Month: July 2014

In an interview, Paul Elie discusses a fascinating venture he’s leading, the American Pilgrimage Project, a joint effort between Georgetown University and the oral history non-profit StoryCorps that records the stories ordinary people tell about “the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives.” How Elie describes the undertaking’s origins:

At a certain point in the sexual abuse crisis, which is ongoing, I thought to myself: “There must be a way for Catholics to tell some of their untold stories outside of the courtroom.” What the sexual abuse crisis made clear is that there are areas that American Catholics are unaccustomed to talk about: sexuality, of course, but also other aspects of our experience. The only place we were hearing these stories publicly was in news reports about sex abuse lawsuits. It called to my attention how many stories are going untold. So I met with Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, and reached out to Georgetown’s president, John DeGioia—and now, some years later, the project is ready to begin in earnest.

Time and reflection have given us a better sense of what we want the project to be.

It quickly became clear that there was no good reason for us to focus on just Catholic stories, in part because those stories often involve other religions anyway. So we decided that we needed to take in religious experience in the broader sense. Another thing that became clear was the sheer breadth and variety of people’s stories that touch on belief in one way or another—stories of families, stories of neighborhoods, stories of encounters with people of other faith traditions, for example.  We hope to gather stories told by people in religiously “mixed” marriages, where interfaith dialogue takes the form of domestic encounter.

Why these stories matter:

In American society today, we hear a great deal about the religious habits of Americans from statisticians and demographers. You know how it goes: a study comes out reporting that 90 percent of people believe in this or that, or that the number of Americans with no religion has tripled, or whatever. We also hear American leaders making broad assertions about religious doctrines and their bearing on public life. But the actual experience of ordinary people is scanted or overlooked. I hope the American Pilgrimage Project will help in some small way to correct that. What do people actually believe? How do their beliefs bear on their daily lives? Those are perennial questions, needless to say. Typically to answer them we look to literature, we look to history, we look to journalism and we look to the mass media. Now the hope is that we’ll be able to turn to the American Pilgrimage Project archive as well. It will help to broaden and complicate the narrative.

You can listen to one of the stories here, in which a woman who survived a plane crash talks about discovering how precious life is.

Pico Iyer marvels at the breadth and constant surprises of the gay Catholic’s writing, noting that while his latest book, Darling, ostensibly is about religion, “it’s a central feature of his thinking that nothing—not even loneliness—is ever considered in isolation”:

[E]ven as the book with the ceremonial Catholic title Days of Obligation kept on referring to sex, so his new one, which purports to be about the desert monotheisms, calls itself Darling. Sometimes such gestures may strike readers as a bit much, but to his credit, Rodriguez does not try to link earthly and heavenly love as John Donne does, or to blend them with the abandoned ease of the Islamic high priest of Californian fashion, Rumi. Nor does he follow the familiar path of a gay believer wondering why the religion he serves so faithfully is ready to exile him for his sexual preferences.

Rather, this unpredictable maverick throws all his variegated interests into the mix and lets the sparks fly.

He’s irreverent even toward the objects of his reverence—“Is God dead?” he sincerely asked in his first book—and grave about those issues (computer technology) that others might be flip about. When fondly recalling the Sisters of Mercy who educated him, he suddenly turns to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of gay drag queens whose wild impiety he’d once written against. Now, however, as he watches them rattle cans for charity and jolly along some homeless teenagers, he has to concede that good works can make even the most outrageous poses irrelevant.

Darling begins by asserting that it will address the world in the wake of September 11 and try to bring the writer’s Catholicism into a better relation with its desert brother Islam. Happily, it soon abandons that somewhat rote mission for a much more ungovernable and unassimilable wander across everything from the decline of the American newspaper to the debate over gay marriage, from Cesar Chavez to the world of camp… Rodriguez throws off a constant fireworks display of suggestions and reveals more in an aside than others do in self-important volumes. As you read, you notice how often Don Quixote keeps recurring, and death notices, and meditations on the “tyranny of American optimism,” each one gaining new power with every recurrence, and reminding us of how the pursuit of happiness leaves us sad. The overall mosaic is far more glittering than any of its parts.

Previous Dish on Darling here, here, and here. Check out my Deep Dish conversation with Richard about the book here.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig finds reason to hope so:

If the Reason-Rupe and PRRI reports are right, millennials just might be opting out of the partisan approach to politics altogether, which means the partisan leash on religious constituencies might just be fraying. This makes coalitions like the faith and family left — which has commitments all across the political spectrum, founded in faith rather than political expediency — seem a lot more viable in the long run. In short, the weaker the partisan system becomes, the more nuanced the religious story about politics can become. And this means prime time for the Christian left to re-enter the political stage.

