Gogo jili helens,REGISTER NOW GET FREE 888 PESOS REWARDS! https://www.lelandquarterly.com Wed, 26 Jan 2022 20:28:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.2 https://www.lelandquarterly.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/cropped-PEOPLESHISTORY-Medic-32x32.png imagination – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider https://www.lelandquarterly.com 32 32 #WeAreTwitter https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2016/10/wearetwitter/ Wed, 19 Oct 2016 20:11:38 +0000 https://www.lelandquarterly.com/?p=4417 [image: #WeAreTwitter ]

Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become the latest outgrowth of the platform co-op movement that’s the subject of my new book with Trebor Scholz (and 60+ contributors), Ours to Hack and to Own, available for preorder from OR Books.

Sign the petition at wearetwitter.global

Then RT a tweet about it here!

Meanwhile, here’s a bit more about what I’m up to.

Articles

[ Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle Review ]

Speaking

Okay, that’s it. Take heart!

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Be the Bank You Want to See in the World https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2015/04/be-the-bank-you-want-to-see-in-the-world/ Thu, 09 Apr 2015 15:45:09 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=2880 [image: Enric Duran]

If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like?

Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just represent the future of work altogether. Now, still in hiding because of his heist, Duran is orchestrating his next utopia, a cryptocurrency-infused global financial system. In this month’s issue of VICE magazine, I go face-to-face with Duran and on a tour of his remarkable undertakings.

Read the article VICE‘s website or look through the print version. While you’re at it, retweet this.

In other news

I had a great time speaking about God in Proof at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada. I talked about cooperativism on Majority Report with Sam Seder and at Civic Hall with a panel of sagely organizers and thinkers. I upset some white people and prayed the Angelus.

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Code Your Own Utopia https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2014/04/code-your-own-utopia/ Mon, 07 Apr 2014 14:48:59 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=2553 My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin's most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it's the hype:
Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional ones and certainly more automated. But it also creates a means for corporate ownership and abuse to creep ever deeper into people’s lives through new and more invasive kinds of contracts. To perceive the world through a filter like Ethereum is to think of society as primarily contractual and algorithmic, rather than ethical, ambiguous and made up of flesh-and-blood human beings. How this new ecosystem will take shape depends disproportionately on its early adopters and on those with the savvy to write its code — who may also make a lot of money from it. But tools like Ethereum are not just a business opportunity. They’re a testing ground for whatever virtual utopias people are able to translate into code, and the tests will have non-virtual effects. Idealists have as much to gain as entrepreneurs. As for any utopia, though, the power struggles of the real world are sure to find their way in as well.
]]>

My latest at Al Jazeera, on Bitcoin’s most ambitious successor, Ethereum. This may or may not be the future, but for now it’s the hype:

Even the most flexible platform comes with certain built-in tendencies. Ethereum, for example, makes it easier to build organizations that are less centralized and less dependent on geography than traditional ones and certainly more automated. But it also creates a means for corporate ownership and abuse to creep ever deeper into people’s lives through new and more invasive kinds of contracts. To perceive the world through a filter like Ethereum is to think of society as primarily contractual and algorithmic, rather than ethical, ambiguous and made up of flesh-and-blood human beings.

How this new ecosystem will take shape depends disproportionately on its early adopters and on those with the savvy to write its code — who may also make a lot of money from it. But tools like Ethereum are not just a business opportunity. They’re a testing ground for whatever virtual utopias people are able to translate into code, and the tests will have non-virtual effects. Idealists have as much to gain as entrepreneurs.?As for any utopia, though, the power struggles of the real world are sure to find their way in as well.

]]>
A Father Can Also Be a Woman https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2014/03/a-father-can-also-be-a-woman/ Mon, 03 Mar 2014 17:51:25 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=2523 Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:
[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together. As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said. She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her. With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”
Read the rest (and see William Wedmer's moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.]]>
Photo by William Widmer for Al Jazeera America

Years in the making, my profile of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community has been published at Al Jazeera America. I hope that, above all, it points to some ways in which transgender experience not merely challenges Catholic faith, but is poised to deepen it:

[Hilary] Howes told the story of her life as a parable, a tale of a girl born with a penis and expected to live like a boy. “She died a little each day.” The girl grew up into a man, married a woman and became a father. Yet the dying continued. She decided to reveal herself, at last. Her wife and daughter stuck with her through it all. With the help of hormone treatments, father and daughter went through puberty together.

