Nathan Schneider
Nathan Schneider is an editor of Killing the Buddha and writes about religion, reason, and violence for a variety of publications. He is also a founding editor of Waging Nonviolence. His first two books, published by University of California Press in 2013, are God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. Visit his website at The Row Boat.
Recent Posts by Nathan
Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah Trilogy
Kathryn Lofton, one of the cleverest young religion scholars out there nowadays, has a trio of op-eds celebrating (sort of) the last episode of Oprah’s TV show: “What Was Oprah?” – The Washington Post‘s On Faith “How Oprah Became a Messiah” – CNN’s Belief Blog “Oprah Winfrey’s last show: Finale marks end of an era…
Napoleon’s God Vote
Something marvelous from the archives of the Guardian, from 1856:
Levitating Alien Mind Gods
After months of delays and excuses, I finally got around to doing an interview with Jeffrey Kripal, a religion professor at Rice University. It’s now up at The Immanent Frame. He’s one of the great oddballs in the study of religion today, about whom grad students whisper to each other, “It’s like he actually believes…
Set Free on Holy Thursday
Today I watched a man go free. I was on a jury, trying him for the crime of breaking into an apartment and stealing a cell phone. We heard the evidence and deliberated for two days. Most people thought he probably did it. He had a mean look about him. But the evidence wasn’t there…
How to Instigate a God Debate
Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism…
Martyrs Who Know How to Sing
Ever since seeing Terrence Malick’s extraordinary film The Thin Red Line a few months ago, I’ve been transfixed by the chants that play on its soundtrack, especially those by the Melanesian Brotherhood, an Anglican religious community on the island of Guadalcanal. My favorite is this one: Wow. The film takes place during the gruesome battle…
Martyrdom Makeover
New from me at Religion Dispatches: The idea of martyrdom hasn’t been in very good shape lately. One common usage of it—“I’ll not be made a martyr!”—refers to the prospect of somewhat tragic but mostly useless suffering, perhaps in the service of a delusional cause, religious or otherwise. Another appears regularly in the news with…
Reverend Billy’s Church of Earthalujah!
I just got a note from
Q Reports Live from Madison
Our very own Senior Editor Quince Mountain is, as we blog-speak, in the occupied Capitol building of Madison, Wisconsin. Over the course of yesterday, he and I had an extended text-message exchange, which tells the dramatic story of a rumored crackdown, a victory, celebrations, and preparations for the next crisis. The full account of yesterday…
Revolution Is What You Do
It’s a happy day when good ideas—and the people who create them—get their due. Today was one of those days. Thanks in large part to The New York Times‘s feature on the backdrop of the revolution in Egypt, and then a profile devoted to him (which as I write is still #1 on the most-emailed…
DIFTS: Do It For The Story
So I was over at a friend’s last night for dinner, and she let me in on something kind of awesome that’s swirling among the existentially-hungry, generally-affluent Catholic school boys she teaches. Wow. (If any of them reads this I guess I’m going to sound majorly out of touch for even mentioning it, but that’s…
Oprah-atic Citizenship
I’m really excited to announce that my interview with Kathryn Lofton, one of the most creative and brilliant young scholars of religion around right now, is now up at The Immanent Frame. Katie is a historian by trade, but over the years she has also cultivated a powerful fascination with Oprah, leading to her new…
I Need My Pain!
There’s nothing like seeing an old friend come up with something awesome. That’s just what I got to do last night, blessedly; at Dixon Place, the experimental performance space on New York’s Lower East Side, I caught a reading of Krista Knight’s new play, Phantom Band. Krista is an amazing young playwright who is now finishing…
Seven Pieces of Advice
What advice would you give your 18-year-old self? Or, for that matter, an actual 18-year-old? Alexa, very good old friend of mine, sent out an email recently that brought out some surprising things among those of us who received it and responded: a request for advice. Apparently, her brother’s teacher wrote to parents asking for…
Do Not Strive for the Life of the Immortals
The philosopher Patrick Lee Miller has an intriguing new book out—Becoming God—which I’ve been privileged to follow from the dissertation stage some time ago. It’s a daring philosophical argument wrapped up in a close reading of ancient texts. In the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, he finds an alternative to the most cherished axiom of philosophy, from…
The Kabul Scarf
It’s New Year’s Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end the endless war, to which so many young people in that country have…
A Cabbie Made Anxious by Churches
My roommate came home late last night and left me an email saying, simply, “just had a cab ride from this guy:”
Gods Must Die to Live
I’ve been meaning to share this for a while; it’s an arresting passage from C. S. Lewis that came to me on a page sent to my by a friend, a Trappist monk, on the subject I’ve been touching on from time to time here (and here), truth and mythology: The gods—and, of course, I…