Keep on Rockin' in the Islamic World

Who doesn't want to read Heavy Metal Islam, a new book by UC Irvine scholar Mark LeVine on rock and revolution in the Middle East? If you don't, you shouldn't be reading this blog. Is the book good? Hell if I know. LeVine had me at the title. But Howard Hampton's review in the New York Times Book Review, intended as a rave, dampens our anticipation just a bit. Writing on LeVine's explorations of metal scenes in Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iran, Hampton declares,

Given that the metalheads I grew up with thought they, too, were shaking foundations -- starting with those of the high school and moving on up to the "War Pigs" in Washington, Hampton's Cold War-style vision of totalitarianism in the Middle East comes across as more adolescent than the distinctions between "death, doom, and black" metal that matter so much to Cairene headbanger "Marz." (Marz insists that LeVine make clear that his band, a hybrid of death and black metal, is most definitely NOT "blackened death metal.") Would that Hampton, or at least one editor at the Book Review, take as subtle a view of the Middle East, where subversive and bohemian subcultures predate even Lemmy's pre-Motorhead days as a Rockin' Vicker. This is to take nothing away from the courage or artistry of Hate Suffocation. But Hampton is overstating the level of state persecution they face -- they're not the Plastic People -- and in so doing he reinforces the orientalist cliche of all-seeing, authoritarian Islamic regimes Heavy Metal Islam is evidently meant to subvert.

Hampton closes with a rebuke to LeVine's optimistic view of metal in Islamic lands: Metal, he says, is dystopian, not revolutionary. This is an inadvertent echo of the "culture of death" cliche with which conservatives condemn all of Islam as a monolithic "civilization" incapable of even imagining democracy. "Don't confuse [metal] with 'If I Had a Hammer,'" Hampton warns. "Unless it's a hammer of the nihilistic gods aimed at your forehead."

That's unfair to metal -- and to the brilliantly fierce "Hammer Song," as it was originally known. (Disclosure: I'm writing a book about it.) No, "If I Had a Hammer" wasn't dystopian, though it implicitly acknowledged the darkness its authors, Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, saw in the coming Cold War. But it wasn't about mild mannered civil society, either: "If I had a hammer," sang Seeger, "I'd hammer out a warning." Sounds like metal to me.

--Jeff Sharlet

Continue reading: Keep on Rockin' in the Islamic World

20 July 2008
8:24 PM: Sharlet: The liberal blogosphere will soon be a-twitter over James Dobson's announcement that he's reconsidering his once absolutist opposition to McCain. Evidence, say Dobson's and McCain's critics, of the Christian Right's hypocrisy. But I've long maintained that Dobson, despite his authoritarian faith, practices politics democratically. "There's nothing dishonorable in a person rethinking his or her positions, especially in a constantly changing political context," he told the AP. Dobson knows he's reassuring his base that he, and by extension, they, are the open-minded ones. And liberal media figures will help him achieve that by blasting him as unprincipled. It's a media loop everyone thinks is spinning their way. But only McCain will get new momentum.

13 July 2008
11:52 AM: Every now and then, two great faiths converge. Such meetings transcend the ecumenical impulse; indeed, they may lead to new religions. That nearly occurred at Windsor Hill Baptist in Oklahoma City. The church decided to promote a special youth weekend with a prize: an $800 semiautomatic assault rifle.

11 July 2008
2:31 PM: "The beacon of the Catholic church to immigrants has rarely shown more brilliantly" than in Postville, Iowa, writes Samuel G. Freedman in The New York Times. Freedman, one of the great religion writers at work, is referring to a tiny church that has become a literal sanctuary for hundreds of longtime Postville locals who also happen to be illegal immigrants, following a massive federal raid on a meat-processing plant. Freedman is clearly on the side of the immigrants and their aged pastor, Father Ouderkirk. It's hard not to be after reading his story; it's designed to elicit not just sympathy but solidarity. And so should it be, regardless of one's views on immigration -- this is journalism meant to make us understand faith in action.

