Dear Revealer readers,

For the past two weeks, more than 300,000 people have tested positive for COVID-19 each day in India. Hospitals have run out of room and life-saving equipment. In several Indian states, people have been told they will have to manage their COVID symptoms on their own and hope for the best. The number of people dying daily from COVID is staggering. Entire fields have been filled with pyres to cremate the deceased. And although India is the world’s leading producer of vaccines, they are in desperate need of more COVID-19 vaccines to distribute to the country’s population.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

The situation in India is an urgent global crisis, not a national one. The rapid spread of the virus could easily cause a mutation that will lead to a new COVID-19 variant. And that new variant could prove more powerful than our current vaccines. As vaccinated Americans rejoice in seeing their loved ones for the first time in a year, our efforts to remain safe could be undone if we do not prioritize sending relief to India. The virus does not care about borders or national loyalty. If we do not recognize our interconnected world and urge elected officials to do the same, our global pandemic could worsen quickly and come back into our neighborhoods with a vengeance.

The Revealer’s May issue considers how global issues transcend national boundaries. The issue opens with Amy Fallas’ “How I Met My Mother (and Billy Graham),” where she recounts the role Billy Graham played in the violence that tore apart her mother’s home nation of El Salvador and the role Graham played in her mother’s life when she became his hair stylist after she fled to the United States. Next, in “A French Inquisition: France’s Crackdown on Muslim Life in the Name of Public Order,” Kirsten Wesselhoeft investigates the concerning reasons why the French government implemented laws to put imams on a state registry and why it is monitoring the bank accounts of Muslim organizations and mosques. Then, in “Credit Card Christianity, Debt, and Violence in Colombia,” Kali Handelman interviews Rebecca Bartel about her new book, Card Carrying Christians, and what her research reveals about the commingling of religion, capitalism, and violence in Colombia and throughout the world.

Our May issue also explores a topic where the United States has no global competitor: mass incarceration. In an excerpt from his book Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State, Brad Stoddard explores how “faith-based” correctional facilities try to teach female inmates that they should be submissive to men as a religious ideal that God wants.

Our May issue also includes the newest episode of the Revealer podcast: “Faith-Based Prisons in the United States.” Brad Stoddard joins us to explain how states are running faith-based correctional facilities, what religious activities take place in these prisons, and how these institutions promote conservative religious ideas that often align with evangelical Protestant Christianity – despite America’s theoretical separation of church and state. You can listen to this fascinating episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

As the pandemic improves in the United States, and as global travel opens up again, let us be more cognizant than we might have been before the emergence of COVID-19 that our shared world is fragile. All of us remain in jeopardy if the virus spreads rapidly in any other part of the world. Let us commit to acting in ways that show awareness of our global interconnectedness for the sake of the pandemic, the climate crisis, and in respect of our shared humanity.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.