Volume 46, Issue 1

THE NEW JOURNAL WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE page 11

staff publisher Tessa Berenson editors-in-chief Sophia Nguyen Cindy Ok executive editor Benjamin Mueller managing editors Eric Boodman Julia Calagiovanni design editors Lian Fumerton-Liu Emmett Kim David Shatan-Pardo photo editor Maya Binyam senior editors Ava Kofman Isabel Ortiz associate editors Maya Averbuch Lara Sokoloff Grace Steig Ike Swetlitz copy editors Nathalie Levine Justine Yan

members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter B. Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh advisors Richard Bradley, Jay Carney, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Michael Addison, Austin Family Fund, Steve Ballou, J. Neela Banerjee, Margaret Bauer, Anson M. Beard, Jr., Blaire Bennett, Richard Bradley, Martha Brant, Susan Braudy, Daniel Brook, Hilary Callahan, Jay Carney, Daphne Chu, Josh Civin, Jonathan M. Clark, Constance Clement, Andy Court, Masi Denison, Albert J. Fox, Mrs. Howard Fox, David Freeman, Geoffrey Fried, Sherwin Goldman, David Greenberg, Stephen Hellman, Laura Heymann, Gerald Hwang, Walter Jacob, Jane Kamensky, Tina Kelley, Roger Kirwood, Jonathan Lear, Lewis E. Lehrman, Jim Lowe, E. Nobles Lowe, Daniel Murphy, Martha E. Neil, Peter Neil, Howard H. Newman, Sean O’Brien, Laura Pappano, Julie Peters, Lewis and Joan Platt, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Fairfax C. Randal, Robert Randolph, Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager, Richard Shields, W. Hampton Sides, Lisa Silverman, Scott Simpson, Adina Proposco and David Sulsman, Thomas Strong, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Wilson, Daniel Yergin and Angela Stent Yergin

staff writers Gideon Broshy Ashley Dalton

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2013 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. Four thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, $18. Two years, $32. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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the new journal

the new journal Vol. 46, No. 1 September 2013 www.thenewjournalatyale.com Cover Illustration by Christine Mi

features

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Where the Wild Things Are A Bridgeport zoo adopts an orphaned bobcat kitten.

by Sophia Nguyen

All in a Life’s Work A new initiative addresses the needs of the long-term unemployed.

by Arielle Stambler

standards

4 7 19

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points of departure

by Julia Calagiovanni and TNJ Staff personal essay Step by Step

by Diana Saverin profile Saving Grace

by Ashley Dalton

31 32 40

comic Best Video

by Madeleine Witt critical angle Making Believe

by Aaron Gertler endnote From the NSA, With Love

by Jesse Schreck

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points of departure

Taking the Stage

Devon Geyelin

From the Harlem-125th Street Station, it was a simple subway ride uptown to Bronxworks, a community center on the borough’s artery, the Grand Concourse. I settled into a folding chair in a bright room, facing a makeshift stage. A dozen middle-schoolers outfitted in matching T-shirts mingled onstage, nervous and excited. A tall bald guy, intense and energetic, introduced himself as a “joker,” or facilitator, and explained to the audience that we were “spect-actors,” not spectators. Then he urged us to be alert: “What’s the thing that makes you angry?”

The students launched into a short play based on their own experiences, about starting a girls’ basketball team at their school.

After they seek guidance from a teacher— played by a peer of theirs decked out in a comically oversized blazer—he tells them that they need to fundraise for uniforms and equipment. The students are passed from one teacher to another, none of whom is willing to commit to coaching them. Eventually even their principal dismisses their idea.

“Who thinks they could change this?” the joker asked. Almost everyone around me thought they could. An “awww, hell yeah,” rose from the audience. We were asked to think of a possible solution, then share it with the person next to us. “Anything that’s possible in the world is possible on this stage,” the joker reminded us.

I turned to the girl next to me, who was just a few years younger than the kids on stage. But before I could launch into an ex-

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planation of Title IX, she pointed and told me, with obvious pride, “That’s my brother.”

Here, the idea is that the spect-actors belong to the community, and the community belongs to the spect-actors. They know each other’s experiences and frustrations.

By naming them, together, they can begin to change them. Interrogation leads to investigation, and then to transformation.

The afternoon’s performance was a format called “forum theatre,” one of many structured activities used by the Theatre of the Oppressed, a method developed in the seventies by Brazilian actor and artist Augusto Boal. Boal’s project of liberation was as simple as it was visionary, creating games that take on complex issues like internalized oppression and democratic representation.

“All theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theatre is one of them,” his manifesto begins. Boal published the book while in exile from Brazil, having been arrested, tortured, and forced to leave by a military dictatorship. Working throughout South America with ordinary peasants and workers, he established the Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. The method spread through South America, but did not stop there, making its way to Europe, New York, New Haven, and beyond.

Theatre of the Oppressed owes its New York existence to Katy Rubin, a native of New Haven. She grew up in a family of arts and activism, and first met Boal when she was fifteen. After graduating from the acting conservatory at Boston University, she started to study his method more intensively. While working as a teaching artist in New York’s public schools, Rubin noted that interactive art could improve students’ grades and behavior. Theatre of the Oppressed, she found, could be used to “activate social change” and “engage diverse communities”—but it had yet to come to New York City. Now, there are troupes with homeless actors, and strangers approach them in subway tunnels to ask, “Weren’t you in that play the other day?” Rubin says that power shifts when the ostracized are given a voice, and can become recognized.

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In 2011, Rubin returned to her hometown to hold New Haven’s first Theatre of the Oppressed training. One of the jokers trained there is a woman named Janet Brodie, who in her day job coordinates group therapy at a mental health clinic on Chapel Street. Brodie, who specializes in creative arts therapy, finds that the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed “dovetail with the goals of therapy,” helping clients to develop spontaneity and relationship skills.

Brodie’s work extends to the wider New Haven community. Most recently, she has worked on a “Healthy Aging” project, a forum theatre group for older people living with mental illness. A group of seven worked for eight weeks, creating skits and spoken word poems, which they performed along with forum theatre at local mental health facilities and for the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

“Who oppresses?” her notes for the project read. “Self,” “police,” “therapist,” participants wrote. One added, “I can only go so far with the way I am being made invisible.” As the project challenges, it aims to empower. A flier for workshop participants reassures them, “If you are feeling confused in the workshops, it means that the work is going well.”

New Haven is taking the work even more into its own hands: jokers will be running their own training this upcoming September during a weekend’s crash course in Theatre of the Oppressed that ends with a performance. The project’s organizers hope the momentum continues. “It could go a million places,” Brodie said.

The New York project’s reach gives an idea of just what those million places might be. The city’s branch also conducts workshops in a Staten Island youth court; at the Harvey Milk High School, an alternative school for queer youth who have been harassed at other schools; at Housing Works, a center for people experiencing poverty and homelessness; in psychiatric hospitals and soup kitchens and public schools, with refugees, domestic workers, and undocumented immigrants.

“This is a real story. This is real life,” the

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joker at Bronxworks said at the top of the show. It is real life, but it is also a vision of a world of reality and possibility, of imagination and empowerment and fearlessness, of spect-actors and jokers, and crowded rooms in community centers on sunny spring afternoons.

— Julia Calagiovanni

Imperfect Pitch “DO YOU SING?” Yale boasts over four hundred active undergraduate organizations, but if you measure activity in terms of decibel levels, there is really only one to note. Every August, hordes of ardently chirpy a cappella singers descend upon timid freshmen continuously asking the dreaded question. Oh, you anxious-to-please freshmen, making bad jokes like, “Only in the shower!” “Well, I’m not going to quit my day job!” After the hundredth ask, even questions such as, “Are you mad at me?” and, “Do you have a boyfriend?” would suddenly seem like fun, normal conversation starters to you. You begin to wonder, “Should I sing?” before remembering that you cannot, and have never been able to.

The onslaught doesn’t stop at the extracurricular bazaar. One night at the dining hall, the topic of conversation is “rushing.”

Well, every night at the dining hall, the topic of conversation has been rushing, but it isn’t until this particular plate of Berkeley mac ’n’ cheese that you realize: it’s never been about Greek life! It’s always been about a cappella! You feel bewildered and bereft as you try to keep up with the chatter about callbacks, rush meals, and singing desserts.

None of this was in any of the movies. Is this college? Where are the togas?

A cappella rush season and its full calendar of parties and performances has traditionally sprawled over the entire month of September. It ramps up for a pre-tap period, when the thirteen singing groups under the Singing Group Council (SGC) alert the hopefuls of their picks. When the pro-

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cess finally culminates in “tap night,” each singing group selects its fastest runner to sprint through the Old Campus gates and up the stairs of the freshman dorms. The upperclassmen singers are drunk—either on vodka or on the festive spirit. Some groups wear matching T-shirts and yell nonsense.

Other groups wear matching jersey pinnies and sing nonsense. Some freshmen cry of joy. Others cry from rejection. Together, the newly constituted and divinely chosen groups belt out that immortal anthem that closes out the musical version of Les Miserables: “Do You Hear The People Sing?”

Yes. Yes we do.

But rush is not the lawless free-for-all that we tone-deaf outsiders may think it to be. It operates according to a highly ordered system of rules spelled out for the first time this year in a Rush Manifesto—a document sanctioned, circulated, and enforced by the aca gods, the almighty SGC. The council is always composed of two men and two women, including one member from each of the all-senior groups, the Whiffenpoofs and Whim ‘n Rhythm.

“In recent Yale a cappella history, we as a community have gotten vicious during rush,” the 2013 manifesto, sub-headed “How to Not be an Ass,” admits. The document speaks to change that is radical and relevant for the entire campus: rush will be shortened by almost two weeks. The calendar change avoids the overlap of Peter Salovey’s inauguration and Parents’ Weekend.

Over the course of seventeen pages, the manifesto outlines proper procedure for each stage of the rush process. Before the first big a cappella party at the off-campus house of the Sons of Orpheus and Bacchus, each group must deliver their tithe of alcohol to the house no later than forty-five minutes before the start of festivities. During the second, more intimate Dwight Hall Jam, space will be limited, the manifesto warns, leading us to rule number two, “Only necessary personnel should be present during setup—Don’t crowd Dwight with people standing around doing nothing. You’re not fooling anyone.”

Further bylaws govern behavior out-

side of official events, including what the manifesto terms “outside contact.” It bans unsanctioned meals, secret meetings, and a litany of other activities: “No picnics,” “No sketch walks,” and, “No sitting with rushees in class.” Bolded type announces “the new T-shirts rule,” which has been relaxed this year in order to allow singers to wear their group’s T-shirt as soon as their feet land in New Haven in August. “It takes a special person to abuse the power of an a cappella shirt,” the manifesto reads. We think they’re all special.

But what is crime without punishment?

Extreme violations of the “Spirit of Rush” may call for the convening of not only the Singing Group Council, but also a subcommittee, which needs to rule with a threequarters majority vote that a violation had occurred. These measures are supplemented by online “badgering hotlines,” which allow rushees to email the SGC to anonymously report instances of harassment.

Unfortunately the Council has yet to release the badgering hotline information for the rest of us, but we’ll let you know if we hear anything. After all, this is an a cappella world. We’re just living in it.

— TNJ Staff

Devon Geyelin

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personal essay

Step By Step Folk dancing spins connections

By Diana Saverin

Four years after I hold Bill Fischer’s hand for the first time, he learns my name.