As the parable caught up with the present, Howes turned to a discussion of the hierarchy’s official position, or lack thereof, and the basic comfort she feels in her church, and in her faith, day to day. “I make a good spokesperson because I’m disarmingly normal,” she said.

She’d observed over the years that liberal Catholics — the kind likely to be friendly toward LGBT rights, the kind likely to be in the room — often feel uncomfortable with the masculine language Catholic tradition tends to use for God: Him, Father, Lord. Some prefer to discard those words altogether. But Howes had noticed that the old-fashioned words have never really bothered her.

With her dimples hinting at a sly smile, she said, “I suppose it’s because I know that a father can also be a woman.”

Read the rest (and see William Wedmer’s moving photographs) at Al Jazeera America.

]]>
Give the Gift of God & Anarchy https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2013/12/give-the-gift-of-god-anarchy/ Fri, 06 Dec 2013 18:56:11 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=2466 God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy What better gift to give friends and loved ones than stories of grasping at the impossible? According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, God in Proof “breathes life back into proofs” and is “entertaining, well written, and historically comprehensive.” Says former Washington Post columnist and peace educator Colman McCarthy, Thank You, Anarchy is "rich with metaphors, historical allusions and clearheaded reflections.”

Buy direct from University of California Press

Use discount code 13M4225 for 20% off the list price

You can also get both books pretty much anywhere else if you ask for them. Try your local bookstore. And don’t forget to share your reaction on Amazon or Goodreads.

Sleigh-bells a-ringing

In the coming months, I’ll be making the following live appearances:

Other great gift ideas

  • Contribute to the online communities that made these books possible, and which support countless other writers in doing uncommon work—give the gift of membership to Waging Nonviolence, which covers movements for justice and peace around the world, or Killing the Buddha, a literary magazine of religion, politics, and culture. Both are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, and membership dues are tax-deductible.
  • Last month, The New Press published a new edition of Noam Chomsky’s anarchist writings, On Anarchism, and they asked me to write the introduction. The result is a slim, sweet little stocking-stuffer that presents anarchism as a tradition with both a long history and particular relevance today.
  • The growing revival of interest in my favorite theologian, William Stringfellow, continues with a new reader published by Orbis and edited by Bill Wylie-Kellerman. It’s the best introduction yet to a thinker who will turn your cosmic situation upside down.
Thank you, as always, for reading! Signature]]>
God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy

What better gift to give friends and loved ones than stories of grasping at the impossible?

According to the Los Angeles Review of Books, God in Proof “breathes life back into proofs” and is “entertaining, well written, and historically comprehensive.” Says former Washington Post columnist and peace educator Colman McCarthy, Thank You, Anarchy is “rich with metaphors, historical allusions and clearheaded reflections.”

Buy direct from University of California Press

Use discount code 13M4225 for 20% off the list price

You can also get both books pretty much anywhere else if you ask for them. Try your local bookstore. And don’t forget to share your reaction on Amazon or Goodreads.

Sleigh-bells a-ringing

In the coming months, I’ll be making the following live appearances:

Other great gift ideas

  • Contribute to the online communities that made these books possible, and which support countless other writers in doing uncommon work—give the gift of membership to Waging Nonviolence, which covers movements for justice and peace around the world, or Killing the Buddha, a literary magazine of religion, politics, and culture. Both are 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, and membership dues are tax-deductible.
  • Last month, The New Press published a new edition of Noam Chomsky’s anarchist writings, On Anarchism, and they asked me to write the introduction. The result is a slim, sweet little stocking-stuffer that presents anarchism as a tradition with both a long history and particular relevance today.
  • The growing revival of interest in my favorite theologian, William Stringfellow, continues with a new reader published by Orbis and edited by Bill Wylie-Kellerman. It’s the best introduction yet to a thinker who will turn your cosmic situation upside down.

Thank you, as always, for reading!

