#our image is still enshrined in history as this. and men have never had that history. of being viewed as the epitome of beauty

[britneyshakespeare]

lately i’ve been thinking about how very annoying it is that we talk about women as if we are the objectively “more beautiful” binary gender. men are gorgeous and i mean this politically.

[whitepolaris]

Frank Emmert and the Cheese-Hat Mystique

Sure, people in other states poke fun at the cheesiness: The Wisconsinite dressed for football success with a wedge of faux cheddar struck on his or her head is the most classic image that comes to mind. Without question, no other state even comes close the joke chapeau department. But despite rumors of gangs in cheese hats duct-taping Chicago Bears fans to lampposts, wedge-heads are usually easygoing. They don't mind if others laugh. Besides, anyone familiar with recent state history will tell you in a voice hushed with reverential awe that cheese hats are not only warm and pleasing to the eye but have actually saved a man from certain death.

That's according to no less an authority than the Federal Aviation Administration, which made the pronouncement in connection with an incident that has only added to the cheese-hat mystique. In November 1995, Frank Emmert of the town of Superior survived a plane crash largely because of his cheese hat. He keeps his lucky headgear, which is still smeared with blood and engine grease, enshrined in a glass case on the wall of his home. After all, you don't risk wearing a holy relic to Lambeau Field, where it could be splashed with Miller Lite or ketchup from a stray bratwurst. Emmert remains humble despite his status as a living legend. "I'm just another Packers fan," he told Weird Wisconsin in a recent phone interview.

Emmert was flying home from a Packers-Browns game in Cleveland when the accident occurred. He was cruising along near Stevens Point with his flying instructor when ice began choking the rented Cessna Skyhawk, and the two pilots realized they were heading for the frozen turf below. Thinking fast, Emmert, who was thirty-six years old at the time, clutched his genuine Foamation Cheesehead hat and burrowed into it. There was another foam hat in back, said Emmert, but his instructor was a Steelers fan, so he chose not to use it.

The plane was a total wreck, but the two men walked or, in Emmert's case, limped away. Emmert's section of the plane took the brunt of the crash, and the FAA told him he most likely would have been killed if not for the cushioning effect of the cheese hat. As it was, Emmert's right foot was twisted into a complete circle by the impact. And that (almost literally) diehard Steelers fan suffered a sheared scalp and a smashed jaw.

"The ironic thing was," said Emmert, "that before the flight, my sister had told me to go break a leg."

The incident made Emmert an instant celebrity, getting him his fifteen seconds of fame on various television shows, including Jay Leno's and Geraldo Rivera's talk shows, and an NFL Films shows. There have been additional perks too. "I've been to Brett Favre's house," said Emmert, "and had a lot of good times over the years." For a while, he became a sort of cheese-hat "spokesmodel" for Fomation, Inc., the St. Francis company that makes all manner of foam-cheese paraphernalia. And for a short time while he was recuperating from his injuries, he even ran his own cheese-hat store in Superior.

The crash didn't sour Emmert, now forty-five, on flying, though. "It was the airplane's turn, not ours," he told us. But to this day, he never flies without a cheese hat within easy reach.

[ravenmyecoaction]

Métis Peoples & the Buffalo

For this post I will be discussing Métis people and the significance of the buffalo to us as a culture and as a Nation. I will first give a bit of background on who the Métis people are. Then, I will discuss why the buffalo were historically a central part of Métis culture, identity and way of life in the 1700s to 1800s. A part of this history is the incredible buffalo hunts that the Métis came together for, in a highly chaotic, yet organized fashion, for such freedom loving people, in order to sustain their families, as well as for trade and income. I will also touch on a darker part of history, where the magnificent buffalo herds of Turtle Island were almost driven to extinction in the late 1800s, of which the Métis may have played an unfortunate part in, along with other forces at play during that time. I will then discuss how the buffalo hunt, although a thing of the past, still has relevance to contemporary Métis people, particularly regarding our political tradition, and I will consider how Métis peoples historical relationship with buffalo has implications for the future of the Métis Nation, including Métis wellness and self-determination.

Who are the Métis?

The Métis people are descendants of plains First Nations women and European fur traders who had country marriages and began families (Kodiack, 2020b), in the 16 and 1700s (Métis Nation of Ontario, n.d.) Over several generations a distinct culture emerged from these unions, where the Métis have a unique culture, a distinct ancestral language, Michif, an extensive network of kin, and a shared history, political tradition and way of life (Gaudry, 2019). They had many lifestyles in the 17 & 1800s, including as hunters, trappers, gathers, traders, farmers, translators or clerks. Education opportunities varied, depending on peoples’ access to money and land. A shift from trading to a mixed lifestyle was more common as permanent Métis communities formed across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in the 1800s (Kodiak, 2020b). The Métis were known as entrepreneurs, ‘self-made” people, who were independent of clan or kinship obligations to European and First Nations groups. Some Michif traders did very well for themselves and were known as ‘Rich Men’. The Métis valued liberty, equality and democracy (Teillet, 2019). The Cree would call them Otipemisiwak (oh-ti-pi-miss-i-wak), which means the “people who own themselves” or “those who rule and command themselves” (Kodiak, 2020).

(Image: https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/toward-metis-homeland)

History of the Métis, Buffalo, and Buffalo Hunt

The buffalo is central to the formation of Métis culture and nationhood, where buffalo herds brought thousands of descendants of the First Nations women and European fur traders together in the 1700s & 1800s, to work towards a common goal, to hunt buffalo for food and the meat was also used as form of currency to be traded for other important things, including trade goods, other food, land and education. Métis buffalo hunters brought in a reliable, steady source of nutritious food, which was an important source of food security in the Red River, where crops often failed. They also made far more money than one could farming (Teillet, 2019). 

