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.

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.

The Holy Land is supposed to be a far-away place. So it has been ever since Peter and Paul journeyed there from Rome, since “next year in Jerusalem” became exilic Jews’ sigh of resolve or resignation, since the prize of that city excused crusades, since London redrew the map of Palestine as a solution to the Jewish Problem, since Birthright trips have taken suburban twenty-somethings to sip tea in Bedouin tents. Thus the place can appear especially distant even after you go there, and meet the people for whom it is, simply, home. In some sense you’ve been there all along and can never leave.

I went to the West Bank last September with little eagerness or preparation of my own, but on the urging of a colleague who once wrote a book about the First Intifada. The place had always seemed, to my head, comfortably remote—a notorious source of trouble I preferred not to assume for myself. I went only because my colleague made doing so seem easier than the alternative. She arranged for me to join the Freedom Theatre, based in the West Bank town of Jenin, for a ten-day tour of performances throughout the region. After the arrangements were all settled, I mentioned them to friends familiar with Israeli-Palestinian affairs and was told, “Woah. Be careful.”

Because traveling to the West Bank makes one immediately suspect in the eyes of Israeli security, I prepared ahead of time a story about being a religious tourist in the process of finishing a book—technically true—about proofs for the existence of God. I rehearsed the fictitious details over and over in my head. With every word I wrote in my notebook, there was the superego of the Israeli intelligence officer watching over my shoulder. A fellow journalist told me about the time when a film he’d made in Palestine was erased from his hard drive as he was interrogated at Ben Gurion Airport. Another had just been banned from the country. These are some of the techniques of presenting distances as greater than they actually are, and of giving words meanings other than the reality to which they refer.

Read about the trip in a new essay published at Killing the Buddha called “The Hourglass.” It also appears in slightly different form at Waging Nonviolence.

Law, law, law. The other day I published an essay about the renegade lawyer William Stringfellow. Today I’ve got a new one at Harper’s?exploring what Occupy Wall Street has to do, if anything at all, with the First Amendment. Most people think it does, and I think they’re mostly wrong. Here’s a bit of it:

As the movement matured, … it became common practice for occupiers to make reference to the guarantees of the First Amendment as they justified their actions to the public. The “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” passed by the General Assembly on September 29, states, “We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right.” It further calls on “the people of the world” to “exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” The “Statement of Autonomy” passed on November 1 described the occupation as “a forum for peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, lawyers working on behalf of the movement were trying to establish, on First Amendment grounds, the occupations’ legal right to exist — even as the constant police presence around the occupiers suggested that they had none. The “right” the legal documents spoke of were more an aspiration than a reality.

Ultimately, however, the struggle didn’t play out on legal grounds; Zuccotti Park remained occupied mostly thanks to extra-legal pressures. When the city proposed to clean the park on October 14 — effectively a forcible removal — thousands of people arrived before dawn to stand in the way. A month later, when the eviction finally came, it was as a surprise in the middle of the night. The difference wasn’t so much legal as tactical.

In the end, I think the “peaceable assembly” this movement is doing is less about the letter of the law than about a law inscribed in us elsewhere—in the conscience. Call be a bad lawyer. Or maybe just go ahead and call me an anarchist.

NS: Some have criticized these spiritual tendencies as overly individualistic and even anti-political—Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart, for instance. How does your Age of Spirit deal with what Bellah and his co-authors were concerned about: a retreat from the political and social sphere?

HC: I don’t think that spirituality is necessarily a retreat from social life. It can be. Of course, orthodox religiosity can be as well, and it is for a lot of people. I don’t think there’s much to be lost or gained there. The question now is how spirituality is going to be institutionalized to make it more socially and politically effective. It’s at a formative stage now, and you can see it developing. I have a section in the book on the Sant’Egidio community, which is one of my favorite examples. I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they’re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they’re a model, and they’re not the only one.

It’s a controversial claim, one that has been interesting me more and more lately.

