After ten years in the making, five years in the writing, and a few days doing little drawings, my first book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet, is now becoming available. This is a guide on how you can get it for yourself and—please, please please!—help spread the word.

Buy the book

There are some choices for how to do this.

• Get it direct from University of California Press—with the discount code 13W3359 it costs just $27.96 for the hardcover. Shipping now!
• Help Amazon put everyone else out of business by ordering it there for their ever-varying low price—though it won’t ship until around the pub date on June 10. And leave a review if you’re so inclined!
• Ask for it at your local bookstore or find it wherever else books are sold.

The ebook version isn’t out quite yet, but it will be coming in a few weeks.

Come to the party

It isn’t a book release without a party!

• The big main release event, “An Evening of Song and Abstraction,” will take place on June 4 at 7 p.m. at the gorgeous Cathedral of St.?Joseph in Brooklyn. I will be reading from the book along with sensuous, hanting renditions of medieval music by the ensemble Resonanda, which is reuniting for the occasion.
  • RSVP and invite your friends on the Facebook event page
  • Retweet this tweet
• Other God in Proof events are in the works, in New York City and elsewhere. If you want to help arrange an event in your area, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Spread the word

Media is social nowadays, so I can’t do this without you.

• Tell your friends the old-fashioned way: There’s no substitute for that.
• Share the link: To send people straight to the basic info and buying options, this webpage is where I’m stashing all the latest updates and reviews.
  • Share this Facebook post
  • Retweet this tweet
• Review it on Amazon, Goodreads, or B&N: If you liked the book, tell the world why!
• Draw your own proof: Already, some people who’ve read the book have felt inspired to come up with proofs for various things of their own! I’ve set up a proof-making contest, which I hope you’ll enter, and the most popular entries stand to win free copies of the book courtesy of UC Press. See what others have come up with at GodInProof.com, and enter by tweeting proofs to #GodInProof or emailing them to [email protected].

Finally…

…a word of thanks. I am so grateful for your support and your willingness to help God in Proof reach readers who might not otherwise find it. I can’t do this without you, and I’d love to hear what you think about the book.

Resonanda was founded in December 2004 by Stephen Higa, who is currently a professor of medieval history at Bennington College. Since its inception, Resonanda’s members have taken an experimental approach to the performance of medieval song. In order to resurrect this antique repertoire, they work closely with medieval treatises and the nuanced period notation, relying heavily on improvisation, oral learning, and a wide variety of reconstructed vocal techniques. Resonanda savors lilting melodies, startling harmonies, and striking voices blending with fervent clarity and naked devotion.

Staff from Unnamable Books, an independent bookstore located nearby in Prospect Heights, will be present with copies of God in Proof for sale.

An after-party will be held following the performance with excellent beer, wine, and small dishes at Atlantic Co., 622 Washington Avenue.

RSVP on Facebook here.

In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

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 that John D. Rockefeller Jr. shipped over from Europe and plopped in Fort Tyron Park, full of exquisite works both in and inside the architecture. The day had no audience planned, except for the city itself and the few of us who invited ourselves along. The goal was to search for places that could join in, for the silent accompaniment of stone, concrete, and history.

We gathered in late morning and the singers started with a warm-up right outside the museum’s unceremonious entrance. Now be aware that we intended to be cautious. Museum authorities had already warned over the phone that they would be removed if they attempted an unscheduled concert inside. This should come as no surprise—Resonanda’s approach to medieval music is not your pious monk-chanting, aside from a few bars we hummed of “Salve Regina.” They revel in the fleshier side of that period’s song, in vernaculars from Iberia to Hungary, which can make even the worldliest blush. They’re experimental, but tempered by the scholarly rigor enforced by their founder, Stephen Higa, a doctoral student in medieval history. Here’s how Stephen puts it (as only he could):

Resonanda fully believes in the deliciousness of medieval music: it savors the sweetness of lilting melodies, the crunchiness of startling harmonies, and the spiciness of several striking voices blending with raw energy, fervent clarity, and naked devotion.

