KtBlog

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…

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…

Death: A View from the Moon
This enchanting letter comes from Graham Jones in the UK (or the moon), just in time to help spread the word about Friday’s death event at New York’s Rubin Museum: Looking back from the moon, it’s easy to see the little humans always getting stuck. I was a human once but I seem to have…

Does Science Need Religion?
When one is out to study religion, or to cover the religion beat, it can be awfully tempting to see religion everywhere you look as the all-satisfying explanation for everything. It’s the whole if-you-have-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail effect, right? Today at Religion Dispatches I’ve got a review of the new book by Steve Fuller, a rather audacious and…

The Most Controversial 89-year-old Man in New York
I’ve just been one-upped by The New York Times, and I’m glad of it. In October, 2008, I did an essay for The Smart Set in tribute to my favorite “ancient astronaut” theorists, the greatest of which is without question Zecharia Sitchin. About him, I wrote: The idea goes like this: If you read the…