From the work of artists Emiliano Paolini and Marianela Perelli’s in their (cancelled) show “Barbie: The Plastic Religion”

Recent work by Revealer Contributors 

Ayala Fader writes for The Immanent Frame about Orthodox Jewish women bloggers, their language, and their communities in “The Multilingual Jewish blogosphere.”

Shpitzle imagined her readership to be other ultra-Orthodox Jews (heimishe Jews), especially women. Indeed from some of the comments they seemed to be. The public that evolved, which I would posit formed through the postings, the comment threads, and the links on the side of her blog, created a space to explore and express and question without necessarily leaving the community, though some did.

Tanya Erzen has a story in Guernica on prison seminary programs in the American south, “In the Prison of New Beginnings.”

The prison seminary is part of an experiment sweeping through some of the most notorious prisons in the South. In Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and elsewhere, Baptists and prison administrators are molding an army of prisoner missionaries. In the past, these prisons were the epicenter for punitive incarceration. Most of them are former slave plantations or convict-leasing farms where bodies were measured solely in profit and loss. Now these prisons are at the vanguard of a movement where belief in the necessity of punishment coexists with the hope for an individual prisoner’s redemption. The seminary’s idea of freedom for a prisoner is for them to find Jesus and convert others without ever leaving prison.

Brook Wilensky-Lanford writes in The Forward about how her half-Jewish identity has shaped her personal and professional interest in religion: “Tales of a Jewish ‘Nun.'”

It wasn’t the “Jewish” part, my fellow half-Jewish editor explained to me, so much as the “half” part that seemed key to the magazine’s offbeat sensibility. When you grow up half-Jewish, you grow up knowing, viscerally, that it is possible to be more than one thing at a time, even if those things are seemingly in conflict. You always have one foot in and one foot out of the tribe. This marginal viewpoint is something I’ve always had, but I thought about it as a lack of something rather than as its own position.

Jenna Krajeski reports for Harpers about Iraq’s forgotten Christians in Kurdish exile in “Marooned at the Mall.”

In mid-August, hundreds of displaced Christians who had fled to Erbil were moved by Kurdish authorities into the concrete shell of a half-built mall. Most of them were from Iraq’s northwestern Nineveh Plain, home to some of the oldest Christian communities in the world. 

In New York City

Photo by Fiona Aboud

Carol Hills asks, “Captain America is a Sikh. You got a problem with that?” for PRI’s The World. 

Now Vish spends a lot of time in costume, visiting college campuses, youth retreats, camps and conferences, talking about being Sikh and what it means to be an American. His hope is to shed his software engineering day job and work on Sikhtoons and be Captain America full-time.

Sharon Otterman reports for The New York Times about eight seminary professors who were fired at the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, “Seeking Deans Firing, Seminary Professors End Up Jobless.”

How an internal management dispute behind seminary walls turned into a mass dismissal seems to be a tale of hardball negotiating tactics gone awry, and mistrust between the faculty, the dean and the board of trustees.

In the U.S.

Eva Mroczek smart biblical criticism offers insight into present-day struggles in her piece for Religion Dispatches, “Anger, Privilege, and Invisible Injustice: What Cain and Able have to do with Ferguson.”

Photos from the archive of Dr. Ralph Hood.

Asher Elbin writes beautifully about snakes and pentecostalism in “The Pentecostal Serpent” for The Bitter Southerner. 

There’s a constant repetition in recorded interviews: Don’t take up a serpent if you don’t feel the Spirit. Don’t handle for show. There’s death in that box, boy, and you open it at your peril. At the same time, they embrace the risk. Life and death rest entirely in God’s hands, they believe, and whatever happens while handling is His will. Sometimes He holds back the snake. Sometimes He calls them to Heaven. It’s not something they expect the rest of the world to understand.

The Supreme Court is about to take on another important religious freedom case, Holt v. Hobbs. Darwinder S. Sidhu asks, “How Serious is the Supreme Court About Religious Freedom?” in The Atlantic. 

…the idea that Hobby Lobby creates robust protections will be credible only if the justices are willing to recognize the religious freedom of marginalized religious minorities—not just the Judeo-Christian tradition. The next religious-freedom case to come before the Court, Holt v. Hobbs, will test whether the Roberts Court’s stance on religious freedom includes a minority faith, Islam, practiced by a disfavored member of our society: a prisoner. At stake are both the state of religious freedom in the country and the Court’s reputation.

 Meara Sharma interviews scholar of African-American religion at Rice University Anthony Pinn about black mega-churches and the American dream in Guernica: “Divine Acquisition.”

This is the genius of the system. It’s not working because you’re not doing it right. There’s no flaw in the system! No flaw in the teachings! There’s a flaw in your practice of the teachings. How can the minister say this? Because the minister is still doing well! The minister is still driving that Rolls Royce, wearing ten-thousand-dollar suits, so clearly the teachings work! You are not practicing them properly.

Laura Durkay argues that “‘Homeland’ is the most bigoted show on television” in The Washington Post. 

These errors all add up to something important: The entire structure of “Homeland” is built on mashing together every manifestation of political Islam, Arabs, Muslims and the whole Middle East into a Frankenstein-monster global terrorist threat that simply doesn’t exist.

Kelsey Dallas compiled a curiously interesting list of religions items that have been sold on auction, “5 religion-related items that went to the highest bidder” for Deseret News.

Photo credit: Jon Super, Associated Press.

In the World

Elest Ali asks questions about how Muslims are represented in the latest vampire blockbuster in a piece for The New Statesman, “What the historical inaccuracies in “Dracula Untold” tell us about the rise of Islamophobia.”

Admittedly, Hollywood is no genius when it comes to accurate representation. If it’s not a larger-than-life action flick where America is saving the world from aliens, chances are they’ll get it all wrong. But why Turks? And why now, when all eyes are on Turkey, and the country teeters unwillingly on the frontline of impending war? In the current climate of global political tension and escalating Islamaphobia, what political statement does Dracula Untold make in pitting our vampire hero against the armies of Mehmet II? 

Stassa Edwards has the fascinating story of how “Europe’s history of penis worship was cast aside when the Catholic Church relized Jesus’s foreskin was too potent to control” in “Venerated Members” for The New Inquiry.

The Holy Prepuce, as it was known, was housed in churches across the continent, and figured in medieval liturgical texts. As the only remaining scrap of God on earth, it brought together the patriarchal powers of the church and the state in ritual obeisance. The foreskin aroused mystical visions and devotional practices throughout the history of the Catholic Church. But its near-total disappearance at the dawn of the modern era indicates that the two institutions felt compelled to hide their phallic object when faced with the end of their absolute reign.

via Marion Balac

“Asif Lahore: My parents are traditional Muslims. It took a lot of courage for me to tell them I’m gay.” Vivek Chaudhury reports on an evening spent at a British night club frequented by the Asian gay community for The Guardian.