Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Category: Posts

  • Owning Is the New Sharing

    What if we owned the Internet? Would we get paid for our likes and comments? What privacy policies would we write for ourselves? Last month, the Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched me to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. The folks at Shareable recognized that,…

  • A Generation of Hackers

    Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why? This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey…

  • Wisdom Hacking

    Starting this Thursday, October 9, tune your radios and podcast machines to On Being, Krista Tippett’s extraordinary, nationally syndicated public radio show about the meanings of life—I will be the guest. Krista interviewed me this summer at the Chautauqua Institution about my books, God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy, as well as my recent…

  • From Occupation to Reconstruction

    Ever since I wrote a book about Occupy Wall Street, I’ve often found myself being asked, “What happened to Occupy, anyway?” Now, more than two years since the movement faded from the headlines and in the wake of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling diagnosis of economic inequality, the urgency of the question is mounting, not…

  • 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…