Springtime With Paris
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Paris Hilton, photographed in Los Angeles, May 22, 2007.

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Two By Two By Tinsletown
Thursday, April 26, 2007

Noah's ark is landing in Los Angeles. These pics from a new exhibition at the Skirball Center.

Some view a strip of tire tread as trash. Brooklyn-based artist and puppeteer Chris Green envisions a crocodile. Wind turbines are zebra haunches. Pink flamingos arise from an amalgam of wood and bamboo, combs, spools of thread, flea market purses and plastic fly swatters.

Shaped by Green's fertile imagination, the oddly lifelike critters are among the many inhabitants of "Noah's Ark," a new play-oriented, hands-on, animal-centric realization of the flood story opening June 26 at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Five years in the making, the 8,000-square-foot, $5-million, non-religious permanent installation is a deliberate redefinition of the Jewish heritage institution as a destination attraction for families of all backgrounds, expanding the center's big-tent philosophy, says Uri D. Herscher, founding president and chief executive.

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I Was For Teaching-the-Bible-in-Schools Before Teaching-the-Bible-in-Schools Was Cool
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

TIME joins the bandwagon for teaching the Bible in public schools. Hooray! As I argued in the NYT over 15 months ago, religion is the dominant force in the world today. The idea that you can prepare students to enter that world without teaching them about that force -- and the book that helps define it for half the world's believers, is absurd. Here David van Biema sets out the beginning of the argument:

Last year Georgia became the first state in memory to offer funds for high school electives on the Old and New Testaments using the Bible as the core text. Similar funding was discussed in several other legislatures, although the initiatives did not become law. Meanwhile, two privately produced curriculums crafted specifically to pass church-state muster are competing for use in individual schools nationwide. Combined, they are employed in 460 districts in at least 37 states. The numbers are modest, but their publishers expect them to soar. The smaller of the two went into operation just last year but is already into its second 10,000-copy printing, has expressions of interest from a thousand new districts this year and expects many more. The larger publisher claims to be roughly doubling the number of districts it adds each year. These new curriculums plus polls suggesting that over 60% of Americans favor secular teaching about the Bible suggest that a Miss Kendrick may soon be talking about Matthew in a school near you.

To some, this idea seems retrograde. Citing a series of Supreme Court decisions culminating in 1963's Abington Township School District v. Schempp, which removed prayer and devotion from the classroom, the skeptics ask whether it is safe to bring back the source of all that sectarianism. But a new, post-Schempp coalition insists it is essential to do so. It argues that teaching the Bible in schools--as an object of study, not God's received word--is eminently constitutional. The Bible so pervades Western culture, it says, that it's hard to call anyone educated who hasn't at least given thought to its key passages. Finally, it claims that the current civic climate makes it a "now more than ever" proposition. Says Stephen Prothero, chair of the Boston University religion department, whose new book, Religious Literacy (Harper SanFrancisco), presents a compelling argument for Bible-literacy courses: "In the late '70s, [students] knew nothing about religion, and it didn't matter. But then religion rushed into the public square. What purpose could it possibly serve for citizens to be ignorant of all that?" The "new consensus" for secular Bible study argues that knowledge of it is essential to being a full-fledged, well-rounded citizen.

He concludes:

Oh yes, there should be one faith test. Faith in our country. Sure, there will be bumps along the way. But in the end, what is required in teaching about the Bible in our public schools is patriotism: a belief that we live in a nation that understands the wisdom of its Constitution clearly enough to allow the most important book in its history to remain vibrantly accessible for everyone.

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Bible Road
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Now on sale.Here's a description: Over the last 25 years while driving through 49 states, Sam Fentress encountered thousands of religious signs along America's highways, city streets and country roads. With over 150 images from every region of the country, Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape is his photographic chronicle of what he discovered on beauty salon windows, highway pylons, silos and burger joint marquees. Aware that photographers Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, and others had only partially documented the subject, Fentress embarked on this remarkable and singular typology of roadside evangelism in America.

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Obama: The Joshua of His Generation?
Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Joshua is one of the great under-heralded leaders of the Bible, squeezed between Moses and David, the two monoliths. Maybe my favorite story from his life comes before he inherits the leadership mantle from Moses when he's one of the spies sent to check out the Promised Land and, along with Caleb, reports back that it can be taken. The others, of course, say the place is filled with giants who are too powerful. For that Joshua finds himself winning the Hebrew Idol competition. The prize: Leadership of the troops and his profile on the logo of the Israel Tourism Authority.

