Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Category: Posts

  • Religion Blogs: Too Many to Count

    Lately I’ve been waking up with these terrible cold sweats. Reptilian reflexes bounce me out of bed and to my laptop across the room, where my fingers pull up a familiar spreadsheet. I’ve forgotten a blog! How could I leave that one out? Now I’ve got to spend half the morning revising the whole thing…

  • Atheist, Ensouled

    I can’t help but be grateful for the so-called New Atheists. They’ve given me lots of excuses to write articles, for instance. It’s a common trope, one that I’ve been guilty of on occasion, to dismiss them out of hand as, in one way or another, deranged lunatics who don’t know what they’re talking about.…

  • What’s The Point of War?

    What will it take to prevent the next war? Can’t say I know exactly, but, like how many others in the same boat, I keep writing about it anyway. I just received in the mail the elegant new second issue of The Point magazine, out of Chicago, which includes my essay “The War at Home.”…

  • Karen Armstrong’s Compassion

    It’s a common refrain that one hears among those of us looking to think responsibly about the world’s religions: at bottom, they all have a common core, and the core is a genuinely good one. That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be…

  • Theology for Atheists

    At the Guardian today, I’ve got a short bit about secular, mainly Continental philosophers who, in recent years, have turned to theology: [Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published…

  • The Study of Special Experiences

    When I arrived at UC Santa Barbara for my graduate work in 2006, I had some horrible, vague idea about wanting to study issues of interreligious dialog(ue)—it was a mess. I’d just finished an undergraduate thesis about evolution debates and wasn’t sure where to go next. Fortunately, the professor I found myself paired with, Ann…

  • Hipsters, Hasidim, and My Bike Lane

    A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant…

  • The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit

    I’ve got a zany new essay at Religion Dispatches today about a lecture earlier this week in Brooklyn, “A Philosophical Proof of Santa Claus.” Jamie Hook, the evening’s presenter, did a masterful job of miming some of the issues at play in debates about God—though in the guise of a fellow whose existence, this season…

  • Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater

    What concerns me about the coming literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the full or partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves but the assortments in which they find themselves. Specifically, I am concerned about what’s going to happen to my own library. For public and academic libraries,…

  • Beginning with Witness: the FOR’s Mark Johnson

    At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Mark Johnson, executive director of the pioneering pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (I wrote about the Fellowship in a recent book review for Commonweal.) We discuss the FOR’s current work, its legacy, and how it is adapting to the the challenges of religious (and non-religious) diversity in…