Many Métis preferred the lifestyle of living “entirely by they chase,” with the wind in their face and with the constant change that following the herds across the plains for 100s of miles brought, rather than by the “monotonous toil of the settlers.” There were summer, fall and winter hunts. Whole families went along on these hunting expeditions, because everyone was needed, where the men were responsible for the hunt and the women played an important role in pemmican making, and later in the production of Buffalo robes (Teillet, 2019). 

(Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_buffalo_hunt#/media/File:PaulKane-BuffaloHunt-ROM.jpg)

Here is a poem by Marilyn Dumont about how to make pemmican:

How to Make Pemmican

Kill one 1800lb. Buffalo 

Gut it

Skin it

Butcher it

Slice the meat in long strips for drying

Construct drying tripods and racks for 1000lbs. Of wet meat

Dry it while staving of predators for days

Strip from drying racks and lay on tarps for pounding

Round 1000 lbs. of dry meat

Mix with several pounds of dried berries, picked previously 

And rendered suet

Cut buffalo hides in quarters

Fill with hot dried meat, berry and suet mixture

Sew quarter-hide portions together with sinew

Bury in a cache for later mmmh.

(Dumont, 2015)

While the buffalo hunt had the very practical purpose of obtaining meat and trade supplies, it was also a time where the Métis were able to sing, laugh, dance, gossip, joke and fight. It was a pretty loud affair, not to mention over the shrieks made by their signature Red River carts (Teillet, 2019).

Cuthbert Grant, the Buffalo Hunt & its Significance for Future Métis Governance

After 1816, Cuthbert Grant brought together the Métis in a way where you could say that “the buffalo hunt began in earnest” and grew into the legendary Métis buffalo hunts. He was able to somewhat tame a freedom loving and wild group of people. He managed to create an environment where their freedom and pride was honoured, while they also learned to work together as a unit. Grant developed democratic rules of the hunt, and a chain of command, from the chief captain of the hunt to ten captains below, as well as to scouts and camp guards (Teillet, 2019). When over a 1000 people could be participating in a single hunt, it required rules to make it work, including things like no stealing, swearing or hunting on Sundays. Once these rules were well established among the Métis, it was possible to apply them to other important matters of survival. This is why this institutional structure of the hunt was an early form of Métis governance (Cram, 2020).

(Image: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/grant_cuthbert_1854_8E.html)

Near Extinction of the Buffalo Herds of Turtle Island 

The buffalo hunt as a way of life came to an end in the late 1800s, when the buffalo herd populations were nearly decimated. This near collapse of the population is said to be due to over harvesting, as well as the  deliberate and successful attempt to starve Indigenous peoples of plains in the United States by the American government (Bergman, 2013). 

Well not the only groups considered to be responsible for the near extinction of buffalo, the Métis have been named to have been part of the problem. They were considered to be wildly successful hunters, where they rode on horseback and killed by the gun. I’ve also read contradictory information about whether they used as much of the buffalo as they could or whether they were wasteful. One source claims that nothing was wasted, where all the “meat and skin was preserved and cured” before any more buffalo were killed (Teillet, 2019). But another source talks about how it was witnessed that the Métis could be quite wasteful, where hunting in the summer risked spoiling a huge amount of meat and fat if the weather suddenly became too hot and they sometimes took the best cuts of meat and best fat and left the rest of the buffalo on the field (Cunfer & Waiser, 2016).

If the latter part is true, it is certainly requires some critical reflection. If it is true, It makes me think maybe many Métis lost their teachings from their First Nations mothers, that animals are sacred and every bit of them should be used to honour them for sacrificing their lives. It’s possible that survival may have been so hard at that time they felt they had no other way to survive but to get pemmican meat and buffalo robes to market.

Relevance of the Buffalo and the Hunt to the Métis Today and in the Future: Political Tradition

First off, I recognize that as Métis people we will never go back to a subsistence life based on the buffalo.

Yet I recognize that Métis peoples’ past relationship with the buffalo and the structures that came about due to the buffalo hunt has current and future implications for the Métis, including opportunities and challenges.

One could argue that out of these buffalo hunts came a sense of unity and from that emerged a new Nation. The Métis had developed a governing system during these hunts that were based on Métis values, including egalitarianism, freedom, democracy, mobility, family and kin (Teillet, 2019). We saw these values and structures of government reflected in the Métis provisional government, of which Louis Riel was the leader, that was concerned with the rights of the Métis and negotiating the terms of entering Confederation (Bumsted, 2019). We now see these values shine through in our current local community and provincial governments, who represent us and advocate for our Métis rights today, as constitutionally enshrined Indigenous peoples in Canada. 

I think that one of the opportunities that has arisen from the Métis buffalo hunt and Métis values is our strong political tradition, which our culture should continue to use in governance. I think the continuation of this political tradition is important to carry on into the future in the Métis fight for increased self-determination in a State which has continuously and continues to try to deny many of our rights, as Indigenous peoples in Canada, and more specifically as Métis people.

(Image: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/recasting-riel-568290592.html)

Métis, Buffalo and the Buffalo hunt: Other Implications

I also think that the love of Métis peoples to be out on the land, where they would have rather been hunting buffalo than toiling away at agriculture, points to the fact that connection to land is an important part of Métis wellness. I have noticed that in my Métis community, particularly with youth, there is a strong desire to connect more with the land, including through the gathering of plants for food and medicine, and through hunting. In the future it would be helpful if there was more funding that helps get Métis people out on the land. 

