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
Lips Moved by an Angel’s Hands
Correction: This post is premised on an incorrect interpretation of the work in question. Refer to Lisa Levy‘s comment below and my response to it. Finally, on my third attempt—not counting two extra false starts—I made it by bicycle, with six friends, to see the Chagall and Matisse stained glass windows at the Rockefellers’ Union…
The Practice of Questioning
This came in a letter from Bruce Illig: Hello Editors, I just finished Jeff’s book [The Family], and had to subscribe to your site’s newsletter and become a facebook fan just to find a place to hide. The amazing book answered many questions of my past 40 years, most notably the relationship between “elite” and…
Jewish Without the Big-Noseness
My RSS feeds were crawling with Jewish International Conspiracy today. (It was a welcome break from learning that my other favorite religion, Catholicism, is going back on its longtime and necessary support for health care reform.) First, Sarah Silverman gets some Kabbalah—or Kabbalah—in L.A. and explains what makes it different from Scientology. (Hat tip to…
The Pleasure of Proof
I’m really pleased to report that the excellent New York Times blog Happy Days—a series of reflections on “the pursuit of what matters in troubled times”—has just posted an essay of mine: “The Self-Thinking Thought.” It’s a reflection on my experience spending part of a summer with St. Anselm, the 11th-century monk-turned-archbishop who introduced the…
Will Mormons Preserve American Civilization?
Inspired by a hint from Mormon sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card, Josh Levin has a piece at Slate suggesting that Mormonism might be for American culture what the Catholic Church was for Rome: a time capsule. He gets excited, especially, about the Mormons’ capacity for resilience and self-reliance. As far as organizational practices go, a…
Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia
At BLDGBLOG, an alluring post about the liquid underbelly of a historic building. While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has “managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach,” down there in the flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul’s ancient religious structure….
The Proof Industry
Today at The Guardian, a bit of a glimpse into my ongoing obsessions about proofs for the existence of God. Just last night, sifting through a novella I wrote as a freshman in college, I discovered a whole forgotten chapter about the proofs—for some reason, they have been following me so doggedly all these years….
42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns
Finally, from Mother Jones, a new piece on the Landmark Forum by Laura McClure. It’s yet another in a line of first-person, female, and only partially-skeptical takes on the Forum’s brand of white-collar, secular prosperity gospel. This is certainly one of the major supposedly not-religious new religious movements on the scene today. If you don’t…
Visual Metaphysics: Opicinus de Canistris
Passing through the Met’s Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages show this week, I was thrilled to discover a new fascination: the works of Opicinus de Canistris, a 14th-century Pavian who worked in the papal court in Avignon, France. According to the accompanying text, he survived a traumatic sickness, after which “he worked…
Journalism as an Encounter
People usually don’t like what’s written about them. If you’ve ever been quoted in an article somewhere, you know that journalists mess up and mangle what you say beyond recognition. One wonders why people even bother talking to them (us) at all. Recently on The American Prospect‘s website, Courtney E. Martin had a really thought-provoking…
Killing Writing
Jim Willis says: Equally, the writer should kill writing. What are we left with when this doesn’t happen? And yet, it will be said that we would never in that case accrue knowledge. Thus does the world that was put aside in the zen koan keep gaining speed, keep getting built. Incredible how true that…
Rules of Engagement
What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. Soldiers stake their lives on a…
One Variety of Impiety
There are lots of ways of being disrespectful during church, especially if the church is Catholic. The rules are a lot easier at your average megachurch, where shorts, t-shirts, and Starbucks are as welcome as Bibles. Basically, there, whatever’s clean and decent outside is good also for glorifying the nondenominational, American Protestant God. But Catholic…
The What of God?
A chat with Robert Wright on his new monster, The Evolution of God.
Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…
The Metaphysics of Anxiety
An insightful note came in today from one Michael Bush, referring to the first phrase of our Manifesto, “Killing the Buddha is a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches.” He writes: To paraphrase Mrs. Roosevelt, no one can make you anxious without your permission. You might consider changing your tag line: A religion…
You Said the N-word!
We knew that publishing Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou’s “Gays Are the New Niggers” would make some waves. It came to us, in fact, because others (perhaps rightly) were reluctant to run it with that title. But when we saw the essay’s call to the memory of Bayard Rustin, the civil rights movement’s master of nonviolence…
Transient Vapors
When I got home, when I got the camera, when I jumped out onto the fire escape to take a picture, it looked like this. This is all that was left. But only minutes before, as I rode along Wythe Avenue from Williamsburg to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, and then most of all just after turning…