Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • Oprah-atic Citizenship

    I’m really excited to announce that my interview with Kathryn Lofton, one of the most creative and brilliant young scholars of religion around right now, is now up at The Immanent Frame. Katie is a historian by trade, but over the years she has also cultivated a powerful fascination with Oprah, leading to her new…

  • 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…

  • The Life of the Immortals

    The philosopher Patrick Lee Miller has an intriguing new book out—Becoming God—which I’ve been privileged to follow from the dissertation stage some time ago. It’s a daring philosophical argument wrapped up in a close reading of ancient texts. In the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus, he finds an alternative to the most cherished axiom of philosophy, from…

  • The Kabul Scarf

    It’s New Year’s Eve, and last night my colleague at Waging Nonviolence, Eric Stoner, returned safely from Afghanistan. He was there as a journalist and activist with an envoy of peacemakers, meeting networks of Afghans and internationals who are working to end the endless war, to which so many young people in that country have…

  • Gods Must Die to Live

    I’ve been meaning to share this for a while; it’s an arresting passage from C. S. Lewis that came to me on a page sent to my by a friend, a Trappist monk, on the subject I’ve been touching on from time to time here (and here), truth and mythology: The gods—and, of course, I…

  • Doing Theology

    At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Charles Villa-Vicencio, a theologian who served as National Research Director for the historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his native South Africa. We discuss peacebuilding, forgiveness, and the kind of spirituality that he sees emerging in his country as part of the challenge of building a new nation.…

  • What Good Are Good Arguments?

    Do good arguments end up carrying the day? If not, what else is at play? Today at The Immanent Frame, I interview Colin Jager, professor of English at Rutgers and an authority on natural theology in British romanticism. He’s the author of, literally, The Book of God. Our conversation touches on many things swirling through…

  • 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…

  • The Truth in Myth

    There’s this passage toward the end of the all-important book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that I keep coming back to, one of those bits that reaches out of its antiquity and walks among us. Book XII is where Aristotle’s account of the world beyond physics reaches up from the chains of causes acting on causes…

  • Will Boycotting Mass Spur Reform?

    What would happen if, one Sunday morning, the Catholic hordes stayed home from mass in protest? Would the priests listen to the people’s demands? Or would they carry on without us? Over the weekend I had an essay at Religion Dispatches about an elderly Irish woman who proposed just such a protest in order to…