“Dana? Diane?” He asks.

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ill’s hand grips a microphone. He is calling a contra dance—a style of group folk dance—in the barn attached to his house. It is one of his monthly parties, which require no invitation, called “Bethany Music and Dance”—BMAD for short. His fuzzy blond dreadlocks, dotted and decorated with beads and string, are bunched together on his back. His face is wrinkled and leathery, the look of someone who spends more time outside than in. His shirt reads, “May Day 2002, War on Terrorism, War is Terrorism.”

His feet are bare.

We stand in the middle of the barn, below the arched beams of the high ceiling.

Braided ribbons and fabrics hang on the walls and above the heads of the eightyodd people now crowding inside, ready to dance. Wooden sculptures of bodies dangle from wires attached to the ceiling. In one corner, there is also a paper skeleton from Bill’s former doctor days. The walls are covered in posters: an old American flag with the slogan, “Give it Your Best!”; fields of wildflowers; patchwork designs on leather; an old sepia portrait; yellowed and fraying newspaper clippings. The band is warming up in the corner near the fireplace; tonight it

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includes a recorder, a fiddle, a mandolin, and a banjo. The air is thick and hot. It smells of woodchips and dust, mixed with the dewy, late spring breeze that occasionally makes its way inside from the open door in the back. We haven’t started dancing, but Bill’s face already shines with sweat.

He squints at me, then smiles. “I recognize you now,” he says.

In 1980, a slightly younger Bill Fischer had just moved back to New Haven—he graduated from Yale in 1966—when he and his wife first tried contra dancing. They were drawn to the live music and the community of strangers dancing and following instructions to the beat. Back then, New Haven had a vibrant contra dance scene, with dances three times a month, and a regular get-together for those who wanted to learn how to play the barn dance music.

A decade later, Bill bought his house in Bethany—a small town made up of mostly farmland a twenty-minute drive from downtown New Haven. Soon, people started to gather at the house, mostly to play music: Bill plays the pennywhistle and recorder and his wife plays the fiddle. The first music party happened in September 1991, with just ten or so people, but each gathering brought in more guests. The crowd increased most dramatically when another woman who held music gatherings left town in the late nineties; her frequenters

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heard about Bill and began meeting up at his house in Bethany. In the early 2000s, an influx that Bill calls the “undergraduate brushfire” started. Now, amateur and professional musicians alike jam in the many cluttered rooms of his house one Friday a month, along with students and former medical patients of Bill’s. Some are BMAD regulars, others heard about the dance on CouchSurfing.org. Bill himself does not seem bothered by the crowd.

“The whole thing’s evolved, but there’s no way to stop it,” he says. “It’s word of mouth, and people will find out about it. No one has squatting rights.”

He talks about his house as if he doesn’t own it all; on dance nights, it belongs equally to whoever passes in and out. He is loyal to the space, but he is more invested in the connections people make through his gatherings.

The night Bill learns my name, I wander in from the highway, which is lined with cars on both sides, to find his backyard buzzing with people.

I walk inside. There are dried roses and scooped-out gourds scattered along open surfaces, and various fur pelts hang in the sitting room that the door opens into. Toward the kitchen, brownies, grapes, zucchini bread, chips, macaroni and cheese, and more cover a table above a brightly patterned cloth. In a small room adjacent to the kitchen, four people are playing Simon & Garfunkel songs. On the wall a sign reads, “No smoking, no loitering, no hair combing.”

In the living room, someone is playing a piano by the fireplace. Everywhere, people are talking, laughing, filling up empty yogurt containers with water, trying to fit through the crowd to get to the stairs, looking at posted newspaper clippings, asking each other’s names, if they’ve ever been here, if they’re from New Haven.

Around ten, word spreads that the dancing will start soon. Some wander up the narrow staircase and through the hallway toward the barn. As people fill the room, Bill begins practicing scales into the microphone near the band.

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“Real estate is an important consideration.

Is anyone too cold?” Bill says.

People smirk. It is the end of May, and every person’s face shines with sweat.

“Let’s be careful now, okay? Not just with the band but with each other,” he continues. We are bunched together in the barn so close to one another you can hardly stand without your back brushing up against someone else.

The person I’m paired with, John, stares in disbelief at the bare feet of the man to my left.

“Kind of risky, don’t you think, room this crowded, to have bare feet like that?” he asks.

The man with the bare feet is dancing with a middle-aged woman in a strappy floral dress that reaches her calves. Her brown hair sticks to her neck, and the combination of her giddy smile, hazy blue eyes, and sweat-soaked skin makes her look slightly delirious. Bill calls for us to step toward new partners. The woman looks at me with her head tilted, and says hello, extending the last syllable as she steps back. When we step toward each other again, she says, “You’re beautiful.” Then we grab each other’s forearms for a left-hand star. Sometimes the moves switch quickly, but anyone can join in and follow along. The one rule of contra dancing, Bill says, is that if you’re smiling, you’re doing it right.

At the end of the dance, Bill says that it’s time to find a new partner.

“If you have a boy and a girl, the boy is on the left. If you have a same-gender couple, bravo.”

The music starts again, but Bill yells to stop: someone in the middle is alone.

Bodies shift until everyone is paired. My new partner is lanky, and a few years older than me. He has a red beard and his hair is pulled back into a bun. It’s his first time here, and he tells me he heard about contra dance through word of mouth.

“This is better than a chat room!” he says, as we do-si-do.

He has dark wings on the back of his shirt from sweat. This dance opens up into two circles, with mostly men on the inside

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and mostly women on the outside. Partners homemade lemonade in an old yogurt hit right hands like high fives, then hit left container, we forget that we don’t know hands, then hit both hands, then both hit each other. Instead, we hold hands, skip and their hands against their own thighs each swirl, swing and dance, find our home. three times, then the partners swing. The women on the outside rotate around the The first time I meet Bill in daylight is the circle, so that we swing and dance with day after he learns my name. I am surprised half of the dancers. You learn a lot about by the quiet in the house. I hear the screen a person by the way they swing—whether door slam behind me. they jolt you back and forth, hold you with “Bill?” I call. The pelt of a wolf I’ve never a solid hand on your back, wait for you to noticed hangs in front of me. I can see its determine the pace, spin tightly around nose, where its eyes would have been. one foot, jump into the middle of the circle Bill wanders into the kitchen with and skip. There are the no shirt and no shoes, uncertain ones who are wearing a pair of soccer scared to hold you close shorts. He gives me a hug, “It’s a rare space where and the ones who make and I say how strange it is you fly.

I’ve forgotten to be stingy to be here during the day, I dance with a man how quiet it is. with my love.” named Jonah, who asks “That’s a common at the end, “where have reaction,” he says, as he these people been all of pours coffee into his drip my life?” machine.

We finish the loop and arrange ourselves We lean against the counter and talk for a new dance, a new partner. Before we about his years at Yale, some trouble he got begin, Bill tells us to look down. into for drinking, his stint traveling around “That’s your home,” he says. “Remember Alaska, his life in medical school, then as it, because you’ll have to find your home a doctor. With coffee in ceramic mugs, this time.” we wander out into his sun-streaked yard.

A pen falls out of the bun on my neck. He That music and dance bring people picks it up and laughs. together is no surprise, but it can be hard “Lord knows what could fall out of my work sometimes, this business of getting hair.” strangers to hold hands, to see each other.

We sit on a bench hanging from a tree There are different strategies. I’ve seen in the shade, looking out into the swaying some try improvised dance or movement, grasses of his yard where the maypole which focuses on freeing the body and mind stands. I try to understand why people treat from habitual motion, entering a space to each other so kindly at Bill’s when strangers discover new possibilities of movement and so often ignore each other. Bill’s theory is interaction. Others use games or spaces that “usual social niceties are subsumed in of play to ease the interaction between music and motion.” strangers: a group in Pittsburgh called He continues, “Social dancing, it’s not Obscure Games calls this “social grease.” like disco, where you’re dancing by yourself It’s a rare space where I’ve forgotten to or with a more dedicated partner. This is be stingy with my love, to save my social choreographed, and there’s some bozo with self for designated social time. I live so a microphone telling you what to do.” much of my life in New Haven separated He says that the warmth of the from strangers; here, walls between selves community is amplified by the fact that break down. Every person in the room is you have to dance with many partners a potential conversation or connection. throughout the evening. He laughs when he As we accept the night’s many gifts, like finds out that I went to my first dance as a

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Cuchulain Kelly

Bill Buford plays music and calls dances at Bethany Music and Dance. freshman.

“I’ve known you four years, and don’t know who you are,” he says.

By midnight we are holding hands. Bill breaks the circle, pulling us into a spiral which unspools and leads downstairs, where we weave through cluttered rooms full of people and music, then to the basement, wandering past the ping-pong table and the punching bag, then back up to the barn.

The song stops, we clap for the band, and finally, it is time for the last dance: the group waltz. The recorder slows; the notes stretch.

It is the waltz where, a year ago, I began a romance that led to months of letters and poems. It is the waltz where I have been clutched by a nervous man who asked to dance without making eye contact, and then once we were dancing, counted, “1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3” under his breath, his concentration too fierce for interruption. It is the waltz where I have laughed holding a roommate, spinning each other around, dancing only on our toes. But tonight, I sway, instead. I

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join into a circle with Bill, and he counts, “1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3” into his microphone. Our sweaty arms touch and wrap around each other, and we move our feet to the beat, counting “1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3; 1, 2, 3.”

Diana Saverin is a senior in Berkeley College.

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feature

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

A Bridgeport zoo adopts an orphaned bobcat kitten.

By Sophia Nguyen

W

e meet for the first time in October 2012, with a set of metal bars between us. Safe on our opposite sides, we size each other up. BeeZe (rhymes with “easy”) blinks first, blandly, which only goes to show you the stupidity of a staring contest with an opponent who’s indifferent to the game. BeeZe has nothing to prove.

BeeZe is a creature of limitless patience.

BeeZe has eyes worth a long deep stare: hazel-colored and lamp-like, their expression lying somewhere between complacence and alertness. His gaze flicks between the two people on either side of me. The man to my left presses his face thrillingly close to the cage.

“Hey, big guy,” Gregg Dancho, director of Bridgeport’s Beardsley Zoo, says familiarly.

The big guy blinks again. He also shivers, though that may be an illusion caused by the breeze rippling over his striated fur.

“Hey, kitty.”

“Aww, are you chilly?” BeeZe’s trainer, Chris Clark, croons. BeeZe does not answer her. With a swish of stubby tail, he streaks from the raised platform to a lower branch, then lands silently on the concrete, lapping water from a silver pet bowl.

This is my first encounter with a bobcat, and the Beardsley staff claims that this bobcat is particularly remarkable. Making polite, appreciative noises, I respond as I often do to acquaintances’ beloved pets, enthusiasm masking bemusement at what seems to me to be a weird and unfathomable love. At six months old and fifteen and a half pounds, BeeZe is roughly the size of an impressive housecat—you can imagine moving him out of the way when you fetch the morning paper, and he seems even tamer with a collar around his neck. But moving BeeZe anywhere takes experience: a quick, sure grab around in just the right place around his shoulder-blades, so that his mittenishly large paws protect you from his bite.

