On Being Blog

Dinner is served at the Cathedral Kitchen soup kitchen which serves 300 to 600 meals a day, six days a week, to the needy and hungry in Camden, New Jersey. The U.S. Census Bureau cites Camden as the most impoverished city in the United States with a 19 percent unemployment rate. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

In the most recent presidential debates, candidates have addressed issues ranging from foreign policy to domestic spending, with little mention of religion. Are the candidates failing to make room in public discussion for morality and values among weighty political issues?

Joanna Brooks thinks so. Speaking with her shortly before the Republican National Convention (audio, to the right), Krista cites Ms. Brooks' Religion Dispatches article Romney: “A Life Balanced Between Fear and Greed”?:

"I’m waiting for the story that transcends the flat ethnicity paradigm and gets the deeper and more persistent question of religion and moral bearings:

How does the most religiously devout candidate in recent memory reconcile a life of religious commitment with a values-neutral approach to work, livelihood, and the marketplace?

Why does religion play an outsized role in the politics of gay marriage and contraception but apparently has no say when it comes to big-ticket items like national spending and economic policy?"

Ms. Brooks responds by expanding her thoughts on faith in public life, how it has been used inappropriately instead of in service to many of our country's most vulnerable:

"In the public sphere religion has been weaponized around a very few political issues. Most of which have to do with very private intense personal choices."

An Afghan boy stands inside an old Jewish synagogue undergoing renovation in the old part of Herat city northeast of Kabul. (Photo by Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images)

The road between the Afghani cities of Ghazni and Bamiyan is fraught with danger. The Kabul-Kandahar highway that makes up most of the journey was improved and reopened in 2003, but in the last several years travelers on this road have been targets for Taliban, insurgents, and bandits of all stripes. A recent article in Afghanistan Today reports that hundreds of people are kidnapped and attacked on this route every year.

The road was also dangerous, so it seems, in the Middle Ages. A cache of Jewish documents was recently discovered in Afghanistan, and among its contents is a trader's letter written in Judeo-Persian; like Yiddish, this Jewish language sounds similar to the standard Persian spoken in Iran and Afghanistan today, but is written in the Hebrew script. In the still-unpublished letter, the author, a trader in Ghazni, complains to his brother that he is far from his wife and family in Bamiyan. Despite the relative closeness of the two cities, for the author a journey was out of the question. "I am not a man of traveling and absence from home," he writes, expressing his grief at the absence of his loved one: "My heart is occupied with her, for I know she is in distress."

This trader's letter is just one of the documents that have the potential to shed new light on the history of medieval Afghanistan and its Jewish community. The documents include not only letters, but contracts, poetry, theology, biblical interpretation, and more. While the vast majority of the documents are as yet unavailable to scholars, experts who have seen the texts, such as Shaul Shaked of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, are certain that the documents can be dated between the ninth and the early thirteenth century, when the Mongol invasion devastated the region's Jewish communities.

An Afghan man rides his bicycle on the Kabul-Kandahar highway on the outskirts of Kabul (photo by Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images).

Most scholars agree that the history of the Afghani Jewish community goes back to the seventh or eighth centuries. Beginning as a community of traders, like our letter writer, who traveled as far as China and India along the branches of the Silk Route, with time Jews settled permanently in cities like Kabul, Ghur, and Herat. As indicated by their knowledge of Persian, Afghani Jews seem to have spread east from Iran, where, by the time the new documents were written, Jews had lived for over one thousand years.

Given its significance, the find has attracted media attention. A number of reports, including special coverage on Israel's Channel Two, have compared the Afghan discovery to the Cairo Geniza, the giant cache of manuscripts stored for centuries in a synagogue attic in Old Cairo that have helped to rewrite the history of Jews in the Middle East.

However, what most of the media coverage has left unsaid is that the "Afghan Geniza" is not our only record of Jewish life and literature in Persian from this period. Manuscripts and inscriptions discovered in today's Afghanistan, China, India, and Iran already tell the story of a thriving intellectual culture among Persian-speaking Jews. These documents include two Judeo-Persian letters, also between traders, found in the Silk Road oasis of Dandan Uiliq; signatures in Judeo-Persian found on a king's grant to foreign traders in Kerala, South India; and the longest text from this early period, a nearly complete translation and interpretation of the biblical book of Ezekiel.

For scholars of Persian such as myself, the importance of these documents even goes beyond their historical or literary significance. Judeo-Persian texts from before the thirteenth century — including, it is safe to assume, the new finds from Afghanistan — are not written in a single language. Without a court or other central authority to promote one unified standard, as was the case with Muslim Persian from an early period, Jews writing in Persian with the Hebrew script used a number of different regional dialects. In addition to these regional differences, the register of the language varies from document to document. Some writers used local literary languages — micro-standards, one might call them—while others simply wrote as they spoke.

This variety is what makes the documents so important for uncovering the history of the Persian language. These early texts in Judeo-Persian help explain the transition from the ancient Persian used before the seventh-century Muslim conquest of Iran to the full-blown modern literary language that emerges several centuries later, for instance in Ferdowsi's Epic of Kings. While Judeo-Persian is not itself the missing link — Ferdowsi, for instance, was not plagiarizing the Dandan Uiliq letter — these documents do record snapshots of changing grammar, vocabulary, morphology, and even phonology.

