Tag: books
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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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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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Harvey Cox and the Future of Faith
I mentioned Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian best-known for his 1960s book The Secular City, in my recent Guardian piece on “death of God” theology. Today, at The Immanent Frame, I have an interview with him about his recent retirement ceremony, the legacy of his early-career bestseller, and his latest work, The Future of Faith,…
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Sentimental Repression
It has been a welcome relief from the busy romantic adventures of a single fellow in his mid-twenties in New York City, with my cellular phone by happenstance out of commission, to indulge in a reverie of reflection. Its occasion—in addition to the missing phone—was the discovery of Mark Greif’s challenging new essay at n+1…
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Have You Heard of Rashi?
The day my essay, “The Self-Thinking Thought” appeared on the New York Times blog Happy Days, I received a letter that went thusly: I read your blog on Anselm; quite interesting. Your name sounds Jewish, and although you said you are Catholic, do you have Jewish ancestry? What do you know about Rashi, the great…
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Religion Takes the Stand
Today at The Immanent Frame, I discuss with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan her challenging theses about the failures of American law to account for lived religion and, most urgently, her recent book on the role of religious organizations in prison reform. In Prison Religion, you reveal how the American, secular prison system has largely given up…
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Rules of Engagement
What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. Soldiers stake their lives on a…
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Non-zero-sum God
Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject: It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god…
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Curious, Obscene, Terrifying, and Unfathomably Mysterious
I am going off to write about people. An ordinary proposition, it would seem, particularly for a person who makes a living writing for people and, typically, about people or the things they think about and create. For the next month, I’ll be joining my friend Lucas Foglia in Costa Rica to spend time with…