Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Cooking Up Numbers

    Christianity is on the verge of collapse! The atheists are taking over! No, wait, the Wiccans! Nevermind—conservative evangelicals are more robust than ever! Yada ya. If you’re used to following religion news, there’s this occasional ritual that happens when one of the major polls gets released. The newspapers find the most sensational story they can…

  • A Civilized Conversation about Militarism

    “As a nation we’re waking up from a national drunk,” said Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks at CUNY Graduate Center tonight. Together with the SSRC’s Alex de Waal and retired General Barry McCaffrey, he spoke on “Military Power”—inevitably, the holy trinity of the last decade’s foreign policy disasters: Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur. Early in the…

  • The Diaries of the Late God

    Last week a dear friend blessed me with a 1968 first edition paperback copy of a sleeping classic: Excerpts from the Diaries of the Late God by Anthony Towne. I love this. The dedication page sends a tingle down my spine. The poet Anthony Towne was, if you didn’t know, the extraordinary partner of the…

  • Taking Our Bombs Too Lightly

    As far as I can recall, Jeffrey Stout is the only person who has managed to make me come close to tears at an academic lecture. The occasion was his plenary at the 2007 American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego, later published in the JAAR as “The Folly of Secularism.” At the time…

  • The Trickster of Traveling

    How is it that travel can be so rapturous? Fittingly, this dream of traveling descended on me toward the end of high school, around the same time I decided I would be a writer, around the same time that I began looking at religion. Doubtless they are all part of a single, mystical mix. In…

  • Militarism and Heroism

    Critics of militarism have to make sense of its humanity, to find a place for it, to honor it. This gray afternoon, with a friend, I went to the U.S.S. Intrepid, the Essex-class aircraft carrier-turned-museum on the west side of Manhattan. Dubbed “The Most Inspiring Adventure in America,” it’s an opportunity to tour through half…

  • Must One Describe?

    The air here is always dry. Thin, but also thick. A white pipe the width of a soda can reaches from floor to ceiling, making the never-ending music of a rainstick. From it comes enough heat that even on the coldest days of winter I’ve had to keep the window open at least a crack…

  • 25 Random Notes on Ash Wednesday

    I woke up early to my roommate putting away the silverware in the kitchen, then fell back asleep. When I woke up the wooden rosary that I fell asleep with wrapped around my hand was lost in the sheets. Last night I was asked if I keep any symbolic hidden things on my body, like…

  • Some Say “God Saved the World”

    Over at Killing the Buddha, we’ve just published our first-ever video—the music video for my song “God Saved the World” (previously published on The Row Boat last May). A conversation about it with Jeff Sharlet today made me think I should explain the role of theological imagery in my little songs a bit—not that they…

  • Who Are These Women?

    Along the ramparts of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, there is a small exhibition of ancient female figurines, among them the oldest sculpture in the museum’s collection. What strange forms! Where are the supermodels, where are the Barbie dolls? At the confluence of second-wave feminism and post-Freudian psychohistory, the mid-twentieth century saw…