God, Guns, and . . . Whatever
Paul HarveyA friend sent this photo of a tattoo, which he wants to use as a cover for his book. And, it's just pretty dang awesome, so I'm sharing it.
Updated: see the comments section for more explanation behind the image.
Comments
His dissertation is about Johnny Cash and the religious cultures of the southern poor. The tattoo references the Cash tune "The Wanderer" and, of course, "Ring of Fire."
A UGA alumnus doing us proud in so many ways.
"And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or ..." tattoos of guns and religion.
The New Yorker's point was obvious. Yours isn't (to me, anyway), so that's why I'm asking.
My tattoo is (aside from a hallmark of an early midlife crisis) an emblem of the religious sensibility I wrote about, one forged in the hard confines of rural southern poverty--a poverty that threatened to, and sometimes did, destroy people in violence--but which called people, through judgment directed at oneself, to live instead in humility and neighborliness. The tone of that sensibility, and the social class it came from, are quite different from today's very public evangelicalism. In the tat there's God and guns, but it's a gun pointed at you, and a ring of fire you might fall into, where, in Flannery O'Connor's phrase, "the mercy of the Lord burns." Burns, burns, burns...