Signature

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The Official Guide to Thank You, Anarchy https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2013/09/the-official-guide-to-thank-you-anarchy/ Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:15:38 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=2330 Thank You, AnarchyMaybe you saw a scene from it on HBO’s The Newsroom. Or perhaps you annotated part of it on RapGenius. Some of you may have even glimpsed the foreword by Rebecca Solnit, in which she wrote:
Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.
One way or another, the news about Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is getting out!

Get your copy

Thank You, Anarchy is available as an affordable paperback, extravagant hardcover, or ephemeral ebook. To support fine non-profit publishing, you can buy it directly from University of California Press using the discount code 13W4710. That should bring the price to just about where Amazon has it (and I guess you also can get it there if you have to). Also, between now and Occupy’s second anniversary on September 17, you can get a signed copy of the book by becoming a member (at $5/month or more) of Waging Nonviolence, the publication where the Thank You, Anarchy got its start. Once you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon, or anywhere really, to tell the world what you think.

Attend an event

There are lots of opportunities coming up: Keep up with more events to come on my speaking page. If you’re interested in helping organize an event in your hometown, don’t hesitate to contact me.

There’s more

On AnarchismCan’t get enough anarchy? Here’s what else to look out for this fall:

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Signature]]>
Thank You, AnarchyMaybe you saw a scene from it on HBO’s The Newsroom. Or perhaps you annotated part of it on RapGenius. Some of you may have even glimpsed the foreword by Rebecca Solnit, in which she wrote:

Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world.

One way or another, the news about Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse is getting out!

Get your copy

Thank You, Anarchy is available as an affordable paperback, extravagant hardcover, or ephemeral ebook. To support fine non-profit publishing, you can buy it directly from University of California Press using the discount code 13W4710. That should bring the price to just about where Amazon has it (and I guess you also can get it there if you have to).

Also, between now and Occupy’s second anniversary on September 17, you can get a signed copy of the book by becoming a member (at $5/month or more) of Waging Nonviolence, the publication where the Thank You, Anarchy got its start.

Once you’ve read the book, I hope you’ll consider writing a review at Goodreads or Amazon, or anywhere really, to tell the world what you think.

Attend an event

There are lots of opportunities coming up:

Keep up with more events to come on my speaking page. If you’re interested in helping organize an event in your hometown, don’t hesitate to contact me.

There’s more

On AnarchismCan’t get enough anarchy? Here’s what else to look out for this fall:

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Signature

]]>
What Do You Believe? How Do You Know? Want a Free Book? https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2013/04/what-do-you-believe-how-do-you-know-want-a-free-book/ Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:58:22 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=1950 She Who Is, by @claireinmidair For as long as I've been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I've been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn't seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As I wrote my new book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, I was drawing every step of the way — and my publisher, University of California Press, let me stick some of my pictures in the text. In doing, I soon discovered, I was retracing the history of proof itself. Long before the mathematical symbols and notation we generally use today, ancient proofs were drawn in diagrams and images. #GodInProof picture contest Now that the book is finished, I want to share the fun I've been having by making these drawings with you. The press has agreed to pony up some free books for a drawing contest, and here's how to win one: Draw a proof of something, divine or otherwise, and tweet a scan or photo of it to #GodInProof, along with any explanation you'd like to add. (You can also email them to [email protected].) Selected proofs will appear here, where they'll be entered for a chance to win a free book. Entries with the highest number of social media shares win. Multiple submissions are allowed, but only one book is allowed per winning author. Download the PDF version of the contest postcard here.]]> She Who Is, by @claireinmidair

For as long as I’ve been interested in the search for proofs about the existence of God, I’ve been interested in drawing them. Words and equations just didn’t seem like enough; to wrap my head around what these constructs were expressing, and to try to communicate them to others, I had to make pictures. As I wrote my new book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, I was drawing every step of the way — and my publisher, University of California Press, let me stick some of my pictures in the text.

In doing, I soon discovered, I was retracing the history of proof itself. Long before the mathematical symbols and notation we generally use today, ancient proofs were drawn in diagrams and images.

#GodInProof picture contest Now that the book is finished, I want to share the fun I’ve been having by making these drawings with you. The press has agreed to pony up some free books for a drawing contest, and here’s how to win one: Draw a proof of something, divine or otherwise, and tweet a scan or photo of it to #GodInProof, along with any explanation you’d like to add. (You can also email them to [email protected].) Selected proofs will appear here, where they’ll be entered for a chance to win a free book. Entries with the highest number of social media shares win. Multiple submissions are allowed, but only one book is allowed per winning author.

