Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

What would a movement against mass incarceration be able to accomplish with the support of the country’s largest religious denomination?

Upon recognizing the depth of the problem that mass incarceration poses, it may be tempting for many whites, especially those used to positions of influence and authority, to leap into devising solutions. Reading Michelle Alexander’s book certainly brings to mind a litany of anathemas—for instance, discriminatory policing, the senseless drug war, wildly excessive sentencing laws, the broad discretion afforded to prosecutors, the perverse incentives of the private prison industry and chronic underinvestment in communities of color. But the authors of The Scandal of White Complicity do not venture far into policy proposals or political strategizing. Nor do they allude to the many biblical passages about freeing captives that might tempt one to play the liberator.

What they offer instead is a call to humility, to accountability to people of color, to solidarity. The task they set for white Americans is to organize themselves and each other as allies, and to follow the lead of their neighbors of color who are already fighting the battle against the new Jim Crow every day.

Read the rest at America.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

The entire social fabric of Afghani society has been torn apart as a result of, first the war between the United States and the Soviet Union, between 1979 and 1989, and then the U.S. war against the Taliban and now al-Qaeda. There are civilian casualties reported almost every day—the vast majority of whom are women, children, and the elderly—as a result of U.S. bombs and drones. This violence exceeds and parallels the violence unleashed by the Taliban on the Afghanis.? We read about these casualties in the media, but I do not see any mobilization by major U.S. feminist organizations to demand an end to this calamity. This silence stands in sharp contrast to the vast public campaign organized by the Feminist Majority in the late 1990s to oust the Taliban. I am often asked by American feminists what they can do to help Afghan women. My simple and short answer is: first, convince your government to stop bombing them, and second urge the US government to help create the conditions for a?political—and not a military—solution to the impasse in Afghanistan. It is the condition of destitution and constant war that has driven Pakistanis and Afghans to join the Taliban (coupled with the opportunistic machinations of their own governments). Perhaps it is time to asses whether diverting the U.S. military aid toward more constructive and systemic projects of economic and political reform might yield different results.

Mahmood also discusses her debt to Talal Asad, whom I interviewed, also for The Immanent Frame, earlier this month.

Here’s a bit of our conversation:

NS: Do you feel some responsibility to confront what Oprah represents, in the form of an active, engaged social critique?

KL: It is incredibly important that we—women, men, believers, heathens, citizens—think, and think critically, about the female complaint, especially as it takes this specific form in the public sphere. Oprah is not just Oprah—she represents what has come to be a naturalized logic for women’s suffering. I would be lying if I didn’t say that writing this book was, for me, an act of feminism. But I would say that it is more important to me that it be understood as an act of criticism connected to the deep tissue of our national political and economic imaginary. So yes, this is an act of social critique. For as much as the solo striving hungry female is the object here, it is the silence of her sociality—all the while making commodity of her social receipt and struggle—that disturbs me. On her message boards, everyone testifies, but they don’t form social communities, social insurrection, or social protest. The social is incredibly absent from Oprah, even as she praises the idea of girlfriends, of groups, of clubs. The social is a rhetorical formulation leaving women exposed in their extremity without any public held accountable.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

He brought back a sack full of Afghan scarves, and offered me my pick of them. The one I chose, the yellow one, is what I’m wearing now. What the picture doesn’t show, but which was the first thing I noticed when I put it on, is the smell. One scarf smells strongly; the smell of Eric’s sack of them is tremendous. He didn’t notice it when he was in Kabul, because everything smells this way there. With my scarf on, I’m carrying that city with me today, into the new year. I’m breathing the city that my country has occupied for nearly a decade now.

I can try to describe it, but I’ll never succeed. It’s a bit like the smell of a wood fire, but there’s much more too. There’s also the trace of burning trash, which people use to supplement their insufficient wood and coal, for heat and cooking. There’s smog in it too, from a city where people can’t afford anything but the lowest-grade gasoline in cars, and where the snow-capped mountains all around trap it in. There’s also dust, because the cars are driving over mostly unpaved roads. And there’s the hint of unnamable filth, from the scattered sewers that run along the roads, open to the air. This would be just unsanitary in a city of thousands. But Kabul has swelled to four million, thanks to impoverished refugees pouring in from the war-ravaged countryside, their ancestral land lost and trading good, clean air for what I’m smelling now.

In late 2001, I met a woman who worked at the Pentagon. When she learned I had been protesting the invasion, she argued with me. She said, as we parted, that someday I’d understand that this was right. I’d get over it. Well, I still don’t. I haven’t.