And what a smashing re-entry we’re set for, with figures like Pope Francis casually backhanding capitalism and corporate greed in graceful continuity with his praise of family life, solidarity and a culture of life.

At this very moment, different factions of the religious left are duking it out over Obama’s proposed executive order banning discrimination against LGBT workers on behalf of federal contractors, and though the diversity of the religious left might concern some, the big picture is that the religious left is a growing force for political influence. As time passes and the mantle of political participation passes from prior partisan generations down to millennials, we might see that influence continue to grow, re-invigorating some of the finest features of the Christian tradition: to resist categorization, pull hard for the oppressed and downtrodden and insist upon hope while coping with the realities of power.

But Michael Peppard is skeptical:

[M]oral attitudes and emphases associated with progressives are on the ascendant, but that does not necessarily translate into a “Religious Left” or “Christian Left.” Any comparison with the Religious Right (Moral Majority and Christian Coalition) of the 80s-90s must acknowledge how hard-won and onerous were the achievements of its leaders. Ralph Reed was one of the greatest community organizers of the 20th century.

A counter-movement would need to show regular attendance, financial support, and tenacious action. A movement needs, in short, committed bodies—not just responses to poll questions or clicks on a social action website. The Religious Right still has way more committed bodies, people organized and reared through cohesive, structured communities. There is denominational affinity, some ethnic affinity, and perhaps more importantly, geographical concentration that leads to sustained cultural engagement.

Polyamory is getting more popular:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. More often than not, they’re just office workers who find standard picket-fence partnerships dull. Or, like Sarah, they’re bisexuals trying to fulfill both halves of their sexual identities. Or they’re long-term couples who don’t happen to think sexual exclusivity is the key to intimacy.

Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who interviewed 40 polyamorous people over the course of several years for her recent book, The Polyamorists Next Door, says that polyamorous configurations with more than three people tend to be rarer and have more turnover. “Polys” are more likely to be liberal and educated, she said, and in the rare cases that they do practice religion, it’s usually paganism or Unitarian Universalism.

Polys differentiate themselves from swingers because they are emotionally, not just sexually, involved with the other partners they date. And polyamorous arrangements are not quite the same as “open relationships” because in polyamory, the third or fourth or fifth partner is just as integral to the relationship as the first two are.

Miri Mogilevsky praises Olga Khazan’s piece as “well-researched, balanced, and accurate overall,” but takes the opportunity to debunk some myths about the practice. Among them? “Bisexual people try polyamory because it’s not fulfilling to only date a person of one gender”:

Some do, yes. But this also ties into an unfortunate, harmful, and inaccurate myth about bisexual people: that they will inevitably cheat on you because they “need” to be with someone of another gender. Myths like these, in turn, contribute to prejudice and discrimination against bisexual people, who may face such hurtful attitudes both from the straight majority and from gays and lesbians.

For many bisexual people, the gender of their partner isn’t nearly as essential a factor as others seem to think it is. We may notice it, sure, but we don’t sit around thinking, “I’m very glad that I’m dating both Suzie and Tom because Suzie is a girl and Tom is a boy!” It’s just like you can be attracted to blondes, brunettes,andredheads, without necessarily feeling stifled and unfulfilled if you’re only dating brunettes at a given point in time.

The Dish thread “But What If Three People Love Each Other?” is here.

Morning-after alcohol misery isn’t so bad, according to Tom Vanderbilt. In a 1995 issue of The Baffler – which opened its archives to the public this week – he reviewed the then-new Skyy vodka “hangover free” advertizing campaign. For him, he says, “the hangover, that much-maligned malady of the engorging classes, [is] the clearest window onto my inner self, the one device through which all my pretensions in the material world are brought to a crashing halt”:

The hangover is a rich but undervalued element in our culture. In the literature of every age it provides a handy narrative device for slowing down the action and bringing the most elevated characters to a place we’ve all been. In Lucky Jim, for example, Kingsley Amis expertly captures the moment as the novel’s cheerfully bumbling protagonist awakens after a sordid escapade:

The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Amis, the poet laureate of the hangover, was one of the few to fathom its intricacies and divine its transcendent qualities—to find, if you will, the spiritual in the spirits. The hangover, he wrote once, is no mere physical affliction, but a “unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization.”

This is usually lost on sufferers of the “physical hangover,” obsessed as they are with feeling fresh again. But as they spend the morning shuffling through the Sunday supplements, unable to finish the simplest articles, drinking tomato juice as the sunlight stalks the living room floor, on come those colossal feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and shame—the metaphysical hangover. The best, and really the only, cure for this condition is to simply acknowledge your physical hangover for what it is, rather than attributing these unsettling thoughts to your job or to your relationship. As Amis puts it, “He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.”

Explore The Baffler‘s back issues here.