I grew to love Joshua even more when I was in a helicopter over Jerusalem at the start of WHERE GOD WAS BORN. [To read an exclusive excerpt of this chapter of my book, click here.) My favorite moment in the story of the Conquest occurs at the end, when Joshua gathers the Israelites together to read them the Law of Moses -- men, women, and children. As Yaya, the general I recruited to help me analyze Joshua's military tactics, explained, "Women only got the right to vote 100 years ago, and then only in certain places. This was 3,000 years ago. That's why the Bible survives. Its values are universal."

How interesting, in this context, to see Barack Obama compare himself not to Moses, but to Joshua this week in Selma:

You know, several weeks ago, after I had announced that I was running for the Presidency of the United States, I stood in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois; where Abraham Lincoln delivered his speech declaring, drawing in scripture, that a house divided against itself could not stand.

And I stood and I announced that I was running for the presidency. And there were a lot of commentators, as they are prone to do, who questioned the audacity of a young man like myself, haven't been in Washington too long.

And I acknowledge that there is a certain presumptuousness about this.

But I got a letter from a friend of some of yours named Reverend Otis Moss Jr. in Cleveland, and his son, Otis Moss III is the Pastor at my church and I must send greetings from Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. but I got a letter giving me encouragement and saying how proud he was that I had announced and encouraging me to stay true to my ideals and my values and not to be fearful.

And he said, if there's some folks out there who are questioning whether or not you should run, just tell them to look at the story of Joshua because you're part of the Joshua generation.

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Harvard Snubs God
Sunday, January 7, 2007

My wife, it must be said, is not exactly a reader of Feiler Faster. But she is a contributor! She rolled over in bed last night, while reading the Harvard alumni magazine (insert joke here), and announced she had a great thing for me to blog about: Harvard, as part of curriculum overhaul, would require all students to take a course in religion -- one of five required areas of study. Here's a graf from a piece in the Boston Globe that revealed the plan last October:

Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending.

The surprisingly bold recommendations come after years of rancorous internal debate over what courses should be required of all Harvard students. The current core curriculum has been criticized for focusing on narrow academic questions rather than real-world issues students could likely confront beyond the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Square.

The report calls for Harvard to require students to take a course in "reason and faith," which could include classes on topics such as religion and democracy, Charles Darwin or a current course called "Why Americans Love God and Europeans Don't."

"Harvard is no longer an institution with a religious mission, but religion is a fact that Harvard's graduates will confront in their lives," the report says, noting 94 percent of incoming students report discussing religion and 71 percent attend services.

Sitting down tonight to write about this plan, which obviously was news when the new alumni magazine went to bed, I happened upon this article from CNN.com, dated December 14:

Harvard University said Wednesday it had dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all undergraduates to study religion as part of the biggest overhaul of its curriculum in three decades.

Efforts to revamp Harvard's curriculum, which has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, have been in the works for three years. A proposal for a "reason and faith" course requirement, which would have set Harvard apart from many other universities and made it unique among its peers in the elite Ivy League, was unveiled in a preliminary report in October.

"We have removed 'reason and faith' as a distinct category," a faculty task force said in a revised report, excepts of which were obtained by Reuters. "Courses dealing with religion -- both those examining normative reasoning in a religious context and those engaging in a descriptive examination of the roles that religion plays today and has historically played -- can be readily accommodated in other categories," it said.

Talk about forgetting your roots! One could hardly overemphasize the centrality that religion played in Harvard's founding, curriculum, education, and culture for it's first 200 plus years. Until the 1820's, the commencement speech at Harvard was given in Hebrew -- as it was considered the original language of humankind and the standard of the educated person. Also, religion clearly is the dominant issue of our time, and requiring more students to confront it in an academic way, particularly in the moment in their lives when they are most likely to be confronting it in a personal way, seems laudable. Also, the trendsetting power that Harvard would have to force others to

Having said that, and not being privvy to the internal deliberations, my first reaction is that religion need not be isolated from other large blocks -- social science, liberal arts, history, art, literature -- all of which overlap the study of religion. I mean doesn't religion come up in a lot of classes in the history of Western civilization, the history of Eastern civilization, the art of the Middle Ages, the literature of anywhere, even the history of science? God ought to be in a lot of classes at Harvard. Proposing that he have his own requirement, suggests a greater problem with how universities view the world.