“That’s the physicality we never want the public to see,” Clark confides. If people

catch sight of the zoo staff touching BeeZe—whether to correct unruly behavior or to provide comfort—they may get the wrong idea about how they should behave around a wild bobcat.

Right now, relatively few people catch a glimpse of BeeZe. Though he is part of the zoo’s educational program, he is not formally on exhibit. BeeZe has been raised in captivity with the goal of making him an “animal ambassador” for the Beardsley Zoo. While an ambassador’s duties may vary across zoos or species, the Beardsley staff sums them up as “edutainment”: an animal gets trotted out while its keeper explains its habits, habitat, and other key facts to the audience. Some ambassadors move within zoo grounds with a keeper, while others visit schools for educational assemblies.

Others may appear at birthday parties or

“He needs to learn that he doesn’t want to kill us. ”

corporate events. Often, the price of the “Animal Encounter” escalates with the glamour of the animal.

The practice of maintaining off-exhibit animal ambassadors is not uncommon, especially among smaller institutions.

The only zoo in the state of Connecticut, Beardsley is home to a mere three hundred specimens and seventy-five species, and has a budget of $3.5 million. BeeZe joins a modest diplomatic corps whose mammal members are mostly cute and harmless: a rabbit, a chinchilla, and a ferret. Yet the most significant difference between BeeZe and his colleagues is not size or rank on the food chain, but origin. The majority of Beardsley’s educational animals were acquired from former pet owners or from professional breeders. BeeZe comes from the wild. Now, he makes his home at a zoo

Previous page: The bobcat kitten was found wandering alone, along a highway in Connecticut.

Photo provided by the Beardsley Zoo.

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A young girl comes face-to-face with a toucan at the zoo’s rainforest exhibit. that can trace its lineage back to Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, in the 1920s.

He needs to learn, Clark jokes, that he doesn’t want to kill us.

In May 2012, a bobcat kitten was found wandering alone by the side of a highway in Connecticut, his mother likely killed by a passing car. The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection picked up the orphan, and for lack of a wildlife rehabilitation center in the area, called the Beardsley Zoo. Custody of the three-week-old transferred to Deputy Zoo Director Don Goff and his wife Janet. The Goffs, experienced animal rehabilitators, bottle-fed the kitten for the next seven weeks. He was named BeeZe, after the initials of his new home and employer.

The bobcat (Lynx rufus) has a range that encompasses the continental United States, southern Canada, and parts of Mexico. The Connecticut population is concentrated in the northwest corner of the state. In the last year, there have been sightings in Milford, Winchester, and North Haven. A shy and solitary species, the bobcat is at its most active just after dusk or before dawn, preferring areas dense with young brush.

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Seeking the spotlight is not in its nature. A wild bobcat would prefer not to interact with humans at all.

A normal kittenhood for BeeZe might have begun in a nest of dried leaves or moss. He would have lived for three to eleven days with his eyes still closed, and nursed alongside his siblings for the next sixty days.

At about twenty-eight days old, he might have started to venture out of the rock crevice or hollow Justine Nguyen log that housed the den.

By the time a new year came around, he likely would have left his mother’s territory, making room for the new litter already on the way.

At the zoo, the trajectory of BeeZe’s kittenhood has been extensively planned.

The staff maintains a neatly labeled binder of BeeZe’s records dating back to his arrival, including his training schedule, medical information, and handling log, where they note any instance when they’ve made direct physical contact with him since his arrival. The records provide insight into a life of prevailing strangeness. BeeZe is constantly being met with some new experience that no wild bobcat would expect to encounter, like the rumble of a golf cart, the sight of someone in a baseball cap, or the mere, befuddling existence of stairs—an architectural feature for which he has no instinctive physical response. Each encounter initially terrified him.

BeeZe has training once in the morning and once in the late afternoon, sometimes with a third session in between. Three times a day, he’s fed a meal of ground-up horsemeat: breakfast can occur anytime between seven and nine, lunch between twelve and four, and dinner between four and nine. The schedule can’t be too regular, or he’ll become “regimented,” expecting food at an exact time each day and

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making his performances more difficult to Dancho insists, “We want the animal to schedule. Mondays are his day off. Having remain knowing it’s a bobcat. It’s important been adequately socialized, BeeZe will help to do that.” There are strict rules for how educate visitors—most of them residents visitors conduct themselves with BeeZe: of Connecticut—about an animal that they “No cuddling, no hugging, no kissing. No may one day glimpse in their own backyard. touching with the hands.”

Dancho, the zoo director, is quick to A good animal ambassador doesn’t let frame BeeZe’s story as an opportunity born relations between his species and humans out of necessity. get too chummy.

“BeeZe was a special, specific case,” he says. “He was a baby when he was brought Teaching a bobcat that he doesn’t want here. So, at that point, we could just decide: to kill you can be a full-time job. During the it could go as a collection animal or it can go most crucial stretch of a kitten’s bonding into programming. And the staff said, ‘let’s period, it is imperative that he be exposed try to do this, and we’ll see what happens.’” to humans even after Beardsley closes each Dancho’s slip between pronouns, day at 4 p.m. Left behind at the zoo for long though accidental, and lonely overnights, the reflects the uncertainty of bobcat might not become BeeZe’s status between properly socialized. For His trainers frequently self-governing being and BeeZe’s first summer and emphasize his essential object, wild animal and autumn, Chris Clark, his wildness, claiming that pet. His trainers frequently primary caretaker, drove emphasize his essential to and from work with a bobcat cannot be wildness, claiming that a bobcat riding in back. domesticated. a bobcat cannot be Clark is on the staff of domesticated—but at the Beardsley’s education same time, they remain department, where she leery of socializing BeeZe too thoroughly. has years of experience working with “If they’re too wild, then an injury could animals and children, both at the zoo and in happen to them or to the handler, or to the classroom. Because of her background somebody,” says Dancho, “If they’re too in training dogs for a K-9 unit, Clark was an much of a pet, then psychologically, they intuitive choice for the job. get damaged because they don’t know “You have to be a little nuts to try to what they are.” do this,” she admits. “But it really is the Sitting together in one of Beardsley’s opportunity of a lifetime.” classrooms, Dancho recounts the classic When she returned home at the end of case of Travis the chimpanzee. Raised the day, Clark would let the bobcat loose as a member of his owners’ household, for a few hours. Unleashing his energy is Travis had acquired a number of uncannily essential both to BeeZe’s overall happiness human behaviors, like drinking wine from a and his good behavior. Clark believes that stemmed glass. It’s believed that once he hit allowing the bobcat to jump on the furniture puberty, over-socialization and testosterone and generally behave as he likes enables pushed the primate into violence, leading to him to work at the zoo with renewed a much-publicized incident in 2009 when he concentration. He can walk on a leash, sit mauled a friend of the family whom he had still for photos, and go into his carrier when known for years. Travis might be an extreme directed. As the owner of several dogs and case, given chimpanzees’ intelligence and cats, Clark runs an exceptionally pet-friendly deep genetic similarities to humans. It may household: plenty of cardboard boxes to be more difficult to assess psychological play with, no fragile tchotchkes. damage to a bobcat, and more difficult to “Luckily enough, my house is an openinflict it. But the zoo staff remains cautious. floor plan,” she says, “So he can run around

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like an idiot.”

Sometimes, one of Clark’s German shepherds would wrestle and roughhouse with him. When the dog overpowered BeeZe, she laid her forearms along his body, pinning the bobcat to the ground. When BeeZe overpowered the dog, he jumped on her hindquarters and launched himself to execute a perfect spin in midair; then he went for the throat. Clark has always been able to verbally intervene before anything’s gotten “too crazy,” and BeeZe has never bitten hard. Pairing big cats and domesticated dogs is not an uncommon practice: cheetahs at the San Diego and Houston Zoos have “companion canines” with whom they play. Still, the tussles never fail to impress.

“You realize,” she says matter-of-factly, “How an animal of his size can take down a full-grown deer.”

None of this fazes Clark, who discusses BeeZe with imperturbable humor and affection. While maintaining that, “I can’t get into his little brain,” she is an experienced reader of his body language and moods.

She recalls, “When he was a baby, he would get over-tired from play and not realize he would need to take a nap. He would get cranky, like a human child. You would scoop him into his bed for a nappie, and he would get obnoxious.”

Bearing Dancho’s rules in mind, I ask if bobcat kittens like being hugged.

“Well, their moms scoop them into the fold and groom them,” Clark says, “and the worst thing that could happen during a program is he gets scared and he gets loose.”

Clark explains that her hug communicates to BeeZe that “I’m the mom, everything’s safe. I will protect you.”

A zoo occupies a slippery position on the continuum between domesticity and wildness: it’s a sanctuary with reinforced borders, an intensively managed series of dioramas, a nonprofit organization that must entertain to survive. The modern zoo justifies its existence by measuring its distance from its crueler, more exploitative forebears: the traveling circus, the private

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menagerie, the drive-thru amusement park.

BeeZe’s home bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to those cheap public entertainments.

James W. Beardsley donated one hundred acres of land to Bridgeport in 1878, architect Frederick Law Olmstead drew up designs for the park in 1884, and Parks Commissioner Wesley F. Hayes proposed the zoo in 1920—but the name that looms largest is that of Phineas T. Barnum, the impresario who sold millions of tickets to his circus after he acquired its most famous performer, Jumbo the Elephant.

Barnum and Bailey’s animals wintered in the city, and legend has it that the keepers exercised their charges in the streets.

Residents would spread picnic blankets on the grounds of Beardsley Park to watch the parade from “The Greatest Show on Earth”: big cats and giraffes, elephants and zebras.

The public’s enthrallment to the spectacle purportedly inspired the establishment of the Beardsley Zoo. Barnum contributed a camel to its founding collection, and a number of circus retirees would join the zoo’s ranks over the years.

Beardsley was formally taken over by the city of Bridgeport in the 1920s, and its exhibits and attitudes stayed stuck in that era through the 1980s, when the federal Department of Agriculture found it in violation of new licensing requirements.

Animals ranged on concrete, in overcrowded cages. Main roads passed right next to the exhibits. Families entered by driving directly into the zoo, and children would leave their cars, check both ways for oncoming traffic, and run right up to the cages. Beardsley’s layout put the entertainment of the public first, reflecting the outdated assumption that a clean cage and full food bowl represented the extent of an animal’s needs.

“There was no rhyme or reason to the exhibits,” Dancho says, recalling childhood visits to the zoo after church on Sundays.

“They were basically random.” He gestures to various buildings along the walkways, where there was once a Mouse House, a petting zoo, and at one point, a Wizard of Oz-themed exhibit. “There was no place to have an educational program, no

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Justine Nguyen

BeeZe’s performances show off natural abilities, like leaping. classrooms.”

Dancho has been employed at the zoo since high school, when he completed inservice training for credit. He eventually became a full-time employee, earned a master’s degree in zoology, and was named the zoo’s director in 1983. Immediately, he sought city, state, and private funding for major renovations. To Dancho, the turning point for the Beardsley Zoo was becoming certified by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) in 1987 for meeting its standards for animal care, physical facilities, and guest services. He continually makes reference to the AZA’s core principles of conservation and education— an understandable reflex, given that he assumed directorship at a time when some suggested that the zoo simply be shut down altogether. Debate raged in the Hartford Courant: was the Beardsley Zoo a hidden gem, a Noah’s Ark in the most unlikely of cities? Or was it, as detractors claimed, little more than a postage stamp collection, a peep show of creatures deprived of their dignity?