In this light, the significance of this new find in Afghanistan is not only historical. For scholars of Persian — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — the documents help fill in the missing links in the development of the language from ancient times to the present.

Samuel Thrope is a Lady Davis Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Photo by Michael Cramer/Flickr, cc by-nc 2.0

During the first two presidential debates, Mitt Romney's Mormon faith has come up very little. But, as Joanna Brooks told Krista Tippett shortly before the Republican National Convention, many Mormons continue to "white-knuckle" through this campaign season.

Ms. Brooks says that some of the tensest moments happened during the primaries when two prominent Mormons, Jon Huntsman and Mitt Romney, sought the nomination as Republican candidate for president. She says that one white-knuckle moment occurred earlier this year when the comments of theologian and Brigham Young University professor Randy Bott surfaced in The Washington Post:

“ 'What is discrimination?' Bott asks. 'I think that is keeping something from somebody that would be a benefit for them, right? But what if it wouldn’t have been a benefit to them?' Bott says that the denial of the priesthood to blacks on Earth — although not in the afterlife — protected them from the lowest rungs of hell reserved for people who abuse their priesthood powers. 'You couldn’t fall off the top of the ladder, because you weren’t on the top of the ladder. So, in reality the blacks not having the priesthood was the greatest blessing God could give them.' "

His comments, Ms. Brooks says, were lambasted as racist and pushed the LDS Church into making an official statement about past discrimination and racism rooted in church history:

“The Church’s position is clear—we believe all people are God’s children and are equal in His eyes and in the Church. We do not tolerate racism in any form. For a time in the Church there was a restriction on the priesthood for male members of African descent. It is not known precisely why, how, or when this restriction began in the Church but what is clear is that it ended decades ago.”

Ms. Brooks' commented in Religion Dispatches on the persistence of racism among some LDS Church members and how this event forced Mormons and the LDS Church to confront its own difficult history.

Also, Ms. Brooks reminds us that technology is playing a new role in the faith formation of Mormons — and how Mormon leaders and parents tell their stories. She offers a story about her son, who had no idea about polygamy in Mormon history until he learned about it online:

“Google is playing a huge role in faith formation these days. The church had typically managed its own story.”

Members of Pussy Riot sit in a glass-walled cage during a court hearing in Moscow on August 17, 2012. Photo by Natalia Kolenikova/AFP/GettyImages.

On February 21, the feminist collective Pussy Riot crossed the restricted threshold of the altar and began dancing and singing in front of the iconostasis of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They delivered approximately 30 seconds of the "punk prayer" "Mother of God, Chase Putin Out," before being removed by security guards. The restored Cathedral, destroyed under Stalin and converted into a swimming pool under Khrushchev, stages the complicated relationship between the revival of Orthodox Christianity and the development of Russian nationalism and post-Soviet political sovereignty.

On August 17, three members of Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a labor colony for hooliganism grounded in religious hatred. The media had a trial of its own, scrutinizing everything from the group's gender presentation to their musical abilities. But what, exactly, was on trial and what are the stakes?

On the day of the verdict, Eduard Bagirov, a controversial, Putin-friendly media figure, tweeted the following:

"Not a single normal Russian person would ever support the 'actions' of these cunts. Notice that support comes exclusively from immigrants, faggots, and Yids" (trans. mine).

As a diagnostic tool, Bagirov's comment reveals that on trial were the criteria for "normal Russian personhood" — defining who will count as Russian and who will be the constitutive other(s).

For Pussy Riot, the "punk prayer" aimed to undo the identification between "normal Russian personhood," Putin's regime, and the Orthodox Church. The mutual constitution of a unified "Russian people" and a unified "Orthodox Christianity" reinforce the legitimacy of Putin's sovereignty along with that of his former KGB colleague Patriarch Kirill Gundyayev. On trial, then, was also the possibility of religious contestation — i.e. that one might be critical of a religious tradition and nonetheless speak for it rather than hatefully against it. As one blogger for Women in Theology notes, the language of Judge Marina Syrova's ruling pits Pussy Riot's feminist commitments against the "antifeminism" of Christianity. Judge Syrova explains that "The court does find a religious hatred motive in the actions of the defendants by way of them being feminists who consider men and women to be equal. Now gender equally [sic] is asserted, maintained by the Russian constitution [...] At the same time, Orthodox Christianity, and Catholic Christianity and other denominations do not agree with feminism and their own values are not in line with feminists."

Playing a theologian or a historian, the Judge publicly establishes a uniform "Orthodox Christianity," whose constitutive feature is an opposition to equality between men and women, so much so that any challenge to this inequality constitutes an act of hatred. Since the Judge makes clear that sex-based discrimination is unlawful in Russia, one wonders why sex-based discrimination with religious "credentials" can become legally sanctioned. Is Orthodox Christianity an extra-legal space that represents "the Russian people" but is not subject to its laws?

