![]() Not a realist drama but a “fantasia.” Not a conventionally secular account but one shot through with angels and Mormons, Jews and ghosts. What we find more challenging in class discussions is Kushner’s genre. But they are eager to learn this history. They also know little about the Reagan era generally. Granted, most of my students, born in the late 1990s, know little about the history of the AIDS crisis in the U.S., including its emergence through anti-gay and racist assumptions about the mostly marginalized people who lived with and died from AIDS. What my students and I find most challenging about this play is not the political history it rehearses. At the play’s end, he calls not for the end but for “more time.” Angels seek out Prior Walter, their prophet, who they hope will call humans to stop moving, to stop time, so that God will return. Angels is very much a play about time, even about an era, one in which God has left heaven. The main antagonist of Angels, set in New York City in 1985, is the irascible Roy Cohn, a bullying lawyer haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg and touched by “ the wine-dark kiss of the angel of death” (a fictional alternative offered not by Cohn, who is dying of “liver cancer,” but by the play’s protagonist Prior Walter, whose AIDS diagnosis begins with a mark identified as Kaposi’s sarcoma). Last semester, a month after the 2016 election, I taught Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 play Angels in America in a class on religion and politics in the U.S. The reasons, explains the New York Times, included “‘unethical,’ ‘unreasonable,’ and ‘particularly reprehensible’ conduct.” When Cohn died, Trump remarked: “That’s the end of an era.” In 1973, he defended the real estate magnate against Department of Justice charges that the Trump Organization violated the Fair Housing Act when it developed a secret system to discriminate against African Americans and others considered “ undesirable.” Cohn was disbarred in 1986. In the 1970s, Cohn worked as a lawyer for Donald Trump. “Communism” was a slippery term, one that often extended to those marked by sexual, racial, and political positions that fell short of McCarthy’s yardstick for measuring true American patriotism. On August 2, 1986, infamous lawyer Roy Cohn died of liver cancer, a diagnosis we might today call an “alternative fact.” Cohn rose to prominence in the 1950s, when he served as chief council in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s effort to stamp out communists living in the U.S. How Not to be a (Religious Demographic) Size Queen in an Epidemic by Anthony M. Petro (Boston University) in an essay titled, “How Not to be a (Religious Demographic) Size Queen in an Epidemic.” The first contribution to the roundtable comes from Anthony M. We invite you to join the roundtable conversation by sharing your thoughts in the comments section. Fredericks, Assistant Professor of Environmental Ethics at the Divinity School, will close out the series by offering a summative response to the posts. Each scholar has been invited to share how the “Trump phenomenon” will shape (or has already shaped) their particular research, teaching, and activism as scholars of religion. Throughout the month we will be publishing pieces by a diverse group of scholars in the fields of religion and religious studies. For this month’s issue of the Forum, we have invited a small cadre of religion scholars to participate in a “scholars’ roundtable” reflecting on the implications of a Trump presidency for the academic study (and teaching) of religion.
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