"Things Do Things"

Emily Clark

Those of us who were in Atlanta for the AAR have had nearly a week to recover from our self-inflected wounds of staying up late and social networking over lagers and ales. We have also had a little under a week to digest the wide-ranging, quality panels and papers we had the opportunity to hear. One Saturday afternoon panel that continues to stick out for me was the Author Meets Critics panel for Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Though the book came out in 2006 and in 2009 the Journal of the American Academy of Religion published a review symposium, including a response from Tweed, this 2010 session in Atlanta drew quite a crowd. Based on his years in the field of religious studies and American religious history, Tweed defines religion as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing upon human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries.”

Unfortunately Ivan Strenski (of University of California, Riverside) was unable to attend, but the three other respondents/“critics” led off an engaging discussion that ranged from scholarly moral obligation to the agency of “things.” Chip Callahan (University of Missouri) reflected on Tweed’s book in light of his current research on the religious lives and worlds of New England whalers. Callahan found Tweed’s work helpful because his use of dynamic water metaphors allows us to focus on the everyday lives of our actual subjects. Marie Marquardt (Agnes Scott College)’s reflections on Oscar, a Mexican migrant “outsider” living in the US who she met during her fieldwork, demonstrate how a theory or definition that is itself “on the move” resonates well with subjects who are on the move. Also recognizing Tweed’s dynamic definition, Grant Wacker (Duke University) spoke about the “positionality of the observer” and the “motility of data,” along with amusing anecdotes from his years of working with/near Tweed in North Carolina.

During his response and the Q&A session following, Tweed reflected on his past projects and his forthcoming book on the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. He spoke of the moral obligations we as scholars have to our subjects, living or dead. Both ethnographic work and archival work exists in a world of “moral entanglement.” Tweed also drew our attention to the significance of artifacts – for “buildings perform roles” and “statues have agency.” “Things do things.” Scholars of material culture have long called for the importance of stuff, but material culture can easily be overlooked by discussions of power and authority. Tweed’s short but poignant phrase “things do things” got me thinking about destroyed things. I’ve blogged before about Hurricane Katrina and Avery Gordon’s notions of haunting, as the absence of pre-Katrina buildings lends a ghostly presence to the Crescent City. Not only are dwellings important, the Q&A also prompted Tweed and the respondents to reflect on those who are excluded from home. In addition to looking at how/why some people are unwelcome from particular dwellings, destroyed dwellings and our subjects’ response to their destruction and absence is significant. Do they rebuild? Do they move? Do they forget? Or how do they remember? Non-things do things too.

Wading Back in the Troubled Waters

Paul Harvey

A few notes on Katrina, religion, and the weird trifecta coincidence of Katrina, MLK’s speech in 1963, and Glenn Beck’s picnic on the mall.

First, the NYT has an interesting piece on the Katrina and black churches in New Orleans, focusing specifically on the Lower 9th. Of some 75 churches there before the storm, a great number have closed down, many likely for good. About a dozen struggle to remain, their tenuous hold a symbol for the tenuous hold of the recovery outside the touristed zones. Amid the more chipper pieces the paper ran on various pieces of good news about the recovery, this gives a piece of reality on the other side. The article chronicles the efforts of one pastor who is trying to fire up his congregation again, an uphill battle for sure. This article makes a nice accompaniment to the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion, on religion through the storm. The issue includes (among many other goodies) Tulane professor Randy Sparks’s piece on religion and recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. And it gave me a nice reminder about perhaps the single most compelling video production I’ve seen on Katrina, Trouble the Waters, which we’ve blogged about here before. And I mean no disrespect to Spike Lee’s outstanding efforts there in When the Levees Broke and, more recently, his revisit to New Orleans, timed for the Saints to march in and BP to spill its guts out. When the Levees Broke is a great film, but for total immersion viewing it’s hard to beat Trouble the Waters (plus it’s giving me the title for a book I hope to start to work on next year).

On Katrina, politics, and religion, my thunder has been stolen by Tenured Radical’s post today Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, What Would Jesus Do?, which comes with the added bonus of a Johnny Cash clip from YouTube (always a good thing). “Looking back over the last five years,” she concludes, “we need less God and more politics: by that I mean not less faith, and all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide, but we need to end the lie that you can substitute faith for politics.” This and much else at the post is so much better than what I was struggling to come up with that I’ll just point you there. To her post, I would only add the point that the most effective use of religious rhetoric in twentieth-century America has been to provide the spiritual inspiration necessary to move recalcitrant political institutions (hence the connection between the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Bill; or social Catholicism and the New Deal). But presumably that is what she means by “all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide.”

