Dear Revealer readers,

Welcome to our first issue of 2020! We have several exciting things planned for the new year to share with you.

First, this year the Revealer will publish two themed special issues. Our first special issue, “Religion and Sex Abuse: Within and Beyond the Catholic Church,” comes out in March 2020. The issue will feature eight articles that explore religion and sex abuse from angles not often covered elsewhere, such as a focus on race and abuse within the Catholic Church, the perspective of Native American Catholics, and the role the media has played in re-victimizing survivors. The issue will also examine complicated issues of sex abuse within American Protestant, Jewish, and Hindu communities. Taken together, we believe the special issue will illuminate important insights and raise the bar for how we discuss this pervasive crisis.

Our second special issue will take a different tone and focus on “Religion and Fashion.” Our fashion issue will come out in September and feature articles that address Black Muslim men’s fashion, conservative Christian clothing styles, the mainstreaming of the hijab, the queer religious aesthetics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and more.

Next, we are thrilled to announce the launch of the Revealer podcast! We are releasing the premiere episode the first week of April. Each episode will coincide with the publication of our online magazine. The podcast will feature conversations with Revealer writers and offer an additional way to bring you insights about religion and our world.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

In addition to these new developments, we are excited to continue publishing ten issues each year that provide in-depth analysis of crucial topics. Our February issue exemplifies the breadth of what the Revealer covers. In it, we feature the final installment of Megan Goodwin’s “Abusing Religion” series with “Michelle Remembers and the Satanic Panic,” an article about how Americans at the end of the twentieth century displaced blame for child abuse onto imagined Satanic cults.

We are also publishing two articles in this issue about a topic many consider the most pressing of our time: the climate crisis. In the article “Bathing the Gods in Bottled Water: An Account of Climate Change and Faith,” Tulasi Srinivas examines how Hindus in India are dealing with sacred rivers that long served as sites for the gods, but that are now too polluted for people. And, in an excerpt from her book, Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue, Sarah McFarland Taylor shows how popular culture, consumerism, and capitalism work together to make people feel like their individual acts of environmental virtue make a difference even though most evidence suggests we need vastly larger-scale government, corporate, and NGO actions to save our planet.

Our February issue also takes a look at the politics of race, religion, and Americanness. In “Unsovereign Love: Thoughts on Race, Sex, and Undoing an Evangelical Education of Feeling,” Amaryah Shaye Armstrong reflects on the racial dynamics at play in a recent, and extremely popular, story about an ex-lesbian evangelical Christian. And, in “With Limits: Dusk Sets on the American Frontier,” Ed Simon reviews Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America and considers how the lore of the American frontier promoted a white supremacist vision that gave way to today’s calls for a border wall.

The Revealer prides itself on showcasing topnotch commentary about religion by a wide range of experts, journalists, and scholars. We are excited to bring you our February issue about some of today’s pressing concerns and to provide you with new formats to engage with the Revealer.

Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.