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Religion Takes the Stand
Today at The Immanent Frame, I discuss with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan her challenging theses about the failures of American law to account for lived religion and, most urgently, her recent book on the role of religious organizations in prison reform. In Prison Religion, you reveal how the American, secular prison system has largely given up…
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Journalism as an Encounter
People usually don’t like what’s written about them. If you’ve ever been quoted in an article somewhere, you know that journalists mess up and mangle what you say beyond recognition. One wonders why people even bother talking to them (us) at all. Recently on The American Prospect’s website, Courtney E. Martin had a really thought-provoking…
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The Quaker Birds of Costa Rica
It began with the advice of a federal judge in 1949. If you’re not going to follow United States law and register for the draft, he told the group of Alabaman Quaker farmers before him, “get out of this country and stay out.” So they did. In 1951, along with several dozen family members and…
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Rules of Engagement
What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. Soldiers stake their lives on a…
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Radio Silence
“Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” —Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Going off into the wilderness for some unknown days—unknown in length, unknown in content, unknown in consequence—I’m taking the opportunity to wrest myself from the vicious habits of blogging, into the naked, unpublishable chaos of experience, quiet as long as need be…
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Events Today in Costa Rica
My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our…
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Non-zero-sum God
Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject: It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…