The Revealer: A Review of Religion & Media [Resources]

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

The Revealer

The Revealer is a daily review of religion in the news and the news about religion. We’re not so much nonpartisan as polypartisan — interested in all sides, disdainful of dualistic arguments, and enamored of free speech as a first principle. We publish and link to work by people of all persuasions, religious, political, sexual, and critical. The Revealer was conceived by Jay Rosen of New York University’s Department of Journalism, and created by journalists Jeff Sharlet and Kathryn Joyce.

We begin with three basic premises: 1. Belief matters, whether or not you believe. Politics, pop culture, high art, NASCAR — everything in this world is infused with concerns about the next. As journalists, as scholars, and as ordinary folks, we cannot afford to ignore the role of religious belief in shaping our lives. 2. The press all too frequently fails to acknowledge religion, categorizing it as either innocuous spirituality or dangerous fanaticism, when more often it’s both and in between and just plain other. 3. We deserve and need better coverage of religion: sharper thinking; deeper history; thicker description; basic theology; real storytelling.
– Jeff Sharlet, 2003

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Review: Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse

A story often told of Alexander the Great, repeated in popular media from 30 Rock to Die Hard, runs that, after years of victorious campaigns, the young general surveyed “the breadth of his domain, and wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” This image of the archetypal empire-builder, petulant at the lack of further realms to subdue, has a certain attractive quality to it as a parable of the vanity of earthly power, especially given Alexander’s early death (Calvin certainly mined it for that angle). But it turns out the popular version isn’t quite accurate. In fact, as Plutarch tells it, Alexander did not cry because he had exhausted all possibilities for conquest in this world, but because his travelling companion, the Atomist philosopher Anaxarchus, had just convinced him of the existence of an infinite number of other worlds (kosmoi). “Is it not worthy of tears,” Plutarch has Alexander say, “That, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?”

Poor Alexander. But as Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s superb Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse documents, reckoning with the existence of other worlds has a way of driving folks to their wits’ end, whether they be Macedonian God-Kings, Scholastic theologians, Classical philosophers, Early Modern astronomers, or contemporary theoretical physicists.

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

A Conversation with Shannon Taggart

Garforth is a spiritualist. His religion, a product of the American nineteenth-century, holds that death is not the end of consciousness. For him, there is an eternal world of “spirit,” and certain gifted individuals, mediums, are capable of conveying messages and energy from the other side. Some can even manifest various physical substances and effects, broadly identified as “ectoplasm.” When he enters a trance, Garforth told Taggart, “You’ll see masks spilled over my face. You’ll see my hands change.” It was just how the spirits worked for him.

Taggart was skeptical. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay. Well that could mean many things,’” she said. “I didn’t go into his séance expecting anything. I got to sit in the front row, about six feet away from him.” She kept a camera on her lap.

“He was seated in front of a low red light,” she said. The room was dark, otherwise. After twenty minutes, the medium’s wife announced that spirits were going to begin working with his hands. Taggart remembered the next moment very clearly: “He just brought out his hand. What I saw, with my eyes, was this regular hand just very gently and instantly —skip gigantic.”

“I screamed out loud,” she continued. “Which is very impolite in a séance situation.”

“I had that experience of seeing that hand get large,” she explained. “I don’t know how it happened. Whether it’s a hand actually getting large in front of my face and I was creating a photograph that documented it, or whether it’s that I was tricked somehow or I had a hypnotic experience and then my camera, through its dysfunction, mimicked that experience… I mean, all of those are interesting perspectives. I love that they’re all there.” She’s been catching similarly ambiguous situations for over a decade.

Taggart grew up in Buffalo, New York. From an early age she was attracted to the nearby town of Lily Dale — a spiritualist community which has, since 1916, played host to many of the movement’s most prominent thinkers and mediums. “I was raised Catholic,” she continued. “A lot of Catholics actually go to Lily Dale for readings, because Catholic belief doesn’t dismiss what is happening in spiritualism, necessarily.”

Taggart’s cousin once attended a “message service” in Lily Dale, a public assembly where mediums provide scattered communications to a curious crowd. “You don’t know even which medium is going to be there that day,” Taggart said. “Whoever it is stands in front and they pick people out with their finger. Then they give a short message from someone who’s died.” Taggart’s cousin was picked out. The medium told her a secret, something nobody outside the family could have possibly known. At this point in the story she wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know if I want to put all the details about this in the article – if you don’t mind,” she said. “You could say it’s a secret.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

Driven by this strange incident, Taggart had a formal meeting with Lily Dale’s Board of Directors in 2001, asking to make the town the subject of a long photographic project.