Finally, I think that the issue of the near collapse of the buffalo population is both a challenge and opportunity to the Métis peoples, and other peoples, when reflecting on the future. I think it is important for us as Métis people to reflect on the fact that we may have played a significant part in this and to use it as an opportunity to reflect and take action in the future regarding environmental protection and conservation that is done in a decolonized manner, where we take the lead from those First Nations whose traditional territories we are working in.

References

Bergman, B. (2013). Bison back from brink of extinction. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bison-back-from-brink-of-extinction 

Bumsted, J, (2019). Red River Rebellion. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/red-river-rebellion

Cram, S. (2020). Muddied water season 2 episode 2: The buffalo hunt [audio file]. CBC Listen. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/371-muddied-water

Cunfer, G. & Waiser, W. A. (2016). Bison and people on the North America great plains: A deep environmental history. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

Dumont, M. (2015). The pemmican eaters: Poems. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ECW. Retrieved from https://www-deslibris-ca.libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/ID/467925

Gaudry, A. (2019). Métis. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/metis

Kodiak, K. (2020). Lii sayzoons Michifs: L’itii (June to August) [PowerPoint presentation]. Archaeological Society of Alberta.

Métis Nation of Ontario. (n.d.). Métis historic timeline: Significant dates in the development of the Métis Nation. Retrieved from http://www.metisnation.org/culture-heritage/m%C3%A9tis-timeline/

Teillet, J. (2019). The north-west is our mother: The story of Louis Riel’s people, the Métis Nation (First ed.). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

[jeannereames]

How does Alexander's personality change through the series? I've found that depictions of his later life range from showing as a splendid hero to a crazed despot. I'm excited to see your take, and to see how Hephaistion changes as well, and whether those changes bring him and Alexander together or push them apart.

HOW DO I INTEND TO DEPICT ALEXANDER IN DANCING WITH THE LION GOING FORWARD?

Ummm… this might have got long? My apologies. :-)  I threw in some pretty pictures to cut it up?

I tend to see Alexander as a man made by his culture. Macedonian kings were expected to win wars and provide loot. Furthermore, his society named men heroes for prowess in battle and personal bravery, not selfless public service. It was deeply agonistic, with zero-sum competition and a constant need to prove one’s personal excellence (aretē). Such demonstrations brought kleos–fame–and elevated one’s personal timē–honor or public standing. Humility was NOT a virtue, and there were no poor men, only rich men in the making. ;)

Put all that together, inject it with a hefty dose of testosterone, and you begin to understand Alexander (and larger Macedonian society).

Modern attempts to paint Alexander (ATG) as a hero or a villain often depend on modern views of virtue, not ancient ones. We want our heroes to be Captain America, or Frodo Baggins. Good-hearted, honest, humble, sometimes reluctant heroes. They’re driven by a sense of SERVICE, not a desire for KLEOS.

THAT IS EMPHATICALLY AT ODDS WITH ALEXANDER’S PRECHRISTIAN WORLD.

Which makes him a hard sell.

I don’t plan to paint ATG as either hero or villain, in the usual sense. The very last line of Dancing with the Lion: Rise is highly ironic. I won’t repeat it here for those who may not yet have read the second book, but while Alexander absolutely means what he thinks in that moment, it’s a young man’s fancy.

It ain’t gonna be so easy.

Riptide has said they likely won’t publish further in the series, even before the first two came out, because the whole thing is a tragedy, not a romance. The first two books (or really one novel) have a “happily for now” ending, so they were okay with that. But we all know how the story ends.

It’s not a tragedy, however, because Alexander is a megalomaniacal villain. The protagonists of tragedies are called the “tragic hero,” after all.

I want to continue writing him much as I tried to in Becoming and Rise: a human being with flaws and virtues. And as with any tragic hero, the greatest flaws are often overdrawn virtues. Virtue turned inside out.

So again, if you’ve read book two, go back to the novel’s last line. There’s his tragic flaw in all it’s glory. His desire to uphold that, often in the face of serious reality checks, will finally break him in Baktria, where in the name of virtue, honor, and piety, he’ll commit a terrible atrocity that will drive Hephaistion from him for some time. Hephaistion is still loyal to him as king, mind, but he can’t stomach what happens on a personal level. It’s no silly love triangle, situational misunderstanding, or manufactured angst for “drama.” It’s a deep, fundamental ideological clash–the sort of thing that Real Couples face sometimes, and must then choose to accept and move beyond, or acknowledge is irreparable and separate.

Obviously, they’ll get over it. But it’s not immediate. Nor easily. And it will involve a lot emotional blood on the floor, from both of them.

Baktria is the pivot point in the series, where it moves from triumph to tragedy. Things that came together are now falling apart.

Less poetically, Alexander is discovering–post Gaugamela–that “compromise” is the ugly truth of successful politics. I love the line from Hamilton, George Washington to another brilliant, impetuous young man named Alexander: “Dying is easy, living is harder.” Alexandros may want to be Achilles, but Achilles DIED.

In Alexander’s case, “Conquest is easy, ruling is harder.”

Alexander has no plans to die, but he’s going to realize how much of what he thought would be the case about rule…isn’t. And maybe his father DID know a thing or three, after all.