Bound within Plexiglass walls or chainlink fencing, today’s exhibits cheerily reenact the fractious overlap of human and animal environments. The path to the

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Wolf Observation Viewing Facility crosses through a replica of a hunter’s cabin, complete with vaguely period lanterns, hay bales, and farm tools. The alligator exhibit boasts a Southern-style wooden porch where the reptiles bask in the sun, right up against the glass and inches away from an old-fashioned rocking chair. Most of the oldfashioned cages are gone, and the spaces are more expansive. But the architecture underscores that, as Head of Education Jim Knox puts it, “Wild is a qualified term.”

When I visit in October, the education office smells strongly of cat, and for several uncomfortable hours I suppress sneezes. As a young kitten, BeeZe became something of an office fixture, often allowed free reign while his trainers did paperwork; he quickly settled upon the filing cabinets as a favorite perch. By autumn, the need for constant proximity to his caretakers had abated, and he had grown too active and powerful to stay in that environment for long. His climbing tower and cage still stand next to one desk, and maintenance workers on their way to fix the roof peer around the corner to ask, “No bobcat today?”

“People have a fascination with cats,” explains Knox. He can sympathize: before

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coming to work at Beardsley, he was a dismissal: “charismatic” species, the bald keeper at the Bergen County Zoo in New eagles and humpback whales of this world, Jersey, where his favorite animals were the excite public response disproportionate mountain lions. to their actual ecological importance; at “I love those guys.” A boyish, dreamy the same time, they can be leverage for smile spreads across his face. “I just think those activists wishing to achieve more they’re magnificent.” He blinks, clarifying, far-reaching goals. Otherwise, the term “That’s not a scientific term,” then shrugs. is often used as a catch-all, describing “They scare the hell out of me, but I love animals that are beautiful, affectionate, them. It’s a fascination based on respect.” easily anthropomorphized, or fun to hunt.

For some on the fringes, fascination Inevitably, if unconsciously, the concept of can give way to an unreserved and reckless “charisma” is linked to utility for humans. infatuation. The Beardsley Zoo often finds But when Knox talks about BeeZe’s itself fielding unsolicited “donations” charisma, he’s not talking about interfrom the owners of exotic, illegal, or species relationships in the abstract. BeeZe’s otherwise unmanageable pets: crocodilians, charisma is individual and immediate, a unexpectedly large constrictors, venomous function of evaporated distance, the shock animals, even primates. More often than not, of proximity. This is not about glamour the zoo refuses. shots, or the Discovery Channel. When “We don’t want to acquire BeeZe enters a room, he people’s poor choices,” says can make it go silent.

Knox.

Most of the visiting In October, I sat in “I love those guys. They public lies on the other on one of BeeZe’s leash scare the hell out of end of the spectrum. To training sessions, held in me, but I love them. It’s them, nature is something the Learning Center where that exists elsewhere. he would be making most a fascination based on Children from surrounding of his presentations. It respect.”

Bridgeport have only was one of the most experienced animals as unassuming areas of the threats: rats, cockroaches, zoo: several sets of metal tough neighborhood dogs. bleachers ringed around a Even suburban kids, who have more access wooden stage backed by drab wooden sets. to summer camp and scouting, don’t get the Someone had discreetly tacked a list of chance to discover nature in an uninhibited, entrances, exits, and cues to the back of one unstructured way. The Beardsley Zoo is of the walls, a leftover from some previous far from unstructured, but Knox sees it as performance. a space where people can begin to forge This was a two-trainer operation: one had a more ethical relationship to the wild, a hold on the cat, and the other had a hold learning about native biodiversity, wildlife on the bait, a stick-and-string toy ending tolerance, and backyard conservation. In in a dangling fluffy tail. The secret was some ways, a local animal like BeeZe makes harnessing BeeZe’s prey drive, an exercise for the ideal ambassador. in empathy, intuition, and split-second “BeeZe strikes the balance between anticipation. Expertly and even wittily beautiful and safe,” Knox explains, “He’s not controlled, the tail twitched just inches intimidating. He’s intelligent. He works well beyond his reach; the trainers watched for with people.” the twitch of an ear or the ripple of shoulder The bobcat also has what Knox calls blades. BeeZe’s body language hinted at “charisma,” a term he finds difficult to define what he would do next, so that when he was in an animal. Environmentalists, however, use about to propel forward, the trainer with the the word with varying levels of irony, even leash gave him the verbal command, “Let’s

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go,” and when he was about to jump, she called, “Up.” BeeZe would associate his own actions with his Ultimately, training was not about bending his will to theirs; human guidance had to be congruent with his natural instincts. Throughout, the leash needed to remain at a perfect degree of tautness.

The entire process was incredibly quiet: no calliope music, no crack of the whip, just the sound of New England wind in the leaves, and beyond, the dull roar of traffic. But for even in front of an audience of one, BeeZe was a spectacle. The thrill I felt watching him was primal and strangely voyeuristic.

My return to the Learning Circle in August 2013 brings the sight of a sign advertising for “BeeZe’s Wild Adventure!” and a line of young families and local summer campers waiting to be admitted. As the audience settles into the bleachers, volunteers in pale blue T-shirts circulate, offering a bobcat skull and swatch of fur for them to touch.

The performance, ultimately, is a modest affair. Jim Knox takes the microphone and explains the rules to the small crowd: at their distance from the stage there is little danger of touching, but they all need to be quiet so that BeeZe can concentrate.

BeeZe enters, along with Clark and another trainer, Chrissy Shore. Shore has his leash, and Clark a leafy bamboo switch and a handful of treats: shrimp and a zoo feed called Feline Diet. The switch is dangled in front of him like the squirrel’s tail was once, directing his attention to a model waterfall onstage, or the wooden railing that they want him to balance along, or the ledge on which they want him to leap. As the three of them move behind him, Knox explains bobcat behaviors, elaborating on their preferred habitats, diet, and times of day.

When he tells the visitors about how BeeZe came to live at the Beardsley Zoo, he jokes that the bobcat gets free room and board, and free medical and dental plans. The entire presentation lasts only around ten minutes, and after BeeZe exits the stage, Knox takes questions and answers from the crowd. A couple of people comment that

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they have seen bobcats in their yards, which piques his interest. “Which town?” Knox asks. When they ask what they should do about these sightings, he answers that they should just keep at a safe distance.

BeeZe performs this educational program about three times a week, in addition to his other ambassadorial visits. His schedule since this February has included ten birthday parties, and a corporate event for the Bridgewater Fund.

When he hits the one-year mark, the staff will begin advertising encounters with him more widely. He’s even more relaxed, they say, in the zoo’s indoor spaces. Though his trainers had worried about what would happen when he went through puberty at nine months—some animals refuse further training and socialization and must be transitioned to exhibits—the process was much less difficult than they had anticipated.

“Sometimes he was moody with us, but he’s a professional,” Chrissy says. “When he needs to work, he works.”

BeeZe will continue to educate assemblies of students and campers, and to make appearances at birthday parties. He will walk along the rows of kids who have been given strict instructions not to touch.

They’ll whisper and shriek, exclaiming over his immaculate fluffiness, his nubby tail.

What they are too young to notice, the adult guests might: his perceptive gaze, his impenetrable silence. They will take photos for which he will not pose, not exactly.

BeeZe’s attention will move in unreadable ways. He will sit utterly composed, perfectly safe but never quite harmless, collar unable to make us forget those teeth.

Sophia Nguyen is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

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profile

Saving Grace Burl Salmon builds a new home in the Church.

By Ashley Dalton

T

his is Lexington, a small town only an hour outside of Atlanta. But in this land of boiled peanuts and dairy farms, I feel worlds away. I’m in the Georgian countryside, at the home of Burl Salmon, my formƒer high school English teacher and a graduate of Yale Divinity School. His neighbor is the photographer for the magazine Gun and Garden, the self-proclaimed “Soul of the South.” I’ve been here a few times to visit Burl on trips back from college, and the area has always felt familiar. Though I grew up in Atlanta, my family comes largely from rural Virginia in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

There, as here, the pace is slow. It’s a sweltering summer afternoon and thunderrolls reverberate through the surrounding pastureland, promising a storm. Still, Burl and I sit together outside on his porch, that sacred Southern meeting place for socializing and storytelling.

“Would you like a glass of lemonade?

Sweet tea?” he offers. A slight Southern twang accents his speech.

The first time I met Burl, I was a teenager at a small, nondenominational Christian private school in Atlanta. Though my classmates would have denied being bigoted, gay people just didn’t fit into our conservative, privileged bubble, and we had never had a teacher as open about his sexuality as Burl.

He charmed my high school English class—and soon the entire school—into not only accepting, but also embracing his identity. For years, I have wondered how Burl managed to prove likeable even to the boys who called him a “fag” behind his back.

After I graduated, the school honored

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Burl with its most prestigious teaching award.

Earlier that year, he had led the homecoming day parade in silver stilettos and a blond wig in the style of Aretha Franklin.

This fall, Burl will leave my old high school for a position as chaplain at an Episcopalian middle school in Charlotte, North Carolina. After making it through an unusually convoluted, decades-long process to become an Episcopalian priest, he is eager to start his first job in the ministry. He will commute to Charlotte during the week; on the weekends, he will continue to live with his husband Bob in their white-washed old farmhouse in Lexington. The house has fallen into disrepair, but they are giving the dining room a fresh coat of paint in a color I doubt it has seen before: “I call it coral, kissed by shrimp.”

“This is home now,” Burl explains.

Here, in this old house, in a town where his ancestors once lived, he is finally putting down roots with his partner of ten years— and his cat, Caspar. “Never forget the cat,” he instructs me.

This place reminds Burl of the farm where he grew up outside Natchez, Mississippi—a town whose motto is, “Where the Old South still lives.” Imagine mansions straight out of Gone with the Wind lined up along the mighty Mississippi. These antebellum homes are still owned in large part by families who struck rich on “white gold,” when the town was a major cotton exporter in the nineteenth century. To this day, local families participate in the Natchez Pilgrimage, a celebration of Southern opulence involving hoop skirts, long white

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gloves, and scenes of Confederate life.

Burl was an actor in these annual tableaus from kindergarten through his junior year in college.

“It must have been hard to grow up there, right?” I ask.

“Natchez is an odd little brigadoon,” Burl explains. “It is the most liberal corner of a highly conservative state. There’s this acceptance of the bizarre, which is so antithetical to what we understand as the South now, where everyone must be a Baptist and religiously conservative.”

There’s an old joke that most people hide their crazy relatives up in the attic while Southerners put them on the front porch. This is especially true in Natchez.

For Burl, it was never unusual to see C.T. Kelly, a well-dressed, mentally handicapped man, wave to passersby while standing alongside a black servant paid for by his trust fund. Everyone waved back. It was equally unremarkable when a mother had a staircase installed down to the casket in her child’s grave in the Natchez City Cemetery because the girl was afraid of thunder, and her mother wanted to be able to sit with her during a storm.

In a town where oddity was the norm,

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Burl found it relatively easy to grow up as an openly gay boy—at least compared to the rest of Mississippi. The prevailing spirit of Natchez was aristocratic and laissez-faire, the kind of liberalism and sophistication afforded by longstanding wealth. Though sex and sexual orientation were never openly discussed in the community, Burl was just another eccentric local character.