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Catholics Top Congress
Thursday, January 4, 2007

It says something powerful about American Protestantism these days that its fiercest members are more concerned about one Muslim in Congress than 155 Catholics. I've been re-reading the history of religion in America for my new book, and for most of our history, news that the TOP DENOMINATION in Congress was Catholicism would have meant marching in the streets. On swearing-in day, here's the breakdown (via CNN):

Roman Catholics are the largest single U.S. religious denomination among members of the new U.S. Congress which also includes two Buddhists and a Muslim.A survey published by Americans for Religious Liberty finds Baptists the second most common faith, followed by Methodists, Presbyterians and Jews.

The breakdown for the 535 members of the 110th Congress being sworn in Thursday: Catholic 155; Baptist 67; Methodist 61; Presbyterian 44; Jewish 43; Episcopal 37; Protestant nondenominational 26; Christian nondenominational 18; Lutheran 17; Mormon 15; United Church of Christ 7.Eastern Orthodox 5; Christian Science 5; Assemblies of God 4; Unitarian Universalist 2; African Methodist Episcopal 2; Buddhists 2; Evangelical 2; Seventh Day Adventists 2; Christian Reformed 2; Disciples of Christ 2; Church of Christ 2; Congregational
Baptist 1; Anglican 1.Reorganized Mormon 1; Quaker 1; Church of God 1; Muslim 1; Evangelical Lutheran 1; Church of the Nazarene 1; Evangelical Methodist 1.

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Posted by B Feiler at 12:24 PM 0 comments

The End of Fundamentalism?

Andrew Sullivan has what is, in my mind, the defining blog covering politics and religion. His mix of short squibs and longer, more thoughtful posts, gets the mix almost exactly right, in my opinion. I disagree with lots of what he says, for sure, but I enjoying seeing how his mind works. As he has written about there, and elsewhere, for months, his new book explores the role of humility in religion, and especially in dealing with God. This is a big theme of mine in Where God Was Born. Most people take confidence from the Bible; I believe in its very narrative, especially the way God continues to shift his allegiance from first sons to second sons, from king to prophet, from Israelite to non-Israelite, the Bible is sending a message that humility must be part of our relationship with God.

Andrew has just posted a new piece arguing that 2006 was the year of humility in religion. Here are two key grafs:

There was the strain of Islamic Wahhabism incubated in Saudi Arabia, exported to Afghanistan and wreaking havoc in Iraq. There was Shi'ite theocracy, centered in Tehran, made more terrifying by the apocalyptic worldview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the West, the dominant form of Christianity was Fundamentalist Protestantism, gaining new converts and, fused with the Republican Party, flexing powerful political muscles. And in the Vatican, the conservatism of John Paul II found its natural successor in the austere and more thoroughgoing orthodoxy of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. There seemed no stopping this cultural surge, just various attempts to adjust to it, restrain it from violence and temper its extremes.

And then in 2006, there was an unmistakable pause, a moment of self-examination, even the hint of a great humbling. The most absolutist visionaries found a limit to their certitude. Benedict XVI went in a matter of months from proclaiming an irreducible gulf between Christianity and Islam to visiting a mosque in Turkey with white slippers on his feet. He publicly called for Turkey, a secular state but a Muslim country, to be integrated into the European Union. In the U.S., the religious right saw its most enthusiastic repre sentative in the Senate, Rick Santorum, go down to defeat by a crushing 18 points. For the first time, a state constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage failed — in Arizona. State initiatives for embryonic-stem-cell research became a wedge issue for ... Democrats. Religion finally cut both ways in democratic discourse. For the first time since the evangelical revival began in the 1980s, too much rigidity began to cost politicians votes rather than win them more.

If only this were so. I disagree that fundamentalism was the "dominant" brand of Protestantism. It's by far the minority. The Shia revolution in Iran was in 1979 and has been showing many, many signs of weakening in recent years, despite the political rise of the new president. His evidence of a turnaround in 2006 are more persuasive, but I think in retrospect will be tied to the overreach of the Iraq War, which, as I write in my book, was more tied to religion than anyone ever admitted. If anything, I can't help wondering if this "turning point" is more associated with the publication of his book. Its reaction in conservative quarters might be evidence against him, however.