I was thinking along these lines today as I’m in the midst of reading Alison Greene’s excellent dissertation “No Depression in Heaven” (recently completed at Yale, under Glenda Gilmore), a searching history of religion and politics in Memphis and the Delta through the Depression years. The hapless rhetoric of evangelicals through that era was especially resonant given the same vapid speechifying at the Glenn Beck picnic this weekend. Also fascinating in her work is to see the churches basically cede authority to NGO’s (the Red Cross in particular) and, as the New Deal progressed, governmental agencies. The evangelicals basically said 1) the Depression just shows that we need a revival – that the nation needs to “turn back to God”; 2) in the meantime, don’t look to us for relief, because we ain’t got any; if you need food, go someplace else, because there’s too many of you to serve; 3) only God, not politics, can save us; 4) but Jesus is coming soon anyway. Obviously this applies to only part of the diverse religious formations through that time period, not (for example) to the religious left, and actually not to some of the premillennialist Pentecostals who had another agenda going on. But at the very least, these evangelicals implicitly understood that, for all their rhetoric about turning back to God, ultimately governing authorities might have answers, not to mention indispensable resources, that they just didn’t have. Perhaps they might have even given an ear to Tenured Radical’s conclusion:

What would Jesus do? Throw Glenn Beck and every money changer like him out of the temple, that's what, and get back to what government is supposed to do: help people take care of themselves, make politics a vehicle for loving one's neighbor (not blaming him, or seeing if she needs to be deported) and protecting Americans from those who prey on the simple, the weak and the vulnerable. Until we do, the waters will keep on rising.

Five Years and an Oil Spill Later

[Emily Clark is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. She is also the new managing editor of the Journal of Southern Religion. You can expect great things from Emily in the not-too-distant future!]

Five Years and an Oil Spill Later

Emily Clark

This upcoming Sunday marks the 5 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the American gulf coast. The aftermath of the storm–the outrage, the rising death toll, the fundraising, the widespread donations of time and money to rebuild, and the levee investigations–largely languished in the national media as time passed. Interest would perk up again when Brad Pitt finished another house, and with the recent interest in the HBO show Tremé, the public eye will incline towards the Crescent City that Care Forgot in the approaching days.

In addition to its Tremé style jazz, New Orleans is also famous for its historical haunting and ghost stories. A former New Orleans resident–the folk artist, musician, and street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan who died in 1980–remains today in the city she evangelized in a ghostly form. According to sociologist Avery Gordon, “to write stories concerning exclusions and invisibilities is to write ghost stories,” and the scholar’s investigation of these social ghosts leads “to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.” As the floodwaters receded from the Lower Ninth Ward (her former neighborhood), they resurrected a Sister Gertrude Morgan specter. Created and propagated largely by current Preservation Hall owner and creative director Benjamin Jaffe, the spectral Gertrude Morgan exists in a specific cultural context: post-Katrina New Orleans. Jaffe’s initial uncertainty about staying in his hometown and the city’s subsequent rebuilding efforts, particularly his artistic contribution to the city’s cultural revival, swirl about his spectral evangelist. For him, she became a symbol for the enduring love, acceptance, and creativity he reveres about his beloved city. She is an icon for authentic New Orleans culture in the post-Katrina world–a symbol for the city she viewed as sinful and most in need of her didactic message (click here for more on Morgan and Katrina).

In 2009, the Journal of Southern Religion released two issues of its typically annual periodical. One of these installments was a special issue entitled “After the Storm,” an exposé on religion in the American South in light of and responding to Katrina. Including articles, poetry, and the visual arts, this particular edition of JSR demonstrated, in the words of guest co-editor Tracy Fessenden, that “New Orleans isn’t going away.” The editors of the JSR encourage you to revisit or explore for the first time this special issue. Five years after the storm and one oil disaster later, religion in the gulf continues to raise difficult questions about power, identity, and social forces. Not only that, the South furthermore remains key to our constantly-developing and ever-nuancing picture of American religion.

On Illness Stories and Hospital Beds

Art Remillard

I’m blogging from a bed. It's supposed to look like a hospital bed. More on that later. For now, let’s talk about stories.

Whenever I do research, I’m not looking for sources. I’m looking for stories. Sometimes I find fragments of stories in letters and diaries. Other times I find more detailed stories in memoirs and autobiographies. In any case, since I write religious histories, I want stories that convey a certain essence—something that is reflective, insightful, unique, aesthetically compelling—something that gets to the heart of an issue, event, or idea.

But even when I do find that gem of a story, I worry that I’m just not getting everything. Recall Mike Pasquier’s post on this very point as it related to Hurricane Katrina. “The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment,” he laments. “Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like ‘lived religion’ and ‘extraliturgical religion’ to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of ‘official religion’ or ‘institutional religion.’ But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive.”

Stories of the storm, filtered through memory, will always cast a veil of mystery. Is it even possible, I wonder, to find a “now” perspective? Probably not. But illness stories might come close. In At the Will of the Body, medical sociologist Arthur Frank chronicles his journey through two illnesses, a heart attack and cancer. Religion and storytelling play no small role in his account.