Hearing their voices in that stone entryway, finding each other’s harmony and ancient elocution, was instantly transporting. From then on, our little group—three singers and as many tag-alongs, including me—was on a different plane from the rest.

The museum was still quiet when we went in, before the rush of Mothers’ Day visitors. We took our time, fully. The herb garden kept us for nearly an hour of careful examination, discovery, and high winds off the Hudson. Inside, among the artworks, time passed just as easily. The group of us collected especially around the most intricately detailed pieces of devotional art, where we pooled our knowledge to make meaning of everything there portrayed. More discoveries, to be sure! The Paraclete in the form of a tiny baby; one of the three wise men with a possibly Jewish hat and a very Jewish beard; one harrowing of hell after another; Thecla, unburned by the fire. The Christian lore of that period, so little of it properly biblical in the literalistic sense that passes for religion today, makes for wonderful hours of sharing stories and wild guesses. While we were lost in deciphering, the rooms became more and more packed. We rushed through the popular Unicorn Tapestries, mulled through the bookstore, and finally settled on the quiet West Terrance for a sing. A few people stopped to listen, but it was mainly us to ourselves, under the clear sky, sounds carried in the wind.

Before long it was time to leave the museum. We found our way to Broadway and headed downtown, our eyes peeled. After filling ourselves with eerie Chinese food at 169th Street, it was down into the subway. First, the tile echo-chamber of the A Train area. For that, the singers chose an old American shape-note tune rather than their usual medieval fare. Next, I led them down to one of my favorite places in the New York City subway system, the 168th Street 1 Train stop. It’s a vaulted, brown-brick tunnel with these great globular lights that make it feel like the 1920s. On the elevated bridge under which the trains pass, Resonanda gave us another medieval song, which ended as the next uptown train arrived.

But that train wasn’t ours. We returned to the speedy A Train and took a downtown to 110th Street, our final stop before the group had to catch a bus for Providence. New Yorkers should know where we were headed—to the magnificent, charred Cathedral of? St. John the Divine. There, under the great middle door, atop the stone steps, came the finale. Listening, I dissolved into the steps, watching the otherworldly city buzz by to the sound of what had become my world for the day.

I joined Resonanda for the encore, a song Stephen and I used to sing together often: “Angel Band.”

I’ve almost gained my heavenly home
My spirit loudly sings
The Holy Ones behold they come
I hear the noise of wings

What better way to end and to say goodbye to friends than with a note of aural anticipation?

Last night was the 76th anniversary of the Catholic Worker, the organization founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin to serve the poor and fight for justice. It began with a mass at St. Joseph House, with the kitchen table as the altar. Friends of the Worker piled into the small dining room and poured out of the doors and open windows into the rain. The highlight for me was the two verses sung of “How Great Thou Art,” accompanied by what sounded like an 80s Casio keyboard. The church sang boldly, in every which pitch.

By mistake, though the gospel reading was about a prophet in his home town, the sermon was on the Beatitudes. Above all, peace was preached.

Afterward, many of us moseyed through the rain, two blocks up in Manhattan’s East Village, to St. Mary House, acquired for the Worker in the 70s with the help of the Trappists at Genesee Abbey upstate. Formerly the home of the Third Street Music School, the house has a charming auditorium, newly-painted and decorated with Bread and Puppet prints. There we had a simple dinner of cold cut sandwiches, salad, and birthday cake which K of St. Joe’s had stayed up the night before baking.

Soon, food turned to music, and Workers took the stage of the auditorium with two guitars and a banjo. J, the boy dressed in a tux and top hat, tap danced, air-guitared, and sang along up there throughout.

