{"id":82,"date":"2010-10-01T08:52:48","date_gmt":"2010-10-01T08:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/stewart-the-fool.html"},"modified":"2010-10-01T08:52:48","modified_gmt":"2010-10-01T08:52:48","slug":"stewart-the-fool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/stewart-the-fool.html","title":{"rendered":"Stewart the Fool"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gimpel.jpg\"Progressive religious folks will be on hand<\/a> for tomorrow’s One Nation Working Together<\/a> rally in Washington, putting their faith-based shoulders to the wheel in the Schultzian hope<\/a> of changing the national script. And here’s hoping it all works out.<\/p>\n

But what I’d really like to see is a coalition of the Mainstream Religious (MSR) sign up for the Stewart\/Colbert Restore Sanity<\/a>\/Keep Fear Alive<\/a> carnival at the end of the month. Sure, the Democratic congressional leadership is too stupid<\/a>
\nto understand what the Comedy Central stars are up to, but those in the
\nreligion biz ought to recognize what’s going on–especially the
\nChristians.<\/p>\n

\"Basil.jpg\"In First Corinthians, Paul refers<\/a> to the apostles as “fools for Christ’s sake,” and ever since there has been a tradition of holy fools<\/a>.
\nTheirs is not the direct prophetic assault on the status quo and the
\npowers-that-be. Rather, it’s the quiet and comedic witness of decency
\nand humanity. In Western Christianity, St. Francis is perhaps the most
\nprominent case in point; Eastern Orthodoxy has many examples–which
\nperhaps inspired Isaac Bashevis Singer to write his iconic story “Gimpel
\nthe Fool,” about an apparent naif who bears with good humor the
\noutrages of the world and ends up as a species of Jewish saint. <\/p>\n

Stewart
\nthe Jew and Colbert the Catholic propose to address the lunacy of the
\nmoment with self-mocking moderation. The scores of thousands who have
\nsigned up on Facebook understand the power of their holy foolishness.
\nThe MSR should too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Progressive religious folks will be on hand for tomorrow’s One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, putting their faith-based shoulders to the wheel in the Schultzian hope of changing the national script. And here’s hoping it all works out. But what I’d really like to see is a coalition of the Mainstream Religious (MSR) sign…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nStewart the Fool - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/10\/stewart-the-fool.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Stewart the Fool - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Progressive religious folks will be on hand for tomorrow’s One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, putting their faith-based shoulders to the wheel in the Schultzian hope of changing the national script. And here’s hoping it all works out. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}