Historically, at the end of his life, Alexander is much less idealistic: shrewder, harder, less trusting, and more pragmatic. Just look at his appointments at the beginning and in his last two years. Early on, he’s inclined to put the former ruler back in charge, as long as that ruler surrendered to him, and add a garrison. After returning from India, he discovers how many of those men (and some garrison commanders too) betrayed his trust. So he kills the lot and reappoints…virtually all Macedonians (and a few Greeks).

This is the opposite of Tarn’s “Brotherhood of Mankind” (which was enshrined in Renault’s The Persian Boy, and picked up as well by Stone’s 2004 flick).

This is Macedonian Realpolitik.

It’s also Alexander Disillusioned.

But he’s still not the devil. That’s too simplistic, and too modern. While I greatly admire Brian Bosworth’s scholarship (he was THE Arrian specialist), I disagree with his assessment of Alexander’s career in his 1986 JHS article, “Alexander the Great and the Decline of Macedon,” wherein he ends with, “That was the unity of Alexander–the whole of mankind, Greeks and Macedonians, Medes and Persians, Bactrians and Indians, linked together in a never ending dance of death” (12).

What Bosworth ignores is that nobody at the time would have seen conquest in itself as evil, merely how one went about it. And how Alexander went about it is, actually, a mixed bag. Maybe that’s his problem. He’s not ruthless enough to be admired for his sheer bloody-mindedness (aka, Genghis Kahn), but he did some terrible things, which kinda undercuts the “squeaky good guy” image he wanted to project–and I think genuinely wanted to believe himself to be.

We live in a post-WWI and post-WWII world, where starting a war to take land is sorta frowned upon. Even if Putin, Xi, and Erdoğan Didn’t Get That Memo. But that colors how we read Alexander’s career. We can’t and shouldn’t ignore Alexander’s atrocities, but casting him as a Hitler-esque madman says more about us than him. Alexander was NOT Hitler.

One of the toughest things about doing ancient history is this weird “double think” wherein the historian must UNDERSTAND why ancient people do what they do or think what they think…without necessarily approving of it. THIS IS HARD. It’s really hard. Too often, both professional historians and fans of history either react with modern attitudes and anachronistic critique because they find something so appalling, OR they go so far into the “understand” that they confuse it with “approve.”

Walking that line is what I hope to do, going forward with Dancing with the Lion. There are ways to faithfully show ancient attitudes even while telegraphing to the reader that’s not okay. (Hephaistion often gets used for that, incidentally, both in what’s been published and in what’s coming.)

Back to Alexander…I suspect he was often frustrated with Macedonian pushback, given his need for approval/affection. (That’s one of the key elements of ATG’s character that I think Mary Renault hit dead on the head in her novels.) I also believe he was deeply disappointed in his Macedonian soldiers at times. As noted above, Tarn’s whole “Brotherhood” notion cracks apart when we look at what Alexander actually DID, not what he said in his “Reconciliation Banquet” speech. (Remember, ancient speeches are NOT what anybody actually said, but [maybe] the gist couched as a rhetorical exercise by the authors of these texts … regardless of whether it’s Thucydides’s “Funeral Oration” of Perikles, Arrian’s speech by Alexander after the Opis Mutiny, or Calgacus’s address to his troops found in Tacitus.)

Remember what I said about expectations for Macedonian kings? Win wars and provide loot. Alexander did that with bells on. As I’ve said before, here and elsewhere, he was the Energizer Bunny of Macedonian kings, just kept going and going and going….

Yet somewhere along the way, he decided he wanted to rule what he’d won, not simply plunder it. Opinions about Alexander’s “Persianizing” have waxed and waned. First, it was so tied into the “Brotherhood” concept that after Badian, et al., torpedoed Tarn, ATG was recast as simply a glorified marauder. Yet more recently, the pendulum has begun to swing back, pointing out that, rather than some ideological notion, perhaps it was pragmatic?

Alexander was a very smart man. He understood that to rule this new united kingdom he’d created, he had to get creative. I think he also, quite genuinely, LIKED some of Persian culture. IMO, there are two basic types of people. Those who see something different, regard it with fear and suspicion, and run away or denigrate it. Then there are those who see something different and regard it with curiosity and run towards it. Alexander was (I think clearly) the latter type.

Yet many of his soldiers were not. They belonged to the former type. Plus, they’d been conditioned to think of themselves as conquerors, masters, etc. They’d proven their superiority on the battlefield. It’s the most simple sort of ethnocentrism: the “schoolyard bully” type. We beat you, so we’re better than you. They didn’t hold with Alexander’s myth-infused notions of conquest. To be honest, I don’t think Alexander held with them after Baktria. But I do think he understood that if he wanted to become Shah-han-shah of Persia, he couldn’t squash the Persians (and everyone else) under his heel.

IMO, too many modern historians are inclined to elevate the objections of Alexander’s soldiers, as if they are somehow pure of motive while Alexander isn’t, and he’s betraying them. That’s buying into ancient narrative bias. Let’s recast the whole thing in the modern era.

I see certain parallels between Alexander’s Macedonian soldiers and the red-hat wearing mobs at Trump rallies, terrified of the “browning of America” and convinced of their own cultural (and racial) superiority. The more diverse Alexander’s army became, the angrier his Macedonian troops got. One of the breaking points behind the Opis Mutiny was the emergence of the “Epigoni,” The mixed-race and Iranian boys trained in Macedonian arms. That INFURIATED the rank-and-file Macedonians. How dare Alexander share the sacred trust of Macedonian military might with Those People (who we just conquered and so, must be inferior to us)?

Reframed so, I think it easier to get beyond ancient pro-Hellenic source bias.

