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Category: Posts

  • Star Trek Sans Politics

    I’ve got a new essay on Religion Dispatches that I did up in a sleepless tizzy after seeing the new Star Trek movie. I had a great time going with my old Star Trek convention buddy Mat to the Lincoln Center IMAX on opening week. Nothing can quite compete with the thrill of seeing those…

  • The Teachings of Carl on Vice

    Vice magazine has just run a blog post of mine, an invitation into the world and works of Carl Johnson, whom I visited last month in his hometown of Thornton, IL. He’s a man of cosmic imagination who doesn’t get on well with his neighbors. Check out the pamphlet I published in 2006 of one…

  • Resounding through Manhattan

    Today I had the great privilege to join members of Resonanda, Brown University’s medieval music ensemble, for their one-day, unannounced New York tour (before you continue, go to Resonanda’s MySpace page and put on one of their songs as you read). It began—where else—at The Cloisters, the museum in the form of a medieval monastery…

  • Regions of the Great Heresy

    At the 92nd Street Y tonight, I joined KtB author Ann Neumann for a lecture by the Israeli novelist David Grossman on Bruno Schulz. Jonathan Safran Foer, in turn, introduced Grossman. Grossman said that everybody remembers when and how they discovered Bruno Schulz—I am no exception. It was in my first college fiction writing class,…

  • 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 Barbara?o 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,…