Throughout the night I kept remembering a passage from Day’s The Long Loneliness that struck me so deeply when I read it years ago, giving the Catholic Worker, before I knew anyone there, a special place in me:

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

“Work Is Love Made Visible” is the title of Jim Reagan’s cover article in the May edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper.

Tonight at the glorious Brooklyn Academy of Music, I got to see a screening of Astra Taylor’s (of Zizek! fame) new film, Examined Life, in which she casts some of today’s most attention-getting philosophers as noble peripatetics—and most of them on the streets and in the parks of New York City. Cornel West, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum. Yes, Zizek too. Peter Singer, who’s in the film, came to participate in the most bizarre Q&A I’ve ever experienced (two conversations at once, one audience member talking half the time, don’t ask). Through sounds and images, the film exposes us to the ideas and personal ticks of some incredible thinkers. Kwame Anthony Appiah has never looked so good as posed in front of elevators in JFK Airport (and, thanks to this city, I’ve seen him in person twice in the last month). The theater at BAM was packed with mostly young people really engaged with what was going on.

So while I was sitting there remarking at how maybe philosophy has become somehow cool, I had to ask: Which philosophy? A unifying thread isn’t obvious. West is a Christian pragmatist, Singer is an atheist utilitarian, and Zizek an (intellectually) anarchic psychoanalyst. Nussbaum talks justice, Butler talks body, and Michael Hardt talks revolution. Singer keeps talking about world hunger, but the die-hard folks wish he’d keep talking about animals. In a pointlessly nationalist mood, one might ask, is a particularly American philosophy emerging here? All but Zizek, after all, are primarily based here, and he’s around pretty often.

Nah. Connectedness is big, in one way or another. Responsibility for others. The badness of commercialism and of Bush. But beyond that, not that I can detect. So what is Astra Taylor giving us, if not the image of a movement? Beyond, at least, that most of these guys are great self-promoters.

A conversation, I think. An image of the eschaton. By tossing philosophy out into the streets of our insane cities, she holds out the possibility of Athens—the rosy-remembered world of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle where thought was in the air. The streets, the legend goes, were practically paved with ideas. In good old anti-intellectual America, a philosopher in the street seems like a fish in the desert. I like the film, in all its scatterbraining, because it invites us to do something new with our streets. To take them as an opportunity to think, to talk, to criticize, and to imagine.

A conversation about it with Jeff Sharlet today made me think I should explain the role of theological imagery in my little songs a bit—not that they should be taken too, too seriously. Obviously, these days, Christian music is in a pretty terrible rut. The task, as I see it, is to combine heartfelt piety with honest uncertainty. “God Saved the World” begins with the words, “Some say…” in order to cast the only certainty about theology into sociology. That doesn’t mean they’re any less real or true, and I sing them with conviction. And then the theology is practicable. After the instrumental interlude, verses about Bible stories give way to stories about worldly things, though clothed in the same tropes of creation and salvation. I am grateful for those tropes because they give me the language to speak of two aspects of worldly life: love is the first, then the act of growing up into oneself.

I don’t know what to say about the cows. They happened to be who I encountered on the road to visit my friend Brother Benedict.

And sorry about the lousy quality. I filmed it on my tiny digital photo camera.

We’d like to do a lot more audio and video over at KtB, so if you’ve got any good stuff somehow related to religion lying around, send it along to us. Writing, of course, is always welcome too!

• tourist drum circles
• roosters, 24 hours
• rapping hammers of construction workers
• blasting ranchera music from one place or another
• children
• dogs barking
• a crying animal that has lost a fight
• the loudspeakers of the water delivery trucks
• engines of cars and trucks and motorcycles of all ages and conditions
• bird tweets
• announcements through unintelligible loudspeakers
• unexplainable loud booms
• noisy chains dragged behind the gas delivery trucks
• church bells (fireworks may be imminent)
• fireworks during holidays, large and small, day and night

I don’t make it seem to sound overly noisy. Look up to the stars at night and everything seems to fall silent. Goodbye, city!