This is definitely something I’ll be playing with in the novel. It will NOT be “the poor, benighted troops are being mistreated by Ruthless Alexander.” But it also won’t be, “Alexander can do no wrong, and his men have no legitimate beefs.”

Life is NEVER that clear-cut.

NUANCE is all. And in the end, Alexander’s own virtues: his creativity, his ability to think outside the box, his insatiable desire to succeed, and his need to at least appear to be honorable…all these things will be his undoing.

(PSA: I reserve an author’s right to change my mind as I go forward and see how the series unfolds, but at least at present, this reflects my intentions, and some details aside, I think the gist will stay true.)

[glittergummicandypeach]

Tearing Down Evangelical Icons: Why Penn’s Decision to Remove George Whitefield Statue May Be Good for American Evangelicalism | Religion Dispatches

It’s a curious fact of history that a statue of John Wesley stands prominently ensconced in the center of downtown Savannah, Georgia. In stark contrast, a nondescript gazebo dedicated to George Whitefield sits nestled in a quiet residential area on the outskirts of town. 

It’s not what you’d expect given the history of these two men in Georgia. A young imperious Wesley, fresh out of Oxford, angered British settlers and made a mess of his time in the colony. The failed missionary eventually had to flee Savannah under cover of night with a lawsuit hanging over his head. 

Whitefield, on the other hand, was a widely admired, steadfast champion of Georgia. He dedicated over three decades of his life advocating for the fledgling colony’s social and economic success, making time in his busy life as an evangelist, a catalyst for the Great Awakening, and a founder of the evangelical movement in America. 

When I was a graduate student doing research in Savannah, the unexpected juxtaposition of Wesley’s statue and Whitefield’s gazebo served as a sobering reminder of the twists of historical memory. It’s a complicated matter to memorialize people and movements. 

If Whitefield’s admirers were disappointed with the Savannah gazebo, they did get a statue of their hero at the University of Pennsylvania. After an early model was rejected by donors as “too limp and tepid,” the final version was a rousing success. When one supporter saw it, he exclaimed, “Whitefield is alive! He is resurrected!” Since its unveiling in 1919, the preacher’s towering figure in Philadelphia has become a pilgrimage destination of sorts. 

That statue, however, is about to go away. Citing Whitefield’s legacy as an advocate for slavery, university administrators announced on July 2 that they would be taking Whitefield down. For many evangelical Christians, the removal of one of their founding fathers will be a bitter pill to swallow. 

Acknowledging the sins of the past is a difficult thing. It’s easier to see history through a rose-colored lens. I’m reminded of Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller, one of the most celebrated preachers for evangelical renewal in our day, who frequently quotes Whitefield in his messages and describes reading all of Whitefield’s sermons as one of the most profound influences on his own preaching. Keller wrote in the New Yorker that true evangelical theology is inconsistent with the racism and xenophobia of politicians like Donald Trump and Roy Moore. 

Quibbling with pollsters’ methods for identifying evangelicals and insisting on the purity of evangelical theology, Keller defended true evangelicalism, which he believes stands above racism. If we look back far enough in history, according to this view, a purer version of evangelical faith awaits rediscovery. 

But we would search in vain. You can go all the way back to Whitefield and find that it was always possible to preach the Christian gospel and promote white supremacy and chattel slavery at the same time. Whitefield, after all, criticized the belated legalization of slavery in Georgia by lamenting white lives lost: “How many white people have been destroyed for want of [slaves]?”

Historical amnesia is buoyed by the display of statues and the proliferation of hagiographies. It’s also exacerbated by a rhetorical Christianity that denounces the most blatant outward manifestations of racial sin but shirks the hard work of examining the history of evangelical culpability. The truth is, pat answers like “nobody’s perfect” and “we can appreciate the theology of evangelical greats without getting distracted by their cultural and social blind spots” do more harm than good. Enshrining individuals and systems is a sure way to preserve their blind spots too. 

For all these reasons, the removal of Whitefield’s statue might actually be good for evangelicals. A moment of apparent defeat may become an opportunity to question their proclivities for hero worship. They may examine myths of evangelical innocence and theological superiority, which obscure the hostile takeover of indigenous lands and violence against enslaved bodies. This more sober understanding of evangelical history might lead to honest reckoning with the deep wounds that continue to fester in our common life together. 

A cult of celebrity that papers over a multitude of sins has long been a temptation for evangelicals, long before Trump. The fact is, Whitefield wasn’t just the benevolent founder of an orphanage in Georgia, but a plantation owner who profited from enslaving Africans. Worse, the preacher was an evangelist for British imperial expansion and arguably the most vocal and persistent lobbyist for the legalization of slavery in Georgia. 

“I challenge the whole world to produce a single instance of a negro’s being made a thorough Christian, and thereby made a worse servant,” the great preacher said. Instead of listening to abolitionist contemporaries like Anthony Benezet and John Woolman, Whitefield rationalized and theologized slavery. 

Removing Whitefield can become the occasion for rejecting nostalgia for a bygone era that never existed in the first place; it can be an opportunity to learn. 

The tearing down of this iconic image might challenge us to reflect on Western Christianity’s obsession with what the theologian Shoki Coe called a “cathedral mentality,” the desire to build lasting monuments commemorating our own achievements. Such monument-making almost always requires a derogation of historical memory. 

When an alumni group at the University of Pennsylvania set out to mark the bicentennial of Whitefield’s birth by erecting a statue and calling him a founder of the university, they veered from the facts of history and followed a script of their own revisionist making. Attributions to Whitefield as a “founder” of the university are overly generous, if not downright inaccurate.

