Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Give Up Now, Young Writer

    I was 15 when Kurt Vonnegut blew my mind. Good timing. I had never read anything so fantastically alive as Cat’s Cradle, his apocalyptic story of invented religion in a banana republic. At the time, I had just recently converted from being an obsessive TV-watcher to, inexplicably, an in-over-my-head bookworm. Now, with Vonnegut in hand,…

  • Seeing Home

    I keep seeing license plates. Only certain ones, only ones from places I’ve lived before. Who knew that Brooklyn had so many cars visiting from Virginia? The other night I saw Rhode Island. And I never see anything else—not Connecticut or Jersey, or Pennsylvania or any other. I certainly never notice New York plates. The…

  • Believer, Beware in NYC!

    The brand new Killing the Buddha book is coming out next month, so we’re going to spread holy doubt and confusion all over New York City on June 29th. Would love to see you all there! Here’s the release: What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual…

  • At the Bushwick Reading Series

    I’ll be presenting a talk called “Living Wilderness” Saturday afternoon at the Bushwick Public Library’s Bushwick Reading Series. 3pm. Discussed are Ivan Illich, Thomas Aquinas, Moses Maimonides, and a computer program I wrote in college. There will be slides, thank goodness, ensuring a modicum of eye candy. First, we invent computers. Before long, we realize…

  • Notes on Bodega Engineering

    If $2 bodega umbrellas are really so crappy, how did mine manage to self-destruct so exquisitely the moment I stepped into the rain today? “I bow to the economic miracle,” says the narrator in Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil. And now I throw it in the trash. ‘I am proud that we Chinese have the…

  • The End of Evangelical-Bashing?

    So what if I didn’t finish my first book before graduating from college? Today at Religion Dispatches I have an essay about someone who did—Kevin Roose, author of The Unlikely Disciple, an account of his semester “abroad” from Brown at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Like me, Roose was happy at Brown. We each ventured into…

  • 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…