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Quote of the Day
Thursday, December 28, 2006

From an occasional series: Things I stumbled upon while doing research on my new book.

The question as to the use of the Bible in modern culture stands as a perplexing enigma troubling multitudes of minds. As modern man walks through the pages of this sacred book he is constantly hindered by numerous obstacles standing in his path. He comes to see that the science of the Bible is quite contrary to the science that he has learned in school. He is unable to find the sun standing still in his modern astronomy. His knowledge of biology will not permit him to conceive of saints long deceased arising from their graves. His knowledge of modern medicine causes him to look with disdain on the belief that epilepsy, deafness, blindness and insanity result from the visitation of demons.

Yet he finds each of these unscientific views in the Bible. Here is the practical difficulty that has confused the minds of many educated people in using the sacred Book. Some have tried to solve this problem by seeing the old Book, "as an inferior record produced by an inferior race." Others have attempted to solve this problem by avoiding many areas of the Scripture altogether. Still others have tried to solve the problem by discarding the entire Book. But these solutions are far to evanescent for the person who wishes to think wisely about religion. He comes to see that the influence of the Bible is so embedded in the fibre of Western Culture that to remove it would mean a removal of much of our intellectual heritage.
-- Martin Luther King, from an essay "How to Use the Bible in Modern Theological Construction," 1949

Read on to find out how he solves his dilemma.

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Take Back the Bible
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

I used to think of Dennis Prager as a thoughtful spokesperson on religious ideas in America. But all the bile he received last week for suggesting that swearing in on the Koran was anti-American must have gone to his head. Now he's after more publicity, with a new rant that says the Culture Wars come down to believing in the "divinity" of the Five Books.

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? ("Divinity" does not necessarily mean "literalism.")

I do not ask this about "the Bible" as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But "Bible-believing" Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

The piece ends: "This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about."

But liberals do not universally believe the Bible should be "dethroned." That task was already handled by the Founders. In fact, as I have tried to say as widely and as loudly as possible, the Bible is not filled with talking points of the Religious Right. Liberals can, should, and increasingly are using it to support their causes as well.

Take Back the Bible. Now.

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People of the Book
Monday, December 25, 2006

George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) about the recent controversy surrounding Congressman Virgil Goode's assertion that if tight immigration policies were not adopted, America would be overrun with Muslims. Graham's answer was a beauty:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to a domestic issue, Senator Graham. A Republican congressman from Virginia this week, Virgil Goode of Virginia, raised a lot of controversy with a letter he wrote in response to the idea that the newly elected Democrat from Minnesota, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, was going to take the oath, the ceremonial oath, on the Koran. He wrote to his constituents saying -- "If American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

Now, Democrats have risen up and said that Republicans ought to denounce Congressman Goode. Do you find anything wrong with what he said, and will you denounce him?

GRAHAM: I don't think that's the appropriate line for a congressman to take when it comes time for another congressman to take the oath. Why would you swear allegiance to a document outside your faith? In our legal system, people can take the oath in a variety of ways. Religious diversity is a strength, not a weakness in this country. We need immigration reform, but not for the reasons that Mr. Goode cited. What would happen in this country if a Christian were elected in Lebanon and he had to swear allegiance to the Koran when it came time for them to take office? There would be an outcry in this country.

So I embrace religious diversity. I welcome this new member of Congress. I'm glad he's swearing allegiance to a document that is consistent with his faith. And what I would like America to do in 2007 is understand that the war on terror is about intolerance, that Syria is a dictatorship that has no interest in seeing a representative democracy in Iraq, that Iran, the president of Iran hosted a conference denying the Holocaust in December 2006, has avowed to destroy the state of Israel. We don't need to be talking to these people. We need to be standing up to their agendas and bringing them in line with the world, a world of tolerance. And Iran and Syria are not tolerant states, and the statements by Virgil Goode do not represent the best of who we are as a nation.

via TPM.

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Hallowed Ground
Thursday, December 7, 2006




More on Gettysburg later, but I thought I would post a few images from dusk on a wintry afternoon. The first image is from the center (aka "the copse") of the Union line, where the North repelled Pickett's Charge. The second is a view of Little Round Top, one of the decisive battles of the war, first as it was this week, then as it was in July 1863.



