Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Credit Card Rosary

    The Row Boat has already become something of a destination for people interested in wallets. This post is a contribution to that burgeoning tradition. My friend/hero Will, who for the months since his success in electing Barack Obama president has made it his business to travel around “visiting people,” sent me a delightful little gift…

  • Work Is Love Made Visible

    On the subway last night, for the third time in recent months, I happily ran into E—we’d met at a party once, and we’ve been building a little friendship out of chance meetings on the C train. I was with my friends, and he was with his. His friends happened to mention that they regretted…

  • The Poem of Force

    Some time ago, a dear friend shared with me a photocopy of some sections of Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad or The Poem of Force. I remember being haunted by those pages at the time, and I kept them in a safe and prominent place but never opened them again. Until, at least, the other…

  • The Illustration Saga

    My recent article for the Boston Globe included this unassuming concoction by way of illustration: Sure, it’s nice, but I would have thought no more of it but for a message from my dear friend Thinker Bill Hackett, Santa Barbaraño extraordinaire. He began: I was impressed with the Globe people who did that little illustration.…

  • Revolution by Religion

    I’ve got a new review in The American Prospect of two books published by Yale University Press on the same day last month, both rejoinders to the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc.): Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution and David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions. Only Nixon could go to China, so perhaps it…

  • Niebuhr, Pacifism, Realism, Peacebuilding

    During the years leading up to World War II, there was no deeper thorn in the side of Christian pacifists—by whom I mainly mean members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a community founded in the first months of the previous world war—than Reinhold Niebuhr. Having been formed as a pastor in working-class neighborhoods of Detroit,…

  • Science of the Secular

    Extra! Extra! In the Ideas section of today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a new article. Read all about it! RELIGION CAN BE good for more than the soul, a growing number of studies seem to say. Over the past decade, academic research on religiosity has exploded, and with it has come a raft of publications…

  • Mark Twain’s Eden

    When I was little, one of my favorite movies was The Adventures of Mark Twain, a claymation video that wove together bits and pieces from some favorite Twain stories. I was reminded of this the other day when, browsing in Denver’s magnificent Tattered Cover bookstore, I came across a delightful 1995 collection called The Bible…

  • A Crook for Souls

    Today I arrived in Wyoming to visit a dear friend. On the way, while in what she approvingly called “the Wyoming part of Colorado,” we passed the Benedictine Abbey of St. Walburga and decided to stop. On the road in we passed a magnificent little canyon and a pair of smiling alpacas. We were greeted…

  • The Tweets of the Christ

    I’ve got a new little piece at Religion Dispatches this morning about last Friday’s Twitter passion play hosted by Trinity Church, that ancient place located at the top of Wall Street. “If you look in the scripture,” explains Linda Hanick, Trinity’s V.P. of communications and marketing, “the last words of Jesus are almost written in…