Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

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  • Critics, Critique, and LAWMAKERS

    I’d like to invite you, if you’ll be in New York this weekend, to see the final performance of WE ARE THE LAWMAKERS, a daring play of political chaos directed by my dear friend, Marc Andreottola. It is part of this year’s New York International Film Festival and will be playing Saturday, August 23 at…

  • The Olympic War and the End Times

    There was a time when the Olympics meant a cessation of hostilities. A glimpse of the eschaton—as William Stringfellow would have put it—when our desires to dominate over each other get translated into harmless athleticism. This year, not so. The start of the Olympics (which China made sure would happen on the auspicious day of…

  • Do You Believe in Mother God?

    Yesterday evening in Washington Square Park (or what’s left of it), just after getting off the phone with my mother, a man and a woman approached me and asked if I knew about God the Mother. At first, forgetting myself, I said I didn’t want to have that conversation. Thankfully, the man (who did all…

  • The Benefits of Conflict

    The Economist has already shown its interest in following the fascinating recent scientific work about the origins and functions of human religiosity. This week’s article on the subject, “Praying for Health,” brings up challenging questions both for the study of religion and for the study of conflict. […]

  • Can Creationism Go on Forever?

    AlterNet has just posted a review I did of Lauri Lebo’s The Devil in Dover, an account of the 2005 evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. It was a real treat to do the article, since I wrote my college thesis on the Dover trial while it was going on. As another round of my usual…

  • Clarify Your Position

    This passage from Henry Miller’s late book, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, has long spoken to me. I first found it when I was eighteen, the summer of a month-long solo road trip across the United States and back, the climax of which was the discovery of Big Sur. Those were my…

  • Plato against Impiety

    It is always a wonderful sensation when one discovers something in an ancient text that feels fresh and alive and of the present. That was my experience today in reading book X of Plato’s Laws, his conservative, unfinished final work. There is always this problem in doing historical work: what in our minds today was…

  • Cicero’s Sin

    I guess Cicero was the original flip-flopper. Since following him in a recent boat of watching the HBO/BBC TV series, Rome, I’ve been reading up on the guy who before I’ve mainly known from heresay—from the pens of Augustine, Montaigne, etc. It was disappointing to see that the show had no interest in Cicero’s (or…

  • The Certainties of Ascension

    At the Church of the Ascension in Manhattan, two things can be counted on in every service (the English ones, at least): words of welcome will be made with explicit mention of sexual orientation and Sibelius’s “Finlandia” will be sung, using the words by Lloyd Stone: This is my song, O God of all the…

  • Dialogs and Debates

    Thanks to Tom Gilson’s critique, I have already pulled back somewhat on things I said in my article this week at Religion Dispatches. And since it is a dogma of mine that there is truth in even falsehoods, I’d like to try teasing out what put me on a seemingly unwarranted attack. It all reminds…