2 July 2008
1:28 PM: Couldn't resist:God arrested for selling cocaine.

29 June 2008
10:52 PM: The universe is in balance, George Carlin once said, because Jesus has a little statue of a middle-class American hypocrite on his dashboard. In a bold move, NBC pays tribute to the dead comic with an old Saturday Night Live monologue by Carlin about a "semi-supreme being." "I think God may not be perfect," Carlin says. "I think his work shows that." It's hardly news that Carlin was a big critic of religion, but the clip (available on NBC's main site) is a reminder of a time when atheism wasn't a battlecry, a la Sam Harris' angry screeds, but a laugh.

24 June 2008
8:23 PM: The NYT delivers news of The Shack, a gi-normous bestseller of a Christian novel, to the secular world, comparing its sales to Eckhart Tolle's new age blockbuster, A New Earth. But the paper misses the more interesting connection between Tolle's self-help Bible and author William Young's therapeutic parable: Tolle is closer to the popular evangelicalism of Joel Osteen than his secular fans realize; and Young seems to be closer to the pulp mysticism of new age classics such as Carlos Castenada's Separate Reality than the Times, filing The Shack under "Christian," can imagine.

24 June 2008
7:41 AM: Sharlet: I'll be discussing my new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, on The Diane Rehm Show, from 11-noon, east coast time.

13 June 2008
9:17 AM: Big, big story missed by the press: Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting, held in Indianapolis, rejected the relatively moderate vision of outgoing SBC president Frank Page by electing -- with big numbers -- Johnny Hunt, an Atlanta megachurch pastor associated with the "fundamentalist" wing of the denomination. That in itself is news -- the SBC is the largest single Protestant denomination in the U.S. -- but there are plenty more stories here, ranging from the general -- what effect will this fundamentalist resurgence have on the SBC's role in national politics? -- to the particular -- Hunt's a crusader against Calvinism. Calvinism? Indeed -- a growing influence in the SBC, according to Christianity Today's always-reliable Ted Olsen. Meanwhile, SBC numbers are declining -- a fact pointed to by those who say fundamentalism is a waning force -- but the denomination is responding. Last but not least, there's the fact that Hunt is a Lumbee Indian. Significant in a major denomination that's never been even remotely progressive about race? Who knows? No major national media offered any in-depth reporting.

3 June 2008
4:57 PM: Sharlet: WNYC's Leonard Lopate and I discuss "maximalism," cronyism, and The Family.

2 June 2008
12:27 PM: Time's Steven Gray follows up Obama's decision to resign from Trinity United Church of Christ with what we think is the most logical and interesting story: How does the church move on? Of course, for a major media media outlet to ask this question now is a little bit like a bully extending a hand to the kid he's just kicked the s**t out of and asking, "What's next, l'il buddy?"

2 June 2008
12:21 PM: Jesse Sunenblick, a former Revealer, writes: "i know you're probably sick of the subject, but you should write about this guy. he is a wacky American creation: an Indian weened on the Brady Bunch (hence the nickname "Bobby"), who converted to Catholicism, and whose possible introduction into the presidential race smacks of racial profiteering. he's more American than 99 percent of the Americans we know." "This guy" is Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a frontrunner in McCain's VP-stakes -- and, according to the New York Times, in bed with the Louisiana Family Council, offshoot of James Dobson's Focus on the Family empire. What was that the press was saying about the Christian RIght being dead? / UPDATE: Why hasn't the story of an exorcism Bobby Jindal helped perform, according to his own account, broken out beyond the New Orleans blogosphere? Is this a case of the press censoring that which it deems too weird? / UPDATE 2: Dr. Richard Sloan, author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, writes The Revealer: "the interesting link to Bobby Jindal's religious history concludes that he was conceived in India and born in Baton Rouge. Since according to the religious right and by Jindal's own views, life begins at conception, is Jindal a native born American? If he is a nominee for vice president, doesn't he repudiate those views? Or are they merely politically expedient?"

