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JOHN MODERN |
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Dear Pastor Rex: I really have enjoyed hearing you on television. I can
never thank the Lord enough for what He has done for me through your
ministry.
When I first began to listen to your services on TV, my husband
would go outside and not come back in until it was over, but I just kept
on turning you on every Sunday morning. After a few Sundays went by,
he would come through the room a few times while the program was on.
Then one Sunday morning, he turned on the TV and said to me,
"Aren't you going to listen to Rex this morning?" I answered him, "I sure
am." So he sat down and listened to the singing and your sermon. Then
one Sunday when you asked all who wanted to be prayed for to come up
and you would pray for them, he stood up by his chair and said, I want
you to pray for me."
I was so happy I cried. He was just fine for two months, then he
dropped dead with a heart attack.
So that is why I am so glad to have you for my TV pastor. I shall always
be so very grateful for you and the Cathedral of Tomorrow. I know
that God is with me and will never let me down.
—Mrs. F.C., California
You Are Loved
Rex Humbard pitched his tent just outside Akron, Ohio during his 1952 summer
"Gospel Big Top" tour. Humbard, an ordained Pentecostal minister, heralded
from Little Rock, Arkansas and had grown up in a traveling gospel ministry
led by his parents. When Humbard arrived in this midwestern industrial
hub he was the patriarch of his own traveling music ministry (with his wife,
Maude Aimee, and eventually with his children, Rex Jr., Don, Elizabeth, and
Charles). During his summer Akron stint, Humbard took a trip downtown. As
Humbard recalled, he was walking down the street one night when he noticed
a crowd gathered outside a department store window. He had a revelation right
then and there, an insight into the future of crowds, his destiny, and a world
increasingly tied to screens. God, claimed Humbard, had given us the gift of
television. "Even more remarkable [than] the TV medium's unique person-toperson
intimacy [was] the undeniable power of the picture tube [. . .] to hold
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Polymer Love
on to the newly attracted attention of the listener until he begins to realize in
his mind and heart the truth of what he is hearing."
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LUCINDA RAMBERG |
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Long before History of Sexuality, Volume I, Foucault suggested, in
praise of Georges Bataille, that discourse on sexuality had been shaped
to fit a space left by the death of God [. . . .] If queer theory analyzes the
discourses that swelled to fill the empty throne room of God, how could
it not be troubled by lingering words about that old God? [. . .] Queer religion
will continue to make trouble for queer theory so long as religion
contains the dangerous memory of older theologies, by which I mean,
older theories of how to make sex out of bodies and pleasures.
—Mark Jordan
How are we to think about the relationship between religion and sex as categories
of knowledge? How have they and how do they organize our ideas
about what bodily enactments can do or mean? Do we consider religious and
sexual expressions to be discrete, indiscrete, or interpenetrating domains of
human activity? In the formulation offered above by historian of Christianity
Mark Jordan, theologies are theories of "how to make sex out of bodies
and pleasures." The idea that theology articulates sex confounds our usual
habits of thought. Typically we think of religion and sex as discreet domains
sequestered respectively within houses of the gods and the bedrooms of the
world. How have we come to take this organization of ecstasies for granted?
As a concept and as a practice, theogamy, marriage of or between the gods,
is useful to think about in relation to these questions.
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KATHERINE LEMONS |
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Years into my research on Muslim divorce in India, and years into our
friendship, I finally asked Nadia, a Muslim woman in her early 30s, how
her divorce had been carried out. She told me that her husband had said
"talaq, talaq, talaq" to her in the presence of several members of their family.
The utterance, which effectively divorced the couple, followed a set of long
negotiations between the families about where she would live, who would
retain custody of their son, and who would be financially responsible for her
and her son after the split. Some of these discussions were mediated by the
imam from the mosque they attended in their Old Delhi neighborhood, but
most were kept within the family. The utterance "talaq, talaq, talaq" was
the culmination of a process of undoing their marriage and setting up the
conditions of their divorce; in this sense the couple, and their families, had
been undergoing divorce for some time and the utterance merely marked
the end of this process. No state apparatus was involved.