Stories we tell ourselves about what is happening to us are dangerous because they are powerful. Stories come to us from many sources: some we seek, many happen without our notice, others impose themselves on our lives. We have to choose carefully which stories to live with, which to use to answer the question of what is happening to us. Jacob’s wrestling became a story I lived with as part of my personal mythology of illness. This is what it is to be ill: to wrestle through the long night, injured, and if you prevail until the sun rises, to receive a blessing. Through Jacob’s story, illness became an adventure.

Frank elaborates on the significance of stories and spirituality in The Wounded Storyteller and The Renewal of Generosity. He emphasizes how a diagnosis wounds both a person's body and identity. Reconstructing both calls for a new story, one that accounts for the illness and all of its implications. Caregivers can play a significant role in this process, if they are truly caregivers. “I reserve the name ‘caregiver’ for the people who are willing to listen to ill persons and respond to their individual experiences,” he explains in At the Will of the Body.

Is Frank’s illness story—and others like it—“now” enough? “Cancer never disappears,” he affirms. Frank will always live with his illness, and tell his illness story. And this story's religious dimension might influence readers too. As Martin Marty put it in his review, “this short work can transform lives or at least ways of thinking about living.”

This brings me to my faux-hospital bed. It’s Relay for Life time at St. Francis University. Students from my “Narrative Medicine” course decided to set up 3 hospital beds, with 3 volunteers acting as cancer patients for 24 hours. Somehow, I ended up being one of the patients. I've assumed the identity of a 40-year-old brain cancer patient. I'm married, with two kids. I’m also angry, depressed, disoriented, and enveloped in pain. My motor skills are such that the “nurses” have to feed me.

So I have a story. It's a story of humility, mainly. I've ceded my freedom to move, sleep, and eat. It's nothing like the real thing, but maybe I'll leave with an improved sense of empathy. After all, throughout the day and night, survivors have stopped to share their illness stories. The depth and detail has been nothing short of astonishing. Every story resonates with spiritual force, causing me to reflect on the limits of life, and the reality of death.

I'm almost finished now. I have crossed over in to another identity, as well as another discipline, and will be resuming "normalcy" soon. I will bring back new insights. In particular, maybe on my next trip to the archives, I'll pay closer attention to stories of illness. They seem to make the “now” a bit less elusive.

God's Gonna Trouble the Waters of Paradises Built in Hell

On this 4th anniversary of Katrina, I finally got to watch Trouble the Water, about which I had blogged briefly a year ago. So at the risk of repeating myself, allow me to repeat myself, from the previous post:

Following up on Mike's last post, and our previous discussion of the special Katrina issue of the Journal of Southern Religion -- the new film Trouble the Water appears to be a must-watch (has anyone here seen it yet?). The film captures Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two New Orleans Katrina survivors whose video camera provides an inside view of the days during and after Katrina. Of the film, Richard Corliss writes:

In the gritty, buoyant Kim they [the filmmakers] found a person who symbolized both the lower depths of urban life and the resilience, when faced with an impossible challenge, to rise to a level higher than flood tide. Maybe Kim, Scott and their crew were no angels before Katrina, but that doesn't matter--because in Trouble the Water, we see the lives of the saints.

The filmmakers recently were interviewed on Bob Edwards Weekend.

In the "beyond parody" department -- our old friend Michael Brown of FEMA -- remember the good old days? -- makes a brief appearance in the film, and reminds us (unintentionally, of course) of the costs of neglect and ineptitude, as well as the costs of philosophies which denigrate government as the root of all evil. In case anyone was wondering what he's doing now, aside from a career as a "motivational speaker" here's one thing he's doing -- hosting an AM talk radio show on the largest station in Denver. I listened with fascination recently as he tore into the "incompetence" of the Obama administration. It was rather like if you heard me, after my latest pick-up basketball game debacle, tear into Dwight Howard for his incompetence because I had seen him mess up one fast break opportunity somewhere in last year's playoffs.

Rebecca Solnit's work A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster has been getting some attention lately, as well it should given the inherently interesting subject matter, and the author's engaging body of work to date. She covers ad hoc communities of communal help that arose after the San Francisco earthquake, during the London blitz, in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake, and in post 9/11 New York -- times "when everyone has agency and no one has ultimate authority, when the society invents itself as it goes along." She also discusses Katrina and New Orleans, as a kind of counter-example. But the lessons to be learned about New Orleans strike me as rather different than some kind of Woodstockian celebration of spontaneous community, and nothing shows this more than watching Kimberly Rivers et famille in Trouble the Water.

Christine Stansell takes on this work in a usefully skeptical way in the latest New Republic (I can't find a link presently, will post when it's up). Stansell rightly finds this work suffused with the religious language of grace (I'd say a Rousseauian language of an ideal state of nature, as well) -- "Solnit's classless self-governing society resembles nothing so much as a state of grace; and her uprising of the spirit -- 'the joy in disaster' -- evokes the exaltation of a revival. . . . Solnit here taps into a repository of Protestant millennialism that lies deep in the American psyche. More precisely, it is an Arminian understanding of sin and salvation. God dispenses suffering as HE pleases, but we can make of it what we will, using the test to redeem ourselves and deliver ourselves into His hands, washed of our sins."