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 and document people who have come to that place from elsewhere in search of something: eco-villagers, retreatants, hermits, surfers, exiles, and narco-warriors.

Upon realizing the resemblances, I had no choice but to take out James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men from the library—two young men, a writer and photographer, living in the northeast, the writer from further south, the two going even further south than that for a summer as spies in a foreign world, the intention being to report back and tell the truth and do justice to what they see. Agee, for a time, even lived on a street in Brooklyn that runs parallel to mine, one block east. But finally opening the book and wandering through its words and images, the proposition of writing about people became astoundingly less ordinary.

The occasion to read Famous Men came in the last few days, while driving through the South with a friend moving to Oxford, Mississippi—a mecca of Southern literature. Much of the road between New York and Oxford goes through Agee’s home state of Tennessee, and my friend and I read the book aloud to one another as we went, marking the monotone miles of Interstate by the peculiar arrangement of its table of contents.

Everything in the book is tireless belaboring in language. Page after page tirelessly belabors a house, a room, a table, a candle, a person, a smell, an encounter. But what Agee tirelessly belabors most tirelessly and prominently of all is the very prospect of what he and Evans set out to do. One cannot get the sense of these passages in a short excerpt, for their essence is in their longness, but for now this will have to do as an example:

All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.

So does the whole course, in all its detail, of the effort of these persons [Agee and Evans] to find, and to defend, what they sought: and the nature of their relationship with those with whom during the searching stages they came into contact; and the subtlety, importance, and almost intangibility of the insights or revelations or oblique suggestions which under different circumstances could never have materialized; so does the method of research which was partly evolved by them, partly forced upon them; so does the strange quality of their relationship with those whose lives they so tenderly and sternly respected, and so rashly undertook to investigate and to record.

In the very tirelessness that runs through the whole course of this magnificent book so far, I find so plainly the texture of respect. Not “respect,” the appellation so easily bandied about in the play of politeness and politics. It is, in fact, a respect that isn’t always (or often) “respectful,” for one can find Agee guilty of inevitable intrusiveness, voyeurism, glorification, objectification, condescension, ignorance, and whatever else—all offenses against that thin and impossible ideal. His respect comes through a piety of description, a piety that can become as petty as a prayer for a good grade on a test, which remains piety nonetheless only because what inspires it is its relation to something felt as “curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.” That is God, they say, and that is people, as we should well know.

I leave tomorrow, early. From now, from then, I intend in my own ways and means, thanks to Agee’s example, to exercise the kind of respect somehow worthy (even if inevitably insulting to) the personhood of the people we’ll be encountering along our way.

Keep an eye out for what’s to come, and, if you find it worth the bother, help keep me honest.

One of the highlights of my trip up to Brown last week was the chance opportunity to hear Stout speak again, on March 6th. This time, his title was “It’s a Boy: How Militarism Has Corrupted the Republic.” Again, I am deeply grateful to see him taking up this matter—it comes at a time when I am in the process of finding ways to engage militarism in my own work. To find him with the same things on his mind is deeply encouraging. Stout exercises philosophy of a kind that gives me hope for the whole enterprise—that it might be heartfelt and engaged while also, as a matter of course, rigorous.

Stout’s title repeats the short message sent by physicist Edward Teller at the successful detonation of the first hydrogen bomb in 1952: “It’s a boy.” The phrase is, I can’t help but notice, a far cry from what Robert Oppenheimer famously muttered seven years earlier at the Trinity test (pictured above), invoking the Bhagavad Gita: “I am death, destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer’s words attempt to grapple with the human consequences of the event. Teller’s jauntily embrace them. Since the Founding Fathers, who knew from experience the dangers of imperialism, Stout argues that our politics has grown far too casual about dominating others militarily. The public’s willingness to not only accept the false premises of the 2003 invasion of Iraq but, a year later, to reelect its perpetrators, is the most astonishing symptom of our civic atrophy. We have set a very dangerous precedent.