31 May 2008
6:29 PM: The Revealer failed to alert readers to what promised to be an excellent panel on "Blacks, Jews, and Post-Racial Candidate," so we're glad participant Ari Berman of The Nation gives us a glimpse of the conversation in this short but important challenge to the media's master narrative on American Jews and Barack Obama.

31 May 2008
2:31 PM: The collapse of John McCain's relationship with Christian Right leader John Hagee made for minor news in the mainstream media. Was this because the press doesn't think the Christian Right matters anymore? Or because they recognized that in their frenzy over Jeremiah Wright, they'd overlooked a genuine bigot strutting the national stage arm-in-arm with Straight Talk McCain? Or was it because McCain's reputation for straight talk comes with a wink? (Everybody in the media knew Maverick McCain was making nice with Hagee, an "agent of intolerance" so extreme that in comparison the late Jerry Falwell was as cuddly as Tinky Winky, out of political calculation.) Hard to say. But the fact remains that the man who drove Hagee out of presidential politics wasn't an investigative reporter for a major daily or a TV anchor, but blogger Bruce Wilson (disclosure: a friend of this blog), working with a budget of zero. Wilson tells a tale -- and provides a how-to for citizen journalism -- at Religion Dispatches.

30 May 2008
5:27 PM: "The Betrayal of Judas" is the rare piece of journalism that sheds light on the secrets and lies of ancient times and the modern media world. Thomas Bartlett, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, untangles the complicated tale of National Geographic's publication of the Gospel of Judas -- a major media event that fit neatly into the press' penchant for polarity. Judas was a bad guy! Now he's a good guy! "The first shall be last, the last, first," is, according to its simplest interpretation, some of the oldest media melodrama in the book. But it's usually not that simple, as Bartlett reveals...

30 May 2008
11:45 AM: Sharlet: Veteran Christian Right-watcher Frederick Clarkson reviews The Family for The Public Eye, the publication of Political Research Associates, a public think tank. I consider Clarkson a friend via internet, so it's fair to say the review is biased in the book's favor. Even so, I'm grateful for the thoroughness with which Clarkson responds to my account of what he describes as "The Family's highly elastic fundamentalist theology." "Elastic" is not usually a word joined with fundamentalist, but I think Clarkson nails it -- Family-style fundamentalism stretches as far as the political ambitions of its devotees.

30 May 2008
9:50 AM: Cliff Schecter, an Ohio-based investigative reporter with a new book on "The Real McCain," collects the candidate's most egregious misstatements at his "Campaign Silo" website. Most relevant to Revealer readers may be McCain's total failure to distinguish between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. The press has already reported one or two of McCain's blunders on the question, but the media's master narrative remains fixed on the idea that McCain is a man who knows his foreign affairs. Slip-ups should be forgiven. But Shecter collects seven instances of McCain emphatically tying Al Qaeda to Iran --despite the deep political and theological enmity between the two. This speaks not just to McCain's confusion, but to an apparent religious illiteracy in the press -- no news organization should have let these statements stand unchallenged. Most did, leaving it to the partisan press to make the problem an issue. That's good for Shecter, whose work deserves attention, but bad for the media, which is failing those who don't read the progressive press.

29 May 2008
3:43 PM: Richard Byrne in Bookforum: "The Family is classic muckraking: passionate, principled, and powerful."

29 May 2008
9:53 AM: Contributing to the conservative drumbeat for war with Iran are the criers of "religious freedom," who point, correctly, to Iran's extreme restrictions on liberty of conscience. Will bombing help? We'll leave that to wiser heads to decide. Meanwhile, we're looking at this peculiar report in U.S. News & World Report by Anuj Chopra, on Christian converts in Iran. It's a good idea for a story, but rather than explore the Why and the How of such conversions, Chopra follows the lead of conservative activist Joseph Grieboski (not identified as such). We're left wondering why the family at the heart of the story responded to "a seductively passionate voice on a satellite TV channel imploring Iranians to embrace Christianity," and what this Christianity has to do with America, since Chopra tells us that the family must now feign enthusiasm when called upon to chant death to the great Satan. We get a word from a David Harder, somehow involved w/ the satellite TV channel, but no idea about his denominational affiliations or sponsorship. Chopra could have followed these important strands of the story without undermining its evident support for the converts -- indeed, that would have made Chopra's case stronger.

