Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Posts

Posts are syndicated across various social media networks—find them here and join the discussion.

  • A Symbologist Speaks!

    In my Religion Dispatches essay this week about Angels & Demons, I make a crack about the nonexistence of the hero’s stated academic discipline, “symbology.” But maybe I’m wrong. I think I’ve just found a symbologist. Trolling around on the Internet today, I found this Canadian Masonic website which denies the conventional wisdom that the…

  • Religion and Science, Sitting in a Tree … in Vatican City … with a Mysterious Pentagram Carved into It

    For one who knows anything about the stuff in Dan Brown’s novels, the temptation is do, of course, what many have already done: assemble a book-length catalog of all the hideous inaccuracies and abominable oversimplifications and gross assaults on whatever faith one happens to hold. When restricted to an article, perhaps it’s better to choose…

  • Waging Nonviolence

    You might not believe it, but I’m now involved with yet another website. I never seem to be able to say no to a good thing. So if checking The Row Boat and Killing the Buddha all the time isn’t enough for you, here’s one more: wagingnonviolence.org. When I first arrived in New York, I…

  • A Country to Die For

    Memorial Day as never been my favorite. In Arlington, Virginia, where I grew up, it always meant the roar of Vietnam Vets on motorcycles all day. And the occasion can bring out our most jingoistic spirit. As I passed three separate suspension bridges across the Hudson River today, each with a giant American flag hanging…

  • The Defense Department Gospel

    Donald Rumsfeld took the Lord’s name in vain. Today at Religion Dispatches, I discuss the documents released by GQ this weekend, cover sheets for 2003 intelligence briefings that Rumsfeld delivered to President Bush. On them, Biblical passages sit suggestively alongside scenes of desert warfare. With only the most cursory bit of investigation, I was able…

  • The Original Peaceniks

    My review of Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience appears in this week’s Commonweal. The online version is subscription-only, but the magazine is well worth picking up at your local newsstand. In his new history of Christian nonviolence from World War I to Vietnam, Joseph Kip Kosek asks what this movement has offered American democracy,…

  • Star Trek Sans Politics

    I’ve got a new essay on Religion Dispatches that I did up in a sleepless tizzy after seeing the new Star Trek movie. I had a great time going with my old Star Trek convention buddy Mat to the Lincoln Center IMAX on opening week. Nothing can quite compete with the thrill of seeing those…

  • The Teachings of Carl on Vice

    Vice magazine has just run a blog post of mine, an invitation into the world and works of Carl Johnson, whom I visited last month in his hometown of Thornton, IL. He’s a man of cosmic imagination who doesn’t get on well with his neighbors. Check out the pamphlet I published in 2006 of one…

  • Resounding through Manhattan

    Today I had the great privilege to join members of Resonanda, Brown University’s medieval music ensemble, for their one-day, unannounced New York tour (before you continue, go to Resonanda’s MySpace page and put on one of their songs as you read). It began—where else—at The Cloisters, the museum in the form of a medieval monastery…

  • Regions of the Great Heresy

    At the 92nd Street Y tonight, I joined KtB author Ann Neumann for a lecture by the Israeli novelist David Grossman on Bruno Schulz. Jonathan Safran Foer, in turn, introduced Grossman. Grossman said that everybody remembers when and how they discovered Bruno Schulz—I am no exception. It was in my first college fiction writing class,…