Jimmy Swaggart's Secular Confession

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The published version is available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773940902766748 .Following the exposure of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s illicit rendezvous with a New Orleans prostitute, the Assemblies of God simultaneously orchestrated a massive attempt to silence those who would discuss the tryst and arranged the most widely publicized confession in American history theretofore. The coincidence of a “silence campaign” with the vast distribution of a public confession invites us to reconsider the nature of the public confession. For what place has a public confession, the discourse of disclosure par excellence, in a silence campaign? This question is best answered, I argue, if we understand public confession not as a stable a-historical form, but as a practice that is informed by multiple, competing traditions. I argue that by situating Swaggart’s performance in a philosophically modern and secular tradition of public confession we can understand both its complicity in a silence campaign and, more generally, the political logic of the modern public confession

Colorado naturalist wins religion prize - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A pioneer in environmental ethics who says humanity has treated nature "disgracefully'' was named Wednesday as this year's recipient of a religion prize that is billed as the world's richest annual award. The Rev. Holmes Rolston III was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The prize is 725,000 British pounds, roughly $1.2 million.Rolston said at a news conference that he would use all the prize money to endow a chair in religion and science at his alma mater, Davidson College in North Carolina. "I've spent my life in a lover's quarrel with the two disciplines I love: science and religion,'' Rolston said. "I had to fight - or maybe better, challenge - both theology and science to love nature.''Rolston will receive the award at a private ceremony May 7 in London's Buckingham Palace. The religion prize has been awarded to a wide-ranging interreligious lineup of academics, philanthropists and activists, including Charles Colson, Billy Graham, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Mother Teresa