As a pragmatist, he calls for us—not the leaders but us—to step up with more robust “practices of accountability.” Citizen institutions must act as a “counter-power,” preventing those in government from exercising force arbitrarily. Only through them, our potentially-despotic republic can become, truly, a democracy. The consequences of failing—which may now be already inevitable—are drastic, far more than any of the far-flung conflicts that defined the “American century.” As countries like China and India grow ascendant, the world will hold them, at the very least, to the standards of the superpowers that preceded them. If we cannot show that a democratic, just exercise of strength is possible in this world, we may suffer the consequences firsthand at the mercy of others.

One might quickly ask: To what standards do we hold leaders accountable to in the first place? How do we agree? Stout, for instance, evaluates Iraq from the perspective of just-war tradition, while I would push for a more radical pacifist ideal. Fortunately, one need go little farther than Stout’s earlier writings, such as Ethics after Babel and Democracy and Tradition. There, he offers compelling accounts of how the very process of democratic institution-building can create—and has often created—the conditions necessary for a habitable agreement.

My favorite moment in the talk was Stout’s response to a question about what advice he would give Obama. He started trying to answer, then stopped himself. As appealing as it seems to have the ear of the Commander-in-Chief, his argument isn’t meant for the president alone. Far from it. The work of establishing these conditions, and of reconciling moral traditions, is anything but a gnostic exercise to be carried out at the highest levels. It cannot be worked out by professional philosophers alone, nor by benevolent leaders. All people share in the burden of philosophy, in the responsibility to hold those in power accountable, and in the opportunity to enact their philosophies through civic institutions. After all, we can only know the truth of what we actually try, and democracy will only come when we act democratically.

Like Edward Teller, American democracy, such as it is, still takes its bombs far too lightly. As citizens, we have failed to own up to the responsibility we bear. The consequence has been a far too casual habit of violent domination, with military abroad and prisons at home. Benevolent pronouncements, which we hear much of lately, are not enough. Says Stout, rightly, America’s enemies “mock our talk of liberty because our bases speak louder than our words.”

That’s a funny statement for a writer to deal with. What do I have but words and theories? Well, the difference between Oppenheimer and Teller was so plainly evident in their words. Their theories unleashed nuclear force. In theories and words, one can at least take the means and ends of destruction seriously, for what they are, never permitting them to slip into the disguise of lightness.

Blah, blah.

Must one describe like that? Really? Must every scene be thus set? In a period of lull between frantic freelance projects, I’ve been going back to the 2004 book Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, the first volume that came out of KillingTheBuddha.com, where I’ve recently begun working as an editor. And (maybe it’s because I haven’t read a novel in ages) I’m blown away by how everything is so drenched in imagery and description. It’s delightful. From page 28:

The pipes of the church’s organ swelled—that weird, spiraling hysteria at the high end of the scale, raising the eybrows of the music’s bass foundations. Highs and lows wrenching us apart, making us all into Emma, nothing but sensation and reflection—hot and cold, bright and dark, hard metal and soft flesh, smoke rising and a building collapsing [read: 9/11]—as the pulse and melody of the music collided in the final phrases of the song.

(Oh lookie there, it talks about hot and cold too!) The way I’ve been writing lately, this is how I’d say the above:

We listened to the church organ and thought of 9/11.

It wasn’t always like that for me. The first assigned book in my first college writing course was The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schultz. As the title might help you imagine, the whole thing was beautiful descriptive imagery. Beautiful filler. But that book was the guidepost for all my early writing—which in those days was fiction. The first lines of the novella I wrote that semester read like this:

and the walls and the chairs and tables and stairs let out their breaths and held for not daring to make a sound over the silence inside, over the wind blowing furiously from out towards Boulder. Still air hanging, suspended, hung over the hard wood floor like an unwelcome guest, perfectly welcome but feeling unwelcome and frozen still in the corner among all the merrymaking that to the merrymakers wasn’t really all that merry except for the sound of the wind blowing through the dark stained walls, that was all they listened to, it wasn’t so terrible merry as the air might have thought.