Download the PDF version of the contest postcard here.

]]>
Paint the Other Cheek https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2012/03/paint-the-other-cheek/ https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2012/03/paint-the-other-cheek/#comments Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:16:08 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=1683 When?The Nation?assigned me to do a story about questions of violence and nonviolence at Occupy Wall Street early last month, I had no idea how much the subject would explode. Occupy Oakland's "Move-In Day" on January 28 and a subsequent article by Chris Hedges (as well as some heated discussions on my articles at Waging Nonviolence in between) triggered a national identity crisis in the movement. I followed the controversy as it played out in the OWS Direct Action Working Group, one of the movement's most active and radical corners during the relatively quiet winter. Over the course of the month, I found yet another example of — the overcoming of challenges through raw creativity. In particular, I wrote about the birth of a new undertaking called the + Brigades:
The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own. Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire. “Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”
Read the rest of the article
at The Nation.]]>
When?The Nation?assigned me to do a story about questions of violence and nonviolence at Occupy Wall Street early last month, I had no idea how much the subject would explode. Occupy Oakland’s “Move-In Day” on January 28 and a subsequent article by Chris Hedges (as well as some heated discussions on my articles at Waging Nonviolence in between) triggered a national identity crisis in the movement. I followed the controversy as it played out in the OWS Direct Action Working Group, one of the movement’s most active and radical corners during the relatively quiet winter. Over the course of the month, I found yet another example of what “diversity of tactics” really means for Occupy Wall Street — the overcoming of challenges through raw creativity. In particular, I wrote about the birth of a new undertaking called the + Brigades:

The urge for this first came from a frustration with the same old tactics that Natasha Singh had been feeling for a while. “The marches were pointless,” she says. Then, just after the incident in Oakland, her friend and artistic collaborator Amin Husain returned from a World Social Forum meeting in Brazil, where he learned about the Chilean student movement’s creative tactics. He wanted to bring some of that home. The two of them recruited others and settled on a name: “+ Brigades.” They scoured photographs of movements through history at the New York Public Library. The goal, says Husain, is “addition and supplement rather than negation, opposition and subtraction.” Thus their answer to all the worry about black blocs: create blocs of your own.

Husain, who with Singh was one of the earliest OWS organizers, took part in the first intifada as a teenager in the West Bank. But he identifies neither with principled nonviolence nor, for instance, anarchism. The movement’s problem, he and Singh thought, wasn’t a matter of violence or not; it was a lack of imagination. There was too small a repertoire.

“Don’t negate the things you don’t like,” said Austin Guest at that inaugural + Brigades meeting in the church basement. “Add the things you do, so we can get a real diversity of tactics.”

Read the rest of the article at The Nation.

]]>
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Some Great Cause, God’s New Messiah https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2012/01/some-great-cause-gods-new-messiah/ https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2012/01/some-great-cause-gods-new-messiah/#comments Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:49:32 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=1661 Early this past summer, I came across a certain quotation opening an essay by Mary Elizabeth King—now a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and a friend. This was right about the time I first got the idea in my head that I needed to learn how to tell the stories of how great resistance movements are planned, during a conference where I was meeting revolutionaries from around the world.?The quotation was from "The Present Crisis," penned by nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell, and which became a hymn popular during the civil rights era:
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Those words seemed to capture what any revolution must be, especially when it remains just an idea: "Some great cause, God's new Messiah." It's unimaginably gigantic, impossibly messianic. Yet somehow, there comes "the moment to decide," despite "the bloom or blight" that might arise in the course of a movement, and its inevitable, incarnate shortcomings. One has no choice but to choose, for inaction also is a choice. These were the lines I kept in my head while I attended the early planning meetings of what would become Occupy Wall Street—“Some great cause, God's new Messiah" if there ever was one. What I experienced in those meetings is now the subject of my article in the February issue of Harper's Magazine, "Some Assembly Required" (subscription necessary, or get it at your local newsstand). It follows the incipient movement from the third planning meeting until September 16, the night before the occupation began. Where it leaves off, my articles at Waging Nonviolence and?The Nation?pick up. (There was also one snippet about the planning at Killing the Buddha.)?The chance to do this Harper's?story, though, was the opportunity I was really hoping for; something with the space and support to delve more deeply than I elsewhere could into "that darkness and that light" of a movement that has changed and is changing the world.]]>
Early this past summer, I came across a certain quotation opening an essay by Mary Elizabeth King—now a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and a friend. This was right about the time I first got the idea in my head that I needed to learn how to tell the stories of how great resistance movements are planned, during a conference where I was meeting revolutionaries from around the world.?The quotation was from “The Present Crisis,” penned by nineteenth-century poet James Russell Lowell, and which became a hymn popular during the civil rights era:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God’s new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever ‘twixt that darkness and that light.