28 May 2008
11:56 AM: Sharlet: Amanda Marcotte -- the blogger behind Pandagon and author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments -- and I talk about The Family on her podcast for RH Reality Check, an online publication about reproductive and sexual rights. Also of interest on the site's current line-up: Scott Swensen looks at how Bill Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights games the media on behalf of one small faction of American Catholicism.

21 May 2008
10:38 AM: "The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere. I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome." Chris Hedges talks with Fr. Daniel Berrigan on the 40th anniversary of the events that made him one of the Catonsville Nine.

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Fresh Brains for Zombie Buddha!
Killing the Buddha.com -- god for the godless, cheaper than church, Allah in the family -- rises from the grave, again. The website Peter Manseau, Jeremy Brothers and I founded in 2000, declared dead once and for all after numerous resurrections during the last two years, marches back onto the internet like a zombie in search of fresh brains. And KtB has found them: three Revealer (and NYU journalism grad school) alumni, Meera Subramanian, Ashley Makar, and Marissa Kantor-Dennis, have revived the anti-tradition of Buddha-killing. [ Continue reading: ]

Christian Right Revealer Radio
And Family news. [ Continue reading: ]

Southern Baptist Style and Substance
Sharlet: Bob Smietana, religion reporter for the Tennessean and occasional Revealer contributor, responds to my Friday post on the most overlooked religion story of last week, the change in leadership of America's biggest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.. [ Continue reading: ]

The 'F' Word
What Rick Warren, a founder of modern advertising, and the dirtiest word in politics don't have in common. Adapted from The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, and excerpted here from CounterPunch. [ Continue reading: ]

Bomb Throwers and Hall Monitors
Sharlet: Mark Silk, an eminent scholar of religion, politics, and journalism, takes issue with my Casting Stones post on the how the press is re-arranging its account of Obama's ascent now that his victory is assured... [ Continue reading: ]

You Say Journalism, I Say Betrayal
Sharlet: Harper's editor Bill Wasik and I talk about The Family and how the article we collaborated on as author and editor five years became a book. Here's an excerpt. [ Continue reading: ]

Obama's Exorcism
It looks like it's the end of the line for Clinton and the beginning of a new battle for Obama, and that means it's time for the press to do what it does best -- tidy up the tale, craft a chronicle of inevitability, obscure its own role in the political process... [ Continue reading: ]

The Rebellion Within
"The Rebellion Within," Lawrence Wright's long New Yorker account of theological rifts between leading Islamist militants, defies easy summary. That's because Wright' story is a story, not a thesis or a set of talking points backed up by illustration. That won't stop some readers from responding to the weakest line in this otherwise brilliant piece of reporting: "...rumors that imprisoned leaders of Al Jihad were part of a trend in which former terrorists renounced violence." Trends, rumours, and renunciation. That's the cliff's notes version. Don't cheat yourself -- read the whole thing, an engrossing and important work of intellectual history, not a trend report. That's right -- "intellectual history," often (but not often enough) the most revealing kind of reporting. [ Continue reading: ]

Down Under, I'm Not Angry
"Sharlet is not an angry liberal and the tone of the book is balanced, reasonable and often good humoured." So says the Australian Courier Mail... [ Continue reading: ]

The Family Radio Hour
Sharlet: I've been cruising the airwaves to promote my new book, The Family, talking with a lot of great radio hosts about what I call the avant-garde of American fundamentalism. Two of my favorite conversations occurred at the opposite ends of the political -- or, at least, economic -- spectrum... [ Continue reading: ]