 

[Jim_Smith]

http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/62014-...-afterlife.html#articles_by_subject_ectoplasm

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threa...-of-religion-media-resources.1208/#post-85387

Pierre Curie
(Nobel Prize for Physics)
According to the "Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia"...

On July 24, 1905, Pierre Curie reported to his friend Gouy: "We have had a series of séances with Eusapia Palladino at the [Society for Psychical Research]."

It was very interesting, and really the phenomena that we saw appeared inexplicable as trickery—tables raised from all four legs, movement of objects from a distance, hands that pinch or caress you, luminous apparitions. All in a [setting] prepared by us with a small number of spectators all known to us and without a possible accomplice. The only trick possible is that which could result from an extraordinary facility of the medium as a magician. But how do you explain the phenomena when one is holding her hands and feet and when the light is sufficient so that one can see everything that happens?[13]​

http://www.answers.com/topic/eusapia-palladino​

Photos of Jack Webber during a seance
http://www.survivalebooks.org/Webber/webberphotos.htm

More about Webber
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/05/medium-jack-webber.html

"Leon Isaacs, who took the photographs at Webber’s circles, used two cameras placed at different angles…shots using this two-camera technique showed the disposition of trumpets and other objects, establishing that they were not held aloft by any material agency.

Old Nordic Mediums
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/05/old-nordic-mediums.html

http://mariondampier-jeans.com/●-spiritism/personer/sven-turck/

The Danish psychic researcher and photographer Sven Türck took many photos of Jonsson's psychokinetic powers, protected against any form of cheating through strict controls in his laboratory.

The Physical Mediumship of Einer Nielsen
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/12/last-may-i-posted-some-links-to.html

"This tribute comes from a pastor of the Swedish State Church ... 'Twice I have sat in the cabinet and kept hold of the medium’s hands. The ectoplasm came directly through his clothes. One figure that of Rita, rose up from the ectoplasm grasped my arm, and we went out together to the sitters and talked with them.'"

dead link in above see here for photos:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130117041901/http://mariondampier-jeans.com/english/library/pictures/

 

[Jim_Smith]

http://breakfornews.com/offsitearch...gAmericasSecretTheocrats_byJeffreySharlet.htm

Jesus plus nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats
BY Jeffrey Sharlet

...
The Family is, in its own words, an “invisible” association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries.
...
Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family's unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation.​

...

 

[Sciborg_S_Patel]

Santa Muerte: The Enigmatic Allure of the Beautiful Girl

For some she is a savior who brings them out of lives of addiction, violence and desperation. For others she is a justification for the most inhuman acts of violence and blasphemy imaginable. Lyrics penned by the rap group La Coka Nostra for their 2012 song “The Eyes of Santa Muerte” provide a chilling sense of the contemporary environment in which Saint Death has found a home:

This is all there is now there ain’t shit left, it’s like I’m looking in the eyes of the saint of death. La Santa Muerte, these people fear me, I see murder, disease, it’s all near me…La Santa Muerte, I know you hear me, our world is fucked up you see it clearly.

Hearing the song after my experience in the county jail, the group’s lyrical celebration of Santa Muerte as the “Virgin of the incarcerated martyrs of Satan” now strikes a much stranger chord for me – a Godmother of those cast off from the safety of the status quo and an icon revered by those who seek power at any cost she is an eternal enigma, uncomfortably neutral, unquestionably powerful. Santa Muerte’s explosive growth on a global scale should be taken as a serious call for all of us to take a step back and look at the culture that is emerging around us. Amoral and unflinching, the empty eyes of the skeleton saint stare out on the pain, turmoil and confusion that ravage billions of lives around the globe. No government, religion or social organization offers a true solution to the question that Saint Death silently asks.

Moving through history, taking on the needs of those seeking her favors she shows partiality to the marginalized and dispossessed who look for salvation in her bony hands. She simply smiles at the corrupt systems and officials that justify the more malignant aspects of the Beautiful Girl’s allure and presents a Saturnine face of justice wielding a scythe and hour glass as she offers equal kindness to the judge and the condemned. For all of her complexity, perhaps a devotee from the U.S. Armed Forces put it best when he told me, ‘more than anything, in a world like this, la Nina Bonita is simple, death just makes sense.’