Those words seemed to capture what any revolution must be, especially when it remains just an idea: “Some great cause, God’s new Messiah.” It’s unimaginably gigantic, impossibly messianic. Yet somehow, there comes “the moment to decide,” despite “the bloom or blight” that might arise in the course of a movement, and its inevitable, incarnate shortcomings. One has no choice but to choose, for inaction also is a choice.

These were the lines I kept in my head while I attended the early planning meetings of what would become Occupy Wall Street—“Some great cause, God’s new Messiah” if there ever was one. What I experienced in those meetings is now the subject of my article in the February issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Some Assembly Required” (subscription necessary, or get it at your local newsstand). It follows the incipient movement from the third planning meeting until September 16, the night before the occupation began. Where it leaves off, my articles at Waging Nonviolence and?The Nation?pick up. (There was also one snippet about the planning at Killing the Buddha.)?The chance to do this Harper’s?story, though, was the opportunity I was really hoping for; something with the space and support to delve more deeply than I elsewhere could into “that darkness and that light” of a movement that has changed and is changing the world.

]]>
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An Eden Full of Dudes https://www.lelandquarterly.com/2011/08/an-eden-full-of-dudes/ Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:05:28 +0000 https://www.therowboat.com/?p=1545 The end is the beginning is the end (that's a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure out where Eden actually was, and whether we can get back there again. As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it's all dudes. I'm the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:
You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman? The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.” I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?
Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.]]>
The end is the beginning is the end (that’s a Smashing Pumpkins line), and all are in Eden. Today at Religion Dispatches, Brook Wilensky-Lanford and I talk about her brand new book, Paradise Lust, out this week. It tells the stories of some bold explorers from the past few centuries who have tried to figure out where Eden actually was, and whether we can get back there again.

As I read the book, I kept coming across lots of parallels with my own work-in-progress about proofs for the existence of God. One thing about both that certainly sticks out: it’s all dudes.

I’m the questioner in bold, Brook is the answerer:

You note that most of the searchers you write about, maybe “not surprisingly,” are men. Why is that not surprising? Not surprisingly, too, I’ve found something similar in my work on the search for proofs of the existence of God, which has turned itself by virtue of the fact into a study of masculinity, at least implicitly. I’ve had to think a lot myself about what thinking about proofs has to do with being male. How about you, though? What does all this thinking about Eden-searchers have to do with being a woman?

The “not surprisingly” is just my little bitter feminist joke. It actually was sort of surprising, or certainly disappointing to me as a woman writer working on this book, not to find any full-fledged Eden-seeking women. I kept running into historical women on the edge of the search, who were always sort of “tsk-tsking” dreamier male Eden-seekers. The feminist Victoria Woodhull gave an entire lecture in 1871 refuting the idea; she said that any “schoolboy over the age of 12” who would read Genesis 2 and think it describes a literal place “ought to be reprimanded for his stupidity.” Others were more diplomatic. Gertrude Bell, who lived in Iraq for much of her adult life, only mentioned Eden once in her diaries: her friend William Willcocks had come to town, to discuss “Eden and other reasonable things.” She called him “dear old thing.”

I feel like this kind of biblical musing was a creative canvas for men, but it brought out a certain practical streak in women. Then of course there’s the stereotypical demonization of Eve—if Eden is the origin of women’s villainy and/or victimization, why would we want to go back there?

Also, keep an eye out for the review of Paradise Lust in the New York Times Book Review this weekend.

]]>