Jeff Sharlet
Jeff Sharlet is a founding editor of Killing the Buddha, coauthor with Peter Manseau of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible (2004) and co-editor of Believer, Beware (2009). Sharlet is also the author of Sweet Heaven When I Die, (2011), C Street, (2010), and the New York Times bestseller The Family (2008).
Recent Posts by Jeff
Prayer Hands
Better than kitsch.
This Mutant Genre
The introduction to a new anthology Radiant Truths: Essential …. Essays on American Belief
Ditto Boys
“What they claim, in fact, is innocence.”
Superheroes’ Religious Affiliations Revealed!
There’s so much we doesn’t know. Like that Kal-El is Jewish. Or that Batman’s an old school Presbyterian scold. Or that Spiderman’s half-Jew. Or that Wonder Woman’s a Congregationalist. You’d THINK Wolverine’s a Catholic, but he’s not. (Again, Pr Buy Cheap Cialis Online esbyterian.) Nightcrawler and Storm, we know, are Catholics. Phoenix was Episcopalian, and…
The GOP attack on Dems Jerusalem platform isn’t about the Jews…
It’s about Christians. In case you missed it, the Democratic Party dropped its longstanding insistence that Jerusalem is and will be the capital of Israel, despite the fact that most of the world doesn’t recognize it as such. Why not? Oh, the fear of setting off a never-ending, apocalyptic war. But for some of us,…
Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata
A poem from the new U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, from the American Academy of Poets. Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata by Natasha Trethewey —after the painting by Diego Velàzquez, ca. 1619 She is the vessels on the table before her: the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher clutched in…
Jeff Sharlet Fall Book Tour
Following are some of the events I’ll be doing this fall in support of my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, and around other topics. I’ll probably be adding a few more. Bookstores interested in hosting an event should contact my publicist, Whitney Peeling, at whitney.peeling at gmail.com. Universities, colleges, and other organizations should…
Calling Vermont & New Hampshire
Vermonters, New Hampshirites, and all the fish in the river in between: Please join me Wednesday, September 21, at Norwich Books in Norwich, Vermont, for true stories from my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, which has won me comparisons to Joan Didion (good), Norman Mailer (bad), and John McPhee (WASP). I’ll be discussing…
Egypt For Everybody
Immediately following the Egyptian revolution, my friend Greg Berger, a filmmaker, and journalist Al Giordano, of Narco News, went to Cairo to make a series of short videos with the activists who made it happen, “A Video Manual on How a Civil Resistance Was Built to Win.” Some of you are probably ready to click…
President Prayerey’s Bloody Moon
Here at Killing the Buddha, we’re all about helping Rick Perry. This morning I was given the chance to do so by “opening the Bible” for him — that is, reading a bit of Joel 2, the scripture he cited as justification for his prayer rally, “The Response,” on Canada’s CBC morning show, “The Current.”…
The Heavenly BMW
Gawker, where KtB gets all its religion news, reports that police found Zachery Tims, Jr., pastor of New Destiny Christian Center, an 8,000-strong megachurch in Orlando, dead with what appeared to be drugs in his pocket in Times Square this week. As it happens, I’m pretty certain it was Tims that KtB cofounder Peter Manseau…
For Every Life Saved
The last Yiddish writer. A story from the newest book to come out of KtB, Sweet Heaven When I Die.
Chava Rosenfarb on CBC
The oldest essay in my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die, is “For Every Life Saved,” a portrait of the last great Yiddish writer, Chava Rosenfarb. I adored Chava. I loved her massive, crudely translated novel, Der boym fun lebn (The Tree of Life), and her later, even sharper short stories, especially “Edgia’s Revenge,”…
Code of the West
Guernica, a terrific online magazine of art and politics, has just published an excerpt from my new book, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness and the Country In Between. It’s called “Code of the West,” and it includes cowboys, gunfights, the Confederate dead, karate, evil twins, and my friend Molly, herself a past contributor…
Pork Rinds and Mayonnaise on Wonder Bread
I’ve been waiting for my pal and collaborator Kiera Feldman’s debut feature in The Nation, “The Romance of Birthright Israel” for months. It’s all that I hoped—sex! violence! dirty old men paying hapless young fools to breed for their ideological titillation. But what’s really remarkable is the discovery that Kiera’s delightfully disturbing dish is the…
Files from The Family: The Psychotic and the Spy
The other day I had lunch with a Presbyterian minister who had some minor but firsthand experience with elitist theology of the Family, the avant-garde of American fundamentalism that I’ve written about in two books, The Family and C Street. The clergyman had read The Family and wondered, in the end, whether the Family’s abuses of…
Killing the Buddha in Cairo
Anthony Shadid, in The New York Times: Tens of thousands of protesters who have reimagined the very notion of citizenship in a tumultuous week of defiance proclaimed with sticks, home-made bombs and a shower of rocks that they would not surrender their revolution to the full brunt of an authoritarian government that answered their calls for…
KtB Election Night Event
New Yorkers, don’t sit around cursing your television tonight! Join me as I discuss the C Street effect on the election with Damon Linker, a former leading intellectual light of the right who changed his mind and wrote a book about his old pals called Theocons, and host Mark Crispin Miller, bestselling author of The…