The ruling's logic forecloses on the possibility of such questions in part because it figures "Orthodox Christianity" as a static object rather than a dynamic tradition, whose various claims to "orthodoxy" are themselves products of historical negotiations that could have turned out differently. Hence, even as the Judge claims divergence between Russian law and "opposition to feminism," she nonetheless discursively reconstitutes a unified "Orthodox Christianity," adding "antifeminism" to the chain of congruencies between Putin, "normal Russian personhood," and "Orthodox Christianity." The intactness of this discursive framework relies on the impossibility of interpreting Pussy Riot's performance as an act of religious devotion that effectuates disidentification between Orthodox Christianity and "the Russian people" on the one hand and Putin, antifeminism, and the Patriarch on the other.

In her statement to the court, Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the convicted members, writes,

"In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch's blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia."

The "punk prayer" inverts the locale of Christian authority, declaring the Virgin's solidarity with their countercultural project. They prayed, "Virgin Mary, mother of God, become a feminist." They pled that Patriarch Gundyayev renounce his idolatrous worship of Putin and worship God instead. During the performance, the group cloaked their faces with balaclavas to protect their identities but also to de-hierarchize the liturgical space. The "punk prayer" performance troubled the binaries between clergy and laity, men and women, leader and follower, and fame and anonymity. It appealed to the "feminism" of the Virgin Mary against the "antifeminism" of Putin and the Church elite and leveraged an improvisational, communal mode of prayer, without a frontman, against a highly-centralized, hierarchical liturgical modality. In their closing statements, Pussy Riot continued to draw a connection between their own actions and the biblical drama of the New Testament, where those persecuted for blasphemy turned out to be the rightful bearers of divinity.

Christian supporters of Pussy Riot see the "punk prayer" as an important attempt at elaborating a Christian counterculture. In a petition to the World Council of Churches, a group organized under the slogan of "Christians for Pussy Riot" presents the "punk prayer" and its colorful, disruptive accouterments, as continuous with the tradition of being a fool for Christ, a tradition that enjoyed a particular presence in Byzantine and Russian Orthodox Christianity. As Sergey Ivanov argues, holy foolery in Russia emerged simultaneously with the formation of czarism. Holy fools kept the gap between secular authority, however despotic, and divine authority from closing. The genealogy of the figure of the "holy fool" can be traced from the Paul of 1 Cor. 1-4 to Dostoyevsky's "idiot." While the criteria of "holy foolery" vary historically, one constant feature that Ivanov observes is that holy fools functioned as "cultural antennae" and rehearsed the hypocrisies, idolatries, and abuses of a religious community fallen into sin and decline.

Although Pussy Riot's performance has succeeded in capturing the countercultural religious imagination of some Christians, the "success" of their performance relies on the ability of "normal Russian persons" to read the difference between the critical voice of "holy foolery" and the destructive voice of religious hatred. Ultimately, then, on trial was the critical efficacy of their actions. In other words, what theological and political resources would their audiences need for their performance to generate a spark of countercultural world-building?

The question of efficacy has been at the forefront for those invested in radical politics. For some, Pussy Riot's statements, which portray the masses as conformist automatons, raise the specter of vanguardism. For others, the perception of elitism is problematic not for its antidemocratic implications but for its easy incorporation into Putin's anti-dissent strategies, where "normal Russian persons," whom Putin purportedly represents, are positioned against the intellectual and creative elites. The worry is that far from an instrument of disruption, Pussy Riot's dissent becomes a fine-tuned instrument for consolidating Putin's sovereignty.

The worry about efficacy also echoes in complaints about the ease with which Pussy Riot's highly fashionable cause has been embraced by the West. Exactly how countercultural can you be if "Free Pussy Riot" memorabilia is being sold at a Madonna concert and "support" for the group just means flexing your consumer muscle? Western cooptation testifies to the power of commodification. It also betrays a potent political fantasy about the nature of Pussy Riot's protest. As Vadim Nikitin points out, the West's outdated reflex to venerate any Russian dissenter as a "Cold War trophy" misses the point. Pussy Riot is not fighting for "freedom of expression" understood as libertarian "freedom" of rabid individualism and unfettered capitalism. Theirs is a radical politics targeting the corporatization of public institutions—church and state. In other words, the religious and political counterculture of Pussy Riot activism, which has a history and a future far greater than the "punk prayer," equally indicts American neoliberalism and its destruction of democratic culture by capitalist logics. And the West's support for Pussy Riot may be its own perfectly-calibrated exercise in absorbing radical political dissent.

As the appeals process begins and various international groups strategize about how to support Pussy Riot, the question of what "we" can do to help "them" might be helpfully displaced and politicized by asking a different question: What kinds of radical changes would need to happen in our own religious and political cultures for our own "punk prayers" to be answered?

*Translation from Russian sources are by the author of this Sightings essay.

Larisa Reznik is a PhD candidate in Theology at the University of Chicago, focusing on religious thought in the modern West. Her research interrogates the intersection of religion, politics, and gender.

This essay is reprinted with permission of Sightings from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Photo to the right by Sean Comiskey/Flickr, cc by-nc-sa 2.0