Stansell warns about the "pitfalls of self-delusion in any politics of transcendence," and her words came to me on viewing Trouble the Water, where one sees something closer to a hell built on paradise rather than a paradise built in hell. As Stansell points out, and the main characters of this documentary point out in their raw local argot, "In New Orleans, of course, the disaster was the lack of government. . . . That the reconstruction of a great American city has had to depend on a volunteer army of idealistic ill-paid twentysomethings is not a glory, it is a crime. . . . New Orleans needs more than volunteers and self-actualization. It needs generous and well-administered federal aid, and decent city government . . . That would be paradise."

Kimberly Rivers evidences grit, determination, and sometimes even a little joy in surviving Katrina and attempting to reconstruct her life and those of her family members. Yet her experience demonstrates the wisdom of Stansell's caution about Solnit's "utopian instincts of altruism and mutual aid, which can transform politics-as-usual," which shows "not interest in the vast and contrary evidence that disasters can bring out the worst in people as well as the best -- which is one reason why government action . . . is necessary and desirable." The relative lack of it in New Orleans -- before, during, and after the storm -- was close enough to hell for my tastes.

Watch clips of Trouble the Water here. A useful report on post-Katrina recovery efforts and the state of the city presently is here in yesterday's Times. There's reason for hope, but the waters are still troubled, as well. Obama's reflections on what needs to be done are here. The evidence so far suggests that Craig Fugate has been effective, showing (to paraphrase Stansell's critique of Solnit) that efficacy matters more than joy, that government matters a lot, and that "the destruction of communities is not a boon to communitarianism."

Trouble the Water

Paul Harvey

Following up on Mike's last post, and our previous discussion of the special Katrina issue of the Journal of Southern Religion -- the new film Trouble the Water appears to be a must-watch (has anyone here seen it yet?). The film captures Kimberly Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts, two New Orleans Katrina survivors whose video camera provides an inside view of the days during and after Katrina. Of the film, Richard Corliss writes:

In the gritty, buoyant Kim they [the filmmakers] found a person who symbolized both the lower depths of urban life and the resilience, when faced with an impossible challenge, to rise to a level higher than flood tide. Maybe Kim, Scott and their crew were no angels before Katrina, but that doesn't matter--because in Trouble the Water, we see the lives of the saints.

The filmmakers recently were interviewed on Bob Edwards Weekend, and you can view the trailer above.

One Million Catholics Skip Mass

MICHAEL PASQUIER

It’s just a guess, but I think a good guess, that approximately one million Louisiana Catholics skipped mass last Sunday. Over 95% of the population of South Louisiana, or around 2 million people, spent the Sabbath packed into automobiles, queued at gas stations and Home Depots, laying on cots and loitering in parking lots of public shelters, or stuffed into the homes of relatives and hotel rooms in anticipation of Hurricane Gustav’s landfall, to say nothing of the thousands of National Guardsmen and women, medical first-responders, law enforcement officers, and other civic leaders who stayed behind to oversee the evacuation and emergency response. Diocesan officials cancelled masses and urged their parishioners—about half the population of South Louisiana—to heed the advice of state and local governments to leave areas in the path of Gustav. No doubt, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were on the minds of everyone.

In the weeks and months leading up to Hurricane Gustav’s arrival on the morning of September 1, 2008—just three days after the third anniversary of Katrina and three weeks before the same anniversary of Rita—Catholic massgoers throughout the state recited a prayer to Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the Patroness of Louisiana, which read, “Our Father in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Our Lady of Prompt Succor, spare us from all harm during this hurricane season and protect us and our homes from all disasters of nature. Our Lady of Prompt Succor, hasten to help us. Amen.” The same prayer was recited in Catholic churches unaffected by evacuation orders on the day before Gustav landed, sometimes within eye-shot of highways and interstates streaming with many carloads of Catholics skipping mass.

Suffice it to say that Catholics living in Louisiana, from your regular churchgoer to the so-called lapsed variety, know that Our Lady of Prompt Succor is the Mary you pray to during hurricane season. Hear a story about the feastday celebration of OLPS on NPR here. It’s just one of those things that Louisiana Catholics do, like abstaining from the consumption of meat on Friday’s during Lent and gorging instead on crawfish, shrimp, and cheap beer. It’s also safe to say that most Louisiana Catholics—and historians of American religion for that matter—know very little about the history of the cult of Our Lady of Prompt Succor. I should know, I wrote a boring article on that very subject in the book Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World. Rebecca Carter’s article on “spiritual dwelling” in post-Katrina New Orleans in the Journal of Southern Religion is a better place to start thinking about personal devotions to Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

After evacuating from my residence in South Louisiana and as I enjoyed the company and hospitality of friends and family 200 miles inland, I couldn’t help but think how inconsequential my historical knowledge of the cult of Our Lady of Prompt Succor was to what was going on in the minds of millions of Catholics and non-Catholics as they worried about running out of gas, finding and then paying for a hotel room, feeding and sheltering their children, and when they would be able to return to their homes that may be destroyed. It’s hard to imagine even the most devout Catholic grandmother from Plaquemines Parish—the southeastern most parish (county) of Louisiana lined by the levees of the Mississippi River—focusing intensely on the Mary that was supposed to protect her home and family from disaster. It’s hard to imagine anyone keeping attuned to what scholars generally consider “religious” concerns in the heat of the moment.