It’s true that Whitefield intended to build a school for orphans in Philadelphia. He preached in a structure called the New Building as part of that work, which Benjamin Franklin later purchased to build the university. Whitefield preached in that structure before the roof was even installed, providing an apt image of the breakneck speed at which he moved for most of his life. It may have made for a dramatic scene of worship, where hearers could look up, not only at the honey-tongued preacher, but past him into the heavens. But like many other projects Whitefield started in his life as an itinerant, the work of actually building a school fell by the wayside and languished.

Rather than seeing the removal of statues as erasing our history, it might serve as a moment of reckoning, for redress. If it sparks conversations where we interrogate tropes of white saviorism and nationalistic greatness, that would be a good thing and a sign of hope. 

It’s a fact now largely forgotten, but that gazebo in Savannah’s Whitefield Square is an important site not only for evangelicalism but also for Black history in America. A burial site for formerly enslaved persons, it is hallowed ground. Even if a decorative white structure has all but erased that harrowing memory, their story and their blood still cry out for justice. 

Similarly, the statue of Whitefield in Philadelphia has also served to obfuscate the history of evangelical participation in America’s racial sins. Its removal might mark a turning point in the unfolding story of evangelicals in America. How evangelicals will respond remains to be seen. 

This content was originally published here.

[biofunmy]

A Nile Journey Into the Past

Huddled on a chaise on the upper deck of the Orient, the dahabiya that I had chosen for a cruise down the Nile, I sipped hibiscus tea to ward off the chill. Late in February, it was just 52 degrees in Aswan, where I had boarded the sailboat, but the scenery slipping past was everything the guidebooks had promised: tall sandbanks, curved palms and the mutable, gray-green river, the spine of Egypt and the throughline in its history.

I’d been obsessed with Egypt since childhood, but it took a cadre of female adventurers to get me there. Reading “Women Travelers on the Nile,” a 2016 anthology edited by Deborah Manley, I’d found kindred spirits in the women who chronicled their expeditions to Egypt in the 19th century, and spurred on by them, I’d planned my trip.

Beside my chair were collections of letters and memoirs written by intrepid female journalists, intellectuals and novelists, all British or European. Relentlessly entertaining, the women’s stories reflected the Egyptomania that flourished after Napoleon invaded North Africa in 1798. The country had become a focal point for artists, architects and newly minted photographers — and a fresh challenge for affluent adventurers.

Their dispatches captured Egypt’s exotica — vessels “laden with elephant’s teeth, ostrich feathers, gold dust and parrots,” in the words of Wolfradine von Minutoli, whose travelogue was published in 1826. And they shared the thrill of discovery: Harriet Martineau, a groundbreaking British journalist, feminist and social theorist, described the pyramids edging into view from the bow of a boat. “I felt I had never seen anything so new as those clear and vivid masses, with their sharp blue shadows,” she wrote in her 1848 memoir, “Eastern Life, Present and Past.” The moment never left her. “I cannot think of it without emotion,” she wrote.

Their lyricism was tempered by adventure: In “A Thousand Miles Up the Nile,” Amelia Edwards, one of the century’s most accomplished journalists, described a startling discovery near Abu Simbel: After a friend noticed an odd cleft in the ground, she and her fellow travelers conscripted their crew to help tunnel into the sand. “Heedless of possible sunstroke, unconscious of fatigue,” she wrote, the party toiled “as for bare life.” With the help of more than 100 laborers, supplied by the local sheikh, they eventually descended into a chapel ornamented with dazzling friezes and bas reliefs.

Though some later took the Victorians to task for exoticizing the East, these travelers were a daring lot: They faced down heat, dust, floods and (occasionally) mutinous crews to commune with Egypt’s past. Liberated from domestic life, they could go to ground as men did.

Wolfradine von Minutoli wrote of camping out under the stars by the pyramids. Florence Nightingale, then 29 and struggling to gain independence from her parents, recalled crawling into tombs illuminated by smoking torches. Nightingale, among others, was struck by the otherworldliness of it all. Moved by the fragmented splendor of Karnak, the sacred complex in Luxor, she wrote to her family, “You feel like spirits revisiting your former world, strange and fallen to ruins.”

Taken with their sense of adventure, I wanted to know whether the Nile journey had retained its mystique. Would I feel the presence of these women along the way? And could modern Egypt rival the country that they encountered?

As in the Victorian era, there would be unknowns: Political upheavals and terrorist activity are realities in Egypt. The country’s tourist industry reached a nadir after the 2015 attack on a flight from the seaside resort of Sharm el Sheikh; more than 200 people perished.

Violence has continued to flare: In December, a bomb destroyed a tour bus near the pyramids in Giza, killing four people. A second bus bombing in May injured at least 14.

But risk, I decided, is relative. The State Department’s advisory places Egypt at Level 2 out of 4 (“exercise caution”), along with China, Italy and France. And though still fragile, the country’s travel industry (which recorded 11 million visitors last year, up from 5.4 million in 2017) is rebounding.

Aboard the Orient

Dozens of double-masted dahabiyas and river cruisers now ply the Nile, but I was drawn to the low-key Orient — a charming wooden sailboat, it has a capacity of 10 people but I was joined by only four. Instead of a cinema and floor shows, we had backgammon and intermittent Wi-Fi. (The cost of the three-day cruise, including my single supplement, was $964.) On the upper deck, I could lounge on oversize cushions and watch storks skim the river. In the salon, a low sofa and carved armchairs were perfect for dipping into vintage National Geographics.

