The Dish

Asher Elbein paints a sympathetic portrait of Southern congregations that incorporate snake-handling into their worship rituals. “The point,” he writes, “is to have enough faith in God to take up something wild, untamed and unpredictable”:

That unpredictability, however, is the root of the danger. However acclimated to humans a snake might be, it’s never truly tame. The more often a person handles, the greater their chances for a bite. Bites aren’t necessarily fatal: Toxin is both metabolically expensive for a snake to produce and its only tool for subduing prey. So snakes often give “dry bites,” warning nips that inject none of their precious venom. A full bite from some vipers, like the copperhead, is easily survivable. Contrary to popular belief, though, it’s impossible to become immune to snake venom. Instead, successive bites often lead to worsening allergic reactions. Hensley claimed to have been bitten more than 400 times before he died. Coots was bitten eight times before he received the killing strike. Handling snakes is not a death sentence, but any handling could be your last.

Practitioners are well aware of this. 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.

(Photo by Chris Zielecki)

In a self-interview at The Nervous Breakdown, Tod Goldberg shares what he learned from sacred Jewish texts while researching his novel Gangsterland:

I actually learned more from the Talmud than I did the Torah, since I was already generally familiar with the Torah. The Talmud, however, has so much insight into the laws and philosophy that are the bedrock of the faith, plus essentially provides case law, which is pretty fascinating to read.  I also read a great many books on Jewish thought and identity, which were incredibly helpful. What I learned and what I appreciated personally are vastly different than what was good for Gangsterland. What changed for me personally was a greater appreciation for what it has meant, historically, to be a Jew. That even if I don’t believe in every tenet of the religion per se, I am nevertheless a Jew, and with that comes history, and with that comes a certain a genetic duty. I also learned that the ancient Jews had an exceptionally nuanced understanding of human nature and were bedeviled by many of the same existential questions I still have, which made me feel pretty good, actually, because I think we all end up thinking our hopes and fears are uniquely idiotic, but here you have people in the 8^th century concerned with the very things you are concerned by in the 21^st. But the most important thing I learned reading all of these books was about forgiveness. Forgiving yourself. Forgiving others. Forgiving the mistakes you haven’t made yet. That was extraordinarily enlightening.

Alex Ronan interviews Margalit Fox, who has written obituaries for the New York Times for nearly twenty years. Fox poignantly describes how she approaches cases of suicide:

One of the most heart-wrenching interviews I’d ever have to do was for a poet. I have maybe one suicide a year and they all seem to be poets. If I were an insurance company, I’d never write a policy for poets. This particular poet had shot himself, which I knew from other sources. … I knew I’d have to call this poet’s wife and ask her to confirm the cause of death. There is nothing in Emily Post on making that call. It’s bizarre and horrific that as a stranger you’re calling someone cold and saying, Hello, you don’t know me, but I’m going to ask about the most painful thing in your life, which just happened yesterday, and I’m going to publish it where millions of people can see it. I called up, I took a deep, silent breath, I introduced myself and then—I’d normally never be this familiar with a source—I said, Honey, what the hell happened? God bless her, she told me. It was New York, in the summer, they had a bedroom air conditioner that was very noisy and, as his last act of tenderness to her, he made sure it was on, knowing the noise of the AC would cover the sound of the shot.

She continues:

Suicides, particularly young suicides, are very, very painful. You can’t not be affected by having a story on your desk about someone in their twenties or thirties who has just shot himself. Very rarely is there an emotional toll, maybe once or twice a year. Happily, the vast majority of people we write about are people who’ve died in their beds in their eighties, having lived long, fruitful lives.

Sociologist Jay Livingston recently took the Pew quiz on religious knowledge, which led him to the results of their survey of Americans’ religious literacy. He tries to explain the above findings, which show nonbelievers, Jews, and Mormons scoring the best:

Jews and Mormons have to explain to the flock how their ideas are different from those of the majority. Atheists and agnostics too, in their questioning and even rejecting,  have probably devoted more thought to religion, or more accurately, religions. On the questions about Shiva and Nirvana, they leave even the Jews and Mormons far behind.

For Protestants and Catholics, by contrast, learning detailed information about their religion is not as crucial. Just as White people in the US rarely ask what it means to be White, Christians need not worry about their differences from the mainstream. They are the mainstream. So going to church or praying can be much more about feelings – solidarity, transcendence, peace, etc.  That variety of religious experience need not include learning the history or even the tenets of the religion itself. As Durkheim said, the central element in religion is ritual – especially the feelings a ritual generates in the group. Knowing the actual beliefs might be a nice addition, but it’s not crucial.