“There were more than a few welldressed antique dealers in town,” Burl says with a laugh. “I never knew what it was not to be out.”

This didn’t mean that he never got teased at school. He comments dryly, “It is unfortunate that the name Burl rhymes with girl.”

Growing up in Atlanta with technically Episcopalian, but essentially non-religious parents, I did not witness such acceptance.

A classmate once told me she felt it was crucial that gay people never be allowed to marry. The Bible is against it, she said, “and if we don’t draw the line somewhere—then where will we draw it?” I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t know the Bible well enough then to counter that Jesus never condemned homosexuality, the way that Burl could have.

I told her it seemed a little closed-minded.

For the most part, Burl, who grew up Methodist, did find acceptance, especially at church. There, he did not encounter the prejudice he did at school—even the anti-gay Methodists at state conferences practiced Southern politeness in all regards. “I never, ever heard anyone say homosexuality was sinful,” he says. “The message of Southern Methodism was that God is love. That’s how I was raised. And as a gay boy in Mississippi, that is a wonderful message.”

Everyone in Burl’s household ƒiattended church on Sunday, every Sunday. If you had time to stay out late the Saturday before, Burl’s mother would admonish, you have time to go to church in the morning. I would expect such a stern mandate to push a child away from religion, but Burl has been intensely spiritual his entire life. In college, he converted to Episcopalianism, the faith in which his father was raised. From an early

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Burt Salmon

After twenty years, Burl Salmon finally celebrates his ordination with friends and family. age, church was his refuge, and he knew that he would devote his life to religious service.

“I believed I had a call,” Burl says. But he could not simply decide to become a priest; he also faced the task of proving to a slew of church leaders that God had chosen him. At any point in the long path towards priesthood, any Episcopalian official could stop the process, for any reason.

“It’s probably a medieval construct,” Burl admits. “It has become a place for the exercise of power for persons that might not feel they have power in other places.”

In 1995, he took the first step toward ordination by applying to seminary, and needed the official endorsement of his bishop, the elected head of the Episcopalian church in Mississippi. In New Jersey that same year, a bishop had ordained an openly gay man and been put on trial for heresy by the Episcopalian Church. If he was acquitted,

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it could be very good news for Burl, the Mississippi bishop said. But until then, he was simply unwilling to give Burl his support.

Natchez may have been unusually liberal, but the state was still highly conservative.

So Burl enrolled at Yale Divinity School (YDS), the only seminary in the United States that did not require the official support of a bishop for matriculation. He hoped to return to Mississippi and complete the ordination process after the trial concluded.

At YDS, Burl found that the combination of his sexuality and his Southern background made him an object of fascination.

“They were like ‘Whoa—you’re gay?

And you’re from Mississippi? And you’re Christian? How did you survive?’” Burl says.

“I actually had people ask me if I’d received electroshock treatment.”

His classmates eventually got to know him better and, like at my high school,

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ended up respecting him. They elected him down by my own people. I was bitter at the as student body president in his second church as much as I was bitter at my home year. state.”

Yet a small group of Christian But Burl still believed he had a calling, fundamentalists—some of his own YDS and he certainly hadn’t given up on God. He classmates—regularly spoke out against moved to Atlanta. There, unlike in Mississippi, homosexuality, calling it a sin and even the bishop allowed gay and lesbian members inviting an anti-gay speaker to lecture in the of the Church to be ordained as long as they Divinity School’s quadrangle. did not have a same-sex partner.

“I remember being prayed over by a For a year, Burl hid his sexuality for the student,” Burl tells me. “She asked if I would first time in his life, and never talked about see the light.” his partner, John. It was the first time in his Burl holds that in the Old Testament, life he was forced to be secretive, and it was even in the Ten Commandments, “there nothing short of psychological torture, he are prohibitions against sexual expression. says.

But there are never prohibitions against “That was the most wretched and love or commitment.” damaging year I have ever And prohibitions against had. It was so incredibly homosexuality, he points cruel. And in the middle of “I’ve never felt abandoned it, my partner left me and out, come alongside

by God. I very often would I couldn’t speak about it.” prohibitions against eating shrimp, getting Georgia’s rejection ask God.” a tattoo, and wearing came insidiously and from clothes of mixed wool and behind closed doors. In the linen fibers. end, the church officially If someone tries to use one of the Old denied him the position on the grounds Testament passages against him, Burl says, that he was “arrogant” and “lacked pastoral he asks them if they are wearing polyester. sensibilities.” But at a cocktail party a short And if they are, “I remind them that they time later, Burl’s friend heard a different should be stoned. And then we discuss the reason: “Oh, you know,” a member of the absurdity of what they just said. Maybe over Atlanta Ordination Committee reportedly a nice shrimp dinner.” said over his drink. “Burl’s just too gay.”

He hoped the Mississippi bishop would see the issue similarly and recommend him Burl finally gave up. He moved to following his graduation in 1998. By then, Washington, D.C. He worked at a wine shop the New Jersey bishop had been acquitted; and a stationery store for a year. He met Bob. the court had ruled that nothing in the The ordination process was no longer at the core doctrine of Episcopalianism barred front of his mind. After all these setbacks the Church from ordaining a gay or lesbian and rejections, you might expect some crisis priest. of faith, or at least some disillusionment with Yet when Burl went back to Mississippi, the Episcopalian Church. Yet the Church the Jackson bishop told him that ordaining a continued to be a home to him. gay priest, even then, would be tantamount “That’s the odd thing about me,” Burl to political suicide in his current position— explains. “I’ve never felt abandoned by God. one for which he had been elected by a I very often would ask God, ‘Why?’ But, if largely anti-gay state. anything, I always found peace and solace “You’d make a damn fine priest,” he in my relationship with God.” remembers the bishop telling him, “but I’m Despite the years of hopes followed by not gonna touch you with a ten-foot pole.” disappointments, Burl realized that he still When Burl reflects on that second formal wanted to be a priest. He just didn’t want reflection, he says, “I felt like I had been let to go through the ordination process again,

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and he never imagined that he would return to Atlanta. Burl says, in retrospect, that he was running from God’s call.

After six years in D.C. and one in New Orleans, he received some unexpected news. The Lovett School, in Atlanta, was offering him a job. He had good reason to believe it was still impossible to become a priest there, but before declining the job, he decided to check. During his time away, the Episcopalian Diocese of Georgia had elected a new leader.

Burl decided to pay the new bishop and got on a plane to Atlanta. “I said, look, here’s the deal. I have been offered a job here, and I want to go through the ordination process.

But I’m openly gay, I’m not making any apologies for it, and I have a partner.”

The bishop’s response: “So when are you moving?”

Burl was taken aback, and skeptical.

“I had learned not to trust men in purple shirts,” he admits. Despite his mistrust of church leadership, he took the new job because he felt it was God’s will. He moved to Atlanta with Bob, and became my high school English teacher.

He was ordained as a deacon in 2011, two years later. In 2013, he was ordained as a priest. Even after the bishop placed his hands on Burl’s head, officially marking him a priest in the Episcopalian Church, Burl remembers thinking: “Did that really happen?”

aged woman in a smart summer top, along with her seersucker-suited husband, came up to him and said, “I’m sorry, did you just say husband?” Burl responded yes, of course. Tears appeared in her eyes, and she hugged Burl’s neck. “Thank God,” she said.

“My son is gay. And I needed to hear that.”

After twenty years of church resistance, it looks like the South is ready for a priest like Burl. “It’s like, what’s the big hairy deal?”

Burl says, thinking back on all the years he spent in the ordination process. “If people are so insecure about sexuality and the church, then they need to go do their own work. Because God has already done his.”

In Burl’s New Testament class back in high school, I didn’t learn what God, Christianity, or the Church meant to him, personally.

Now, hearing the saga of the path to his ordination, I have a fuller understanding of Burl’s theology, the set of beliefs tying him to the institution that nearly destroyed him.

He tells me that he fundamentally believes that, “God is grieved by the faults and delineations of human constructs. He only desires the happiness of people.”

We’ve been sitting on the porch for two hours now, so I finally take him up on that lemonade. The rain still hasn’t come.

Ashley Dalton is a staff writer for The New Journal.

Sitting on his porch, I think: surely the story can’t end that easily. I feel like one of the students at YDS, wondering how Burl has survived as a gay priest in the South. But I ask him anyway. People in the congregation must approach him to argue, to pray for and over him?

Burl admits that he has encountered quiet resistance. The committee of his local parish didn’t come to his ordination, nor did they congratulate him. But Burl also has other stories. Just this past June, Burl says, he was in the lobby of an Episcopalian church in Charleston, wearing the collar that marks his priesthood, when he happened to mention Bob in conversation. A middle-

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feature

All in a Life’s Work Maya Binyam

A new initiative addresses the needs of the long-term unemployed.

By Arielle Stambler 24

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“If you’re gonna be Santa, Bob, be the best damn Santa you can be.”

money runs out, even as the economy shows strong signs of recovery. At least five million people in the United States have been out of work for over six months and are therefore ob Greeney steeled himself and considered long-term unemployed. stepped into the big red suit for a kids’ Yet their voices often go unheard in Christmas party in December 2010. the ongoing national conversation about Greeney, a 55-year-old Stamford native, employment. While government officials had been unemployed for a year and a half and talking heads pick over the monthly and was doing anything he could to get by: reports detailing the numbers of jobs added delivering flowers, holding up yardsticks to the economy, far less attention is paid at high school football games, and dealing to an ongoing crisis which has potentially cards at casino parties. more dire consequences: the dramatic rise Before his unemployment, Greeney says, of long-term unemployment. According to he could never have imagined such depths of the Department of Labor, the percentage of desperation. For twenty-nine years, he had unemployed who had been out of work for worked as a sports writer, with newspapers fifty-two weeks or longer jumped from 5.8 across the Midwest and East Coast carrying percent to 29.2 percent in the last decade. his stories. It had been his dream career Re-define “long-term” as being out of work ever since his college days, for twenty-seven weeks or when he had broadcast longer, and that number Indiana State University’s rises to 41.4 percent in basketball games over 2012, according to the At least five million the campus radio. When, National Employment Law people in the United in 2009, the Stamford Project. But regardless of States have been out of Advocate cut Greeney and how they are counted, it two other sports writers is becoming conceivable, work for over six months. from its staff, he saw a even likely, that the longchance to reinvent himself. term unemployed will Thinking that his years become the permanently of journalism experience unemployed. offered transferrable skills—“I had a great Two years after being laid off, Greeney work ethic and reputation, I could deal with learned about Platform to Employment deadlines, and I could write”—he applied (P2E), a new jobs initiative based in to job openings in corporate writing and Bridgeport. P2E offers five weeks of copy editing. Though he was once one of career coaching, social media training, and two final candidates for a United Healthcare confidence-building workshops, followed writing position, he had little success. by an eight-week paid work experience, Six months after the Santa gig, Greeney which, ideally, leads to a full-time position. became a 99er. Unable to find a full-time He enrolled in P2E in August 2011 as a job, he had used up the ninety-nine weeks member of its first graduating class. of unemployment benefits then offered to Some local resources had previously him by the state of Connecticut. existed for those seeking work. The Greeney is not alone. Although federal WorkPlace, the nonprofit that designed and state legislatures have extended the and administered P2E, operates a system length of unemployment benefits multiple of career centers throughout southwestern times, many find themselves in the same Connecticut. Providing job listings, training position—unable to secure work before the referrals, and career counseling, the

B

Opposite: Bob Greeney had worked as a sports writer for twenty-nine years before he became one of the long-term unemployed. september 2013

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Provided by P2E

Participants in Platform to Employment were chosen carefully by the WorkPlace.

