Harvard University Press Blog

Religious Freedom, Health Care, and Women in the Church

2012-05-25T15:26:40-04:00

When then-candidate Rick Santorum declared in February that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 comments on the role of people of faith in the public square made him want to “throw up,” he merely presaged a showdown to come. After this week’s announcement of a lawsuit brought by Catholic groups upset with the Obama administration, HUP Publicity Assistant Bridget Martin turned to a few books for context, and offers the post below.

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This week, 43 Catholic organizations including schools and hospitals filed lawsuits against the Obama administration in response to the federal mandate that birth control coverage be included in health care plans. Though the Obama administration proposed a compromise by which the responsibility for payment could be shifted from employers to the insurance companies, those bringing suit characterize the mandate as an assault on religious liberty. The lawsuits have set off a maelstrom of responses, unveiling the political, ethical, and social complexities embedded in the issue.

In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled “Why the Bishops Are Suing the U.S. Government,” Harvard Law School professor Mary Ann Glendon defends American bishops and their initiative to preserve the separation of Church and State. Glendon, whose HUP books include Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, argues that the health insurance mandate violates the Catholic Church’s constitutional liberty, ultimately demoting religion to a second-class right. She sees the debate not as an argument about contraception, but as a principle for preserving religious liberty, asserting, “The main goal of the mandate is not, as HHS claimed, to protect women’s health. It is rather a move to conscript religious organizations into a political agenda, forcing them to facilitate and fund services that violate their beliefs, within their own institutions.”

But what exactly did the founders intend when they included the separation of church and state clause in the US Constitution? In Religious Freedom and the Constitution, Christopher L. Eisgruber and Lawrence G. Sager caution us against imagining an impenetrable wall between church and state when we consider the ideal. Rather, they argue that while religious institutions and practitioners have the right to be free from governmental discrimination on account of religious beliefs, those religious beliefs do not on their own exempt institutions and practitioners from generally applicable laws. This interpretation sheds a different light on the relationship between church and state, especially as US bishops turn to the court in fear of being marginalized by the federal government.

Government influence is not the only social issue driving the contraception controversy. A day after Glendon’s piece was published, Maureen Dowd’s op-ed in the New York Times took an opposing stance. Dowd frankly rejects the position adopted by Glendon and others: “The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church.”

Dowd’s argument is a window into the gender and power implications of this debate. As an institution dependent on male hierarchy, is the Church’s disapproval of contraception a tool to subordinate women? The struggles of women within the male power structure of the Church are chronicled in Jo Ann Kay McNamara’s Sisters in Arms, which traces the history of Catholic nuns in the Western world. McNamara shows that the earliest female converts were attracted to the Church by the proclamation of equality in the Kingdom of Heaven, a notion vastly different from the patriarchal societies of the Early Church. Yet since the establishment of female ministries, women have struggled to be recognized as equals in the church.

Garry Wills emphasized this subordination in an April post on the New York Review blog. Wills explains how the Vatican recently “stripped the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, representing most American nuns, of its powers of self-government, maintaining that its members have made statements that ‘disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.’” Outraged by this blatant reduction of power for women in the Church, Wills calls attention to the nuns’ unwavering commitment to the social Gospel, aiding those suffering regardless of political implications involved, as in their response to the AIDS crisis, their facilitation of the spiritual needs of gay people, and their activism in the civil rights movement.

Debates over the politics of religious freedom and gender inequality seem certain to reach a fever pitch in this election year. The Catholic Church is planning a national campaign for their cause, “Fortnight for Freedom,” to run from June 21st through the symbolically chosen July 4th. The initiative, intended to encourage prayer, education, and public action about religious freedom, was created in direct response to the perceived threat posed by the Obama administration. With the Church seemingly demonstrating the primacy of a respect for life in its political motivations, it will be interesting to watch the extent to which American Catholics embrace Mitt Romney, even in light of his Mormonism, which some may still find unsettling.

