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Hipsters, Hasidim, and My Bike Lane
A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant…
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The Irrelevance of Proof to the Holiday Spirit
I’ve got a zany new essay at Religion Dispatches today about a lecture earlier this week in Brooklyn, “A Philosophical Proof of Santa Claus.” Jamie Hook, the evening’s presenter, did a masterful job of miming some of the issues at play in debates about God—though in the guise of a fellow whose existence, this season…
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Don’t Take Away My Memory Theater
What concerns me about the coming literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the full or partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves but the assortments in which they find themselves. Specifically, I am concerned about what’s going to happen to my own library. For public and academic libraries,…
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Beginning with Witness: the FOR’s Mark Johnson
At The Immanent Frame today, I interview Mark Johnson, executive director of the pioneering pacifist organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation. (I wrote about the Fellowship in a recent book review for Commonweal.) We discuss the FOR’s current work, its legacy, and how it is adapting to the the challenges of religious (and non-religious) diversity in…
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Why Is the End of the World Such a Big Deal?
I’ve got a new essay today in Obit that takes the new 2012 movie as an occasion for a reflection on why folks are always so eager to proclaim the end of the world: “You Broke It, You Bought It.” Though the word “apocalypse” now is usually taken to mean a world-ending calamity, the original…
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Life After Past Evil
In the last several decades, there have been numerous—and largely unprecedented—efforts around the world to develop and enact protocols for what to do in the wake of conflict and horror. From Nuremberg, to South Africa, to Guatemala, different models have been tried, and each bears lessons for the future. At The Immanent Frame today, I…
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Religion Returns to Montreal
“Bonjour, hello,” I’m told, finally reaching the front of the long line at the convention center cafe. It’s Montreal. I can say “bonjour,” at least. Wouldn’t that be polite? But that could invite an incomprehensible flurry of Quebecois French, which would only serve to remind me how utterly I failed to learn the language from…
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The Gospel of Contradiction
Today at Religion Dispatches, I have an interview with novelist and memoirist Mary Gordon about her latest book, Reading Jesus. There are calls on the right and left—both in different ways—for more religious literacy. Are you, like those, urging people to know the Bible better? It depends on what you mean by “know.” Fundamentalists know…
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The Life and Death of the Death of God
There’s a whole subculture of people who, when the newspaper arrives, go straight for the obituaries. Well, now they’ve got their own, quite excellent literary website: Obit. All death, all the time. I’ve got a new essay there on the “death of God” theology of the 1960s, a bit of a follow-up to my recent…
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Beautiful Dreamers
Today at Religion Dispatches, I’ve got a review of the forthcoming documentary Oh My God. Filmmaker Peter Rodger goes on a sophomoric quest to talk with actors and other people all over the world about what God means to them. But the images are just wonderful. If Oh My God is propaganda of some kind,…