The Last Word
One of the few advantages of maintaining a blog about media and religion is that when a media heavyweight gives you a bad review, you have a forum in which to respond. Politely, of course... [ Continue reading: ]

The Family
An excerpt from The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper), by Jeff Sharlet: He wandered the city, sparking up conversations with people he took to be Muslims—"Islamics," he called them—knocking on the doors of mosques by day and sliding past velvet ropes into sweaty clubs by night. He prayed with an imam (to Jesus) and may or may not have gone home with several women. He got as close as possible to Ground Zero, visited it often, talked to street preachers. His throat tingled with dust and ashes. When he slept, his nose bled. He woke one morning on a red pillow... [ Continue reading: ]

John Hagee: Jews Have Dead Souls
Bruce Wilson's discovery of McCain endorser John Hagee's anti-Semitic rantings is a brilliant example of what bloggers are capable of. While most the press has obsessed over Jeremiah Wright's relationship with Louis Farrakhan, only blogger Bruce Wilson has bothered to track down Hagee's anti-Semitic hate speech. Why did the press miss it? [ Continue reading: ]

Not My Family
Diane Winston on The Family: "This book deserves to be read by every and any journalist. It's a primer for what reporting can and should be." [ Continue reading: ]

Hillary's Third Way
Adapted from "Interesting Blood" in The Family for The New Republic. [ Continue reading: ]

Please Destroy After Reading
Sharlet: Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution makes a connection between the secrecy of The Family the subject of my new book (disclosure: HarperCollins sent A Tiny Revolution a copy. Got a decent blog? Write me and I'll have them send you one, too.) and John McCain's national finance co-chair, Fred Malek. [ Continue reading: ]

Crossing the Line
Rob Boston, church/state separation activist and writer, caught a recent episode of Christian Right leader Janet Folger's "Faith2Action" radio show that should make news among reporters on the campaign trail... [ Continue reading: ]

Mormon "Genocide"?
The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has created a blog, Captive FLDS Children.org, to update its position in the ongoing fight over custody of its children. The group is charging Texas with genocide... [ Continue reading: ]

Faith in the Halls of Power
Sociology and evangelical power -- NYU, Tuesday, April 29... [ Continue reading: ]

The King of Norway Wants You to Buy My Book
All of The Revealer's Norwegian readers will want to look at Tore Gjerstad's front pager from last week's Dagbladet -- what, you don't read Dagbladet, the #2 daily in Norway? Get with it! -- "Hitler-beundrer på audiens hos kongen." Here at The Revealer, we know all the tongues of man, so we translate for you: "Hitler-admirer Received by King." As in the king of Norway. The Hitler-admirer, is a man named Doug Coe, one of the subjects of my new book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, coming next month from HarperCollins. If Norwegian isn't your style, you can read all about him in Doug Ireland's column for the French magazine Bakchich, "Hillary, l’Amérique, et l’intégrisme chrétien." Hillary, you say? Yes, Hillary. But if you don't speak frog, let NBC Nightly News' Andrea Mitchell explain it for you. Or you could just buy the book. [ Continue reading: ]

Atheism Backlash, Part Two
Given that atheism's most visible champions are three smart boy writers -- Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins -- who delight in sharp retorts and cultivate bad boy images, it's hard to say that American atheism has come of age. But, according to a clever story in New York magazine by Sean McManus, the movement may have reached a crucial period of institutional maturity -- the phase when it starts squabbling about who's in charge. Our prediction? Atheism will survive. But watch out for more stories like McManus's, phase two of a media backlash against a movement that allowed a few superstars to distract it from its fundamental mission, unbelieving. [ Continue reading: ]