Neoliberal Penality and the Chicago Police State

2012-05-24T12:51:57-04:00

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production . . . I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” As political scientist Bernard Harcourt notes, these are surprisingly not the words of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, but of then-candidate Barack Obama, in the summer of 2008. As Harcourt demonstrates in The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, a clear relationship exists between the pervasive expectation that the federal government should (or at least could) stay out of market matters, on the one hand, and the public and political acceptance of the expansion and naturalization of government’s role in policing and incarceration, on the other.

Harcourt refers to this self-perpetuating schema—in which a belief in the government’s obligation to respect the illusory freedom of markets can thrive alongside an urge to continually restrict the freedom of people—as “neoliberal penality,” and details how it facilitates the expansion of the penal sphere. Most directly, he notes, the logic provides politicians with rhetorical tools with which to enact prison-packing tough-on-crime policies. Harcourt cites Katherine Beckett’s work in demonstrating Ronald Reagan’s advocacy of the paradoxical rubric by which public assistance can be deemed an illegitimate state function while policing and social control are its obligation. Here’s Reagan speaking at a fundraiser:

This is precisely what we’re trying to do to the bloated Federal Government today: remove it from interfering in areas where it doesn’t belong, but at the same time strengthen its ability to perform its constitutional and legitimate functions. . . . In the area of public order and law enforcement, for example, we’re reversing a dangerous trend of the last decade. While crime was steadily increasing, the Federal commitment in terms of personnel was steadily shrinking.

Harcourt characterizes this as the “core idea in neoliberal penality,” this notion that the government should respect the self-contained orderliness of the economic sphere, yet has a legitimate role to play outside that sphere, especially in law enforcement.

Cut to Chicago site of this week’s NATO summit, where world leaders discussed global issues of “security in an age of austerity.” Pictured at right are those very world leaders, posing together for a commemorative photograph. Below, in striking contrast, we see images of the security forces present in Chicago during the meeting.

The photos, taken by Harcourt’s daughter Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt, depict what Harcourt dubbed “the Chicago Police State 2012.”

In a piece for The Guardian, Harcourt argues that this police state serves as our new welfare state:

The security mania represents our truly unique way of stimulating the economy, of employing piece labor, of creating government jobs and subsidized contracts. Just think of the amount of overtime pay that we are disbursing with all this policing. Instead of investing in schools and education, in job training, or in re-entry programs, this is how we invest in our future. And we never think of it as government welfare because it falls in that sacred space of security–because, essentially, of the American paradox of laissez-faire and mass punishment.

Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt also captured the spirit of the demonstrators themselves, who provide yet another stark contrast to the security apparatus constructed to contain them:

You can see slideshows of Isadora Ruyter-Harcourt’s photos of the NATO police and protesters on her flickr site. You can also read more from Bernard Harcourt on the “American paradox of Laissez Faire and Mass Incarceration,” and on the moving experience of witnessing US war veterans throw away their medals in the shadow of the NATO summit.

Human Rights and the Glamour of Dissent

2012-05-22T15:15:14-04:00

In a recent NYT opinion piece sparked by the now-resolved international episode of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng’s escape from house arrest to American protection, Samuel Moyn considers the evolving implications of “human rights.” Moyn is the author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, in which he argues that the modern conception of human rights begins not with the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but in the decade after 1968. In his op-ed, Moyn writes that what was initially an “uncontroversial effort to establish moral norms above the fray of the cold war’s ideological battles” has since become both more familiar and less clear-cut:

In reporting on Mr. Chen, most publications, including this newspaper, used the terms “dissident” and even “prisoner of conscience” to refer to him.

However, since the time Amnesty International and other groups popularized those phrases, human rights—a term that once meant the defense of individuals against the oppression of an unjust state—has come to imply other things, too.

Today, it is just as likely to be invoked by powerful states to wage war in distant corners of the globe, much to the chagrin of authoritarian leaders in wealthy rising powers like Russia and China, who see such “humanitarian interventions” as a violation of states’ sovereignty—not to mention a threat to their manner of rule.

