A Conversation with Peter for $10
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RNS wants to charge $150 for usage rights to this photo.
Yesterday Religion News Service published a feature interview with Peter Manseau, KtB co-founder and, most recently, author of Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead (check out our exclusive excerpt). If you’re not an RNS subscriber, though, it’ll cost ya 10 big ones to read.
But why bother when you can ask him anything you want by writing a letter to the editor at KtB?
UPDATE:
We got a message from Kevin at RNS informing us that, despite what you’ll see at the link above, the Q&A with Peter can actually be read for free! Here’s the link.
This is a Buddha if I ever heard one:
Q: Relics can attract real violence.
A: Yes, but usually after they take on political meaning. I visited the shrine to the Buddha’s Tooth in Sri Lanka. It had been claimed by successive kings and then become a symbol of Sri Lanka’s independence from Britain. Ten years ago, it was suicide-bombed by Tamil Tigers rebels. It wasn’t religious: the tooth had become the national symbol of a state from which they wanted to secede.
Way to go RNS for liberating the words of the world’s most literary reliquarian.
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.