This last image is of Father William Corby, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross who is best known for giving a general absolution to around 300 Northern troops on the second day of the battle and who later went on to serve twice as President of Notre Dame.

[Click on thumbnails to enlarge. The images on the left were taken by me; the images on the right are public domain images from the era.]

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As Go the Episcopalians, So Go the Jews
Wednesday, December 6, 2006

In the 19th century, denomination after denomination of Christianity in America splintered over the issue of slavery. Now we're seeing almost exactly the same thing over homosexual rights. First, the Episcopalians. Now, the Jews.

Today, Conservative Judaism made the long-expected decision to allow gay rabbis and unions. And just as quickly, the splintering began. The NYT reports on the early skirmishes, soon to play out in every Conservative shul in the country.

But in a reflection of the divisions in the movement, the 25 rabbis on the law committee passed three conflicting legal opinions — one in favor of gay rabbis and unions, and two against.

In doing so, the committee left it up to individual synagogues to decide whether to accept or reject gay rabbis and commitment ceremonies, saying that either course is justified according to Jewish law.

“We believe in pluralism,” said Rabbi Kassel Abelson, chairman of the panel, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, at a news conference after the meeting at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York.

“We recognized from the very beginnings of the movement that no single position could speak for all members” on the law committee or in the Conservative movement.

In protest, four conservative rabbis resigned from the law committee, saying that the decision to allow gay ordination violated Jewish law, or halacha. Among them were the authors of the two legal opinions the committee adopted that opposed gay rabbis and same-sex unions.

Another step in what I have long believed will be the end of tripartite Judaism in my lifetime.

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Posted by B Feiler at 11:33 PM 0 comments

Psalm 1863
Tuesday, December 5, 2006


I'm heading to Gettysburg for a few days doing research on a new project. As part of my preparation, I just read Gabor Boritt's brilliant new analysis of Lincoln's address, The Gettysburg Gospel (it was featured on the cover of USNews last week). A resident of Gettysburg and head of the Civil War center at the college, he goes minute by minute through the events of the week, line by line through the speech, then year by year through the evolution of the speech from a minor part of Lincoln's canon, eclipsed by the Emanicipation Proclamation, to one of the ur-texts of American life. One of the connections he makes is between some of the defining lines of the Address ("Four score and seven ....," "brought forth," "new birth") and some of the wording of Psalm 90.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The opening of Psalm 90, in the King James Version:

LORD, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like rass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told. The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

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Posted by B Feiler at 4:14 PM 0 comments

'God Gap' Shrinks
Friday, December 1, 2006

Barack Obama's appearance at Rick Warren's World Aids Day event at Saddleback Church today is a milestone -- not because of what it says about Obama and his desire to be the most Bible-quoting Democrat, but because of what it says about Warren and the blurring of traditional red-blue lines among religious Americans. Warren, the author of the multi-million selling Purpose Driven Life, took heat from his fellow evangelicals for inviting someone who supports abortion rights. Warren shot back: "We do not expect all participants in the summit discussion to agree with all of our evangelical beliefs. However, the HIV/AIDS pandemic cannot be fought by evangelicals alone. It will take the cooperation of all -- government, business, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and the church."

This dust-up occurs on the heels of the earlier news this week that the president-elect of the Christian Coalition, Rev. Joel Hunter, senior pastor of a central Florida mega-church, resigned because of conflicts with the group's board over his efforts to focus the group more on environmental and anti-poverty issues. Obama's hometown paper gets the larger point just right: familiar alliances are changing, as are familiar voting patterns. Even church-going Americans are not single-issue voters.

"Large portions of the religious landscape are in motion," said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Exit polls and voting returns in the midterm elections last month showed Democrats narrowing the "God gap" with Republicans among Americans who attend church at least once a week--even though the increased support came mostly from Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant voters rather than evangelicals.

Frequent churchgoers still favored Republican over Democratic congressional candidates 55 percent to 43 percent, according to exit polls. But the 12-point difference is down considerably from a 19-point gap in 2004 and a 20-point gap in 2002.

Despite the media fixation with the "Religious Right," most American believers are moderates --and are willing to vote red or blue.

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Posted by B Feiler at 12:26 PM 1 comments

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