Moyn goes on to detail how the concept of human rights has “lost some of its romantic appeal and moral purity” and become a political tool. Even still, he writes, human rights can be useful to “Chinese dissidents and their Western allies” just as they’d been to the “glamorous dissidents” who came before.

In describing Chen, Moyn knowingly evokes the codified concept of the dissident (“the lone icon speaking for moral principle against totalitarian rule, the anonymous but courageous network at home that sheltered him, the supporters abroad who rallied around his cause, and the governments that made their choices based on a difficult calculus of moral ideals and geopolitical interests”), but elsewhere uses “dissent” in a fairly straightforward fashion. A short op-ed can sustain only so much complication, to be sure, but it’s interesting to see the concept of dissent taken as stable in the course of a discussion of the evolution of human rights.

Jonathan Bolton’s Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, The Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism is another recent HUP book that deals with some of the same events and themes as does Moyn in The Last Utopia. Bolton’s book unpacks the myths and the glamour to show how the struggle against state repression was felt by those who lived it, making clear the messy humanity of dissent.

From his Introduction:

In February 1979, Zdeněk Mlynář—an architect of the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968, who was later expelled from the Party and helped formulate the human-rights proclamation Charter 77—wrote: “The term ‘dissident’ is one of the least precise in the contemporary political vocabulary.” Today, historians have ceased to interrogate the term, but it remains as vague and problematic as it was thirty years ago. Conceptions of dissent are still shaped by the vocabulary of the Cold War. The most common model of the dissident personality is constructed from just a few basic planks—courage, truthfulness, steadfast self-confidence. Dissidents are portrayed with a mixture of romanticism (jailed intellectuals writing prison letters, adventurers smuggling secret publications across barbed-wire borders) and political idealism (a few rare souls with the moral courage to speak out against the state, at great personal risk). Both the romanticism and the idealism contain some truth, but they also speak to Western dreams and desires—a belief in heroes, a yearning for a clear stand against evil, a hope for more fulfilling forms of political participation.

Views of Central European dissent, in fact, have always been shaped by the selective perceptions of the West. Most dissidents considered the term “dissent” to be a coinage of American and West European journalists. During the Cold War, the West—newspaper editors and academic scholars alike—selected a few dissident thinkers and fashioned them into a transnational pantheon that conducted an international conversation about antipolitics, civil society, and living in truth. In this pantheon, there was room for one or two thinkers from each country—next to Havel one usually found the Pole Adam Michnik, the Hungarian György Konrád, and a constellation of other figures, with minor changes from one receiving country to the next, often depending on which dissident writings had been translated into which languages. These political and philosophical debates shaped the way Communism and Central European history were understood in the West, which often thought it was listening in on a conversation that, in fact, it had helped to stage by choosing and translating the thinkers—brilliant and influential thinkers, to be sure—that spoke most closely to its own concerns.

In the years since Havel’s landmark essay [“The Power of the Powerless,” 1978], his ironic characterization of dissent has been forgotten. Historians speak of “dissent” or “the dissident movement,” reducing a diverse phenomenon to a simple, unifying label. They continue to work with terms and definitions inherited from the Cold War, even as the understanding of Communist society and culture has evolved out of a black-and-white Cold War framework. We speak of “the dissidents” as if we knew who they were and, indeed, as if they knew who they were. In fact, the very definition of “dissent” was a major concern of opposition intellectuals in Central Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Was it meaningful, even possible, to bracket off a small group of people and to judge the rest of society using them as the moral measuring stick? And how did society degenerate to the point where so few people seemed to speak for it?

“Dissent was born of a particular world,” Bolton goes on to write, “and that world was born in the fall of 1968.” Together Worlds of Dissent and The Last Utopia help us to understand that world and those that have followed.

Food and Memory

2012-05-18T10:58:51-04:00

John S. Allen’s The Omnivorous Mind is an examination of the cultural and biological truths revealed by our evolving relationship with food. From the diets of our earliest ancestors, to cooking’s role in the evolution of the human brain, to the preoccupations of contemporary foodies, Allen’s take on how and what we eat is consistently revelatory. Below, Allen looks at the powerful role food plays in human memory. Also below, listen to a conversation with Allen on a recent episode of our podcast.

