Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

Posts

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  • Simple Gifts

    The inauguration, blessedly, has happened. A wonderful calm settled during the performance of “Air and Simple Gifts,” a piece composed for the occasion by John Williams, the official composer of the Hollywood blockbuster. The new vice president had been sworn in, and we still awaited the new president. As well as a nod to Aaron…

  • An Experiment in Faith

    More on nonviolence. I hope this isn’t dull to some of you. To me it is an important conversation to have in anticipation of the new administration entering office, when any radical hope feels, for the moment, more thinkable than usual, more possible. In several recent articles and posts relating to nonviolence (here, here, and…

  • We Buy Conversation

    If a couple’a stubble-faced young guys came up to you on the street waving dollar bills and shouting that they wanted to buy your conversation or a secret you’ve never told anyone, what would you do? Today, at Bryant Park in Manhattan, that was Andrew Marantz, Ben Brown, and me. We were the New York…

  • Surfing the Satellite

    The clever folks over at The Smart Set have just posted my essay on watching TV in Jordan, “Surfing the Satellite”: What if more Americans got this madness on their sets, rather than the endless rolling plains of midwestern accents (dotted by the occasional Telemundo) on spin-off networks of spin-off networks? There isn’t much that…

  • The Burden of Peace in Gaza

    My first-ever bit on Huffington Post just went up—”Who Carries the Burden of Peace?” It’s an attempt to talk about the place of nonviolence talk in the Gaza conflict and, ultimately, to challenge those in positions of power to push harder for peaceful solutions. Loyal readers will recognize parts of my recent essay, Can Nonviolence…

  • Cleansing Ideology in Method

    In Marxism, when thought as well as applied, there often appears the hope that in pursuit of true ideology, any method can be cleansed. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao come to mind—as long as they had the proper utopia in mind, any amount of sacrifice could be exacted from the people. Trotsky wrote: Dialectic materialism does…

  • An Invitation: What Is Missing?

    Beginning in this new year, which today has dawned on the present generation and its thoughts, I will be editing a new series of pamphlets with The New Pamphleteer press called “What Is Missing?” As in that cliche: “I was going through my life or looking at my world and couldn’t escape the feeling that…

  • The Sounds of San Cristóbal

    Early tomorrow morning, after almost two weeks here, I leave San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, for a few days in Washington, D.C. It has been a very peaceful trip and such a gift to be with family here. To share a sense of what I’ve been experiencing all this time, here is a list…

  • Can Nonviolence Govern?

    SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico – Mayan woman in the streets of this colonial tourist town sell hand-made dolls of Zapatistas, the media-savvy, black-masked rebels who claim to speak for the local indiginas and, indeed, for all the oppressed peoples of the planet. While they began, on New Year’s Day in 1994, with an…

  • Numbers into Buildings

    Being sick in bed on this Christmas Eve in San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico has afforded me the welcome opportunity to spend the day with Peter Tompkins’s Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids. Tompkins, a journalist, World War II spy, and occult theorist (AP obituary; profile), was a fixture in the background of my childhood.…