Posts
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The Recession and the Arms Trade
This morning I finally did a long-time-coming blog piece (cross-posted at Waging Nonviolence and The Huffington Post) about the connection between the recession and the growth of the military-industrial complex. This is something that has been disturbing me quite a bit in recent months, but I’ve been slow to getting around to writing anything on…
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The Pleasure of Proof
I’m really pleased to report that the excellent New York Times blog Happy Days—a series of reflections on “the pursuit of what matters in troubled times”—has just posted an essay of mine: “The Self-Thinking Thought.” It’s a reflection on my experience spending part of a summer with St. Anselm, the 11th-century monk-turned-archbishop who introduced the…
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Erik Prince and the Spell of Freedom
Fueled by Jeremy Scahill’s recent revelations about Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince in The Nation, I’ve got a new essay at Religion Dispatches exploring the concept of freedom in relationship to the business of free-market warfare. Erik Prince discovered a passion for freedom long before founding Blackwater. Freedom is a mighty thing. Its exercise…
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The Proof Industry
Today at The Guardian, a bit of a glimpse into my ongoing obsessions about proofs for the existence of God. Just last night, sifting through a novella I wrote as a freshman in college, I discovered a whole forgotten chapter about the proofs—for some reason, they have been following me so doggedly all these years.…
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Visual Metaphysics
Passing through the Met’s Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages show this week, I was thrilled to discover a new fascination: the works of Opicinus de Canistris, a 14th-century Pavian who worked in the papal court in Avignon, France. According to the accompanying text, he survived a traumatic sickness, after which “he worked…
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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…