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Not that long ago, at the counter of a gas station out in the country, something yellow and red caught my eye—it was a Bit-O-Honey candy bar wrapper. I had not had a Bit-O-Honey bar for nearly 40 years, having moved as a child from Bit-O-Honey’s midwest base to California. So I bought one. As I unwrapped and ate it, certain memories quickly came back to me: the difficulty of getting the inside wrapping paper off the sticky taffy, the little rectangles meant to be broken off one by one, the initial hard chewiness that always made me wonder if it was stale, and finally, the honeyed flavor of the taffy itself, offset by little bits of nut. The memories did not stop there, however: in an instant, I was transported back in time to the back seat of my parents’ car, looking out the window at the apparently endless rows of corn stalks that passed by for hour after hour as we drove down highways and interstates. I thought about AM radio and the backs of my parents’ heads. I finished my chunk of Bit-O-Honey, got in my car, and drove back to the present.

We all have our food memories, some good and some bad. The taste, smell, and texture of food can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back memories not just of eating food itself but also of place and setting. Food is an effective trigger of deeper memories of feelings and emotions, internal states of the mind and body. So my Bit-O-Honey experience is not all that unusual. Search for websites with the word candy combined with vintage, retro, or nostalgia, and it becomes readily apparent that many people use candy as a pathway to the past. But why should this be the case?

There are several reasons. First, evolution has seen to it that food in general may be a privileged target of memory in the brain. There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus (one in each hemisphere) that is critical for memory. The hippocampus is particularly important for forming long-term, declarative memories—those that can be consciously recalled and which contribute to the autobiographies that we all carry around in our heads. The hippocampus is also important for spatial memories, which may be its primary role for animals that do not possess language. The hippocampus has strong connections with parts of the brain that are important for emotion and for smell. This may explain why emotional memories can be so vivid or why certain smells trigger a sense of recall in us even before we consciously remember an event.

Emotion and smell no doubt contribute to the power of some food memories, but the hippocampus has more direct links to the digestive system. Many of the hormones that regulate appetite, digestion, and eating behavior also have receptors in the hippocampus. Finding food is so important to survival that it is clear that the hippocampus is primed to form memories about and around food.

But what specifically about childhood candy bars makes them so evocative decades later? Based on our primate ancestry as fruit seekers and eaters, the sweetness of candy pushes a button in our brains—we have a natural sweet tooth. Upon eating a highly appealing food, such as one that is sweet, the reward centers of our brains are activated. The neurotransmitter dopamine has a key role in the brain biology of reward, but dopamine pathways are also involved in many other brain functions. One of these functions, via the hippocampus, is turning short term memories into long term ones. The brain’s reward mechanisms serve to motivate certain actions and behaviors. This would not work very well if motivation was not reinforced by memory.

Additionally, for a child, candies and candy bars are often a special treat. This alone could make eating them a memorable experience. But beyond that, those candies that are associated with special childhood occasions, such as driving trips, visiting a friend or relative, or holidays, are often especially memory-rich. Emotion and novelty tend to make events more memorable, and those tied in some way with food may make for even more powerful memories. Nearly all human cultures engage in feasting, in which past events or special occurrences are commemorated with an abundance of food. The practice probably began as a means to share temporary excesses of food among large groups of people so that it would not go to waste. Over time, food abundance has become a vehicle for memory enhancement at the cultural level. Feasts serve not only an abundance of food but an abundance of memories.

A Bit-O-Honey bar or a Pearson's Salted Nut Roll or a package of Necco Wafers does not a feast make. However, under the right circumstances, a childhood candy resampled years later can unleash a cornucopia of memories. Candy and food in general are of course not unique in their ability to promote a mnemonic cascade. However, our evolved psychology may make food one of the more likely things in the environment around which memories are formed and focused.

