In 1945, faced with an unplowed field, an old plow and no mule, Norman Borlaug—the “Wizard” of Mann’s title—strapped the plow’s harness onto himself. So strong was his desire to invent new wheat breeds for Mexico’s depleted soils and burgeoning population, he was willing to transform himself into a farm animal. Borlaug’s impoverished childhood on an Iowa farm motivated him to save others from the hopeless toil of raising crops that didn’t deliver. The scut work paid off: After countless attempts, his team bred disease-resistant wheat with heavy grains on short stalks that wouldn’t topple in the wind. Borlaug’s work in Mexico led to the Green Revolution, a worldwide movement toward high-input agriculture using fertilizers and souped-up hybrid plants. Crop yields surged—and so did populations.

But Borlaug had a nemesis equally ready to scramble in the field and trumpet his views: ornithologist William Vogt, the “Prophet.” Vogt saw Borlaug’s efforts in Mexico and despaired. He thought Borlaug was charging in the wrong direction: boosting yields rather than decreasing demand for food by limiting population growth or resource use. Vogt’s study of cormorant colonies on Peruvian islands showed the birds depended on nearby schools of fish. Though Peru wanted to keep fishing around the islands and mining the cormorants’ guano as fertilizer, Vogt urged restraint. Overfishing would mean no birds and no guano. In the bird colony, Vogt saw a vision of what would happen to humans if birth rates and consumption kept climbing. Vogt’s philosophy, crystallized in his book Road to Survival, influenced proponents of population control including scientists Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The Ehrlichs’ book Population Bomb drew heavily from Vogt’s work and motivated governments worldwide, especially China and India, to push the brakes on population growth.

Borlaug and Vogt developed two competing schools of thought for confronting environmental problems: the Wizard’s path, focusing on large-scale, tech-savvy solutions that could let society overcome constraints; and the Prophet’s soft path, emphasizing community-based solutions and living within limits. It’s scaling up versus scaling back. Mann confesses he often can’t decide which is better. “On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I think Vogt was correct,” he writes. “On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, I go for Borlaug. And on Sunday, I don’t know.” Rather than picking a winner, he describes how each philosophy deals with the four most pressing environmental challenges: food, water, energy and climate change.

Mann’s book draws electricity from bringing together two people who didn’t want to meet in real life. The opposing forces allow The Wizard and the Prophet to sustain tension for challenging, detailed subjects. Mann dives into the thickets of energy systems and agricultural practices without sounding wonky—human stories help make the drama tangible.

Borlaug and Vogt are opposites in how they want to solve problems, but similar in one important way: they both acknowledge that there are environmental problems. This is not a false-balance project in which a scientist debates a science denier. Instead, it’s an exploration of knotty problems in which both viewpoints are worth spooling out and considering. It’s a refreshing approach in a genre where tend to preach and pontificate rather than self-reflect and investigate—the genre that Vogt and Borlaug helped create, books about the one sure way of the future.

Mann suggests we might not understand the available paths and their side effects well enough to choose between them. Had Vogt and Borlaug listened to their critics more closely, perhaps fewer people would have seen the two as “condescending aliens” whose ideas bore no relation to the messy world outside the lab. Mutual listening, Mann argues, is the first step toward consensus. The Wizard and the Prophet takes an ethical stance about what it takes to make an informed decision: A responsible choice means knowing the alternatives as well as your own favorite plan. Taking the two viewpoints seriously, without advocating for one, opens Mann’s discussion to a wider audience.

This isn’t a hagiography praising famous men—it’s nearly a double tragedy. Vogt’s and Borlaug’s blind spots in bringing their ideas to the larger world caused unintended harm, both to their own lives and to many others. And in evaluating the two philosophies, Mann asks a larger question about the human condition: Are we even capable of changing our behavior to save ourselves from collapse, a feat no other species has accomplished?

Only through overcoming our shortcomings and adapting our ideas to social contexts, Mann concludes, do we stand a chance against the challenges we face.

The post Two Roadmaps, One Planet appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Chatty ghosts, departed sons make Saunders’ contribution to the Lincoln canon worth its words.

Abraham Lincoln commands such a presence in American literature, biography and cultural memory that it is difficult to imagine a new and unique contribution to the canon of Lincoln memorabilia. And yet, in typically fresh fashion, George Saunders has written a novel that merits status on the shrine.