FundamentaList Faultlines
Nobody's doing a better job than The American Prospect's Sarah Posner at tracking the fault lines splitting the old Christian Right. Her weekly "FundamentaList" ought to be a must-read for political reporters as well as religion writers, and for curious conservatives as well The American Prospect's liberal base. This week? An upcoming, still-secret "evangelical manifesto" may provide a new who's who of power players; Mike Huckabee makes his bid for leadership of a new Christian Right by attacking the old Christian Right; meanwhile, Huckabee's old Christian Right financial backers are under ever-fiercer attack by a lion of the everlasting elite fundamentalist organization, The Family, Senator Chuck Grassley. (And don't just read Posner's FundamentaList; get the whole story of "Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters" in her new book, God's Profits.) [ Continue reading: ]

Religion is Media (and Sometimes Media is Religion)
Three powerful new essays from Revealer contributing editors look at the history, theory, and news of religion and media. [ Continue reading: ]

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What We Think We See in Iraq
Artist Karina Aguilera Skvirsky brings the war home by photographing reenactments of Iraqis at prayer or in reflection in American "backyards," ordinary settings which reveal to us the depth of the grief that photojournalism portrays as part of a naturalized landscape of suffering... [ Continue reading: ]

Prepare for the Awesoming!
Awesomed By Comics isn't, technically, about religion. It's about comics. Totally awesome comics. Not so much the kind of graphic novels that get reviewed in The New York Times or the elegant "funnies" serialized for yuppies in the Times Magazine as the pulps: Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Hulk (and Hulkling), Avengers and New Avengers and Young Avengers and old Crusaders. The comics that resist that ol' disenchantment of the world, the trash-lit underside of secularism, chronicles of de facto clergy in capes, matters of ultimate concern addressed with super strength, power blasts, and lots of explanatory dialogue... [ Continue reading: ]

Jewish Anarchists
In the late 19th century, the biggest political movement in Jewish America was anarchism, equally opposed to church and state. One of the offspring of that movement was a Yiddish paper called Freie Arbeiter Stimme, "The Voice of Labor," lovingly documented in this hour long film available for a free download here. [ Continue reading: ]

Apocalypse Savings
"The mind is capable of artful compartmentalisations; in one moment, a man might confidently believe in predictions of Armageddon in his lifetime, and in the next, he might pick up the phone to inquire about a savings fund for his grandchildren's college education or approve of long-term measures to slow global warming." Novelist Ian McEwanreads the story of the end of the world. [ Continue reading: ]

We're All Gay Episcopalians Now
There's some irony in an Episcopalian informing us that the concerns of the Anglican Communion, which has in the past been the dominant church of an empire (Britain's) and a rising power (America, before we became an empire, back when Episcopalians were even more overrepresented in Congress than they are today) should concern us all... [ Continue reading: ]

"Can I Borrow A Feelin'?"
We're using the inclusion of numerous Christian music album covers in the Florida Sun-Sentinel's fabulous collection of the worst album covers ever to justify linking to this masterpiece of kitsch-beat reporting. There's "A Hard Day's Work," by the Electric Amish; "Thank You for the Dove," by Mike Adkins; the incredibly tight scoop-neck sweater vests of "Country Church"; the strangely peppy turquoise cover art of preacher Freddie Gage's "All My Friends are Dead"; and The Handless Organist's "True Miracle of God." There are also serious questions of theodicy raised by much of the secular work on display. How, for instance, could a just God have allowed Cody Matherson to pose thusly for the cover of "Can I Borrow a Feelin'?" [ Continue reading: ]

Beyond Belief
Founder porn: a fetishistic fascination with the behind-the-scenes, under-the-covers, shifting whimsy of a group of men who set down their best ideas--the ones they hoped would actually endure--in a few readily available public documents. Founder porn even sounds naughty.... [ Continue reading: ]

Whose Land?
Under the heading of American mythology, our national religion: "No-Man's Land," a meditation in The Believer on gentrification and Little House on the Prairie, by Eula Biss. [ Continue reading: ]

Introducing Vanessa Hartmann
The Revealer welcomes assistant editor Vanessa Hartmann. Keep an eye out for her byline. [ Continue reading: ]

