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The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters

The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters

by Costica Bradatan, Ed Simon
The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters
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The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters

The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters

by Costica Bradatan, Ed Simon

Overview

In the wake of the horrific 9/11 terrorist attacks we, as an increasingly secular nation, were reminded that religion is, for good and bad, still significant in the modern world. Alongside this new awareness, religion reporters adopted the tools of so-called New Journalists, reporters of the 1960s and '70s like Truman Capote and Joan Didion who inserted themselves into the stories they covered while borrowing the narrative tool kit of fiction to avail themselves of a deeper truth.

At the turn of the millennium, this personal, subjective, voice-driven New Religion Journalism was employed by young writers, willing to scrutinize questions of faith and doubt while taking God-talk seriously. Articles emerged from such journalists as Kelly Baker, Ann Neumann, Patrick Blanchfield, Jeff Kripal, and Meghan O'Gieblyn, characterized by their brash, innovative, daring, and stylistically sophisticated writing and an unprecedented willingness to detail their own interaction with faith (or their lack thereof).

The God Beat brings together some of the finest and most representative samples of this emerging genre. By curating and presenting them as part of a meaningful trend, this compellingly edited collection helps us understand how we talk about God in public spaces—and why it matters—in a whole new way.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781506465777
Publisher: 1517 Media
Publication date: 06/08/2021
Pages: 225
Sales rank: 1,129,702
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Costica Bradatan is religion editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, and an Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He resides in Lubbock, Texas.


Ed Simon holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University. He is a staff writer for The Millions, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Poetry, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Salon, Lit Hub, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Religion Dispatches, Newsweek, Killing the Buddha, The Revealer, The Public Domain Review, JSTOR Daily, Tablet, History News Network, Atlas Obscura, Aeon, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among several others. He is also the author of several books, including America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion; Furnace of This World, or, 36 Observations about Goodness; and Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism, and is the co-editor of The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part I Personal Agon: Experience & Identity

Introduction 7

1 Briallen Hopper, "Learning to Write about Religion" 11

2 Nat Case, "In Praise of Gods That Don't Exist" 23

3 Tara Isabella Burton, "What Is a Cult?" 31

4 Sands Hall, "Light a Candle" 43

5 Brook Wilensky-Lanford, "How to Talk to 'Nones' and Influence People" 55

6 Burke Gerstenschlager, "The Lonely Boy" 69

7 Patrick Blanchfield, "Soul Murder" 73

Part II Political Agon: Politics & Society

Introduction 87

8 Simon Critchley, "Why I Love Mormonism" 91

9 Emma Green, "Will Anyone Remember Eleven Dead Jews?" 103

10 Nathan Schneider, "No Revolution without Religion" 113

11 Kaya Oakes, "Forgiveness in the Epoch of Me Too" 121

12 Sam Washington, "A Welcoming Church No More" 131

13 Joel Looper, "How Would Bonhoeffer Vote?" 139

14 Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, "Zen and the Art of a Higher Education" 147

Part III Natural Agon: Science & Technology

Introduction 159

15 Peter Harrison, "Why Religion Is Not Going Away and Science Will Not Destroy It" 163

16 Leigh Eric Schmidt, "Monuments to Unbelief" 169

17 Erik Davis, "Amma's Cosmic Squeeze" 181

18 Daniel José Camacho, "On the Threshing Floor" 195

19 Meghan O'Gieblyn, "Fake Meat" 205

20 Ann Neumann, "Opioids: A Crisis of Misplaced Morality" 211

Part IV Divine Agon: Theology & Philosophy

Introduction 225

21 David Bentley Hart, "Christ's Rabble" 229

22 Marcus Rediker, "The Forgotten Prophet" 241

23 Jim Hinch, "Evangelicals Are Losing the Battle for the Bible. And They're Just Fine with That." 253

24 Daisy Vargas, "La Llorona Visits the American Academy of Religion" 269

25 Faisal Devji, "Against Muslim Unity" 277

26 Shira Telushkin, "Their Bloods Cry Out from the Ground" 289

Contributors 297

Permissions 303

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