But Sweet Heaven When I Die is, first and foremost, a book about loss, about death, transience, neglect, and quitting. These are the recurring themes in almost every one of the book’s thirteen chapters. The loss of the American west to real estate developers, the loss of a beloved uncle to a meaningless war, the killing of veteran activist Brad Will in Oaxaca in 2006, the neglect of the Yiddish language and its masterful authors, or the devastation of a writer failing to find an audience. In one chapter, Sharlet notes that all things we become invested in and pin our identities on have a half-life. With his consciousness of the inevitable decay befalling all things, Sharlet proves he has taken Cornel West’s lesson of the “death shudder” to heart. “To learn how to die in this way,” Sharlet quotes West in a chapter on the philosopher, “is to learn how to live.” And although the final chapter of When I Die is called “Born, Again,” Sharlet resists the temptation to end on an upbeat note, leaving us instead with a blues note.
Posts Tagged ‘Evangelicalism’
The paradoxes of the re-Islamization of Muslim societies
posted by Olivier Roy
The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West… Then came, just ten years after 9/11, the Arab Spring, in which Islam did not play a role, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, whose death went almost unnoticed among Muslim public opinion. What about the “Muslim wrath”? Suddenly, the issue of Islam and jihad being at the core of the political mobilization in Muslim societies seemed to become, at least for a time, irrelevant. So what went wrong with the perception of the Western media, leaders, and public opinion? Was the West wrong about the role of Islam in shaping political mobilization in Muslim societies? Yes. The essentialist and culturalist approach, common to both the clash of and dialogue of civilizations theories, missed three elements: society, politics, and more astonishingly . . . religion.
The house that D’Souza built?
posted by Charles GelmanEarlier this year, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, a former adjunct professor at King’s College, wrote an exposé for Killing the Buddha on the small Evangelical and—at least in the eyes of its authorities, if not in those of all of its students—politically conservative college housed in New York’s Empire State Building. Now, Andrew Marantz, of New York Magazine, takes a closer look at D’Souza’s tenure, the college’s sense of its vocation, and the student body being trained to become, in D’Souza’s words, “dangerous Christians.”
The rise and fall of Christian rock
posted by Charles GelmanMeghan O’Gieblyn, writing for Guernica, forays into the history of CCM, or Christian contemporary music, which also happens to be that of her own adolescence, tracing the gradual displacement of the more overtly gospel elements of Christian pop, rock, and rap, as the Christian music industry, in its growing drive for “relevance,” felt the squeeze of secular music, especially under the pincers the more profitable and marketing-savvy MTV. More than the fate of explicitly Christian popular music, this course, O’Gieblyn suggests, reflects the simultaneous devolution of a distinctly evangelical way of being in the world, which, stuck as it is between oppositional self-cloistering and secularizing dissipation, seems to O’Gieblyn to have tended toward to the latter.
Putting hell on trial
posted by John D. BoyA long-simmering conflict within U.S. evangelicalism came to the fore recently—a conflict which, as Martin Marty points out, may be more significant in the long run than the question of whether evangelicals support Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin for the presidency in 2012. Partly theological and partly generational, it pits Rob Bell, the 40-year-old founding minister of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan (not to be confused with the equally prominent Mars Hill Church in Seattle), against the likes of John Piper, the 65-year-old theologian, pastor, and author, who has long stood in opposition to newer developments in evangelical theology sometimes called “the emergent church.” Now, the conflict erupted into the public. . . . Bell’s critics are taking advance materials for his forthcoming book, Love Wins, as suggesting a negative answer. According to Bell’s alleged universalist stance, everybody is “saved”; there is no punishment for non-Christians. Since then, various media—online and offline, Christian and secular—have been reverberating with the charge of heresy.
Gov. Bentley’s two addresses
posted by Justin ReynoldsAlabama Governor Robert Bentley spent his first day in office finding out how Christian an elected official can get before causing a scandal.
Studying Evangelicals
posted by Jessica PolebaumIn The Chronicle of Higher Education, Timothy Beal reflects on the historic inattention of academic research to popular evangelical trends and highlights some of the most important work performed in this area since the late ’80s.
Looking for God in the 2010 midterms
posted by David BuckleyThe 2010 elections changed a lot about the makeup of Congress, but did they change much about American secularism? A new poll shows partisanship in pulpits is rare, issue-based politics is alive and well, and Islam’s electoral prominence is ripe for future manipulation.
A new Great Awakening
posted by Aaron WeinsteinGlenn Beck’s track record of keeping promises may not be pristine (in fact, Pulitzer Prize-winning politifact.com has often given his statements a rating of “Pants-on-fire”), but the August 28 Restoring Honor rally seemed actually less political than past Tea Party gatherings.
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