WorkPlace seeks to be a resource for populations who have an especially challenging time finding employment, including veterans, the prison re-entry population, dislocated workers, and disabled workers. President and CEO Joseph Carbone founded P2E to address the distinct and urgent needs of the longterm unemployed.

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Labor estimated people unemployed for twentyseven weeks or more only had a 10 percent chance of finding stable work in a subsequent month. Against these odds, P2E presents a remarkable success rate: since its founding in May 2011, 69 percent of its graduates have secured full-time work. To improve its participants’ prospects, P2E tackles the emotional turbulence of longterm unemployment, then works to make its participants more attractive to employers.

More importantly, the program works to make the long-term unemployed visible again.

Though Greeney’s story mirrors the plight of millions of other Americans, he and his fellow members of the pilot program were chosen carefully. To find its first one hundred

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participants, the WorkPlace contacted the last 1,400 people who, according to the Connecticut Department of Labor, had run out of unemployment benefits.

The selection process included an online application and an interview, ultimately netting a diverse sample of Connecticut’s long-term unemployed: former investment bankers and factory workers, people with master’s degrees and people with only high school diplomas. But while The WorkPlace wanted to avoid cherry-picking candidates, they still selected for evidence of active job searching and readiness to re-enter the workforce.

Carbone sums up the criteria like this: “We were looking for people who were looking for a challenge. We don’t want people who are proving that there’s no way of saving them.”

Many are in desperate need of a lifeline—and through no fault of their own, economists say. Even as the stock market has risen and overall unemployment has fallen in recent years, one section of the labor market has struggled even to get their resumes seen: the long-term unemployed.

A recent study showed that more-qualified applicants who had been out of work for at

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least six months got fewer callbacks from employers than less qualified applicants who had been out of work for less time.

Some employers explicitly exclude job applicants based on the duration of their unemployment, a practice that is both widespread and legal. What results is a vicious cycle in which the people most desperate for a job are effectively barred from the workforce. Economists warn that the long-term unemployed may soon become unemployable.

P2E seeks to intervene in this cycle in two ways. The first phase, designed to address the debilitating frustration that many of the long-term unemployed experience, consists of approximately one hundred hours of training sessions that Carbone hopes will build participants’ self-confidence. Seventy percent of the class sessions are devoted to the “psychology of careering,” a process of guided self-reflection to better the job search . The rest covers the basics of getting a job: interviewing, resume and cover letter writing, social media, dressing for work, and telephone etiquette. The psychology of careering revs people up to fully take advantage of those networking skills that are, in some ways, the most central component of the class.

The second phase of the program is called a “paid work experience,” and pairs a graduate with a business for an eight-week trial period. This time provides participants with an opportunity to prove to themselves and to employers that they can work again.

P2E pays the first four weeks’ wages to make the arrangement more appealing to employers. Eighty-seven percent of P2E graduates are hired by their employer at the end of eight weeks.

Part of the training program directly coaches participants to reclaim control of their lives. After months of job-searching at home, they get back on a schedule: they wake up in the morning, dress in professional attire, and come to class for six hours a day, four days a week.

Carbone’s own experience with unemployment inspired the program’s philosophy. For eight and a half months

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in 1990, Carbone struggled to find work, spending his afternoons watching soap operas. He drove to grocery stores twenty miles away to avoid seeing people he knew and having to explain why he wasn’t working.

Six months into his unemployment, he was up for a second job interview. On his way to the interview, his wife called him with a message he had missed: the interview was cancelled because the job had been filled.

Carbone barely cared. He said he looked at his watch and thought to himself that, if he hurried home, he could make General Hospital at 3 p.m.

In retrospect, Carbone is horrified by the complacency he once felt about his own joblessness, but he says that he would not understand the emotional strain of long-term unemployment if he hadn’t experienced it himself. These days, Carbone is the picture of career success, in his suits with collared shirts buttoned up to the neck. But when he starts talking about the fate of the longterm unemployed, his composure cracks.

His voice trembles, his forehead wrinkles, and the skin around his eyes reddens. What upsets Carbone most is that the 99ers come to believe something is wrong with them, when even economists struggle to describe why employers have marked them unworthy of a second chance. Carbone barely contains his tears, his language taking a suddenly aggressive turn as he compares the situation to untreated cancer, the disease worsening and spreading.

“We are complicit in sacrificing [the longterm unemployed] in the transition from the pre- to the post-recession economy,” he says.

Helen McKee feared she was headed down that path. In October 2009, she was laid off by the Bridgeport distributor of jewelry and dental supplies where she had worked as an accountant for thirteen years. A single mother of two teenagers, she survived on unemployment benefits and the little cash she made doing work for friends—babysitting, cleaning houses, washing windows, and making sales calls

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Provided by P2E

Participants in P2E training sit in a class designed to re-instill a sense of confidence. from home.

The layoff, she says, shoved her from the lower-middle class to the lower class.

Eventually, her children needed scholarships from their high school to continue playing varsity sports. Her son couldn’t get his driver’s license because she couldn’t afford the lessons. The family received subsidized heating. They gave up cable TV, vacations, cell phones—and then, fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables. She started going to food banks.

McKee estimates that she applied to over fifty jobs, some below her skill level and some in areas so unsafe that her friends prayed she wouldn’t get them. She was called for only two in-person interviews, and never got a job offer. McKee suspects that she was discriminated against because of her age and unemployment. She felt defeated.

“The way I thought about myself was that I couldn’t do anything right,” McKee says. “You’re out that long, there’s no way to keep up how you feel.”

Then McKee read an article about Platform to Employment and, willing to try

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anything, filled out an application. According to McKee, she was the last person to be accepted to the class that began in October 2011. She never missed a single training session.

One goal of P2E training is to teach participants to think of themselves as brands, in order to better promote their unique set of skills and abilities. To that end, they complete activities such as the “Fruit Tree Exercise.” Presented with a blank picture of a fruit tree, they write their skills on the fruits and their values on the leaves. Such exercises may seem childish, but they are an intentionally simple part of the program’s structured environment for productive self-examination.

The curriculum, McKee says, taught her that to get a job, “You had to shine brighter.

You had to have six points on your star rather than five.”

Right after completing the first part of the program, McKee went on four interviews for the Bridgeport Regional Business Council.

They hired her before the eight-week work period even started. She worked as director of finance part-time for ten months and was

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hired full-time in September 2012. another position in Newtown, she turned it “I went from feeling like a minus 10 to, down to the prohibitively long commute. like, an 80,” she said. “My old personality According to Sidor, the real issue was that has come out, and it’s sharper because I’m Connecticut’s economy was just too bleak. working again.”

“I’m not blaming them for not having McKee has a renewed sense of personal enough employer commitments,” she said. satisfaction, but says her work pays barely “Connecticut doesn’t have any openings. enough to survive. She still lives in housing They were being idealistic.” with no cable and no long-distance phone.

Yet Sidor she holds that training was Her son left for the Marines in August, so valuable. P2E’s insistence upon personal the child-support payments she had been reflection helps its cohorts to become very relying on stopped coming. To compensate, close, very fast. Seeing that their classmates she is trying to get a mortgage modification. face the same struggles, participants feel She expects that she will never be able to less alone. retire.

“People seemed to benefit from the That’s not unusual for workers who lost community and the connection because they their jobs during the recession. Many jobs had been so isolated,” says Nancy Legow, a regained during the recovery have been low behavioral health consultant who counseled wage. A 2012 study by the P2E participants during National Employment Law and after their training. “It Project found that lowerwas good [for them] to be “We were looking for wage occupations made part of a group, to have up 21 percent of recession somewhere to go, to not people who were looking losses, but 58 percent of feel so alone.” for a challenge. We don’t recent employment gains, Sidor valued that want people who are creating an unbalanced camaraderie. She has kept recovery that researchers in contact with McKee proving that there’s no warn will cement since the end of the class way of saving them.”

America’s long-term rise almost two years ago. in inequality. Even once Sidor continues to they are re-employed, send in job applications.

McKee and millions like her continue to struggle.

In February 2012, P2E was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes. After the piece aired, the Worse yet, some P2E graduates do WorkPlace was flooded with requests from not find job placements at all. At seventy other organizations coordinating workplace years old, Catherine Sidor has a lifetime of development to start programs around the experience bringing tourists to Connecticut country, and now P2E is expanding to ten and New York. The Fairfield County cities. The programs in Cincinnati and Dallas Convention and Visitors’ Bureau, where she have seen job placement rates as high was executive director, was shut down in as seventy-one and eighty-one percent, 2009, and she attended P2E thinking she respectively. would easily secure a job shortly thereafter.

The ten-city rollout is a national But even though she worked with a P2E job research experiment funded by Wal-Mart, counselor for several months, she remains AARP, and Citi Community Development, unemployed. part of CitiGroup, to show that P2E can be Sidor does not blame Platform to successfully replicated around the country.

Employment for not getting her a job. They To keep the experiment as controlled as referred her to a position in New Haven possible, The WorkPlace is selecting the for which she had two interviews, but participants for each city’s program. didn’t get the job. Offered an interview for But Carbone’s ultimate goals for the

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program reach even farther. He wants Platform to Employment to become the centerpiece of a national discussion about why the long-term unemployed remain unemployed. In the last six months, Carbone says he has been to the White House, testified before congressional committees, and spoken to Democratic Senators, the National Governors’ Association, the Clinton Global Initiative and local chambers of commerce about the plight of the longterm unemployed.

He says that people are finally beginning to listen. “No one thought it was important enough to even think about them before,” he said. “It’s beginning now to surface. Really, the nation is beginning to pay attention to this.”

During the 2013 legislative session, nine states have introduced bills that would prohibit discrimination against the unemployed. New Jersey, Oregon, and the District of Columbia already have similar laws on the books. Connecticut Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro sponsored legislation last year that would have prohibited such practices nationwide, but House Republicans decided not to bring the bill up for a vote.

If there is any respect in which P2E is a real, replicable solution to long-term unemployment, it is its ability to empower its graduates to change the unemployment landscape themselves. Each graduate who gets a job and performs that job well changes the opinion of one more employer about the skills of the long-term unemployed.

Employers’ responses have been fairly positive. A survey conducted by the Harvard Business School Club of Connecticut Community Partners surveyed employers after they had worked with P2E graduates for two months. On average, the employers cited most that they liked the employee’s “positive outlook,” “realistic expectations,” and “eagerness to work.” Eighty-eight percent of the respondents said they would consider hiring another P2E participant in the future.

the Stamford Metro-North Railroad Station from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. five days a week, fulltime. He has been with the MTA since May 2012. He enjoys the ten-minute commute to work from his Stamford apartment—until this past June, he had working much further away, at Grand Central Station.

On his one-year anniversary of regaining employment, Greeney got a small raise and benefits for dental and eye care. He now makes $21.33 an hour. Annually, that’s a significant pay cut from the $49,000, including overtime and holiday pay he made during his last year as a sports writer at The Stamford Advocate. During what he calls the extra “life hours,” whch he saves with his shorter commute, Greeney picks up odd jobs, like delivering flowers, just as he used to.

