Dear Revealer readers,

Last week, with much trepidation, I read the news for the first time after a fourteen-day hiatus. I stopped consuming the news because I could no longer read about the daily deaths of my fellow New Yorkers, the overwhelmed hospitals, the inadequacies of the U.S. healthcare system, the mistreatment of millions of workers, or the lies spewing out of the White House without feeling overrun by panic. To continue functioning, to mitigate my hypochondria, to choose life over anxiety, I had to cut the news out of my daily routine. In truth, I did not miss it. I read two novels and took pleasure in escaping to fictional worlds. But occasional guilt and worry set in—guilt that I had the luxury to recuse myself from the daily horrors, and worry that I had missed new discoveries about how Covid-19 attacks the body. I also believed that to edit this publication properly, my sabbatical from journalism should not continue indefinitely. But in those two weeks I learned that I only need to read about the pandemic once a day, and that I must read articles that have nothing to do with the coronavirus. That combination allowed me to end my hiatus and face the news with a sense of possibility.

Revealer Editor, Brett Krutzsch

This issue of the Revealer is an attempt to strike a balance between providing insightful commentary about the pandemic alongside articles that contain no mention of the coronavirus. If you’re looking for astute observations about Covid-19 and religion, we have that. If you’re looking for essays that have nothing to do with the pandemic, we have that too.

Most of the articles in this issue contain powerful personal reflections. The issue opens with Dale Spicer’s “Sacrificing Healthcare Workers: War Rhetoric and the Coronavirus Pandemic,” where he considers how we fail to improve the country’s healthcare system when we valorize nurses and doctors with wartime rhetoric about “heroes fighting on the front lines.” Next, in a beautiful article not about the pandemic, award-winning playwright Mark Williams offers a gripping personal essay about growing up gay and Catholic in “Seeing through Stained Glass: Gay, Catholic, and Conflicted.” Following that, in “Freeing Workers: Labor and Plague in the Islamic World” Shireen Hamza reflects on histories of slavery and religion alongside the current treatment of “essential workers” during the pandemic.

Many of this issue’s articles are also explicitly political. In “The Trump Era’s Tribalism Discourse: Reflections on a ‘Weird Euphemism,’” Charles McCrary considers why so many politicians and pundits have described today’s political climate as one defined by the splintering of Americans into “tribes.” In her book review of Lis Harris’s In Jerusalem: Three Generations of an Israeli Family and a Palestinian Family, Rebecca Alpert reflects on her own struggles with the conflict in Israel and how she found hope in Harris’s writing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, L. Benjamin Rolsky recounts a tense political exchange between President Ronald Reagan and progressive television writer Norman Lear. And, in a conversation between our Contributing Editor Kali Handelman and Anjuli Raza Kolb, Handelman asks Raza Kolb how her research on the ways colonizers linked terrorism with epidemics relates to the political rhetoric taking place today.

I am also happy to share the second episode of the Revealer podcast: “Yoga and Emotional Wellbeing.” In the episode, Shreena Gandhi joins us to discuss why yoga has been so popular among white women, new yoga trends, how yoga can help with anxiety and trauma, and how to practice yoga during a pandemic. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

As the articles in this issue attest, even as the novel coronavirus consumes our lives, countless other issues continue to matter and need our attention. I hope these articles and our podcast offer you insight, new perspectives, and as much or as little about the current state of the world as you can handle to maintain your own sense of possibility.

Yours,
Brett Krutzsch, Ph.D.