It’s this “religion-in-the-moment” that is perplexing for scholars like me who were raised on books like Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street and Thomas Tweed’s Our Lady of the Exile, perhaps the two most influential studies of Marian devotionalism in America. The evidence and data used in these sorts of books, however magnificent, are usually disconnected from immediate experience, when devotees are pressed to fill out questionnaires, contrive quotes for inquisitive interviewers, or send anonymous petitions to shrine newsletters. I have a difficult time thinking of ways to situate the religious experiences of hurricane evacuees in historical, social, and cultural contexts. The circumstances just seem too aberrant, too disjointed from ordinary time and space, to capture the religious experiences of the moment. Scholars of religious studies, myself included, tend to use phrases like “lived religion” and “extraliturgical religion” to describe religion outside the carefully scripted confines of “official religion” or “institutional religion.” But these categories seem only to get at the before and after the storm; the now remains elusive. I can’t help but think—actually, I know—that I’m missing something. The scholar in me wants to know what it's like, but every other part of my being never wants to know.

The Devil Comes Here and Sighs

Paul Harvey

Continuing from yesterday's post on the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion: it's up. Click here for After the Storm: A Special Issue on Hurricane Katrina, courtesy of our guest contributor Tracy Fessenden and our contributing editor Michael Pasquier. With her permission, below is Tracy's introduction to the issue, which will double as her guest post here. Thanks to Tracy and Mike for their hard work, passion for the city, and scholarly skill in pulling all this together in such a short time.
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There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment . . . Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades, 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful double-pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds . . . One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs.

—Bob Dylan, from Chronicles, Part One (2004)

Mike Pasquier and I began discussing the possibility of a special JSR issue focused on Katrina in late 2006. We both had spent a lot of time in various archives in New Orleans—Mike's Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionary Priests and the Transformation of American Catholicism is forthcoming from Oxford, and I had written about the Sisters of the Holy Family, an African-American order of nuns in New Orleans, with plans for returning to that project just as the storm hit. Beyond the connections forged on our respective research trips (or "research" trips, as was the case with some of mine) each of us has personal ties to the city and a deep, widely shared appreciation for the peculiar densities—historical, musical, spiritual, literary, culinary, and otherwise—that make New Orleans unlike any other place. So it's far more than a blow to scholarship we've been coming to terms with since August 29, 2005, when Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast and the breaching of the city's levees put most of New Orleans under water.

Perhaps because we're both so invested in New Orleans, we deliberately cast a wide net when coming up with a CFP for this special issue. We encouraged potential contributors to consider religion in any period or region and from any methodological vantage point, as long as they engaged in a rethinking of U.S. religious history in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. How might the historical plotlines shaping the field, we wondered, come in for new scrutiny, be rendered less helpful or telling, take on unexpected curves and angles? How might the federal response to Katrina shed light on the vexed role of the Gulf South within the national imaginary? How, for example, does a hemispheric narrative of colonialism and slavery, to which the Gulf South more centrally belongs, trouble a national narrative of freedom and progress, to which it has never been easily assimilated? How might the very American myth of self-recreation—of packing up and starting over elsewhere, seemingly without loss—impede recovery projects on the scale of those undertaken in Europe: the rebuilding of bombed-out cities after WWII, for example, or the massive construction of the Dutch levee system after the flood of Amsterdam in1953? What can now be said—or no longer be said—about the unifying power of "civil religion" in moments of national crisis? How has religion, however construed, come to aid or to obstruct the rebuilding of the Gulf South?

We began distributing the CFP a year ago, to coincide with the second anniversary of Katrina. And as much as we'd tried to push potential contributors to consider religious history after Katrina in the broadest of regional, national, and transnational contexts, it became clear over the next several months of responding to submissions and inquiries that this would still be a special issue about New Orleans, after all. With the exception of artist Lynda Frese's mixed-media images of Hindu deities in ravaged Gulf towns, which take their cue from the more familiar Catholic/vodun shrines of Louisiana, every contributor featured here and many more we were unable to include saw the special issue as a forum for reflection about New Orleans, not about the Gulf South as a region, about hemispheric narratives or new directions for American religious history. The near-exclusive focus on New Orleans tells us that a great deal remains to be done to integrate Hurricane Katrina, its historical conditions and aftermath, into the America we study as American religious historians. Likewise and perhaps more importantly, however, it tells us that the devastation of an irreplaceable city cannot simply be taken up into this or that new scholarly frame, and that the confrontation with loss undertaken by the essays and other forms of expression collected here necessarily remains ongoing.

