Author: Nathan

  • Happy birthday, Catholic Worker

    To celebrate the Catholic Worker movement’s 81st birthday today, I snuck Dorothy Day into two articles in the space of a week. Today, at Al Jazeera America, “What’s Left of May Day?”: On May 1, 1933, the Catholic journalist and activist Dorothy Day went to New York’s Union Square to distribute copies of the first…

  • Code Your Own Utopia

    My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype: Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional…

  • A Father Can Also Be a Woman

    Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it: [Hilary] Howes told the story…

  • Astrology as Metaphor

    Jantar Mantar Road, a short passageway through the administrative center of New Delhi, takes its name from a complex of gigantic red astronomical instruments at its north terminus, built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1724. The Jantar Mantar consists of a series of geometric jungle gyms that surround the all-important shadow of the Supreme…

  • Give the Gift of God & Anarchy

    What better gift to give friends and loved ones than stories of grasping at the impossible? According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, God in Proof “breathes life back into proofs” and is “entertaining, well written, and historically comprehensive.” Says former Washington Post columnist and peace educator Colman McCarthy, Thank You, Anarchy is “rich…

  • ‘This Isn’t, Thank God, Another Book about the Proofs for God’s Existence’

    The filter blog Arts & Letters Daily is great, and it’s even greater that today it featured Robert Bolger’s excellent Los Angeles Review of Books review of God in Proof. Writes Bolger: Schneider tips his hand a bit with the title God in Proof. This isn’t, thank God, another book about the proofs for God’s…

  • Heart Waves

    by Susy

  • Anarchy Everywhere, Except Online

    I suppose this is what you get when you publish a book with “anarchy” in the title. This month I’ve got two new anarchy-related essays, both of which are available in good-old print. Here’s a bit of a taste. One is an introduction to a new collection of Noam Chomsky’s writings on Anarchism, straightforwardly titled…

  • Live, Breathe, Recover from Heartache, Believe, Know, Unknow

    by @DNovgorodoff

  • A Holiday from Politics?

    I’m a little perplexed by the new review of Thank You, Anarchy by Adam Kirsch, an editor of The New Republic among other things. Short of outright disapproving of my book, he replays a common liberal dismissal of Occupy. “For the vast majority of Americans, it was little more than a news story,” he begins,…