Lincoln in the Bardo is Saunders’ debut novel; his paper trail of much-acclaimed short stories and essays primed readers to expect excellence from his first book-length narrative. This novel successfully gratifies the outsized expectations that accompany any work by Saunders or about Lincoln. By presenting a composite of historical voices, Lincoln in the Bardo seeks to reveal the tension and significance of a moment in American history as well as the unique attention to the greater good that distinguished Lincoln’s leadership.

The opening lines introduce Saunders’ first narrative device, a collection of individual voices from beyond the grave (in the tradition of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology) that implies the weight of personal protestations contributing to the burden of the presidency. Although the death of his 11-year-old son, Willie, in February 1862 left a grieving Lincoln struggling with personal tragedy while leading the nation in the first year of the Civil War, Lincoln must also endure the knowledge that his is not the only suffering. The war, while still young, had already proved an insatiable black hole for American sons on both sides of the battle lines. Saunders imagines the details of the historical account that Lincoln returned to the crypt several times to cradle Willie in his arms. Integrating the Buddhist concept of the bardo, a liminal state between death and rebirth, he explores how the living cope with loss, pulling back the curtain on the duality of Lincoln’s private pain and public duty by surrounding him with a motley crew of the dissatisfied dead.

In addition to chatty ghosts, Saunders curates snippets of historical texts. Accumulating related sections from previously published works, he pieces together a description of the events surrounding Willie’s death, beginning with the ill-timed White House gala on the night Willie’s health declines and continuing through the burial service and beyond. These nonfiction medleys create a sense of immediacy and provide a multifaceted perspective on the historical Lincoln, emphasizing the distortion of time and legend that pervades even factual accounts. Each fusion of historical fragments creates a unified theme, as if each piece were written to be combined and compared with the others.

What’s more, these sections illuminate the wide range of contemporary opinions about Lincoln’s judgment and leadership. One chapter includes a hail of letters from distraught mothers and disillusioned soldiers blaming Lincoln for the tsunami of suffering. Grieving families denounce him for flippantly sending sons to die while irate racists ironically insist that they enlisted to preserve unity, not abolish slavery. Even his recent membership in the mourning parents club does not create a sympathetic bridge to public approval. His political competency is denounced, and his private character is defamed. By recreating the onslaught of criticism surrounding Lincoln’s presidency, Saunders envelops the reader in the contentious political milieu that surrounded the Union’s grieving leader.

The cumulative effect of the novel is like a collage, sometimes a barrage, a juxtaposition of sources and voices swelling into a cacophonic symphony. The chorus of ghostly narrators combined with the scrapbook of records reveals the limitations of individual perspectives to encompass the historical moment’s enormity. As Lincoln returns to the graveyard to hold his son, beset by torrents of condemnation while wrestling with the past and future deaths of the many American sons, the unseen multitudes of ghosts crowd around him, unused to visitors. Intrigued by Lincoln’s aura of sorrow while imprisoned by their single-minded, individual purposes, their chaotic assembly characterizes Lincoln’s challenge to exist in and serve the collective, to honor his obligation to both the living and the dead. This is where Saunders exercises his signature magic of arousing fellow-feeling via strange and challenging characters. Exposing the pain and longing that plague human souls, he presents Lincoln as the empathetic representative, the tortured guardian of the collective good, the receptacle of pain and figurehead of compassion.

The ghosts, paralleling the torn nation trapped in its own state of limbo, are emancipated from the bardo only when they release their earthly cares and are absorbed into a Whitman-esque communal consciousness. Saunders positions Lincoln as the locus of redemptive empathy, depicting his swelling determination to pursue national unity through the painful necessity of war. Baptized by pain, he is charged to guard the collective, to bring freedom through empathy, backed by the congress of voices (living and dead) calling for restoration. The reader is swept up in the moral balancing act that envelops Lincoln, sharing the visceral necessity of his role as the harbinger of war.

This luminous novel not only illustrates the gravity of a historical moment but provides a window into the tumultuous chorus of needs that Lincoln is duty-bound to address and synthesize, a particular sense of the decisive weight on this much-memorialized figure. In other words, it didn’t win the Man Booker Prize for nothing.

