I hadn't checked in on Jensen in a year or so. As this indicates <http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/shapingoursouls.htm>, he's clearly rounded the fucking bend. Good god. So to speak. I knew about his joining a church a couple of years ago, as there was some "controversy" about it here <http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:378612>, an avowed atheist joining a church and all. But I figured it would be a passing thing, that after the controversy and the desired persecution died away, it's be over. Apparently he's really a (non)believer, and now he even gives sermons.
Here's a lovely story about him testifying for the state of Texas on the evils of nudity and in favor of the "titty tax." <http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid:575580> (I somehow missed this one last year; what an ass this guy is.)
I can't imagine reading a whole book by him, especially the pornography book. Reading this short essay <http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/4868> made me depressed for a week. My fave: "Leftists -- especially left men -- need to get over the obsession with getting off."
I wish I had more dirt on him. But I think you'd have to be an interesting person to be dirty, and other than his t-shirts, there's nothing dirty about Jensen. My crack about the refrigerator box was a reference to an interview I read with him several years ago where he pointed to how he was fighting consumerism and helping the environment by living in a small efficiency apartment and said that everyone needs to do things like that to because we are too privileged.
Of course, his religious turn isn't that surprising or incompatible with his politics really. His insistence on activism, and on activistism politics, is just a modernized version of the Protestant work ethic. Here's something I wrote for my blog a year and a half ago about his latest venture at the time, a "night of dialogue and community":
>The Jensenites <http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org> have undergone a
>bit of rebranding. Like the Democratic Party that they're not so far
>away from as they believe, they've decided to reach out to the
>religious community. Here's a description of their latest endeavor,
>called Last Sunday and billed as a "gathering of the secular and
>spiritual, the political and social--with great music":
>
>"Our goal hasn't changed. Many people recognize the deepening
>crises--economic, political, cultural and ecological--that we face
>in the contemporary United States and the wider world. Yet as we
>grapple with these issues, many of us fear that institutionalized
>religion and traditional political parties are inadequate to meet
>these challenges. How will we build the relationships and
>organizations that will allow us meet our obligations to each other
>and the world? There are no easy answers, but the solutions will
>have to come out of community, out of our commitment and connection
>to each other."
>
>Of course people are free to form any political affiliations they
>wish, and people can believe whatever spiritual nonsense they want,
>but what interests me here is how completely compatible the
>Jensenites' brand of progressive politics (a sort of [very] soft
>Chomskyianism) is with liberal religious thought: the thorough
>intermixing of the apocalyptic and the messianic, the utter
>skepticism of existing forms of institutions but unyielding faith in
>some recoverable essence of those institutions (the problem is
>"institutionalized religion" but not religion, "traditional
>political parties" but not parties), the notion of relationships
>having content primarily if not exclusively because of the ends they
>bring about ("meet[ing] our obligations," justice, truth, heaven).
>It's hard to read this philosophical gumbo, with its balance of fear
>and hope, suspicion and acceptance, and its reduction of affect to
>utilitarian ends, as anything other than instilling the faith that
>allows one to still pay taxes, vote, and go to work.