Katherine Stewart with James Nares

Please join us for our eighth installment of Common Ground, featuring investigative reporter Katherine Stewart in conversation with artist James Nares on the Religious Right’s rise to political power.

In this talk

Please join us for our eighth installment of Common Ground, when we will be joined by Katherine Stewart, investigative reporter and author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury, 2020) in conversation with artist James Nares for a dialogue on the Religious Right’s rise to political power. They will discuss how the alt-right’s ascent to the White House was paved by a massive political network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and legal initiatives bankrolled by a handful of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations, and how this homegrown wave of religious fundamentalism constitutes a much graver threat to the American republic than we may realize.

This conversation will be moderated by Malvika Jolly, and will close with a reading from poet and activist Gabriel Ramirez.

About this series

At the start of quarantine, the Brooklyn Rail asked how might we stay connected to each other in a time of self-isolation? Now we ask: How can we stay involved and engaged in upholding our civic responsibility to one another across communities? How can we deploy this community built through the New Social Environment—through hundreds of conversations and meals shared over the past six months—to mobilize daily action for grassroots movements, social justice and equity projects, and for the political good of our most marginalized communities across the nation? Tune in Thursdays at 1pm for Common Ground, a new lunchtime series featuring weekly conversations with social justice practitioners, changemakers, and activists on how we can mobilize our daily actions to radically reimagine our democracy.

Katherine Stewart

Katherine Stewart is an investigative reporter and author who covers religious liberty, politics, policy, education, and controversies over the separation of church and state. Her latest book is THE POWER WORSHIPPERS: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, NBC, Washington Post, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, and the Advocate. You may follow her on Twitter @kathsstewart

James Nares

Over the course of a five-decade career, James Nares has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of her multimedia practice that encompasses film, music, painting, photography, and performance. She continues to employ various media to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time. Nares has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her work is included in several prominent public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY. A career-spanning survey of her film and video works were presented in 2008 at Anthology Film Archives, New York. In 2014, Rizzoli published a comprehensive monograph on Nares’s career to date. In 2019 the Milwaukee Art Museum published a catalog in conjunction with Nares’s retrospective held at the museum. Nares has lived and worked in New York since 1974 and is represented by the Kasmin Gallery, NY.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we’re fortunate to have Gabriel Ramirez reading.

Gabriel Ramirez

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, CantoMundo and a participant in the Callaloo Writers Workshops.

More on Gabriel Ramirez

• ramirezpoet.com
•  @ramirezpoet

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