Grief and rage at their starkest animate Anthea Butler's 2008 revisiting of the September 2, 2005 essay she published in The Revealer: A Daily Review of Religion and the Press, whose editors praised the unfit-for-mainstream-media jeremiad as "language appropriate to atrocity." Essays by Randy Sparks, Richard Newman, Elizabeth Goodine, and Karla Goldman engage responses to atrocity by various faith communities in New Orleans, all of which powerfully reclaim the meaning of "faith-based" from the Administration that Butler calls so blisteringly to account.

JSR has long encouraged a range of scholarly contributions in addition to standard research articles. For this special issue we made a decision to extend the scope of possible contributions even further to honor the distinctive culture of New Orleans and environs. Thus Lynda Frese and Lynda Doussan Rosamano present mixed-media assemblages; Rebecca Carter looks at houses and spiritual dwelling; Peter Cooley and John Gery give us poetry, Heather Nicholson and Zada Johnson review movies; Cynthia Hogue, Rebecca Ross, and the musician Kid Merv collaborate on an interview-poem, and Mike Pasquier shares a conversation with filmmaker Peter Entell. That generic diversity is matched by the religious diversity of the lives examined here. The distinctive dynamics of New Orleans's overlapping African-American and Catholic communities come in for sustained attention, but so too do Lutheran Oktoberfests, Jewish tzedakah, Hindu altars, and countless other traditional and nontraditional ways of making and sustaining spiritual connection in times of crisis, displacement, and loss.

We didn't think to invite musical contributions when planning the issue, but no doubt the generosity and expertise of our crack team of editors would have made even a library of MP3s possible. This is an unpecedented, "off-calendar" issue of JSR, and the long hours put in by Randall Stephens, Bland Whitley, and webmaster Art Remillard far exceeded the call of duty. Members of our editorial and advisory boards refereed all submissions; for additional advice on particular submissions we thank Greg Miller, Brent Plate, and Cammy Thomas.

We hope that the diversity of materials presented here pays fitting tribute to the place that inspires them. On the morning of August 30, 2005, I'd gone to bed after midnight to helicopter footage of parts of New Orleans submerged to the rooftops and woke to the shaky voice of Governor Kathleen Blanco on my clock radio, telling reporters that there was "no choice but to abandon the city." (These may not have been her exact words; I was deranged.) Soon enough I realized she was saying that those who were still in New Orleans now had no choice but to evacuate—the hows of course were still forthcoming—but for those few impossible seconds the image I had was of New Orleans entirely buried by the storm, lost to the world like Atlantis. This issue of JSR presents a blessedly different picture. It's much too early still to say laissez les bon temps rouler. But together with a number of new books suggesting that, as Mike puts it, New Orleans might in fact be more central to American religious history than the reigning narratives let on, the energy, passion, and resilience demonstrated by the contributors to this special issue insist that, national neglect be damned, New Orleans isn't going away.

—Tracy Fessenden

Katrina's Sheep Without a Shepherd

Paul Harvey

As the anniversary of Katrina nears, dwarfing (for me) all the patter of presidential politics, the Journal of Southern Religion is about to release its special Katrina issue (link will be up soon, as soon as everything is finalized). I wanted here to put up a couple of brief teasers, today and to be continued, to entice as many of you as possible to check out the issue. Originally we blogged about this project here.

We'll start with two pieces from Anthea Butler, our friend and editor of the North Star: A Journal for African American Religious History. Shortly after Katrina, Anthea issued this memorably blistering jeremiad for The Revealer.

Three years later, Anthea reflects further on her original piece for the Journal of Southern Religion -- and in case you're wondering, while she finds some reasons for hope, she's still righteously pissed off.

Three years after writing "As Sheep without a Shepherd" for the online journal The Revealer you might wonder if I am still just as angry about the response to Hurricane Katrina as I was back in early September of 2005. Have no fear, I still am. My anger has turned into disgust and bitterness tempered with occasional glimmers of hopefulness. Since the fateful landfall of Katrina and the breaching of the levee, the lives of thousands of people in New Orleans are changed. Some have not returned to the Crescent City. Others have, only to become discouraged with crime, poor living conditions, and the sadness that seeps around residents as they try to preserve a semblance of their lives in a town that will never be the same.

Anthea concludes by remembering the President's speech at the St. Louis Cathedral:

What stays with me now is the image of President Bush on the Square, in a city without electricity, the St. Louis Cathedral lit up with generators like a Disneyworld castle in the background. Not far from that spot is the port of New Orleans, where the slave ships rolled in. In the news footage of Bush's shameful performance, the strangely lit cathedral, beautiful in its own right, looked to me like a whitewashed tomb. And the darkness was deep behind it. To the slaves that came in on the boats, the church perhaps looked the same way. Then as now the promise of light seemed to beckon beauty, but the reality was a kind of death.