My cabin was compact, with twin brass beds and floral wallpaper. The river was close; I could have pulled aside the screens and trailed my fingers through the current. (Not that I did; early travelers praised the “sweetness” of Nile water, but trash bobs on its shores and bilharzia, a parasitic disease that attacks the kidneys, liver and digestive system, is a risk.)

Before 1870, when the entrepreneur Thomas Cook introduced steamers (and declassé package tours), a cruise on the world’s longest river was a marathon. Journeys lasted two or three months and typically extended from Cairo to Nubia and back.

Just getting on the river was a trial: After renting a vessel, travelers were obliged to have it submerged to kill vermin. The boats were then painted, decorated and stocked with enough goods to see a pharaoh through eternity.

Published in 1847, the “Hand-book for Travellers in Egypt” advised passengers to bring iron bedsteads, carpets, rat-traps, washing tubs, guns and staples such as tea and “English cheese.” Pianos were popular additions; so were chickens, turkeys, sheep and mules. M.L.M. Carey, a correspondent in “Women Travelers on the Nile,” recommended packing “a few common dresses for the river,” along with veils, gloves and umbrellas to guard against the sun.

With my fellow passengers, I spent the first afternoon at a temple near the town of Kom Ombo. The structure rose in the Ptolemaic period and was in ruins for millenniums. Mamdouh Yousif, our guide, talked us through it all. A native of Luxor, he used a laser pointer to pick out significant details and served up far more history than I could absorb.

Celebrated for its majestic setting above a river bend, the temple was nearly empty. Reggae music drifted from a cafe and shrieks rose from a neighborhood playground.

Dedicated to Horus, the falcon god, and Sobek, the crocodile god, Kom Ombo has a separate entrance, court and sanctuary for each deity. Inside are two hypostyle halls, in which massive columns support the roof. Each hall was paved with stunning reliefs: Here was a Ptolemaic king receiving a sword; there, a second being crowned. A mutable figure who was both aggressor and protector, Sobek was worshipped, in part, to appease the crocodiles that swarmed the Nile. Next to the temple, 40 mummified specimens — from hulking monsters to teacup versions — are enshrined in a dim museum, along with their croc-shaped coffins.

Defaced by early Coptic Christians, damaged by earthquakes and even mined for building materials, Kom Ombo was in disrepair until 1893, when it was cleared by the French archaeologist Jean-Jacques de Morgan. Now, it’s inundated in the late afternoon, when cruise-boat crowds arrive. As we were leaving, folks in shorts and sunhats just kept coming, fanning out until the complex became a multilingual hive.

Back on the Orient, my cabin grew chilly and I wished, briefly, that I had made the journey in the scorching summer. An early supper improved my mood, as did the winter sun setting behind silvery-gray clouds. Since I’d brought a flashlight, I was only mildly annoyed when we learned that our generator would stop at 10 p.m. The darkness was nearly complete, but silence never set in: Creaks, thumps and splashes resounded through the night.

In the morning, we headed north to the sandstone quarry and cult center of Gebel Silsila. With their rock faces still scored with tool marks, the cliffs have an odd immediacy — as if armies of stonecutters could reappear at any moment.

The compelling part of the site is a hive of rock-cut chapels and shrines. Dedicated to Nile gods and commissioned by wealthy citizens, they are set above a shore lined with bulrushes. Eroded but evocative, some retain images of patrons and traces of paintings.

In Edfu, an ode to power in stone

After lunch, we traveled downriver to Edfu, to Egypt’s best-preserved temple. Tourism has made its mark in the agricultural town: Cruise boats line the quay, and the drivers of the horse-drawn carriages known as calèches stampede all comers. Begun in 237 B.C. and dedicated to Horus, the temple was partially obscured by silt when Harriet Martineau visited in 1846. “Mud hovels are stuck all over the roofs,” she wrote, and “the temple chambers can be reached only by going down a hole like the entrance to a coal-cellar, and crawling about like crocodiles.” She could see sculptures in the inner chambers, but “having to carry lights, under the penalty of one’s own extinction in the noisome air and darkness much complicate the difficulty,” she wrote.

Excavated in 1859 by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette, the temple is an ode to power: A 118-foot pylon leads to a courtyard where worshippers once heaped offerings, and a statue of Horus guards hypostyle halls whose yellow sandstone columns look richly gilded.

Feeling infinitesimal, I focused on details: a carving of a royal bee, an image of the goddess Hathor, a painting of the sky goddess Nut.

Mr. Yousif kept us moving through the shadowy chambers — highlighting one enclosure where priests’ robes were kept and another that housed sacred texts. Later I thought of something Martineau had written: “Egypt is not the country to go to for the recreation of travel,” she said. “One’s powers of observation sink under the perpetual exercise of thought.” Even a casual voyager, she wrote, “comes back an antique, a citizen of the world of six thousand years ago.”

Our dinner that night was festive: When someone asked for music, our purser, Mostafa Elbeary, returned with the entire crew. Retrieving drums from an inlaid cabinet, they launched into 20 exuberant minutes of song.

The night quickly deteriorated, however. Gripped by an intestinal upheaval, I bumped my way back and forth to the bathroom. In the morning, I was too ill to visit more tombs and temples. The chef sent me soupy rice, and Mr. Elbeary kept me supplied with Coke.

