KtBlog
What Do You Believe? How Do You Know? Want a Free Book?
For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As…
Why I Wrote The New Hate
Back in 2009, I published a book called Cults, Conspiracies and Secret Societies—a serious-minded but basically gee-whiz impulse-buy type compendium of odd, offbeat, and scary beliefs and belief systems. “Mystics,” I wrote in its introduction, “believe that multiplicity and change are illusory; that everything is ultimately interconnected…that our universe is a cosmic One in which…
Listen to This Man
An ongoing hobby of mine is to try and help keep my favorite theologian, William Stringfellow, in circulation. In the past, I’ve written about his ideas on biography, on the sexuality and the circus, on his partner Anthony Towne’s amazing obituary for God, and more. This time, in Commonweal, I had the opportunity to review…
Best American Buddha-killer
Join us at Bookcourt this Tuesday to hear from KtB contributor Danica Novgorodoff, whose work is featured in The Best American Comics 2011. This year’s volume, guest edited by Alison Bechdel, also includes contributions by Dash Shaw and Jillian Tamaki, who will join Danica to talk about all things comics. Bookcourt 163 Court St. Brooklyn,…
“One of the Shrewdest Commentators on Religion’s Underexplored Realms”
Killing the Buddha: We bring good people together. In today’s Boston Globe, recent KtB contributor Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of the amazing new book Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, reviews Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between, a “remarkable new collection of literary journalism” by KtB mothball Jeff…
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,”…
An Eden Full of Dudes
The end is the beginning is the end (that’s a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure…
Gods of the Whole Earth
There’s just something about the current MoMA exhibit “Access to Tools: The Whole Earth Catalog” (closing Tuesday!). I’ve written elsewhere about The Whole Earth Catalog and my family, most recently for the forthcoming Frequencies project, where I consider it as a spiritual object. The MoMA exhibit didn’t take that stance, exactly, but the very experience of visiting…
Taoist Foreplay Works Anyway
Taoist Foreplay: Love Meridians and Pressure Points by Mantak Chia and Kris Deva North This book had me at “Taoist.” Add in “foreplay” and I was pressing the One-Click button. Hard, so to speak. Ahem. [Five minutes elapse.] What? Oh, just doing a bit of “single cultivation.” For, uh, research purposes. I’m back. This book…
KtB in Best Women’s Travel Writing
I just returned from another trip to India. On my second day there, I was eating lunch at my aunt and uncle’s house, setting out the tiered tower of stainless steel tiffin containers to reveal finely cut green bean curries, sambar, rasam and other South Indian staples. In an attempt to be polite, I served…
Nuns are People Too
I am rarely moved to tears by prose. Put on The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or cue up “Space Oddity” by David Bowie and you will be guaranteed a few of them, if that’s what you want. You probably don’t. But when reading does cause me to cry, it’s somehow more real. It hurts. I can…
The Lingering Loveliness of Long Things
When was the last time someone read you a (really long) story?
Stay Out of the Stacks!
Readers—our Communicant, Mary Valle, has been missing for a few days. She was last seen telling her husband she was going to do a little research in the KtB archives the night of November 2. Her husband sighed a silent “whatever” and dreaded the load of horrible out-of-print books she would bring back to add…
The God of This World
Isn’t it obvious that God, or at least our idea of God, needs saving as much as we do? He—forgive me if necessary for saying “He”—has been run through the mud by terrorists, televangelists, New Atheists, and grandmothers’ guilt. The rest of us are supposed to have a relationship with this guy? Or even just…