The post A Presidential Haunting appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

When the Ulrich Museum rolled out the (proverbial) shag carpet for a deep fake AI film and its making-of documentary

One of the more cogent YouTube replies to In the Event of Moon Disaster takes the form of a quote from Orwell posted by user John Riskin: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Contained within that line are myriad counterpoints which are present in the film itself. In the Event of Moon Disaster, directed by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgung, is a deepfake short film, using AI to help viewers “consider how new technologies can bend, redirect and obfuscate the truth around us.” At seven minutes and forty-six seconds, the film consists of an AI-simulated Walter Cronkite broadcast of President Nixon explaining to the American people that Apollo 11 is stranded on the moon, supplemented by footage of the spacecraft malfunctioning. The film’s painstaking technical approach, outlined in the accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary How to Strand Astronauts on the Moon, aims for a maximally realistic rendering of its alternate history.

Widely-exhibited, Moon Disaster was shown at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas, this summer, alongside How to Strand Astronauts. At the Ulrich, the film screened in an installation of a 1960’s living room, complete with Leslie Gore records, a fake newspaper called The Informer (headline: “Astronauts Stranded on Moon”), and a gratuitous array of ashtrays. The Ulrich exhibited Moon Disaster as part of its ongoing film-series “Some Possible Futures,” and the vocabulary of this particular future is grim, with its emphasis on danger, caution, and awareness. Understandably so, considering the applications of deepfakes and their negative media coverage. In a January 13 breakdown called “What are deepfakes — and how can you spot them?”, The Guardian wrote that “the more insidious impact of deepfakes… is to create a zero-trust society, where people cannot, or no longer bother to, distinguish truth from falsehood.” That is the point of Moon Disaster, one rather pedantically made. The film is not a “film” in the cinematic sense, but a conceptual exercise designed to make one disbelieve one’s eyes. The intended reaction: if this thing I know didn’t happen appears to have happened, how can I believe anything?

Debuting in 2019, Moon Disaster is even more relevant in the wake of our voguish outrage at ChatGPT and other AI-generated information. While the moon landing, freighted with conspiracy, might seem a low-hanging event for disruption, it appropriately mirrors our current face-off with AI. Both events represent high points of human accomplishment, and both are bound up with our aspirations, anxieties, and identities. Not until the space race did we question the obvious fact that humans are confined to the Earth. And not until more recently did we question whether our consciousness was exceptional, our machines mere appendages. As Donna Haraway realized in 1985, and wrote in The Cyborg Manifesto:

There was always the specter of the ghost in the machine … But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous … They were not man, an author to himself … To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure.

The twin-anxieties of the eras render the Ulrich’s ashtrays obsolete: we’ve no need to dress the set. We are, in 2023, just as bewildered as Joan Didion when she wrote, regarding the ‘60s, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it.” That’s the trouble with AI; it forces us to contend with the mutability of our scripts.

Moon Disaster follows a script of its own: the comfortable mid-century parlor indicates affluent domesticity as the default mode of life in 1960s America — one feels like they’ve entered The Twilight Zone by way of Mad Men. Or take Panetta’s attempt at nuance in How to Strand Astronauts:

“Cheap fakes are actually more problematic [than deepfakes] — more people have got their hands on the tools of being able to manipulate video and audio to deceive people.” Her conflation of accessibility with danger begs the question of who, exactly, is threatened by greater epistemological equity. Unfortunately, Moon Disaster doesn’t lean into its own fear, refrains from asking that if our realities are so susceptible to distortion, mightn’t we reconsider our relationship to them? Nowhere is there question of the supposition that a more pliable reality is bad, nor any acknowledgement that reality has always been the purview of elite truth-makers — was, during Orwell’s own lifetime, observably authored by those “who control the present.”

In the Event of Moon Disaster grieves the loss of a time and place. One where fewer of us had “mislaid the script,” where we could more easily believe our eyes. One I doubt very much existed except in the hermetic chamber of human myth. Regretfully, Moon Disaster succeeds only at demonstrating that the old myths no longer work, but it offers no new ones. Like Haraway said, we are now “not so sure,” and we’d better get used to it.