Biking for Cabinets in Rhode Island

2012-05-14T11:49:03-04:00

If you found yourself at a backyard birthday party in North Providence this past Saturday evening, you may have overheard a conversation about bicycling. A handful of Rhode Islanders were describing recent long rides, commiserating over the mistake of overindulgence at the halfway mark. One told of marking the turn with too many boozey beverages, making for a risky ride back. Another recalled pausing in a long pedal for a heavy lunch, after which her partner wanted to get a cabinet, too.

You’d have been forgiven for assuming that the conversation had just taken a strange turn towards office furniture. But, actually, you’d just been gifted with a regionalism. As one of the partiers explained, “cabinet” is Rhode Island speak for “milkshake.” None present had a notion as to why, nor did they really need one, standing in that yard, fenced by knee-high chain link, driveway full of old station wagons, and having just gotten a tour of a home frozen in time, with a completely stocked basement bar seemingly untouched since the ’70s, and a lushly green-carpeted hallway, decked with old garden sprinklers wall-mounted like hunting trophies. Rhode Island’s just weird, no explanation needed.

Just kidding, OF COURSE we want an explanation. That’s what the Dictionary of American Regional English is for:

cabinet n: A milkshake. Chiefly used in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts.

The etymology is actually uncertain, but a woman from Fall River interviewed in 1968 claimed it originated in a drugstore there, named by the pharmacist who concocted it. “The ice cream was kept in those days in a cabinet that was part of the soda-fountain set-up,” reads the DARE entry.

The entry also cites a letter to the Today Show from 1971 that explains that a milk shake in Rhode Island is without ice cream, while a cabinet has ice cream. And a Smithsonian letter from a Rhode Islander in 1982:

In Rhode Island this term more likely refers to a milkshake (using milk, syrup, and ice cream) than a piece of furniture. I grew up five miles from the Massachusetts border. As a child I could order a cabinet in R.I., but had to remember to order a frappe just five minutes to the west.

Because “frappe” is totally normal. Carry on, America.

Maurice Sendak, 1928-2012

2012-05-10T12:15:11-04:00

Many of us at HUP were saddened this week by the death of author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. Among those most moved were editor Lindsay Waters and designer Jill Breitbarth, who remain grateful to Sendak for allowing our use of an illustration from his accompaniment to Joel Agee’s translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea on the cover of our 2004 book A New History of German Literature. Below, Waters and Breitbarth recall how we came to use Sendak’s work.

Lindsay Waters:

For me German culture came alive in the drawings and artwork of artists who fled to America before and after World War II, from the artists who made Little Golden Books, Stefan and George Salter, and the book designers and illustrators inspired by them. It was a style, a tone of dark forests where children get lost within seconds of losing sight of their parents, all of a sudden menaced by scary creatures. Maurice Sendak captured and developed this style to and beyond the point of vertigo. He went to the heart of what was scary in German culture, just as he’d journeyed to the heart of American darkness with Herman Melville.

Our New History of German Literature begins with a spell, an account of the very first document consisting of what is recognizably German language, something written on the back of a Latin manuscript which is held in the monastery at Fulda. The German literary tradition is enchanted. Who better to convey that complex history than Maurice Sendak, whose work helped so many to feel that chilling fright for the first time? So we approached him for permission to use one of the illustrations from his edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. It was like a dream come true when he decided eventually that our book was a project he was willing to be a part of. The person who’d made German language culture come alive for me was going to help bring our epic, thousand-page account of that culture to the world.

Jill Breitbarth:

Lindsay was eager to use one of Sendak’s illustrations from Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist for the jacket of A New History of German Literature, and I was thrilled to make a go of it. Getting permission to use the piece involved lots of phone calls between our camp and Sendak’s assistants. At one point, when a little tweaking was necessary, Sendak wished to speak directly with me. I was nervous thinking I would be talking with Sendak. I was such a fan.

We covered the design issues quickly and went right into politics. Sendak bemoaned the recent re-election of George Bush, that the war in Iraq had ever started, and that so many people close to him were dying. His passions were real and he had no qualms about sharing them with a person he’d never met. Sendak was respectful, and I felt I was talking with an honest man, sensitive to history and emotions.