The year to come will only really be new if we make it that way. Let our mere prayers for peace be made acceptable by our actions, by our willingness to shed the pride and importunity that keeps us trying to have our way with drone strikes and night raids. They will fail. There is no victory from making widows and orphans. In a new year made truly new, we will no longer accept the waste and horror of war as the policy of normalcy. We will stop trying to take what isn’t ours. We will starve the bottomless hunger for revenge, and sit down with our enemies, and eat together.

Let God be the first to know, and Congress second: it’s a new year. War, the demon-mother of poverty, is no good in our sight, and we are the ones who can stop it. This year, may the four million human beings in Kabul breathe clean air again. Amen; let this be done.

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.

Her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), reflects on the past decade’s saga of needless war, photographed—even fetishized—torture, and routine horror. It treats these practices as issuing from a philosophical choice, one which considers certain human beings expendable and unworthy of being grieved. The concluding chapter confronts the paradoxical nature of any call for nonviolent resistance—paradoxical because the very identities that we claim and resist on behalf of were themselves formed by violence in the past. Butler does not mistake nonviolence for passivity, as so many critics do. At its best, she writes, nonviolent resistance becomes a “carefully crafted ‘fuck you,’” tougher to answer than a Howitzer.

She eloquently insists that thinking matters, that politics cannot be reduced to technocratic efficacy, and that thinking means more than thinking alone:

Guernica: What can philosophy, which so often looks like a kind of solitary heroism, offer against the military-industrial complexes and the cowboy self-image that keep driving us into wars? At what register can philosophy make a difference?

Judith Butler: Let’s remember that the so-called military-industrial complex has a philosophy, even if it is not readily published in journals. The contemporary cowboy also has, or exemplifies, a certain philosophical vision of power, masculinity, impermeability, and domination. So the question is how philosophy takes form as an embodied practice. Any action that is driven by principles, norms, or ideals is philosophically informed. So we might consider: what practices embody interdependency and equality in ways that might mitigate the practice of war waging? My wager is that there are many.

Read the rest of the interview at Guernica.

That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be nice. All we’d have to do is follow the correct kernel of our religions and we’d be golden forever, end of story. So much of the interesting, complex, and messy stuff that makes learning about religions and about people so engrossing might peel away in the name of unity. And often, when such universal perennialism gets wheeled out, it turns out to be in fact a surreptitious assertion of a particular tradition, to which all the others become subservient.

But when Karen Armstrong, the British dean of comparative-religion-for-the-people, claims that all religions are really about compassion, when she goes on to promulgate a “Charter for Compassion,” and when TED throws its connections and tech savvy behind her, it’s hard to be too much of a curmudgeon. Sure, such things have come and gone again and again in history—how often have we heard calls for World Peace in Our Time?—but no less are we probably still responsible for giving it another go. And if a bit of fascinating religious mayhem has to be quieted in the process, so be it. There will still be science fiction.

That said, I’m glad to have had the chance to interview Karen Armstrong at The Immanent Frame. What she proposes is certainly a brave effort to mobilize her years of studying and writing into action, into a movement. It also represents an important example of activism and organizing from precisely the spiritual-but-not-religious vantage point that is supposedly able to do neither.

NS: Do you anticipate that the Charter will eventually translate into meaningful social change?

KA: All religious teaching must issue in practical action. This is something that has become very clear to me during the last twenty years, which I have devoted to the study of world religions. The doctrines and stories of faith make no sense at all unless they are translated into action. This is one of the essential themes of my latest book, The Case for God, which was being written at the same time as we were composing the Charter. We were all convinced that somehow the Charter must be a call to action. There was no point in us all embracing one another on the day of the launch if there would be no practical follow up. We need compassion—the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to “experience with” the other—in politics, social policy, finance, education, and media. Unless we can learn to treat all nations and all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we are unlikely, in these days of global terror, to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

NS: Some have criticized these spiritual tendencies as overly individualistic and even anti-political—Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, for instance. How does your Age of Spirit deal with what Bellah and his co-authors were concerned about: a retreat from the political and social sphere?

HC: I don’t think that spirituality is necessarily a retreat from social life. It can be. Of course, orthodox religiosity can be as well, and it is for a lot of people. I don’t think there’s much to be lost or gained there. The question now is how spirituality is going to be institutionalized to make it more socially and politically effective. It’s at a formative stage now, and you can see it developing. I have a section in the book on the Sant’Egidio community, which is one of my favorite examples. I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they’re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they’re a model, and they’re not the only one.

It’s a controversial claim, one that has been interesting me more and more lately.