Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Category: Posts

  • The Trickster of Traveling

    How is it that travel can be so rapturous? Fittingly, this dream of traveling descended on me toward the end of high school, around the same time I decided I would be a writer, around the same time that I began looking at religion. Doubtless they are all part of a single, mystical mix. In…

  • Militarism and Heroism

    Critics of militarism have to make sense of its humanity, to find a place for it, to honor it. This gray afternoon, with a friend, I went to the U.S.S. Intrepid, the Essex-class aircraft carrier-turned-museum on the west side of Manhattan. Dubbed “The Most Inspiring Adventure in America,” it’s an opportunity to tour through half…

  • Must One Describe?

    The air here is always dry. Thin, but also thick. A white pipe the width of a soda can reaches from floor to ceiling, making the never-ending music of a rainstick. From it comes enough heat that even on the coldest days of winter I’ve had to keep the window open at least a crack…

  • 25 Random Notes on Ash Wednesday

    I woke up early to my roommate putting away the silverware in the kitchen, then fell back asleep. When I woke up the wooden rosary that I fell asleep with wrapped around my hand was lost in the sheets. Last night I was asked if I keep any symbolic hidden things on my body, like…

  • Some Say “God Saved the World”

    Over at Killing the Buddha, we’ve just published our first-ever video—the music video for my song “God Saved the World” (previously published on The Row Boat last May). A conversation about it with Jeff Sharlet today made me think I should explain the role of theological imagery in my little songs a bit—not that they…

  • Who Are These Women?

    Along the ramparts of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there is a small exhibition of ancient female figurines, among them the oldest sculpture in the museum’s collection. What strange forms! Where are the supermodels, where are the Barbie dolls? At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw…

  • Searching for Truth-Force in Pragmatism

    Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club was a happy discovery for $1.50 at the otherwise frustrating Salvation Army at Bedford and North 7th in Brooklyn. As my bedtime reading for the last few weeks, for better or worse, it has been more thought-provoking than sleep-inducing. It tells the early story of pragmatism as a distinctly American…

  • Environmentalism as a Politics of Fear

    My friend Bryan and I have been engaged in a discussion for several weeks now about the politics of environmentalism and the prospect of climate change. We are both of a rather ascetic bent, at heart—the sense that the only way forward for the human community is a simpler existence made of nonviolence, plant-eating, and…

  • What Would Darwin Do?

    Happy Darwin Day! If you didn’t already fall victim to all the fuss, today is both the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the origin of species. It’s even Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. (And my friend Jake Rosenberg’s birthday too!) To celebrate, I have essay in today’s Religion…

  • The Self-making Man

    On Religion Dispatches this morning, I’ve got a new review of Thomas Carlson’s latest book, The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human. Carlson was my philosophy teacher at UC Santa Barbara—and a remarkable teacher at that. We worked harder in his graduate seminars that in any other class, and every bit was worth…