There is everything and nothing to say in the wake of our most recent apocalypse—a revelatory moment confirming our worst fears about those with whom we never chose to, but must, share a broken nation. Now as in 2016 I’m tempted to respond to an election by pulling a Spider Jerusalem and just dropping thousands of consecutive f-bombs, because really, that says it all.
But despair isn’t a luxury we can all afford. Apocalypses are violent, disruptive, and terrifying—and they’re also thresholds of revelation, showing us to ourselves and offering us a chance to fashion a new, perhaps even a better world from the ashes. Whatever our work was before November 5th is our work today—and will be our work for however many tomorrows we manage to steal from too many systems that want us degraded, demoralized, dead, or obliterated. But as long as we’re still here they can’t make us go quietly. As Lawrence’s Constance Chatterley exhorts us: “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
And many skies have fallen, are falling, will continue to fall. A nation lies in ashes (in some cases literally). How do we live through apocalyptic times? Sara Ahmed challenges us to learn “what happens when the normal rules of engagement are suspended,” and asks what “we do with those moments before a new world has begun when the old order is revealed as violence.” Hannah McGregor reminds us that, while an apocalypse might shatter our world, it is not an ending: “things get the absolute worst they possibly can, and then there’s something on the other side.” Kim TallBear teaches us that minoritized peoples like the Dakota grieve their own apocalypses while knowing all our cataclysms are intertwined, writing, “It is this world built out of our apocalypse that is now at risk.”
It’s this world, built out of too many vulnerable peoples’ apocalypses, that’s now at risk. And it’s from the most vulnerable that we should learn how to refashion our shared world into one that allows us to not merely survive, but to flourish. With the generous support of the Luce Foundation, Religion Dispatches will increasingly platform and amplify writers of color, queer writers, and/or disabled writers. The expertise of historically marginalized peoples must be central to our understanding of ourselves as a culture and to religion itself—both the good religion can do and the damage it continues to inflict on too many of us, over and over again.
To this end, Religion Dispatches is announcing the Ashes Initiative, a series of fellowships for queer writers, disabled writers, and/or writers of color who will share their expertise on how religion continues to shape (and warp) the world around us. These will be funded, short-term collaborations between Religion Dispatches and minoritized experts in religion, on topics to be mutually agreed upon by RD and the Initiative fellows. This opportunity is open to writers with advanced reporting experience or educational training in religion or a related field.
Ashes Initiative Fellows will produce no fewer than three articles (~750-1500 words) for Religion Dispatches over the course of their six-month collaborations with RD and will receive $1500 honoraria for their work. Applications are due 15 January 2025.
Dr. Megan Goodwin
Senior Editor, Religion Dispatches
November 21, 2024