The post Authors to Themselves? appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

If I didn’t already respect Egan’s environmental and social consciousness, I might not have given Pilgrimage a second glance. Books on a formalized religion? A religion I grew up with and later left behind? Not really my thing. But prompted by the event, and alone in a new city, I bought the hardback and started reading it immediately. What I found is that Egan provides background and language for a non-theologian seeking a more fluent understanding of Christianity’s troubled history. Two days later, I made my own little pilgrimage from the wine bar across from Watermark down to the church, only to find that I was a week early. By then I was already hooked on the book and finished it anyway.

See, religion might not be Timothy Egan’s thing, either. Like me, he left his church for philosophical and personal reasons, which emerge throughout his story. Nevertheless, he walks the Via Francigena pilgrimage trail from Canterbury, England, to Rome “in search of a faith,” using the route to examine Europe’s history of Christianization — while opening up about his own doubts and hopes for new beliefs. “You’ve prepared for a journey of more than a thousand miles by walking hills and stairs . . . by shedding weight and inconvenient thoughts,” he tells himself in a pep talk during the book’s opening paragraph. “The goal is to be fresh, open to possibility.” The personal tone marks a major departure from his past six books and welcomes readers like myself to be openminded as well.

Egan has spent a career documenting how underdogs survive social and environmental stresses. I was surprised to realize that in this book, it’s Christianity itself that’s the underdog. While 7 in 10 Americans are Christian, the same ratio of young people in Europe say they have no religion. Thousands of places of worship stand shuttered or demolished. “If White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were indeed the rootstock of the United States, then the mother land is nearly barren,” Egan writes.

So off he goes to not only examine how Christianity is crumbling but discover places where faith has endured. While the spine of this narrative is geographically linear, each location along the route invokes remarkable tales of “martyrs, madmen, or monarchs.”

For instance, Saints Jerome and Augustine lived like hedons in their early lives yet translated the Bible from Greek to languages evoking condemnation. Their interpretations influenced centuries of Christian-on-Christian killing where power swung hard from one branch of Christianity to another, often accompanied by bloodshed. This faith built on a nonviolent Jesus has justified rape, murder and large-scale wars (17 million people died in World War I alone, Egan notes at a French city wiped out during the war). It’s impossible to ignore the hypocrisy.

In Corbe ́ny, where Joan of Arc stayed the night with King Charles VII (in separate quarters), Egan pauses in front of commemorative plaque to ask, “What if Joan had made love to one of the men who worshipped her?” Would she still have the same place in Christian mythology? “Not likely. For the story of Joan the Virgin is also the story of a faith trapped in a logical and biological incongruities.” In this way, the author uses Via Francigena’s every site — marking miracle or massacre — as a chance to explore the Christian story.

Egan never exactly shakes off the factual, self-assured tone of a history and opinion writer, but he softens his account with travel, art, architecture and food writing. Joined at times by his wife, son, daughter, fellow pilgrims, ghosts of the past and worries about the future, the author does his best to weave his own personal journey in with the historical terrain he explores.

Egan also articulates his own desire for spiritual truth. In a time when society seems especially polarized, Pilgrimage sympathizes with those whose inclination is not to turn away from each other but rather to dig deeper and find our common hopes, traumas and possibilities. Toward the end of the journey, Egan ceremonially discards a talisman representing the “chips on my shoulder.” After hundreds of miles reflecting on humans’ experience as long ago as the Iron Age, his grievances against others seem unimportant.

Eagan’s obvious enjoyment of the embodied aspects of pilgrimage helps the reader to live vicariously through his experiences. His detailed descriptions of meals create breathing room around heavier topics while making us aware of physical here-ness. In a particularly joyous passage in Italy, rain falls and mushrooms emerge and cooks sing while making that night’s supper. When his wife surprises him by eating pork, she reminds him they walked 20 miles that day. Pilgrimage pushes you beyond boundaries. Surely that’s another way to spiritually grow.

I suppose I saw something of myself in the author, despite our generational, gender and religious background differences. We both grew up in churches. We rejected the dogma. And although we occasionally look back, we seem resolute in living without a religious community. But like me, Egan wonders what we lose when we distance ourselves from religion. Wonder, understanding and devotion top the list. He wants to believe the pope when he says, “Allow yourself to be amazed.” He expresses disappointment at his children’s ignorance of basic religious traditions. And he writes admiringly about monks who illuminated early manuscripts and others who perfected champagne, monks whose “labors were a form of prayer — doing something good and well and dutifully until it was close to perfect, a tribute to the creator.” As his son and daughter come to join Egan on the trail, he checks in on their spiritual grounding and expresses regret that he parented them with a distanced view of faith.