Read the whole piece here, and stay tuned for more in this series of posts on Katrina and the special issue of JSR.

Free Tour of Colonial New Orleans, Courtesy of Our Newest Contributing Editor

WELCOME TO OUR NEW CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, MICHAEL PASQUIER! HERE'S HIS BRIEF INTRODUCTION AND FIRST POST.

Hello Friends,

My name is Mike Pasquier. Currently, I’m a visiting faculty member of the Department of Religion at Florida State University. I’ll be joining the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University in the fall. But before I move to Baton Rouge, I’ll be spending a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Until now, I’ve focused my research on the history of Catholicism in the American South, Catholic devotional culture, and the relationship between religion and colonialism in Louisiana.

I’m finishing a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Les Confrères et les Peres: French Missionary Priests and Frontier Catholicism in the United States.” And I’m conducting new research on the intersection of African religions, Native American religions, and European Christianities in the Lower Mississippi River Valley during the eighteenth century. I’m also co-editing (w/ Tracy Fessenden) a special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion (on religion in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina). Here in my first post

My first post takes us on a tour of the colonial New Orleans explored in Emily Clark's
Masterless Mistresses.

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A STROLL DOWN CHARTRES STREET

(Also an introduction to religion in New Orleans via Emily Clark’s Masterless Mistresses)

I’d like to take us on a brief tour of New Orleans. No, this isn’t one of those silly “Haunted Tours,” although they are kind of interesting. And, no, this isn’t a chance for us to walk straight from the Fairmont Hotel (home of the Sazerac, the “original cocktail” to Bourbon Street, although I do recall not recalling similar experiences while an undergraduate student at Louisiana State University. Instead, let’s begin by standing on Decatur Street just outside the gates of Jackson Square while facing the St. Louis Cathedral with the Mississippi River about 100 yards behind us.

At the risk of belaboring a very tired metaphor, I would like for us to imagine standing at a crossroads—a historical and cultural crossroads. Behind us flows one of the longest running natural (and rather muddy) transporters of peoples, ideas, and technologies connecting the Atlantic and Caribbean worlds to the interior reaches of North America and indiscriminately cutting through our imaginary conceptions of regions like “the South” and “the West.” We are standing on Decatur Street, originally called Levee Street, literally steps away from over 300 years of human engineering and even more human disasters (recall the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and Randy Newman’s song “Louisiana 1927." Blocking our view of the St. Louis Cathedral is a statue of General Andrew Jackson, the American “savior” of New Orleans who led a coalition of Choctaws, free people of African descent, Baratarian pirates, Spanish and French Creoles, and militiamen from Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky against the British during the War of 1812.

Finally, we can contemplate the façade of the St. Louis Cathedral, built on the site of two previous Roman Catholic churches in 1794 and standing at the center of the French Quarter. But if we want to see French colonial architecture, we’ve got to walk up to the steps of the cathedral, take a right, and start walking down Chartres (pronounced “charters”) Street. You see, a fire destroyed much of the wooden buildings of the French Quarter (also called the Vieux Carré) in 1788, which meant that Spanish officials (oh yeah, Louisiana became a Spanish colony in 1763 after the Seven Years’ War) rebuilt the city, followed by thousands of American migrants building over what remained of French and Spanish structures following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

Whew! I’m already tired, and we haven’t even arrived at our destination. Just a few more blocks to go. Had we taken a left, we could have detoured down Pirate Alley and visited the former home of William Faulkner. But, alas, we’ve got no time to waste (this is a blog after all, where brevity is a virtue). As we begin our stroll toward Esplanade Avenue, you’ll notice the passing of Pere Antoine Alley, St. Ann Street, Madison Street, Dumaine Street, and St. Philip Street, until we finally reach the corner of Chartres and Ursuline Street. Look to your left and you will see General P.G.T. Beauregard’s home. Take a walk around the block and you’ll pass Brangelina’s new mansion on Governor Nicholls Street. Look to your right and you will see the Old Ursuline Convent. Built in 1752, the Old Ursuline Convent is the oldest example of French colonial architecture in the Mississippi Valley and the former residence of a group of Roman Catholic nuns who travelled from France to a minor colonial outpost called La Nouvelles-Orleans in 1727.

