Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Author: Nathan

  • The Local Neighborhood Conspiracy

    Religion Dispatches has just put up my review of Jeff Sharlet’s book, The Family, about a secret Christian political organization headquartered in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia. Like the emperor’s new clothes, power is invisible to those who don’t happen to know about it. One could, as I did, spend eighteen years growing up less…

  • Don’t You Love It When Your Day Is in a Play?

    I don’t know how many of you all out there have been spending your days like me, combing through proofs for and against the existence of God and trying to write clever things about them. But if you are, have I got a play for you: The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist, now playing…

  • Early Morning Raid

    I’ve got a new video up now to join the rest of them, a music video of the previously unheard-by-anyone-except-me song “Afghanistan.” The song is set to some video I got of a wild thunderstorm in New York the other night, which looked so much like a bombing raid that I had to juxtapose it…

  • New York State of Mind

    In a new way I was struck today with what six months in New York (pretty much to the day) can do to a person. I came here originally, to be sure, with a mission. Not quite “to make my fortune” but close. For love and friends, of course, but also to try my hand…

  • An Exchange on Adi Da

    For the last several days, I’ve been in email contact with someone named John Forth, a devotee of the new religious movement leader Adi Da. It began when I received an email from him, possibly related to an earlier Row Boat post, that was clearly an anonymous form letter. It was filled with links to…

  • Oh Soul Most Dear to My Soul

    Anselm, the eleventh-century discoverer of the ontological proof for the existence of God, archbishop of Canterbury, and authority on Trinitarian doctrines, is not much known for his views on friendship. Yet, especially in his letters, it was a subject of great concern to him. The ecstasy with which he speaks of and in friendship seems…

  • The Great Burden of Sin

    The eleventh-century Archbishop of Canturbury, Anselm, wrote on “the great burden of sin”: If you should find yourself in the sight of God, and one said to you: “Look thither;” and God, on the other hand, should say: “It is not my will that you should look;” ask your own heart what there is in…

  • Climbing the New York Times Building (as metaphor)

    I have never felt more in an office. Today two men climbed the outside of my office building, the fifty-something story New York Times Building in midtown Manhattan (one and two). Meanwhile I was in meetings or sitting at my computer. Metaphors begin in things that are real. I can still hear the sirens outside…

  • Hello World!

    The Row Boat has been redesigned! Though only powers above mine can know if it was really necessary, I’ve spent the last two days obsessing over migrating from Little Logger to WordPress. All the old Row Boat material is still available on the Archives page, as well as through the search field on the sidebar.…