Those of us who think we’ve left religion behind might be tempted to skip reading about this particular journey “in search of a faith.” Don’t. Whether we directly participate in a church or not, the rhythms of Christian religion drive existence in the Midwest and the Western world. Learning more about how our society got to where we are can only help us learn and grow. And pushing our edges to examine our own faith (or lack thereof) is a step toward self-understanding. As Egan quotes Pope Francis, “Our kids should be open enough to allow themselves to be surprised, and not foreclose on the idea that a great faith, though flawed, can contain great truths.” Reading this book could prompt us expand our spirituality — and it might just inspire readers to make their own pilgrimages, whatever that means to them.

The post Non-believers Welcome appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

JEFFERSON CITY – The New Territory Magazine recently added three new directors to its nonprofit board: Jeff Schaeperkoetter, Steve Gerkin, and Pete Dulin. The board, which now consists of 10 people, supports the organization’s mission to advocate and foster love and protection of the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest through publishing art and narrative journalism focused on personal, natural and societal stories.

Building on The New Territory magazine’s years as a collaborative art project and LLC since 2016, the organization formalized as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2023. The board of directors focuses on strategic planning, programs outside of the scope of the print and digital magazine, and fundraising.

“We have already seen early success as a nonprofit in our first year, both in printing two quality issues of Lower Midwest writing and art, hosting our Pageturner fundraiser, establishing Founders Circle and Charter Member philanthropic programs, and receiving our first grant,” says Margo Farnsworth, board president. “After establishing many basic policies and procedures, we are excited to welcome new volunteers to help carry our vision and strategy forward.”

All board members have experience with The New Territory as contributors, subscribers and promoters. In 2024 they look forward to leveraging their community connections and professional skills toward increasing magazine subscribers, building organizational partnerships, advising on programs and overall growth strategy, and helping connect more talented Lower Midwestern journalists and artists with The New Territory Magazine.

“I could not be more excited to welcome Jeff, Steve, and Pete to our second year of nonprofit service,” Tina Casagrand Foss, The New Territory Magazine founder and executive director, said. “They bring collective decades of experience serving their home communities of Mid-Missouri, Tulsa, and Kansas City with skills in organizations, law, marketing, creative writing, and more. The Lower Midwest is fortunate to have them focused on the region.”

For more information, visit The New Territory Magazine nonprofit board page.

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About The New Territory Magazine
The New Territory Magazine is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to advocate and foster love and protection of the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest through publishing art and narrative journalism focused on personal, natural and societal stories.

The post The New Territory Magazine Welcomes Three New Board Directors appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

A half-century later, Southwest Missouri’s veteran visionaries of roots music Cindy Woolf and Mark Bilyeu, performing as The Creek Rocks, have presented a set that proves this distinct Ozark sound endures. Wolf Hunter is stuffed full of regional references, down from the hills and into the backwoods. From “Little Rock Rock” to “The State of Missouri,” these are songs set in green pine tree groves filled with blue jays. There are multiple encounters with wild hogs. Set to the bright, plucky banjo and the bopping double bass thumps, the songs sure do sound like their homeland.

The Creek Rocks are not the first to see popular potential in a folklore library. The recordings collected by Wolf and Hunter helped introduce arrangements of standards like “Casey Jones” and “Roving Gambler” that would be reinterpreted by everyone from the Grateful Dead to Billie Joe Armstrong. Their folklorist contemporary Alan Lomax, most notably, has enjoyed perennial relevance, from references on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaboration Watch the Throne to the songs heavily sampled on Moby’s 1999 electronic album Play.

Even still, young listeners may not recognize just how influential these original recordings really were. Today, any
imaginable sound is just a few clicks away. Following musical breadcrumbs back through an artist’s influences is not only possible, but popularized: streaming services suggest similar artists; listeners are prompted with related videos or albums. While listening to Wolf Hunter, you can search and compare older interpretations of opener “Can’t You Hear Them Wolves
A-Howlin’” before the song is even over.

In the analog 1950s, the work of folklorists like Wolf and Hunter was essential to broadening roots music. For curious ears unseasoned to a distinct regional sound, such folk songs provided the discovery of a new musical landscape. And for those living in the Ozarks, folks whose sonic spines were built by the songs they grew up singing, these recorded archives provided recognition, and the promise of posterity.