But even a year later, Greeney is so relieved that he’s made it off what he calls “Unemployment Island,” that he says he can’t complain.

“I was drifting out at sea, holding onto a little plank, keeping my head above the water.” he said, “And then the good ship P2E came along. Joe Carbone was at the bow of the ship with the life preserver. ‘We got you, Bob. We’re going to throw this to you.’ I was professionally adrift and P2E was there to come and save me.”

Many long-term unemployed can’t say the same, beaten back by politicians who have overlooked them and businesses that continually send them to the back of the line. P2E has reached out, but it will take a lot more to turn the tide.

Arielle Stambler is a senior in Morse College.

Bob Greeney has turned in his Santa suit for a Metro North uniform. He sells tickets at

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critical angle

Making Believe Conversions come in many forms.

By Aaron Gertler

O

ver lunch early in my freshman year, my friend Madeleine Witt told me she had been at a Yale Students for Christ retreat that weekend. I asked her how it had gone.

She smiled.

“I had the most intense religious experience of my life,” she said. “It completely changed my relationship with Jesus.”

For the rest of the day, I puzzled over those words. I’d thought religion was something people only found, or sought to deepen, in times of need. Witt was a talented artist at a prestigious school, with a warm, earthy demeanor and a strong sense of humor. She seemed to have her life in order. What could Jesus do for Witt that she couldn’t do for herself?

If God has been watching me this whole time, I hope He understands that before I got to college, I couldn’t help but be cynical about the usefulness of any particular faith.

My mother is Unitarian and my father Jewish (with an interest in Buddhism).

I grew up with evangelical Christian neighbors. Their son—my best friend at the time—once saved me in the name of Christ in their basement. We were eight, and we had gotten bored with our plastic lightsaber

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duel. After that, I was heaven-bound for sure, so I stopped worrying about the hell I’d seen in “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, which had been the source of a few nightmares.

My parents sold me on Hebrew school by describing it as a set of language classes with a party at the end. At nine years old, I saw my religious education as just another chore. The Torah portion that I read years later at my bar mitzvah featured my namesake, Aaron, brother of Moses. His sons, Nadab and Abihu, get drunk and offer the wrong incense to God, who incinerates them in response. Aaron doesn’t mourn; to do so would be to question God’s judgment.

During the same few months I spent memorizing this passage in the original Hebrew, I came across a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which served as my first serious exposure to a variety of useful concepts: cosmology beyond the book of Genesis, morality beyond the Ten Commandments, evolution beyond Pokémon. Dawkins can be strident at times, but I preferred him to God. I’ve been a nonbeliever ever since.

But by my second week on campus at Yale, religion became unavoidable. My new friends included a Catholic who kept her favorite Bible quotes on Post-It notes over her desk, a vegetarian Hindu who believed

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in karma, and an atheist whose hobby was sampling churches and listening without retort to believers. On hammocks and benches, during long walks and over long dinners, I struggled to comprehend the way they saw the world.

Witt’s religious awakening—like that of many of the converts I talked to—was outside my realm of understanding. I wondered if it was really a coincidence that her new relationship with Jesus began at a retreat where she’d begun new relationships with a few dozen Christian friends. Why would God wait to find her on a dock in the woods when she’d been going to church her entire life? Though I saw campus conversion as an uncommon tangent to college life, I needed to figure out how and why it happened— how Yale, which had intensified my atheism by exposing me to neuroscience and secular philosophy, had had the opposite effect on one of my closest friends.

For many, college is the first time we leave home. Religion, and the friends who come with it, can be comfortable and solid when life seems formless or uncertain. The students I met often spoke of a chaotic transition to Yale, and of finding peace in religious study, or the church choir, or moral philosophy with grounding holier than those of Aristotle or John Stuart Mill. I wondered if Witt, who sings in the Christian a cappella group Living Water, might have found similar comfort in joining a nonreligious group like The New Blue or Something Extra.

So I started looking for students who had undergone religious conversions while at Yale. Their stories were diverse, and three stood out in particular. An undergrad named Kim Fabian was fond of Christianity but saw no reason to join the religion, until an emotional crisis helped her find Jesus. Bijan Aboutorabi went from atheist to Catholic, one classic work of theology at a time. And Witt, it turns out, walked a long and winding road before her evening on the dock.

At Witt’s twentieth birthday party, I asked her whether she could introduce me to any friends who had become more deeply connected to Christianity while at Yale. She

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pointed to three of the people sitting on her couch, including Kim Fabian. While Fabian identifies as Christian now, she has doubts to overcome.

“I describe myself as a baby Christian,” she explains over dinner. “I’m still figuring a lot of stuff out.”

Her modest self-description marks a major shift from the behavior that got she kicked out of Sunday school at the age of seven.

“What’s the word for purposefully being antagonistic and arguing with people?”

Fabian asks.

“Contrary?”

“Yeah! And I was a disruption.”

The church asked her parents to “reform” her and send her back, but they decided that she was fine the way she was.

After a few churchless years, she began attending Unitarian Universalist services, which appealed to her spiritual side but left her somehow unsatisfied.

“There was this mentality in the church about tolerance, that all religions were to be accepted—except for Christianity.”

Devout Muslims and Jews were welcome; while devout Christians weren’t exactly unwelcome, Fabian sensed antipathy toward the religion from her fellow Unitarian Universalists, and from herself.

Ever the contrarian, she entered a Bible study group at her high school, hoping to understand and finally dispel her own past view of Christianity. At first, the task seemed difficult. She met some Christians who used religion as a weapon, to chastise or exclude the less devout. From what Fabian knew of Jesus, this felt like hypocrisy.

But others in the group managed to combine serious religion with kind behavior, and soon became some of her best friends. As she spent more time with them, and began to read more humorous and humanizing account of Jesus’ life in a book called The Gospel According to Biff, her remaining antipathy disappeared. Still, after her time with the Unitarian Universalists, she felt that all religions held some truth— why choose between them?

It wasn’t until college that Fabian

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“Without Jesus,” Fabian said at the event of her baptism, “nothing else was enough.” returned to Christianity. After a series of incidents, in which she says she was responsible for “mean, hurtful things happening to close friends,” she looked for a higher pardon. Her friends’ forgiveness was not enough to erase what she had done.

“I needed salvation. I needed a savior.”

Fabian has been a Christian ever since.

Her newfound inner peace is apparent as I talk with her in the Buddhist meditation room at the base of Harkness Tower.

She spends a lot of time here. It’s full of expensive-looking statues, and part of her paid student job is to make sure nobody steals them. She lights candles on the altar, waves a stick of incense in a complicated pattern, sets it down, and bows to a stone Buddha. Her hands are clasped; her face, expressionless. A few silent moments pass.

“What was running through your head, during that ritual?” I ask later.

“Devotion, I guess.”

“Devotion towards what? God?” “I hope so! Otherwise, I’m in trouble.”

She laughs.

Fabian plans to raise her future kids as Christians: “I just want them to know that no other person, or thing, is ever going to be enough.”

Bijan Aboutorabi has many questions for me. “The greatest overall utility for humanity? How do you measure that?

Where does it come from?”

The basis of my own morality is under fire. I can answer this, I think to myself.

I don’t need a Bible, just a third of Mill’s Utilitarianism and a dash of David Hume. I should really get started on Reasons and Persons, too.

Aboutorabi is good at engaging with

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uncomfortable questions. What is ethical?

How do we know? How do we know anything, for that matter? Upon his junioryear conversion to Catholicism, he found himself in possession of a complete, rigorous set of answers. He is the only convert I met who I believe might have chosen the same religion had he spent his life in a library, without the persuasive influence of a single human believer. Aboutorabi’s conversion was the work of divine logic.

Though he identified as a “militant atheist” in high school, at Yale Aboutorabi found himself spending more time with Catholic classmates, exploring the roots of his own morality. In college, he came faceto-face with “serious philosophy,” which caused quite a few problems: “Nothing in materialism seemed to explain the existence of qualia,” he says, sounding distressed.

In philosophy, “qualia” are instances of conscious experience: the taste of cake above and beyond the understanding of pastry molecules, or the understanding of music as more than a collection of sonic frequencies.

Aboutorabi’s concern is common among scholars: if we’re just soulless collections of atoms, why does conscious experience exist? This is an important question, but he found no philosophical consensus as to the correct response.

Catholic philosophy offered an appealing set of answers; religious thinkers were bolder in their assertions than most modern secular ones. Aboutorabi says he read a great deal of C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton but still “wasn’t able to flip the switch” toward faith.

On the last day of sophomore year, he asked a Catholic friend and convert how

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he’d entered the fold: “He told me he’d felt had been religious before Yale, but I was a sudden sense of total, all-encompassing looking for specifics about the conversion. love.”

“So, on a scale of one to ten, you went Though he had then, and has now, from, like… a four to a nine?” almost no mystical life, Aboutorabi asked “You can’t measure it on a scale like another friend what else might dissolve his that!” she protests. We’re not speaking the uncertainty. When a response came back, he same language, but if I listen hard enough, read and reread it until one day he realized I might begin to understand what she calls he was “standing with one foot on either “the most precious story in my life.” side of a ravine, which was growing wider, The first church Witt attended was tiny and I had to jump to one side or the other.” and rural, but her family moved while she was The choice, he says, was ultimately easy. in middle school, and the new congregation And so, without any singular mystical had a few more kids her age. She considered experience—no lightning strike or burning herself faithful, but describes that faith as bush—Aboutorabi became a believer. On misdirected.

Easter of last year, he received his first Holy “I wore a WWJD bracelet, because Communion and was baptized. that was what I thought Christians were His story leaves me wondering, “So, supposed to do. But I didn’t understand atheism couldn’t answer your questions. what it meant,” Witt says. “What would Aren’t there questions Jesus do in this situation?

Catholicism can’t He’d do a miracle! How answer?”

Yale, which had intensified does that help me?”

“A limit on human In high school, Witt my atheism by exposing intellect is very different from saw God as another something fundamentally authority figure she had me to neuroscience and unanswerable,” Aboutorabi to please, alongside her secular philosophy, had replies. He knows there are parents and teachers. had the opposite effect parts of the metaphysical With enough good deeds world he’ll never fully and pure thoughts, she’d on one of my closest comprehend—the Trinity, earn God’s love and be friends. the exact nature of hell—but a “good Christian.” She he trusts that the Catholic goes on to explain how Church has reached the right wrong she was, that conclusions on all important spiritual matters.

Christianity is unique, in that while “God After all, they’ve been discussing those questions asks everything of you,” God also knows for the past two millennia. that we are incapable of becoming worthy His understanding of Christian of his company through human effort alone. philosophy makes my moral foundations I ask Witt what led her to see things begin to feel like bamboo poles to his in this new light. Soon after she entered concrete pillars: flexible enough to tolerate Yale, Witt explains, she met students unlike some stress, but not much to look at, and anyone she had encountered at home. skinny enough that they might buckle under “They were so committed to following the weight of a difficult choice. As we part, Christ that they talked about Jesus like he calls my attention to “the unshakeable he was someone they knew,” she says, conviction of the Apostles that they had seen “Someone they could have an intimate Jesus rise from the dead.” He is convinced relationship with. And this was something I he’s seen the same light as those earliest of was very curious about.”