Geez. What happened?

• I went to graduate school
• I stopped writing made-up fiction and started writing about real stuff
• I started having to write for money

When I think back to the experience of writing that (and I love that passage of mine, whether you do or not), I know where it comes from. Dwelling in those descriptions taught me what would come next. The hardest thing about writing fiction was making up events, and with description I could twiddle my thumbs and keep my pen moving until, accidentally, something happened out of it all. Now, since the events that I write about are already provided by so-called reality, there’s no need to bother with any such nonsense.

I’m no Hemmingway. Plainness doesn’t come from principle. Reading back through Killing the Buddha, and through my own writing c. 2002, feels nostalgic, not disgusting. I can’t help but sense that resplendent, dizzying passages are what writers are supposed to do. Yes? No?

Have I gotten lazy? Or just more matter-of-fact?

Perhaps I’m missing something obvious.

Also here is the rhetorical choice that a state policy of nonviolence should be a decision of faith, a hope in the unseen, rather than just evidence-based bureaucratic computation. Of course, my DoNT project approaches the issue in the evidence-based (while also pretty silly) way. Can’t hurt to try both.

See the new article here.

The realization hit me like, what… the punch that killed Houdini? If I spread all those incorrect (though innocent, rather inconsequential) factoids, what more have I missed without knowing I missed it? Not least, because of the mythical importance giving accurate, precise directions has in my paternal line. But more immediately troubling, as a writer, what accidental falsehoods have I set down and published?

Since first grade, when this kid named Seth fooled me up and down all the time, I’ve known that just about always I’m the most gullible person in the room. The result of being an only child, perhaps. Tell me anything and I’ll believe it, unless you really, really overdo the sarcasm. Or unless I’m massively prepared by some aloof posturing. Probably this is why I ended up getting into studying religions—I have a peculiar fascination with getting inside the beliefs people adopt. Constantly in this work I feel myself being drawn into them, then sneaking out. Viscerally, being gullible feels like the mechanism at work in my bad direction-giving as well. It is the same willingness to believe the first thing that pops up as a possibility.

Wikipedia has a great list of cognitive biases, many of which are pertinent here and have better, more scientific names than “gullibility.”

I recently spoke with a reporter at The New York Times, who in many ways seemed to have the opposite dispositions. His background is as a big-city police reporter, investigating crooked crooks and crooked cops. Now, having been placed on the religion beat, the habits of suspicion he learned on the police beat carry with him. He told me that when he sees a lot of big-shot pastors, he says they look an awful lot like the mob bosses he used to know. It’s hard to get past that, he said, but it does push him to dig deeper, to ask more questions, to get to the bottom of it all.

My tendency is otherwise. I’m usually content with the first things I discover about an issue, or with the bad guys’ public rhetoric. For me the fun is in the interpretation, in crafting the raw material into a story. But the more I do this work of writing about others, the more respect I have come to have for the facts. Particularly writing for the internet, where interpretations are a dime a million, facts are what can turn a story upside down. Or “evidences,” as the 19th century theologians used to say—until Darwin came along, at least.

So I’ve been trying to initiate myself into the cult of suspicion—suspicion of my own beliefs and of the claims that others make. A suspicion that will force me to ask more questions, suspect my own impressions, and go beyond the veneer of lies that covers most everything in public life.

At the same time, though, there is something peculiar in the study of religion that makes gullibility a virtue. When you’re dealing with religions, there is always an important truth to be found even in the coarsest lies. These aren’t truths that would be admissible in court, perhaps, but they’re human truths nonetheless. What they convey is part of the religious state of affairs, and it cannot be ignored. To see those truths, buried as they are in plain sight, it helps to be willing to try any old belief for size. It helps to be gullible.

Giving decent directions, however, is quite different.