This is not to suggest Wolf Hunter is an unfeeling, academic affair. When Cindy Woolf ’s voice takes center stage, her twangy affectation calls to mind both Dolly Parton’s frisky sweetness and Iris DeMent’s raw traditionalism. The arrangements stick close to Americana convention: strings drop out to foreground airtight harmonies; there are no wandering solos or unconventional instruments. But flashes of postmodern twists—like a horn sounded at the beginning of “Groundhog,” or the whimsical studio effects of “Where’d You Get That Hat?”— lend the piece a certain freshness. More importantly, both Woolf and Bilyeu grew up in the Ozark hills, and you can hear it in their earnest performances.

For Mark Bilyeu, formerly of beloved band Big Smith, to tackle a set of Ozarks songs seems not only logical, but probably inevitable. After all, it’s in his blood: the last track, breezy pastoral “Tie-Hacker’s Joy,” is recorded here for the first time, passed on to Bilyeu by his father, attributed to his great-great uncle.

Such passed-down songs are just one aspect that makes The Creek Rocks a family affair. Have I mentioned that Woolf and Bilyeau are married? When their voices coalesce on “Zelma Lee,” cooing to one another, “Her smile is sweet and tender as the moonlight on the sea,” we feel cooed to, too. It’s like watching daddy sing bass and mama sing tenor on the front porch.

Wolf Hunter celebrates the necessity of analog traditions, from singalongs to storytelling. In the beautifully designed liner notes, each track is described with an adjoining anecdote about the place, recording or family member it came from. The listener is reminded of why we sing folk songs in the first place: to mark where we come from, and remember it’s not so different from where we are now.

Much like the recordings of Lomax or Hunter helped define a regional musical character, The Creek Rocks remind us of our shared traditions. Their album is conceptual not only in its curation, but also its intention. This is the sound of Ozark history, the soundtrack of us getting from there to here. Wolf Hunter is distinct as a concept album in that it is filled with warmth and heart. It never holds you at arm’s length, but brings you in for a bear hug, begging you and little brother to join right in.

The post What a Concept: Hogs and History Abound on Wolf Hunter appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

But the cover’s aggressive design serves a purpose: to prepare the reader for the content that lies within. This isn’t a light read to take to the lake; that’s author Rebecca Barrett-Fox’s first lesson. The subject of the book, Westboro Baptist Church, or WBC, is infamous for picketing funerals of fallen soldiers and members of the LGBT community. Through the course of the book, Barrett-Fox goes deeper than their public image. Midwest-nice turns to Midwest-complacency, and at the end the reader is forced to ask: How did I contribute to creating this monster?

She meticulously outlines their theology, history, ministry and political ideology, approaching them with more compassion than I expected, and at times, more than I thought they deserved. After all, this is the group that holds signs saying, “God hates fags,” and, “Pray for more dead kids,” as friends and family mourn their dead.

Why spread hate? Although they are known for publicly urging others to find God, Barrett-Fox reports that the goal of Westboro Baptists is not to convert, but rather to inform. Westboro Baptists say they don’t hate any particular group of people. They simply use scripture to deduce what behaviors God hates: premarital and gay sex, military expansion and Catholicism, to name a few. Because God clearly states opposition to these behaviors (and yes, they do view homosexuality as a choice), Westboro Baptists believe America’s increased support of gay rights and military culture positions our country as a target for God’s wrath. The church refers to every soldier’s death as a “Godsmack,” which Barret-Fox sums up as “acts of God that contribute to human suffering and so reveal God’s hatred toward the world, illustrating the absolute predestination of all things for the purpose of sorting the elect from the damned.” Barrett-Fox balances her academic research with a narrative flow like this that integrates a large volume of diverse resources (first person narratives, media interviews, church blogs, sociological studies), all of which are extensively catalogued in her notes section.

