How can journalism document belief when belief influences what witnesses notice, remember, and understand?
Welcome to Crisis in Perception, where we examine the systems shaping our world.
Radiant Truths: Essential Dispatches, Reports, Confessions, & Other Essays on American Belief, edited and introduced by Jeff Sharlet, collects literary journalism examining the unstable intersection of American identity, religious experience, and factual witness.
Sharlet argues that literary journalism is particularly suited to this territory because it acknowledges a difficult truth: factual loyalty does not eliminate perspective. Every account passes through observation, selection, language, memory, and narrative form.
This investigation traces that process through Walt Whitman’s Civil War notebooks, Henry David Thoreau’s confrontation with inhuman nature, Mark Twain’s satire of sacred tourism, and William T. Stead’s exposure of institutional religious hypocrisy. Together, these works reveal how stories can illuminate hidden experience while also being shaped by the expectations of writers, institutions, and audiences.
The central systems include narrative mediation, religious meaning-making, institutional authority, memory, symbolic simplification, and the feedback loop between existing belief and future perception.
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This content was created using AI-assisted tools for research synthesis, structuring, and narration support. All analysis, framing, and editorial decisions are guided by human judgment as part of the Crisis in Perception project.