Closing the Civic Empowerment Gap

2012-05-08T09:22:12-04:00

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a landmark call for the remaking of civic education in America’s schools. In presenting her challenge to the status quo, Levinson documents a number of organizations that demonstrate the progress to be wrung from her prescriptions. We invited friend of the Press and incoming Harvard Graduate School of Education student Jessica Gerhardstein Gingold to describe her experience as a youth council director with Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, one of the programs that Levinson highlights.

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In No Citizen Left Behind Meira Levinson puts some fire into the often dull argument that the United States needs to get serious about civic education, calling for reform for a system that today largely excludes poor and minority students from democratic participation. She begins the book by describing the experience of teaching on 9/11, and shares a remarkable story about her middle school students predicting the Iraq War. Despite their evident understanding, though, she laments that what she calls a “civic empowerment gap” made it unlikely that her students would become participants in the course charted that day:

Whether my students were misguided or prescient, whether their life experiences blinded or exposed them to the true character of our political leaders, there is ample evidence that they are unlikely to become active participants in American civic and political life. As a result, they are unlikely to influence civic and political deliberation or decision-making. This is because there is a profound civic empowerment gap—as large and as disturbing as the reading and math achievement gaps that have received significant national attention in recent years—between ethnoracial minority, naturalized, and especially poor citizens, on the one hand, and White, native-born, and especially middle-class and wealthy citizens, on the other.

Levinson explores the causes of and potential solutions to this gap through many lenses. As a political philosopher, she considers the political, sociological and historical context of the United States and of our education system, closely examining the meanings of citizenship and democracy. She asks hard questions about how we teach civics in a diverse country where our ethnoracial identities invariably dictate our experiences of citizenship. She grapples with how these theories trickle down into practice by sharing personal stories from her years of inner-city teaching. In addressing these questions and others, she doesn’t fantasize about an unreachable Shangri-La of civic education. Instead, she clearly outlines the qualities of her gold standard curriculum, Action Civics, and highlights schools and organizations that have begun to actualize it.

Action Civics is designed to create “an engaged citizenry capable of effective participation in the political process, in their communities, and in the larger society.” It is founded on the principle that young people have authentic civic experiences that matter and that should be part of their civic educational experiences. “I recommend a constructivist approach that helps students construct their own empowering means of engaging in this work,” Levinson writes, “rather than telling them how to do it. As important as it is for students to learn to take multiple perspectives, educators, too, need to be open to students’ diverse perspectives and experiences.” One of the founding organizations of the National Action Civics Collaborative (NACC) is Mikva Challenge, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to create the next generation of civic leaders. Mikva Challenge is one of many organizations that Levinson highlights in her book, and, having been a member of its staff for over two years, I personally witnessed the efficacy of her prescriptions for closing the civic empowerment gap.

Mikva Challenge accomplishes its mission through three main program areas: elections, classroom activism, and youth policymaking. With the elections program, students learn about electoral politics through campaigning and candidate forums where students compose and ask questions. Levinson mentions the classroom activism program, Issues to Action, in which Mikva staff support teachers in guiding students through the process of choosing an issue they care about, researching it, and then taking action. Both programs include curriculum and professional development to build the capacity of teachers to do Action Civics nationally. In the youth policymaking program, students comprise three city-wide youth councils: Education and Health councils each work to improve the Chicago Public School system (CPS), while a Youth Commission works with the Mayor to address citywide issues relevant to young people. In each of its programs, Mikva starts with the essential question of what young people know. From there, the organization works to ensure that students have access to experts in the field to build their arguments, learn the research skills to do their own surveys of other students, and develop the leadership skills to present their ideas to decision-makers, the media, and each other.