Watching the river in bed, I realized what was missing: While 19th-century voyagers rode camels into the desert and ventured into villagers’ homes, we had seen little of local life. Before the cruise, I had sampled the chaos in Egypt’s capital. With a guide from the agency Real Egypt, I spent an afternoon exploring the neighborhood known as Islamic Cairo. Heading down a street lined with spice stalls and perfume shops, we had passed Japanese children with sparkly backpacks, Arab women chatting into cellphones tucked into their hijabs and old men arguing in cafes. We stopped to watch Egyptian girls draping themselves in rented Scheherazade costumes; after snapping selfies, they happily vamped for me.

A trip to Giza was nearly as diverting. Though I didn’t find the monuments inspiring — the Pyramids looked like stage flats against the searing-blue sky — others did. I was standing by the Sphinx when I overheard a man angling his phone toward its ravaged face. “You see me?” he asked, ducking in front of the camera. “That’s the Sphinx. It’s one of the most famous monuments in the world.”

Roman emperors and Egyptian gods

The next day I roused myself for our final outing. We had docked at the town of Esna, and from my window I watched an ATV driven by a boy who looked to be about 7 just miss a herd of goats.

The others were waiting, so I followed Mr. Yousif through the streets at warp speed. Built during the reign of Ptolemy V and dedicated to a river god, Esna’s temple was conscripted by the Romans and then abandoned. Only its portico had been excavated when Nightingale visited. In a letter to her family, she said, ”I never saw anything so Stygian.”

Now partly reclaimed, the temple is 30 feet below street level. Beyond the portico is a hypostyle hall whose columns are inscribed with sacred texts and hymns. Still traced with color, they blossom into floral capitals. On the walls are images of Roman emperors presenting offerings to Egyptian gods.

On our way back to the boat, Mr. Yousif led us through narrow streets where children were racing about. Two little girls, one in a bedraggled party dress, followed us, whispering. A succession of boys darted into our paths to say, “Welcome, hello, hello.” From a closet-size barber stall, three men called out; a merchant in another stall held up his tortoiseshell cat.

Exploring Luxor’s riches

After a celebratory breakfast the next day — crepes, strawberry juice, Turkish coffee — our cruise ended. A driver from the dahabiya company was waiting to take us to Luxor, about an hour away.

Though it was little more than an expanse of fields dotted with mud huts, in the early 19th century, dahabiyas made lengthy stops in Luxor. Near the town is one of the world’s largest sacred monuments and across the Nile is the Valley of the Kings.

In the afternoon, I set out for Karnak. Founded chiefly by Amenhotep III and originally dedicated to Amon-Re, the complex was modified and enlarged by rulers, including Ramses II.

In the 19th century, its pylons, halls and courts were still mired in detritus: Nightingale was unsettled by the temple’s “dim unearthly colonnades” when she visited on New Year’s Eve in 1849. “No one could trust themselves with their imagination alone there,” she wrote. With enormous shadows looming, said Nightingale, “you feel as terror stricken to be there as if you had awakened the angel of the Last Day.”

Though it’s now besieged by tourists, the complex is still haunting. An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes leads to an imposing first pylon; beyond is a hypostyle hall where 138 pillars soar into empty space.

Wandering without a guide, I lingered over details: the play of light on a broken column; the base of a shattered statue that had left its feet behind. On the way to the necropolis across the river, I thought about the desecration described by Victorian travelers. Jewelry, cartouches and body parts were all on the market, and Amelia Edwards, author of “1,000 Miles Up the Nile,” was among those who were offered a mummy.

After casually expressing an interest in an ancient papyrus, wrote Edwards, she and a companion had been “beguiled into one den after another” and “shown all the stolen goods in Thebes.” Inevitably, they found themselves underground with a crumbling object in “gaudy cerements.” (She rejected it.)

Sheltered by limestone cliffs and set off by a limitless sky, the Valley of the Kings has been brought to order: Vendors now sell their wares in a visitors’ center, and tourists can hop an electric train to the burial grounds.

One of the most spectacular tombs in the royal warren belonged to Seti I; it was known to Victorians as “Belzoni’s tomb.” The entrance was breached in 1817 by the Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni who removed the sarcophagus of Seti I and sold it to a collector. In 1846, Martineau visited the chamber that had held the sarcophagus and reported, “We enjoyed seeing the whole lighted up by a fire of straw.” With its brilliant paintings set off by the flames, she said, “it was like nothing on the earth.”

It still is: The deepest and longest tomb in the necropolis, the resting place of Seti I is adorned with astonishing reliefs. Scenes from texts, including the Book of the Dead, lead from one spectacular enclave to another. On the day I visited, the crowds were elsewhere and the silence was profound.

The pharaoh who eluded the Victorians, of course, was Tutankhamun. Cloaked in obscurity for 3,000 years, his tomb was unsealed by Howard Carter at a time when the valley was believed to hold no surprises. In January, conservators completed nine years of restoration that revived the intimate enclosure.

Though most of Tutankhamun’s treasures are in the Egyptian Museum, his outer sarcophagus is still in the burial chamber. Stripped of its bandages, his corpse, blanketed in linen, now lies in a glass box — a desiccated figure blanketed in linen. Only his blackened head and feet are exposed, but he looks exquisitely vulnerable.

Surrounding the remains of the boy king are murals depicting him as a divinity; he enters the afterlife in the company of Anubis and Osiris and Nut. Set against a gold background, the images temper the pathos of his remains.

In the end, the tomb lost for so long is a reminder that in Egypt, the past continues to evolve. Perspectives can shift; voices can change. And something astonishing may be just around the corner.

Michelle Green has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books and other publications. She is the author of “The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier.”

Sahred From Source link Travel

from WordPress http://bit.ly/33D3P3R via IFTTT