Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Sharlet Jeff
Title : The family The secret fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
Year : 2008

Link download : Sharlet_Jeff_-_The_family.zip

Introduction. The avant-garde of american fundamentalism. This is how they pray: a dozen clear-eyed, smooth- skinned “brothers” gather in a huddle, arms crossing arms over shoulders like the weave of a cable, leaning in on one another and swaying like the long grass up the hill from the house they share, a handsome, gray, two-story colonial that smells of new carpet, Pine-Sol, and aftershave. It is decorated with lithographs of foxhunters and pictures of Jesus, and, in the bunk room, a drawing of a “C–4” machine gun given to them by their six-year-old neighbor. The men who live there call the house Ivanwald. At the end of a tree-lined cul-de- sac in Arlington, Virginia, quiet but for the buzz of lawn mowers and kids playing tag in the park across the road, Ivanwald is one house among many, clustered like mushrooms, nearly two dozen house holds devoted, like these men, to the service of a personal Jesus, a Christ who directs their every action. The men tend every tulip in the cul-de- sac, trim every magnolia, seal every driveway smooth and black as boot leather. Assembled at the dining table or on their lawn or in the hallway or in the bunk room or on the basketball court, they also pray, each man’s head bowed in humility and swollen with pride (secretly, he thinks) at being counted among this select corps for Christ, men to whom he will open his heart and whom he will remember when he returns to the world not born- again but remade, no longer an individual but part of the Lord’s revolution, his will transformed into a weapon for what the young men call spiritual war. ...