Mikva Challenge students developing policy recommendations

As Levinson notes, the civic empowerment gap is also a matter of attitude: those who have lived in marginalized communities are less likely to trust those in power. Still, she points out, that trust is not necessary to motivate civic action if there’s an intact sense of efficacy—the belief that individuals, even youths, can influence government. Good action civics education builds that sense of efficacy. It is the result of validating students’ lived experiences, giving students the opportunity to actually meet those who have power over and expertise in the issues they care about, and allowing students to experience making change firsthand. In my time with Mikva Challenge I watched these methods build authentic youth civic engagement. The students who come through Mikva’s programs often express deep mistrust in government, but when given the opportunity to participate and see the fruits of their labor they are more motivated to keep doing it. You can see much of that spirit in a Mikva Challenge video on the power of youth.

When I directed the Education Council at Mikva Challenge, which was comprised entirely of young people of color, I witnessed their growth as leaders, saw their voices transform policies for the better, and watched adults evolve as they began to see students as partners in problem-solving rather than as problems. Mikva students fought for and won money for student voice committees in several CPS high schools. They launched what’s become a multi-year campaign to bring CPS into the 21st century. Realizing that most of the resources on cyberbullying were aimed at white, middle-class students, they secured funds from CPS to create an anti-digital abuse video that highlights the unique nature of cyberbullying in urban school districts. Additionally, they pushed for a new overall technology policy that, if adopted, would help make school more relevant to the lives of young people today. Time and again the students met with decision makers who were so impressed that they began requesting their presence more often.

Such concrete action is not a fluke. It is happening throughout Chicago Public Schools, driven by the principles of Action Civics that Levinson outlines in No Citizen Left Behind. Youth are not guaranteed to successfully change policy or even change adults’ attitudes when provided with authentic civic experiences. What they are guaranteed is the opportunity to build the skill set necessary to continue being influencers of power. And the more we can give this skill set to those most often left out of our civic discourse, the stronger our democracy will be. The success of Mikva Challenge is an affirmation of Levinson’s ideas, and it should give us hope that her vision of a robust democracy with diverse and engaged citizens can be a reality if we want it to be.

What Does it Mean to Represent a Race?

2012-05-04T08:50:17-04:00

Kenneth W. Mack’s Representing the Race is a collective biography of a group of African American civil rights lawyers during the era of segregation. Mack moves away from the standard telling of 20th century American race relations (“stories of protest and accommodation, heroes and villains, assimilation and black separatism, movement building and backlash, progress and retrenchment”) to focus instead on what he calls an “enduring paradox” of race relations:

From their beginnings, Americans imagined that they inhabited a country composed of distinct racial, ethnic, and religious groups that somehow constituted a unified nation—an idea that, for some, is encapsulated in their historic national motto, e pluribus unum. Just as assuredly, since the time of the nation’s founding Americans have imagined that certain minority groups fit uneasily, or perhaps not at all, into the national whole. Among the most prominent of these groups have been African Americans, and what has connected this particular minority group to the larger nation has been its representatives—those who claimed to speak for, stand in for, and advocate for the interests of the larger group.

The usual story of black civil rights lawyers in American history is that these lawyers represented the interests of a unified minority group that wanted to be integrated into the core fabric of the nation—or, as more-recent accounts have described them, perhaps these lawyers failed at their task of representation. But the story was not so simple as either of these accounts would have it. Rather, from their beginnings, black civil rights lawyers were people caught between the needs and desires of the larger, white-dominated culture, and those of their own racial group, and there was no simple way out of that dilemma.

We recently spoke with Mack about the book, and in the video below he describes how the career of Thurgood Marshall, the most famous figure he discusses in Representing the Race, demonstrates the challenging melding of authenticity and exceptionalism still demanded of those said to “represent a race.”

Kenneth Mack will discuss Representing the Race at the Harvard Book Store’s Friday Forum this afternoon at 3pm.

The New Supernatural

2012-05-02T13:39:09-04:00

Vampires, zombies, Dan Brown. The books sell like crazy, movies fill seats, cash registers ring, young folks swoon. What’s happening? Fad? Trend? Passing fancy? Or the forefront of a reinvention of American Christianity?

