Brook Wilensky-Lanford
Brook Wilensky-Lanford is the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011). An editor of Killing the Buddha, she lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Follow Brook on Twitter: @modmyth
Recent Posts by Brook
God Bless and Be Well
What does church look like when the Baptists go online in a science town?
Happy Birthday, Gordon and Poland!
It’s Gordon Haber’s birthday, and he’s giving you a gift. Several years back, we published his brief dispatch from Poland called “The Only Jew For Miles.” I noticed very quickly that marble is hard on the knees. Presumably, that was the point–a Christian pilgrimage is supposed to have some echo of Jesus’ agony. But I…
KtB Wants You…To Write About the Eclipse
The total solar eclipse passing over the continental U.S. this August 21st is the first to do so in 99 years, but American eclipse stories go back much farther than that. It was a “Dark Day” in the spring of 1780 that apparently convinced Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee to “open” her revelation to new…
God, Mammon, Bathrooms, and Basketball
In the Tuesday-morning quiet of a Chapel Hill that will be riding high from its NCAA championship win last night for the foreseeable future, the news arrives that the NCAA has lifted its ban on hosting games in North Carolina. You’ve heard the story: HB 2, the North Carolina law requiring transgender people to use…
Election History, Second Draft
Killing the Buddha is going to have a lot to say in the coming weeks about the presidential election of a man best described as Voldemort. We will be bringing you first-person dispatches from the margins, as per usual, only just now a lot more of us are feeling “on the margins” than is usual….
Behind the Scenes at KtB
I am honored to be tagged in my very first “blog train,” thanks to the awesome Melissa Duclos, my grad-school colleague and writer-editor extraordinaire, whose latest venture, The Clovers Project, seeks to create mentoring groups for student, emerging, and established writers to support each other. That’s a spirit we can definitely identify with around here…
Apocalypse, Later
We don’t always celebrate the anniversaries of non-events, but here at KtB we thought we’d call your attention to the fact that we have now survived Harold Camping’s non-end-of-the-world, predicted for May 21, 2011, for exactly three years. Congratulations! The infamously inaccurate Family Radio pastor’s apocalypse was fascinating for Camping’s utter conviction in its reality,…
Told You So
As generally skeptical types, we Buddha-killers don’t like to claim victory over the forces of dogma and oversimplification very often. The very act of our title is, after all, in the present tense. But it does seem in recent months that the good word of Buddha-killing–writing about religion the way most of us actually experience…
Ham on Nye: Beyond the Debate
Having been party to an extremely brief and insignificant debate with Ken Ham in these pages over the account of his Creation Museum in my 2011 book Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, I can attest that to him the facts matter not, the debate is all. Having followed Ham’s organization Answers in…
Giving Thanks For Torn Bread
Last week, the awesome Kaya Oakes, who’s written several beautiful personal essays for KtB, entrusted us with a new one, which she felt was a little more experimental, less linear than her other work. “Torn Bread” is a searching, self-reflective exploration of the feeling of receiving Communion from a female Episcopal priest, as a feminist Catholic…
Confessions of a Former Purist
I’m not such a huge fan of the TV show Homeland these days, but the second episode of Season 3, which aired Sunday, might be winning me over. Brody’s daughter Dana has long been my favorite character and she’s getting more so. With that complicated way she wrinkles up her brow, her round innocent face…
Apocalypse Week…Again
Here at Killing the Buddha, we’ve been all over the apocalypse for a long time. The apocalypse is kind of like Christmas: it threatens to happen just about every year, or then maybe it does, or doesn’t, and anyway life goes on. As the apparently Mormon-inspired sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica likes to say “All of…
Heart and Head
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself sitting at a conference table in a Chicago convention center, along with a couple dozen strangers, tears streaming down my face. How embarrassing! It was awkward enough to be a civilian at the Academy of American Religion conference, intimidated by the advance reading packet for this Religion…
What I Would Have Posted on Facebook If I Had Had Power
Or, the self-absorbed diary of a stir-crazy New Jersey shut-in. Day 1: You know you’re on the right path, career-wise, when being prohibited from going to work makes you sad. Sorry, Baruch College Writing Center. Devices charged up, lots of bottled water, ready for whatever but starting to have flashbacks to Irene. My neighbor…
Science and Religion–Sibling Rivalry?
Marilynne Robinson shouldn’t make me mad. She is a lovely Midwestern fiction writer, with long white hair and a demure voice, whose lecture on Religion, Science, and Art my fellow KtB editor Quince Mountain and I had the privilege of listening to at last week’s University of Iowa conference “Futures and Illusions.” And yet, as…
Farewell, Olympia
I want to apologize to Republican Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who announced last week that she will not seek re-election. Some time in the early 1990s, as a teenager growing up in Downeast Maine, I dressed up as Senator Snowe for Halloween. (Pictures will remain in a sealed vault.) First as a representative, then as…
Adam and Eve or Bust
You’ve probably heard about Professor John R. Schneider, who lost his job at Calvin College, a Christian school, for claiming that Adam and Eve could not have been real people. Science agrees that the number of genetic mutations it takes to go from from homo erectus to homo sapiens couldn’t have emerged from a population…
Open Letter to Ken Ham
Dear Mr. Ham, Thank you very much for your interest in my book, Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, which was reviewed this weekend in the Wall Street Journal. It is a singular honor to be mentioned by America’s leading young-earth creationist and the founder of the Creation Museum. My book explores many ideas about…