In John Adams’s presentation of the last days of the Manhattan Project, he asks us to think endlessly through moments which proved themselves precisely impervious to thought. The best scenes show Robert Oppenheimer and his wife rapt in dances of poetry—Baudelaire and, best of all, John Donne’s three-person’d God. We are given to believe that they are possessed of the history in the process of possessing them, but I find that impossible to accept. The poetry is not the encounter, but the game. Or rather, the banality—as Hannah Arendt used the word when accounting for the monstrosities of the German side.

There is a photograph in the program book that, I think, captures what the opera didn’t. Two young men stand in the test tower next to the Gadget, the thing soon to produce the world’s first atomic blast. One, a physicist named Boyce McDaniel, leans back against the makeshift railing with ease. There he is, right beside the wirey thing, and he’s wearing a striped shirt. Stripes! Would you wear stripes to operatic history? When this Boyce hummed to himself, leaning there, whatever he was thinking, I doubt it sounded much like John Adams.

I love the bomb. I really do and always have. As a kid I spent hours reading and rereading the entry about it in the World Book. I read Paul Tibbets’s memoirs about dropping the first one on Hiroshima, and once I got to sit in the bomb bay of the Enola Gay, the plane he did it in. That love fell in the space where it shouldn’t, the same space that makes good poetry and good science alike so dangerous, where tortured ethics and bruised conscience haven’t come yet, but fascination has. Monstrous I was. How is it that we can love, or even lean on a balcony beside, the very thing that so hurts us?

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

But despite the horrid memories that these words evoke, something else lurks at the bottom of most of the pages. There are little boxes with tiny text. Some mention the features and benefits of Cable pianos. Others simply offer moral, upbuilding quotations from notable people. It is as if righteousness were so appealing to the people of 1922 that there was no better way to attract their attention.

Take the box under “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,” a song written by a white man about slaves wailing over the death of the person who claimed to own them:

Courtesy is the eye which overlooks your friend’s broken gateway, but sees the rose which blossoms in his garden.

Today I had lunch with a friend sorely concerned about the direction of the social order and the family and so on. Afterward, looking around the city, it was hard to blame him. Especially as far as little things go, which hint toward things more troubling. Hearing guards at the magnificent 42nd Street library saying bad words nonchalantly to each other while checking the bags of tourists; similarly bad words scrawled along the pedestrian path on the Williamsburg Bridge, which always has families walking on it; a condom lying in the stairwell of my apartment building. When one turns off the blinders that one develops living in New York, these things really can add up. What kind of world are we creating? Certainly not one that says, as The Cable Company does:

Music washes away from the soul the dust of every-day life.

The beautiful is nothing else than the visible from of the good.—Plato.

Be not simply good—be good for something.—Thoreau.

Soldiers remember—”He that ruleth his spirit” is greater “than he that taketh a city.”—<em>Prov. 16: 32</em>.

These are fabulous. I could go on forever. There are many more. And of course, stuff like this is mixed in:

Economy in buying a piano consists in getting the best instrument that can be made for the price you pay. You expect to receive the full equivalent of your money. That principle is the basis of our selling policy.

Today, rather than upbuilding quotations, advertisers attract our attention with boobies and innuendos. (The demise of this form of advertising, which treats the buyer as a rational, essentially decent person and replaces “him” with a base, id-driven subconscious, is the subject of part one of Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self.) I am tempted to agree with my friend—the world has gone to, dare I say on what has always been a blog you can bring the whole family to, shit.

But every time I go back to my favorite Stephen Foster songs in there, I’ll remember, “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground.” Those were days when, in this same country as mine, people couldn’t stand to share a drinking fountain. It is an odd kind of decency, a broken gateway that’s hard to ignore on the way to the blossoming rose.

Human societies seem to work this way. Where there’s righteousness, there’s a cruelty it ignores. And where there’s filth, at least we have music to wash our souls of it.