That last one, says Victoria Nelson, author of Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. In what’s certainly the first HUP book to include both a photo of a shirtless, shimmering Robert Pattinson and a Guillermo del Toro Hellboy II character sketch, Nelson argues that popular culture is now saturated with a supernaturalism reminiscent of Pre-Modern Christian European culture. But it comes with some new twists: these figures aren’t just evil monsters as in the classic Protestant Gothic, but are semi-divine. And they’re no longer just males—the new heroes are joined by heroines.

Gothicka picks up where Nelson’s widely praised and deeply loved The Secret Life of Puppets leaves off, tracing the movement of this “unconscious religiosity” from what she calls the “sub-Zeitgeist” (“the grab-bag mass market popular culture lying beneath or around or on top of the secular-materialist mainstream”) to the everywhere.

In the years since The Secret Life of Puppets was published, this trend has emerged as a much more explicit spirituality expressed in performance and practice as well as in fiction and film. Where that book tracked, through the end of the twentieth century, the nature of the supernatural in the post-Reformation popular imagination, Gothicka attempts to describe the surprising new turn toward the light taken in the increasingly transformed subgenres of the Gothick. Still accessed through the grotesque and monstrous but displaying some striking new features, the twenty-first-century Gothick is showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inherited from its eighteenth-century ancestor.

We recently spoke with Nelson for an episode of the HUP podcast, wherein you’ll learn all about avatars of self-realization, Protestant iconoclasm, and the watershed moment of Interview with the Vampire. Have a listen:

The book covers an awful lot of ground, but Nelson was kind enough to prepare a little “playlist” for us – call it the greatest hits of the new supernatural:

Fiction

Max Brooks, World War Z
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu”
Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight series
William P. Young, The Shack

Film and Television

Alan Ball, True Blood series
Park Chan-wook, Thirst
Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland
Patrick Lussier, Dracula 2000
George Romero, Night of the Living Dead
Guillermo del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and Hellboy

Graphic Novels

Jamie Delano, John Constantine: Hellblazer series
Garth Ennis, Preacher series
Neil Gaiman, Sandman series

Roleplaying Games

Chaosium, The Call of Cthulhu
White Wolf, Vampire: The Masquerade

Videogames

Capcom, Resident Evil
Cyan, Myst
Electronic Arts, Left 4 Dead
Konami, Castlevania

Those are the primary sources for your crash course in the fusion of post-Christian spirituality and mass media.

And, for super extra credit, pair Gothicka with Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, or at least spin their podcasts back to back. Here’s Gregory:

Ancient Rome and the 1%

2012-05-01T10:45:05-04:00

From Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, which brings to light the laboring men, housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who formed the backbone of the ancient Roman world, and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it, all in the face of a persistent historical truth: “Over the centuries, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has been the norm, rather than the exception.”

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I have searched for a term to capture the invisible demographic group that is the subject of this book and have chosen to call them “ordinary people.” This distinguishes them from the elite and leaves their definition open to the wide range of their existence, from fairly wealthy to modestly well-off and downright poor, male and female, slave and free, law-abiding and outlaw. These ordinary people lived in a world dominated by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite that was limited and defined by wealth, tradition, blood, and power. They belonged to one of the three orders or ordines into which they divided themselves. The senatorial order was the most exalted in social and political terms but not always the wealthiest. The equestrian order focused on the acquisition of wealth rather than the power and rank of the senatorial order. The decurial order ran towns and cities across the empire and mirrored the senatorial-equestrian divisions of Rome; these men were generally less wealthy than members of senatorial-equestrian orders, although sometimes local decurials were also equestrians. The three orders amounted to no more than 100,000–200,000 people, less than half a percent of the empire’s population of 50–60 million. Among them only the adult males counted; these numbered about 40,000 and so, as the empire at this time was roughly 2.5 million square miles, there was on average one adult member of the male elite for every sixty or so square miles. As the elites were concentrated in Rome, the proportion elsewhere was even lower. Yet these numerically minuscule and widely scattered leaders controlled almost everything.