While reading, I kept thinking of Westboro Baptists as heaven’s foreign relations department, using activism and dialogue to inform the world about what might start a war between humanity and God. But according to their Calvinist theology, even their own fates are already sealed. Westboro Baptists believe in pre-destination, the intricacies of which Barrett-Fox devotes an entire chapter. As opposed to other forms of Baptist faith, Westboro Baptists believe that God actively damns and elects, as opposed to actively saving a sample few and leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. Barrett-Fox says this complicates their passion for preaching and picketing. Their mission is not to save. It is to warn, and they’re not concerned with their small numbers. Their righteousness hinges on the fact that they remain isolated from the rest of the world. “In this sense, Westboro Baptists’ public ministry is more about them than it is about the listener,” Barrett-Fox writes.

Barrett-Fox also spends a chapter discussing the free speech battles that surround WBC. Are they a hate group? Should their message be protected by the first amendment? To me, this legal topic is less interesting than the theological and political components of the book, but it was a necessary primer for the discussion of Religious Nationalism that follows. Westboro Baptists do not align with the Religious Right, in large part because they target a symbol that religious conservatives hold so dear: “the Christian, heteronormative war hero.” Picketing the funerals of America’s fallen soldiers chips away at the country’s ideals of heroism, masculinity and righteousness. Citizens’ cries foul, and our true morals are exposed. Barrett-Fox says the policies and public discussions that seek to protect fallen soldiers but fail to address WBC’s gay victims uncovers a “homophobia already present in contemporary America.”

And that circles back around to us. The Westboro Baptist Church wasn’t created in a vacuum. In fact, its founder, Fred W. Phelps, to whom Barrett-Fox devotes the better part of the first chapter, was a leader in civil rights litigation in Topeka before creating the Church. Eventually, he was disbarred due to personal misconduct issues, but not before being regionally celebrated for his work in challenging racial discrimination, which included recognition from a Kansas branch of the NAACP in 1987. Kansas policies provided an environment for Phelps’ anti-gay agenda to flourish. While the Religious Right may turn their noses at WBC’s vitriolic rhetoric, it is their quiet support of their underlying values that creates policies steeped in theology.

Barrett-Fox ends the book with a subtle call-to-action, a move that somewhat surprised me, given her overall academic tone. “The goal of opponents, then, should not be to silence church members…but to give no aid or comfort to the message, to reject its underlying theology,” she writes. WBC is a “sanctuary” for hate, but the frontline exists in our own pews, in our own communities and in our own minds. Barrett-Fox allows a group so widely despised to emerge as human and complicated like the rest of us. While the text dissects WBC’s cruelty, the book’s resonating message is not to focus on their moral shortcomings, but our own. In a time so filled with hate rooted in religion and flourishing in politics, it’s a lesson worth confronting.

The post God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

TOPEKA – Humanities Kansas recently awarded $9,436.00 to High Plains Public Radio in Garden City to support “Literary Landscapes in Kansas: From the Ground to the Airwaves,” a writing and radio project that will elevate the history of Kansas stories and writers. Tina Casagrand Foss, executive director of The New Territory Magazine (The NT), serves as the project director.

Building on The NT’s Literary Landscapes series, which hosts 60 personal essays on places of Midwestern literature, this grant project invites Kansans to explore the present and ponder future possibilities for the region. It asks, “How is the literature of a place relevant to the people who live there?”

“Literature is a great way to energize Kansans interested in discussing thoughtful and engaging topics,” shared Julie Mulvihill, Humanities Kansas Executive Director. “This writing and radio series will encourage connections among participants and spark fresh ideas.”

In addition to publishing the print articles on the website and print magazine of The New Territory, a selection of essays will be produced in audio formats and broadcast on High Plains Public Radio (HPPR) and hosted on HPPR’s website. A self-directed, incentivized passport program and in-person launch party to celebrate the new essays will round out the grant project later in 2024.

“HPPR’s ethos of developing the self-identity of the High Plains fits perfectly with The NT’s alignment of writing ‘the autobiography of the Lower Midwest,’” says Casagrand Foss. “We’re honored and excited to work with them to create and publish more stories focused on Kansas.”

To build interest in this project and to encourage writers to submit new essays, The New Territory is hosting an online event January 18, 2024, from 6 to 8 p.m. Central Time. It will include talks by Literary Landscapes founder Andy Oler and poet, author, and University Kansas scholar Megan Kaminski. An optional workshop for participants to develop their own essays will follow.

For more information, and to register for the January 18 workshop, please visit the Literary Landscapes in Kansas page.

