The Noise of Democracy: Stories from the Political Imagination with Jeff Sharlet

Jeff Sharlet, bestselling author of The Family and C Street, will discuss his newest and most personal book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and his reporting on – and from within – the Occupy movement.

Sharlet is Mellon Assistant Professor of English at Dartmouth and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine and Rolling Stone. In 2000, Sharlet teamed up with novelist Peter Manseau to create KillingTheBuddha.com, which has since become an award-winning online literary magazine about religion and spirituality. That led to a year on the road for Sharlet and Manseau, investigating the varieties of religious experience in America—a cowboy church in Texas, witches in Kansas, a Pentecostal exorcism for a terrorist in North Carolina, and an electric chair gospel choir in Florida.

A frequent guest on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show and NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Sharlet has appeared on HBO’s Bill Maher Show, Comedy Central’s Daily Show, NBC Nightly News, CNN, NPR, BBC, and other media venues.

From the Washington Post review of Sweet Heaven When I Die:

Jeff Sharlet delivers a fine dose of thoughtful skepticism in “Sweet Heaven When I Die,” his collection of 13 trenchant essays on how we gain, lose, maintain and blindly accept faith. The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels. Sharlet deserves a place alongside such masters, for he has emerged as a master investigative stylist and one of the shrewdest commentators on religion’s underexplored realms.

Copies of his books will be available for purchase.

Jeff Sharlet in the All Saints Rector’s Forum | Sunday, October 30th | 10:15 a.m.