Countless people find Vodou meaningful as a spiritual tradition and as a source of inspiration within a white supremacist world, and yet the tradition remains largely misunderstood. Eziaku Nwokocha, author of Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States, joins us to discuss Vodou practices, especially as they relate to issues of gender, sexuality, and race. We explore how Vodou transcends gender and sexual binaries, how the gods of Vodou inhabit people’s lives and influence their decisions, and how Vodou helps Black Americans and others counter racism today. You c ..read more

(Image source: Awakening Music) A groundbreaking music video opens with a shot of a spacious, tastefully decorated living room. Sunlight streams through the windows, enveloping the white furniture and modernist décor with an ethereal quality. A wavy-haired, bespectacled, handsome man – wearing stylish jeans and a t-shirt – walks across the room. He is inspecting a roll of film. The walls of the living room are filled with pictures of natural landscapes, urban architecture, and children – the young man is a photographer. Soft and slow music plays in the background – light hand-drums and the o ..read more

(Ye with hands raised. Image source: Dimitrios Kambouris for Getty Images) “I don’t hate Jewish people,” singer and rapper Ye declared last October. Far right conservative activist David Horowitz latched onto that statement as proof that Ye was not antisemitic. Then Ye directly praised Hitler, and even the David Horowitzes of the world mostly abandoned him. Ye’s antisemitism is neither subtle nor in contention. But his somewhat contradictory statements raise questions about what antisemitism is and how it functions. Ye is probably to some degree lying, to himself and to others, when he decla ..read more

(January 2023 riots in Brazil. Image source: Sergio Lima for Getty Images) On January 8, 2023, supporters of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, rioted in the capital’s government buildings to try to retake the country and to encourage the Brazilian military to perform a coup d’etat on Bolsonaro’s behalf. The moment bared a striking resemblance to the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States, and left observers with a surreal and somber sense of déjà vu. The ideological and personality commonalities between Bolsonaro and Donald Trump are, themselves, uncanny: the two heads of ..read more

(Image source: usip.org) “Is Allah a man?” It’s a question that Lamya H (a pseudonym), author of the new memoir, Hijab Butch Blues, asked her Qur’an teacher as a six-year-old child. “In my mind, Allah is a woman, floating and ethereal in the night sky,” she writes. “Allah is not a man or a woman,” her teacher replied, giving a traditional Islamic response to such a question, before changing the subject. Years later, at age 23 in New York, Lamya was at an event for Muslims where a woman spoke about using “she/her” pronouns for God, jarring and angering others who called it disrespectful, even ..read more

(Image source: Gareth Cattermole for Getty Images) It’s 11:00pm on a Tuesday night in New Haven and I’m surrounded by over five hundred Taylor Swift fans, most of whom are screaming. Taylor herself is nowhere to be seen. Instead, an enthusiastic DJ in a knit crop top and high blonde ponytail spins Swift’s music, exclusively, from the stage. Sometimes she cuts the sound and everyone belts out the lyrics together. The fans have come from all over New England, some driving close to three hours to be here. A few got sold out of similar events in Boston, Providence, or Hartford. Most are young, u ..read more

Dear Revealer readers, In December 1999 I boarded a plane bound for Tel Aviv as reporters around the world worried that the coming New Year would herald a technological catastrophe. The impending doom, dubbed “Y2K,” was based on a concern that our computers and the systems that run on them would not be able to process a date that ends in two zeros and would, to everyone’s horror, crash at the stroke of midnight at the start of the new millennium. The internet had revolutionized the world at the end of the ‘90s, and people around the globe, now reliant on computers, panicked that no one had pro ..read more

Why do many white evangelicals, despite holding tremendous political power, feel threatened by feminism, LGBTQ progress, and movements for racial justice? Sarah Diefendorf, author of The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals, joins us to discuss how evangelicals’ anxieties shape their political involvement. We explore their image problem among younger Americans who are turned off by their reactions to societal changes, how they are recruiting new people to their churches, and how white evangelicals are responding to issues like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ equality today ..read more

(Image source: Vernon Bryant via Associated Press) The following excerpt comes from Sarah Diefendorf’s book The Holy Vote: Inequality and Anxiety Among White Evangelicals. The book explores the concerns facing White Evangelicals at a large congregation in the Pacific Northwest and how they are responding to cultural changes. This excerpt comes from the book’s first chapter, “Good and Godly in Trump’s America.” *** On January 22, 2017, the Sunday morning after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a pastor at a predominantly White evangelical megachurch in the Pacific Northwest looked o ..read more

(Women Talking movie poster) This review discusses sexual violence and trauma experienced by real women in an insular religious community in South America in the early 2000s. It is also an account of how these women and their stories are reimagined for film, a fictional narrative that considers how they respond to these events as individuals, listen to one another, and collectively determine whether it is possible to move forward with their faith intact. 1. Hayloft Assembly A self-declared act of “female imagination,” Women Talking began as a novel by Miriam Toews before it became an Oscar-w ..read more