Christian converts—and the experience has At that first retreat, Witt heard a speaker left him, as far as I can tell, unshakeable. discuss grace: the idea that Christ’s sacrifice was a gift from God to all those who would I knew before our interview that Witt accept it and that “earning one’s way” to

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salvation wasn’t necessary, or even possible.

The words resonated, perfectly contrasting old beliefs.

“At the end of his talk, he said, ‘if you would like to accept this relationship with Christ, stand up!’ And I stood up.” She wasn’t the only one.

But it turns out I was wrong in thinking Witt found God in the woods: “He was equally with me in my childhood church. It’s just that my heart was changed, my eyes were opened.” Now, she thinks she could return to that church—or anywhere else in the world—and be as close to God as she was while on the dock. Yale was the place where she managed to fill what she calls the “God-shaped hole” in her heart, but she doesn’t expect that it will ever be empty again.

I tell her that my heart feels, and has always felt, whole. She asks where I find happiness, if I don’t have God as an ultimate source of joy and meaning. “Any time spent with my girlfriend,” I tell her. “Optimism for the future. Interesting conversations with friends and strangers. The moment when a great piece of dance music hits its peak, which is probably the closest I come to how

you felt in that room.” I pause. “Good food.

Good books. Good company.” I look at her.

“I think I have everything I need.”

She nods, but I’m not sure she believes me. I’m not sure I believe me. I tried talking to God when I was young and like millions of others, I asked for a sign. When I didn’t receive it, and some of them did, I thought I might have missed something. Was it possible that I was doing something wrong?

Even after the interviews, I’m still thinking about Fabian’s forgiveness, Aboutorabi’s moral pillars, Witt’s God-shaped hole.

I haven’t been brought to God, but I’m acutely conscious that the age of nineteen is no time to decide I understand morality.

There are limits to my ongoing search: I am a scientist, I’ve seen brain scans of Buddhist monks, I’ve studied the neurological basis of near-death experience. Using terms like “soul” and “grace” won’t help me advance in my field. But even if Christian logic does not persuade me, that’s no excuse to assume that converts are the ones wearing ideological blinders.

I ask most of my sources what they think it means for someone to seek but not find.

Members of the congregation follow projected lyrics as they sing along to contemporary Christian rock.

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Those who heard God’s voice—Witt, Fabian, a few others—tell me not to give up, that if I remain open to possibility, I might well hear something.

I’m standing in Toad’s Place on Sunday morning to watch Kim Fabian’s baptism. The church band plays catchy, original Christian rock; Witt, sitting on the bar beside me, sings along. When the music stops, the lead singer—Pastor Justin Kendrick—delivers a moving sermon on the meaning of baptism.

Music swells again as the first worshipper steps forward for a pre-baptism interview with Pastor Justin. Witt slides off the bar and rushes away toward him, saying, “I’ve got to be baptized. Bye!” She had just come intending to watch her friend, but the sense of religious urgency in the room drew her in, and even I’m beginning to feel it; my heart is racing.

Fabian takes a microphone and relates her story to the congregation: “I just couldn’t do it by myself. Without Jesus, nothing else was enough.” She steps off the stage, and is dipped into a blue plastic tub. Toad’s echoes with cheering and applause. Every member of the congregation stretches a hand in Fabian’s direction. She holds hers out to heaven.

Witt is next on stage. “I don’t know how to tell this story,” she tells Pastor Justin.

“Words are just completely insufficient to describe the experience.”

For now, words are all I’ve got.

Aaron Gertler is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

september 2013

37

endnote

From the NSA, With Love

By Jesse Schreck

Devon Geyelin

Hello American #1,341,682, You may not know me, but I know all about you. I’m a data collector for the National Security Administration. But don’t worry, I’m not here to defend our domestic surveillance program or deny its scope.

I’ll be the first to admit that we have indeed been spying on you. You, personally.

We have mined your phone records, your Google searches, and your direct messages on Twitter. We know your favorite YouTube videos, and we know which Buzzfeed articles you sent around the office with captions like “LOL SO TRUE.” We have neatly collated lists of your most-visited and your privately-viewed. We even recorded your Bing activity. Unethical? Probably, but I prefer to leave that question to the higher powers. What I’m here to do is save you from yourself.

I’ll start at the beginning. Getting the position was thrilling. I mean, data collector!

I spent most of my time eating kettle corn while looking up old acquaintances from high school. Sheldon Jackson, for example,

38

has gone from being the popular quarterback to a sad, sad man whose search history includes “regrow hair cheap” and “human hug feeling.” Rita Stinson, salutatorian, is now a clean-cut vice president at JPMorgan, but her SecondLife avatar has spiked purple hair and is a steampunk anarchist named “Spleen.” Jenny Grafton seems happily married, not that I care. Nine of my former classmates are divorced, three more are closeted, and nearly half of them have ordered self-help books from Amazon.

In addition to my private snooping, the job required me to trek through a neverending wasteland of Facebook profiles. It seems to me like the sadder people are in their real lives, the more they pretend to be happy online. My old middle school math teacher, for example, is severely in debt— this I learned from her email correspondence with a loan shark named Stinky Pat—but her latest status reads, “just bought a BRANDNEW bike (talk about a SPLURGE?!) and i couldn’t be happier!!!” Really, Ms. Stevenson? You have twice proposed marriage to Stinky Pat. Yesterday you spent six hours

the new journal

on Chatroulette, and for two of those hours you were the only user who wasn’t just a penis. Plus, that’s not even your bike in the picture! It’s your nephew’s. And Mr. Katchmore, shame on you for commenting, “can’t wait to see it when me + astrid are back from europe!” You wrote that from your kitchen in Hoboken, and Astrid is in a coma—or didn’t they teach you not to lie when you became a history teacher?

Celebrities, I learned, are especially prone to misrepresenting themselves over social media. Did you know that George Clooney has his hair professionally grayed?

Or that Lady Gaga spends almost 90 percent of her time in sweatpants stained with the tears of oppressed sexual minorities?

Justin Bieber is actually bald, and Nicki Minaj is a five-foot-three Jewish ex-con named Moe. All these people, the ones you spend so much time watching on television and following on Twitter, you probably wouldn’t recognize any of them in real life. Example: see that pig-tailed girl picking her nose over there? That’s Miley Cyrus.

I mentioned that we have neatly collated lists of everyone’s most-visited and privately-viewed web pages, and I wasn’t kidding: the lists are in three-inch blue binders, along with printouts of Google search histories and recent text exchanges. I read your sister’s file earlier today, and there’s some juicy stuff in there. (You should ask her: “Elā mīru telugu māṭlāḍaṭamu nērcukōlēdu?” That’s Telugu for, why did you learn to speak Telugu?) And currently sitting on my desk, this moment, as I’m writing this, right in front of me? Your binder—your personal NSA lifefile. If I open it, I’ll learn all those small dark secret things you’ve tried to hide from everyone.

But why do you so desperately want to hide? When you’re hiding, you’re alone.

Even when you’re in public, even when you’re singing “Superbass” to a sold-out arena—because Nicki might look great, but Moe is still there, plugging away under a pile of fake hair and makeup and clip-on nails, and nobody will talk to him about the aesthetic purity of Shabbat.

When you’re alone like that, you become

september 2013

lonely, and that’s when you order self-help books from Amazon and try to elope with Stinky Pat and lie about how your wife isn’t actually in a coma. You’ll say anything to hide your loneliness from others. Eventually, you’ll become hidden even from yourself, and not even the NSA will be able to find you. Which is saying something, because, as I mentioned earlier, we have a lot of data.

Cheers,

Data Collector #204

Jonathan Edwards College Presents Master’s Tea with

James Salter

Novelist and 2013 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize Winner

Wednesday September 11 4:15pm Tea 4:30pm Conversation JE Master’s House 70 High St.

“Sentence by sentence, James Salter’s elegantly natural prose has a precision and clarity which make ordinary words swing wide open.”

—Yale President Peter Salovey

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YALE UNIVERSITY

JUDAIC STUDIES–FALL 2013 Course Offerings CORE COURSES JDST 200a /HIST219a /ER&M 219a/ MMES 149a/RLST 148ag, History of the Jews and Their Diasporas to Early Modern Times. Ivan Marcus. T Th 11.35-12.50 g

g

BIBLE JDST 110a/RLST 145a/HUMS 349a, The Bible. Christine Hayes. M W 11.35-12.50 CLASSICAL PERIOD JDST 016/RLST 014, Authorship, Originality, and Forgery, Hindy Najman. M W 9.00-10.15 JDST 237ag/RLST 322ag Translating the Sacred. Hindy Najman & Kirk Wetters. M 1.30-3.20 JDST 239ag/RLST 255ag, Paths of Purity in Ancient Judaism. Yishai Kiel. M 3.30-5.20 JDST 256a/RLST400a, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the History of Ancient Judaism: The Damascus Document. Steven Fraade. W 9.25-11.15 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIODS JDST 270ag/HIST 232j/HUMS 392/RLST 201a, Medieval Jews, Christians, and Muslims Imagining Each Other. Ivan Marcus T 1:30–3:20 g JDST 272a /PHIL 220a, Medieval Philosophy, Paul Franks & Stephen Ogden M W 1.00-2.15 JDST 273ag /NELC 267g/RLST 221g, Jewish Sectarianism in the Middle Ages, Eve Krakowski T 9.25-11.15 JDST 335ag/PHIL 274a, Concepts of God in Jewish Philosophy. Gabriel Citron. T Th 2.30-3.45 MODERN PERIOD JDST 331ag/MMES 351a/RLST 331ag, Jewish Law in the State of Israel. Yuval Sinai. M W 2.30-3.45 JDST 332a/RLST 193a, Zionism. Elli Stern. MW 1.00-2.15, 1 HTBA JDST 333ag/HIST 229ag, Tradition in Crisis: A History of Orthodox Jewry in Modern Times.

Michael Silber. T 3.30-5.30 LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE HEBR110g, Elementary Modern Hebrew, Ayala Dvoretzky. M T W TH F 9:25-10:15/10:30-11:20 HEBR130g, Intermediate Modern Hebrew, A. Dvoretzky T Th 1-2:15, D. Roginsky M,W 11:35-12:50 HEBR 160ag/JDST 360a, Hebrew in a Changing World. Dina Roginsky. T Th 1.00-2.15 JDST 215ag/LING217a, Hebrew and Semitic linguistics, Tamas Biro, T Th 11.35-12.50 JDST 317ag/CPLT 281ag, Cultural History of Modern Hebrew Poetry. Hannan Hever T 3.30-5.20 JDST 413ag/NELC 165ag/RLST 411ag, Biblical Qumranic and Targumic Aramaic. Aharon Maman.

Th 9.25-11.15 GRADUATE ONLY COURSES JDST 691/CPLT691, Hebrew Allegory as Cultural Critique, Hannan Hever. Th 3.30-5.20 JDST 739/RLST741, Multilingualism and Translation in Ancient Judaism, Steven Fraade. T 9.25-11.15 JDST 836/GMAN635, Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Paul North. T 1:30-3:20 _____________________________________________________________

Program in Judaic Studies Yale University 451 College St., Rm. 301 New Haven, CT 06511 Tel – (203)432-0843, Fax – (203)432-4889 judaicstudies.yale.edu Please note that information on courses, including meeting days and times, is subject to revision.

Students should check the printed YCPS and especially the on-line course information for the fullest and most accurate information