s grandmother, our understanding of the world is skewed if we only look at headlines. To get a better sense of what is happening, we need nuance, context, and background. Granted, reading the articles themselves will not always make us feel better. That extra information could even make us feel worse. But shifting our reading practice to reading a few articles each morning rather than looking at a laundry list of attention-grabbing headlines could improve our understanding of important situations, show us what others are doing to fight corruption and injustice, and illuminate what we can do to join such efforts.

To that point, the April issue of The Revealer offers articles about pressing issues facing our world with depth that couldn’t possibly be contained to headlines. The issue opens with Matthew H. Ellis’s “Son of Safam,” where he explores, through a nostalgic reflection on a popular Jewish musical group, how his Jewish identity changed as he began to reject Zionism—and where that leaves him today amidst Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. Following that, in “Meeting Chaos with Compassion and Humor through ‘The Roots of Buddhist Psychology,’” Melissa Hart reflects on the enormous popularity of Jack Kornfield’s 30-year-old Buddhism lecture series and how those teachings can help people protesting today’s social injustices. After that, we turn to look at immigration. In “Nothing Unclean Will Enter America, the New Jerusalem,” Ben Woollard reviews Immigration and Apocalypse and considers its argument about how the book of Revelation has shaped ideas and policies about immigrants and who is an “authentic” American. Then, in “Spiritual Oligarchy,” Miguel Petrosky reviews The Violent Take It by Force, a book by Matthew D. Taylor who wrote about “Christian Nationalism Gone Global” for The Revealer, and shares why many Independent Charismatic Christians and Pentecostals are prepared for both spiritual and actual battle to defend Donald Trump. And, in “Measuring Salvation in Chains and Corpses,” an excerpt from White Property, Black Trespass: Racial Capitalism and the Religious Function of Mass Criminalization, Andrew Krinks examines the criminal justice system and considers the religious and racist functions of America’s policing and prisons.

The April issue also includes the newest episode of The Revealer podcast: “Police, Prisons, and the Religion of Mass Criminalization.” Andrew Krinks joins us to discuss why police and prisons exist and if they actually make the country safer. We explore the role religion plays in America’s system of criminalization, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and what types of things should be established that might do a better job at preventing crime that would also create a more equitable society for everyone. You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Since my visit with my doctor and her story about her grandmother, I have thought often about how headline-only reading is not the best way to begin the day, even for those of us who care deeply about what’s happening in the world. Such “doom scrolling” can lead to paralysis, both analytical and activist-oriented, which I’m sure is not what most of us want. Remember, there is a strategy behind the deluge of Executive Orders: overwhelm the media and the population and neither will have a clear sense of where to direct their attention. So, as a strategy for resisting injustice, we need to find ways to focus amidst the chaos. I invite you to spend time with the articles in The Revealer’s April issue as the authors grapple with these questions about the problems facing us. In a time of unending headlines, I hope they offer you a place to ground your thoughts about the world and how you want to live in it.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.