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About Humanities Kansas
Humanities Kansas is an independent nonprofit leading a movement of ideas. Since 1972, HK’s programming, grants, and partnerships have documented and shared stories to spark conversations and invite new insights. Together with statewide partners and supporters, HK encourages Kansans to draw on diverse histories, literatures, and cultures to strengthen our democracy, communities, and connections to one another. Visit humanitieskansas.org.

About The New Territory Magazine
The New Territory Magazine is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization on a mission to advocate and foster love and protection of the Great Plains, Ozarks, and Lower Midwest through publishing art and narrative journalism focused on personal, natural and societal stories.

About High Plains Public Radio
High Plains Public Radio was founded in 1977 for the express purpose of enriching the educational, cultural, and community life of the High Plains region.  It is also dedicated to developing the self-identity of the High Plains so the region might better appreciate its common heritage and build a sustainable future.  It pursues this mission through public radio broadcasting, a medium freely accessible to nearly everyone, as well as digital web and mobile services.

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The post High Plains Public Radio, in Partnership with The New Territory Magazine, Receives Humanities Kansas Grant to Support Literary Landscapes appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions. To place a proxy bid, please email tina[at]newterritorymag.com

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Power’s Island”

This linocut print is from a series of six prints based on six maps of the Mississippi River along southern Illinois and Missouri created by the United States Coast Survey in 1865. The maps detail the river and its environs from St. Mary’s, Missouri, to Cairo, Illinois. Abstracted from the indications of towns and property owners on the originals, the prints emphasize the mercurial nature of the river: its swooping S-curves, its powerful cuts and islands, its sometimes explosive interaction with the earth, and its human-like corporality. The print is layered with egg tempera paint made with natural pigment from southern Illinois creek stones.

This series of river maps accompanies Josephson’s feature story “River Meanders” in The New Territory Issue 13.

Starting bid for this print at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $75

Marika Josephson and Her Connection to the Lower Midwest

I am the co-owner of Scratch Brewing Company, a farmhouse brewery nestled next to the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Scratch makes beer with a sense of place, using Midwestern ingredients that are grown on our own farm or that grow wild in the woods around the brewery to create unique beer that expresses what is special about our part of the Midwest. My art follows a similar tack, exploring what is unique about southern Illinois utilizing found materials natural to our environment.

“It is my hope that through my work, and through venues like The New Territory Midwesterners are able to bring the stories and beauty of this part of the country to life for other people who aren’t as well acquainted with it.”

Hope for Art/Literature in the Midwest

Southern Illinois is a confluence of many biomes and consequently has some of the richest biodiversity in the country. I’m happy that nobody knows how beautiful it is so we don’t have to share it with anyone else! However, it is my hope that through my work, and through venues like The New Territory Midwesterners are able to bring the stories and beauty of this part of the country to life for other people who aren’t as well acquainted with it.

Buy tickets to The Pageturner here to see and bid on Marika’s work and experience Scratch Beer for yourself! Thanks to Marika for donating a case of Black Cherry beer and for donating this beautiful print.

The post Marika Josephson, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Boxed In”

Tickseed sunflowers, also called bearded beggar ticks, burst from the side of a drainage ditch in Springdale, Arkansas, in September 2016. This paved, desolate place would seem a poor spot for any living thing, and the background building and its reflection visually trap the subject in an artificial box. But even here the line between death and life is thin and easily cracked. 

Starting bid for photograph at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $100

About Dan Holtmeyer

“My hope for literature and other art in the region is that it continues to reflect we who live here in all of our colors and thoughts and backgrounds.”

I’m a photographer and writer living in northwest Arkansas with my husband and two dogs. I’ve lived within the mid-U.S. for all of my life, most especially Missouri, Nebraska and now Arkansas. There are a lot of elected leaders and ordinary people in these states that would prefer that I not live here, and at points it has been tempting to leave. But it’s my home as much as it is any of theirs. My hope for literature and other art in the region is that it continues to reflect we who live here in all of our colors and thoughts and backgrounds. Doing this can change minds. But even if it doesn’t, it lets us know we aren’t alone. 

Note from the editor: Dan was our longtime copy editor, and his photography appeared in The New Territory as early as Issue 02. He also donated his work for these Northwest Arkansas Postcards:

Buy tickets to The Pageturner here to participate in the live and silent auctions.

The post Dan Holtmeyer, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.