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Category: Posts

  • 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…

  • The Defense Department Gospel

    Donald Rumsfeld took the Lord’s name in vain. Today at Religion Dispatches, I discuss the documents released by GQ this weekend, cover sheets for 2003 intelligence briefings that Rumsfeld delivered to President Bush. On them, Biblical passages sit suggestively alongside scenes of desert warfare. With only the most cursory bit of investigation, I was able…

  • The Original Peaceniks

    My review of Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience appears in this week’s Commonweal. The online version is subscription-only, but the magazine is well worth picking up at your local newsstand. In his new history of Christian nonviolence from World War I to Vietnam, Joseph Kip Kosek asks what this movement has offered American democracy,…