According to the Hanafi legal tradition of Sunni Islam, the utterance "talaq,
talaq, talaq" is performative: in saying these words to his wife, a Muslim
husband divorces her, much like Austin's classic example of "I do" (take
you to be my wife) in the wedding ceremony. This form of divorce, which
is one among the several that are available to Sunni husbands and wives, is
called talaq-ul-ba'in [irrevocable divorce]. Talaq-ul-ba'in can only be given
by a husband unless a couple have explicitly stated in the marriage contract
that the wife has the right to unilateral divorce. According to Hanafi jurisprudence,
talaq-ul-ba'in is a divorce "given in violation of the prescribed
procedure," and most Islamic legal scholars and practitioners consider it to
be legal but reprehensible. This is because unlike other forms of unilateral
divorce, which allow for reconciliation between spouses, talaq-ul-ba'in is
irrevocable. In situations like Nadia's, talaq-ul-ba'in is a useful instrument to
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Paying for Kinship
finalize a divorce to which all parties agree without having to go through the
courts as the process is extra-judicial: it does not require legal authorization,
religious or secular.
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PETER COVIELLO |
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In the March issue of its 1855 run, Putnam's Monthly led with an editorial. A
newish arrival on the tumultuous scene of mid-century New York periodical
culture, Putnam's was a rival to established venues like Harper's, and had
sought to distinguish itself in the literary marketplace not least through its
trumpeted commitment to a certain style of American progressivism: to explicitly American content—American themes, American authors—and also,
increasingly, to the great progressive cause of anti-slavery. Only a year and
a half before, none other than Herman Melville had published "Bartleby" in
two installments in Putnam's; later in 1855, over three issues, Putnam's would
run Melville's incendiary parable of slavery and revolt, "Benito Cereno."
No surprise, then, that the editorial from the March 1855 number took as
its subject and theme a piece of homegrown Americana. It was entitled,
simply, "The Mormons."
The text of the editorial itself is curious. Though its occasion is the pending
Mormon petition for statehood, and though it does indeed expend some
rhetorical energy specifying for its readers some of the vagaries of Mormon
theology—the Mormon belief in the protodivinity of humankind, say; or the
Mormon conviction that God is not merely spirit but embodied, has "limbs
and local habitation"—nevertheless what the editorial amounts to finally is
neither legal disquisition nor metaphysical inquiry. Or not exactly. We are
offered instead an ardent rhapsody on the saving human force of something
that is reducible neither to religion nor to law, though the editorial will insist
that this force, the preservative of "everything that is pure and sacred" in the
species, underwrites both. This force, this preservative, Putnam's informs its
readers, is monogamy.
At a moment that witnessed the high flower of what has been called a "culture
of sentiment," with its relentless aggrandizement of the private nuclear
family as the wellspring of all that was redeeming in a world corrupted by the
amorality of market capital, this editorial was, perhaps, unremarkable. But
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Plural
listen to the terms in which that rhapsody unfolds: "Monogamy is sanctioned
by our religion," we are told, "but goes beyond our religion [. . . .] It is one
of the elementary distinctions—historical and actual—between European
and Asiatic humanity [. . . .] It is one of the pre-existing conditions of our
existence as civilized white men [. . . .] Strike it out, and you destroy our very
being; and when we say our, we mean our race—a race which has its great and
broad destiny, a solemn aim in the great career of civilization, with which
none of us has any right to trifle."
Religion and beyond religion: these are the coordinates within which the
editorial moves. Notably, what italicizes the editorialist's disgust is not
Mormon theology, or not quite. Nor is it precisely the mere fact of Mormon
erotic errancy, though this is indeed the occasion for an especially fulsome
performance of horror. Rather, because of their derangements of normative
intimacy, which are themselves wholly entangled with a set of devotional
practices the devious Mormon leadership has conspired to counterfeit as
"religion," the Mormons figure here as race-traitors. Their very existence,
in the progressive American nineteenth century, appears as a dire sort of
scandal for Putnam's. They are threats from within, a population fallen away
from the civilizing destiny of whiteness, and so they pose a danger to nothing
less than the flourishing of life, of liberty, of imperial nationality.
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