The Kaus Problem
"Besides the Jew," writes Joshua Cohen in the Jewish Forward, "there is no greater hater of the self than the journalist, whose work is labored over intensely, then printed on sheets that quickly disintegrate. The Jew has internalized the hatred of the centuries, and so continues to destroy himself by the example of others. The journalist must perish, too, but he must publish first; it is a wonder that he should care about his words, or his style, at all. The Kraus Problem is exactly that. Karl Kraus isn’t read today because Viennese newspapers aren’t read." Ah, but Kaus -- the anti-reporter and an artist of self-loathing -- should be. [ Continue reading: ]

Hurry Up, Harper's
Could Harper's' timing have been better? Just as the California Supreme Court issues its landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, the latest issue hits the stands with a major new essay by one of the best religion writers we know, Garret Keizer, on the Episcopal Church's angst of homosexuality. Unfortunately, Harper's' website isn't as well-tuned -- they've failed to post this most timely of articles online. So go down to the newsstand and fork over a few dollars, regardless of your views on the issue, for a larger perspective guaranteed to rise above the cable news rabble. Here are two other Keizer gems: "The Reverent and the Rude," published right here on The Revealer, and "Left, Right, and Wrong," in Mother Jones [ Continue reading: ]

Science and Spirit
Jeff Sharlet: My longtime collaborator and frequent Revealer contributor Peter Manseau has been given charge of a magazine called Science and Spirit. I'll have lots more to say about it soon, but in the meantime, check out Peter's inaugural issue. Peter writes on Ben Stein's Expelled. Meera Subramanian, another Revealer veteran, writes on animal extinction and religious practice in India. And our Killing the Buddha comrade Ashley Makar writes on the United Church of Christ's plan to pitch God to the scientifically-minded. Also sounding off on science and religion in this issue: P.J. O'Rourke, Christopher Hitchens, Francis S. Collins, and much more/ [ Continue reading: ]

Tulsa, City of (Somebody's) Dreams
Akshay Ahuja on tour with Cremated Souls, an Indian death metal band for whom Tulsa is a distant city of dreams... [ Continue reading: ]

Real Wright and Wrong
Sharlet: I'm putting Diana Butler-Bass' response to the Jeremiah Wright media tour in the "timeless" category because her response on Beliefnet's "God's Politics" blog speaks of enduring questions and ideas. It's the exact opposite of the literally pathetic fretting of Obama supporters who want Wright to just go away so they can go back to believing that Obama's candidacy signals the end of racial division in America... [ Continue reading: ]

Between the Motion and the Act
"Between the idea /And the reality," reads Omri Elisha's epigraph for his new anthropological study of evangelical compassion, "Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow." — T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men. Omri, a Revealer contributing editor, spent 15 months conducting fieldwork with an evangelical church in Knoxville, Tennessee... [ Continue reading: ]

Cult Rock!
NPR reporter Jennifer Sharpe describes her journalistic immersion into the "ooga booga" of Father Yod's Source Family commune, the most beautiful cult of the 1970s. "After a few weeks, I started noticing a shift in my mental state. Father Yod's teachings unexpectedly began to resonate. Suddenly, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to stop eating meat. So I did." Ok, but did she learn how to rock to the transcendental vibrations of Pithius, Zunthar, and Octavious --YaHoWa13, Father Yod's musical ministry? Click here, and you will (Don't miss the slideshow). [ Continue reading: ]

A Pat Robertson Retrospective
Bill Sizemore of the Virginian-Pilot has spent much of his career reporting on Pat Robertson, the last alpha male of the old Christian Right. Now he brings all the threads of the story together in "The Christian With Four Aces," a literary essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review. There's nothing new here for those familiar with the bits and pieces of Pat's biography, but it's an excellent synthesis of decades of reporting on a transformative figure in American religious history, one whose influence will likely be felt long after he's "promoted to Heaven." [ Continue reading: ]

How to Name a War
"Euphemism and American Violence," an essay in the New York Review of Books by David Bromwich, may be the most important commentary on the uses and abuses of words since George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." [ Continue reading: ]

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