If you want to understand the historical and cultural context of everything we’ve seen up to this point, then you must read Emily Clark’s Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. Published in 2007 for the prestigious Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, Masterless Mistresses is a story about the first group of Catholic women religious to immigrate to a place that would become part of the United States. It is a story about early modern Europe, the Atlantic world, and the commingling of French, Spanish, and American interests in North America. It is a story about women in a world dominated by men, Catholic women in a world defined by anti-Catholicism, celibate women in a world where Protestant women valued motherhood and domesticity, and slaveholding women who also devoted themselves to the education and welfare of enslaved and free children of color. Clark calls the Ursulines “ideological outlaw[s]” and “mistresses without masters” because of the many relationships and conflicts that developed between the French (and later Spanish and American) nuns and everyone else they met in the streets of New Orleans. Clark also extends her discussion of the Ursulines to larger issues related to the retelling of early American history. “Gender,” Clark reminds us, “as much as race and class, gnawed at the fragile foundations of unified American identity. Weaving the Ursulines into the fabric of American history tellingly reveals that to us.”

Unfortunately, Clark’s masterful Masterless Mistresses is one of only a handful of other books that conceives of colonial Louisiana as something other than a peripheral sideshow to “the normative culture of British North America that prevailed in the young Republic.” Might New Orleans be more central to early American religious history than the historiography would suggest? Might the Mississippi River be just as important as, say, the Chesapeake Bay in delivering European and African peoples to a New World already populated by native peoples? Might we learn from Walker Percy—a Catholic convert who came of age in Greenville, Mississippi, and who became a National Book Award winner for his 1961 novel The Moviegoer—when he says that “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.”

It’s strange to think that we historians of American religion—that is to say, people most likely to read this blog—are stuck in a realm of possibility when, all along, New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi River Valley have been soaking in their deep, thick, gelatinous (yes! I used the word “gelatinous”) culture, seemingly content to let us experts of American religious history avoid the obvious.

But hey, New Orleans ain’t goin’ nowheres. Right?

Post-Katrina, Still Waiting

ART REMILLARD

I recently received word of a PBS documentary, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina. There’s a low resolution version of the film on the website. Here’s a description…

Still Waiting: Life After Katrina documents the remarkable story of resilience, family, and attachment to place. The role of race, women, family, food, and faith are integral to the content and provide powerful teaching opportunities.

Still Waiting takes place in the post-Katrina world of three African American women who grew up in the New Orleans area. The stories of Connie, Katie, and Janie are set against a backdrop of the larger extended family they share. In the film, we see how our primary women who have long held up the center of their respective families react differently to the circumstances that Katrina has thrust upon them.

The unusual size and interconnectedness of the 155-member family portrayed in this film point to a cultural truth that, while unfamiliar in most of the US, resonates strongly in the New Orleans area. The group’s well-knotted bonds of love and reciprocity function like an emotional ecosystem, capable, it seems, of absorbing the profound betrayal of nature and the system. But as the story of their evacuation to Dallas gives way to the story of their return to the bayou and the unexpected difficulties they face, the hopes of reclaiming life as it once existed look increasingly remote.

Still Waiting is a collaborative project of two-time Emmy winning filmmaker Ginny Martin, and Kate Browne, Afro-Creole specialist and professor of anthropology at Colorado State University. The documentary was filmed between October 2005 and March 2007 and was funded by National Science Foundation, Colorado State University, and Women in Film. Still Waiting was broadcast on nearly 300 PBS stations in August, September and October 2007. The film's website includes a low resolution streaming video of the film, a link showing reactions to the documentary, PBS air dates and times, and links for ordering a DVD for personal or institutional use. Please visit www.stillwaiting.colostate.edu

Water in Sacred Places

PAUL HARVEY

In the new Journal of American History, Donald DeVore of the University of South Alabama explores the role of the black church in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans: "Water in Sacred Places: Rebuilding New Orleans Black Churches as Sites of Community Empowerment," JAH 94 (2007): 762-769, part of an entire issue devoted to the theme "Through the Eyes of Katrina: The Past as Prologue," featuring articles by Lawrence Powell, Ari Kelman, Reid MItchell, Alecia Long, Arnold Hirsch, and other notables of scholarship on New Orleans.

Devore traces the history of some black Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic institutions, including Franklin Ave. Baptist Church. It began as a white congregation affiliated with the SBC, went into decline, and in 1986 transformed into a successful African American congregation under the pastoral leadership of Fred Luter: "He utilized a pastoral style characterized by a gospel message that emphasized inspiration and teaching, relationships that fostered equality, and ministries that stressed community service and empowerment." The church was devastated by Katrina: "Water, often symbolizing a life-giving or life-renewing power in Christian traditions, had been transformed into a toxic reality that defiled the sacred sites of African American life." Devore concludes:

"The political stance of New Orleans's black Christians . . . should not be oversimplified or misread. Religious leaders know that faith-based initiatives alone cannot command the monetary resources necessary to rebuilt a shattered city. But they see no fundamental contradiction between federal aid and grassroots action. They also understand the imporatnce of religiously informed group solidarity in preventing the kind of psychological fragmentation that leads to defeat and despair. In the end, the outlines of a 'new' New Orleans may be less about politics and race or concrete and steel, and more about the prophetic and communal role of the African American church."