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.

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.

As a journalist, I’ve been doing the same. Everyone with a notebook or a camera seems to be covering the movement now, so I’m letting them do the work I was doing early on, when few others were there. I’m going through my notes and through my pictures and through my memories, trying to sort out where this came from and how. In the meantime, some more publications and appearances:

• My article “From Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Everywhere” was the lead story of the October 31 issue of The Nation.?I subsequently discussed it on The John Batchelor Show.
• A bit of an essay of mine forthcoming in The Catholic Worker?newspaper is now up at OccupyWriters.com, a petition that I helped start with Jeff Sharlet and Kiera Feldman.
• An essay?on the meaning of “diversity of tactics” for Occupy Wall Street at Waging Nonviolence has been pretty widely circulated—and I hope its call for nonviolence will be heard. I’m told an edited version will appear in a new book being put out by YES! magazine next week.
• In an essay in?The New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg mentioned the article of mine in the first issue of The Occupied Wall Street Journal, adapted from my Nation?FAQ.

Occupy Wall Street has had its share of celebrity visits and they haven’t always gone very well either. The example that comes to mind concerns another prominent black leader, Russell Simmons, who was allowed to speak during a General Assembly meeting. He interrupted the discussion at hand and gave his two cents about what, in general, the movement should do, concerning the by-then-tabled question of “demands.” He received applause and thanks. But a few minutes later, after the scheduled discussion continued about how white, male-bodied people on the plaza needed to “check their privilege,” a white, male-bodied young man got up and said something like, “Perhaps celebrities should check their privilege, too.”?That got applause as well. A lot, as I recall.

It’s really unfortunate that this has become a racial issue, especially when the occupiers have problems with outreach to some racial groups already. As one black left-wing journalist suggested in a conversation I took part in recently, it may be better understood as a problem of communication styles among different communities rather than active, albeit subtle, racism.

But I do think this represents a really interesting effort on the part of occupiers to—so to speak—kill the Buddhas of power and hierarchy in our society. And celebrity really is a huge Buddha.?Even well-earned celebrity. I’ve witnessed other—including white—notable people getting essentially no attention during visits to the plaza. I think it’s really telling that Lewis chose not to hold a grudge. From his remarks, I don’t get the sense that he understands the movement in a deep way, but he does clearly understand—from experience—that creating a new world can get messy sometimes.

The occupiers’ obsession with process—the General Assembly meeting, in this instance—is one really important case of the role of ritual in what they’re doing. The ritual of process comes before all else because it is the vehicle of the future, and the bulwark against compromises with the past.

Read the rest, including Anthea Butler’s discussion of the Lewis incident,?at?Religion Dispatches.

Here’s a bit of our conversation:

NS: Do you feel some responsibility to confront what Oprah represents, in the form of an active, engaged social critique?

KL: It is incredibly important that we—women, men, believers, heathens, citizens—think, and think critically, about the female complaint, especially as it takes this specific form in the public sphere. Oprah is not just Oprah—she represents what has come to be a naturalized logic for women’s suffering. I would be lying if I didn’t say that writing this book was, for me, an act of feminism. But I would say that it is more important to me that it be understood as an act of criticism connected to the deep tissue of our national political and economic imaginary. So yes, this is an act of social critique. For as much as the solo striving hungry female is the object here, it is the silence of her sociality—all the while making commodity of her social receipt and struggle—that disturbs me. On her message boards, everyone testifies, but they don’t form social communities, social insurrection, or social protest. The social is incredibly absent from Oprah, even as she praises the idea of girlfriends, of groups, of clubs. The social is a rhetorical formulation leaving women exposed in their extremity without any public held accountable.

Read the rest at The Immanent Frame.

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 rabbi that lived in northern France at the same time as Anselm?

We went on to have a friendly exchange in which he invited me to visit him in Israel and, further, suggested that Anselm might have learned his concept of God from Rashi, the 11th-century Jewish commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki. I was of course suspicious—it reminded me a bit of when my grandfather came home from a class at the synagogue thinking that Kant was a Jew—but it really wouldn’t hurt me to be less ignorant of the history of Jewish thought. Despite a year of Hebrew and a few classes in college, I know painfully little about the intricacies of the faith of my father’s fathers.

Providentially, I caught word that Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author of Night, has a new little book called, precisely, Rashi. So I found myself a review copy and, in the last few days, got around to reading it.

From the first, I let myself fall happily into Wiesel’s nostalgic mood. He remembers the companionship of Rashi’s text in his childhood (read: before the Holocaust), his ancestor, who it seemed to him then “had been sent to earth primarily to help Jewish children overcome loneliness.” There is nothing sweeter to a scholar’s heart than the thought of little Jewish boys pouring over their ancient books, searching for meaning and a place in life through the scribbles of the sages. As I read, I began jotting notes for a future essay on the meaning of ancestry.

We then descend into a sequence of Rashi’s interpretations, from creation to Joseph. Wiesel shows, line by line, how Rashi pulls open the biblical text, expands it, and exposes it. The tendency of modern interpreters (and those in the thrall of Greek rationalism, from Origen to Hegel), when they don’t quite know what to do with a passage of scripture, is to abstract it, to look outside, and understand it in terms of a foreign logic. (For instance, how one might use evolutionary theory to claim that the six days of creation really each represented millions of years.) But, for someone like Rashi, the interpretation of a text lies in the text itself, to be found between the lines, to be summoned in imagination. One of many examples:

“So Esau returned that day on his way unto Seir.” [That’s the biblical passage.] Rashi wonders why the verb is in the singular. Because he [Esau] was alone. One after the other, the four hundred men who had been with him, deserted him.

It is a wonderful process to follow, and Wiesel delights to guide us through.

As the book goes on, however, it grows darker. Like Wiesel, Rashi lived through a tragic period for European Jews, one full of brutality and suffering at the hands of Christians. And crusades. Rashi, therefore, has reason to be unapologetic in his disdain for the goyim:

A general rule: whenever he can, Rashi chooses passages in the Midrash that can be interpreted as arguments against “the other nations.”

When interpreting biblical stories, he protects the sanctity and holiness of the Israelites whenever possible, even blaming the manufacture of the Golden Calf at Sinai on foreigners among them. Wiesel attempts to qualify:

Rashi believes, following all the Midrashic literature, that the people of Israel live and act at the center of the history of men and of nations. A feeling of superiority? No, of singularity.

He even ends by claiming Rashi for cosmopolitanism:

Furthermore, Rashi taught his disciples to engage in open discussions including polemics with the Christian world.

But of such universalism he offers scant evidence. For the horrors inflicted on Jews—and indeed on Wiesel himself—the outcome is certain knowledge of the community’s righteousness: this, I can’t help but think, is as much a delusion as that which motivated the violence that, in the first place, inspired it.

For my own part, as paternal half-Jew and accidental apostate, I cannot possibly accept the singularity, justified by suffering, of the Jewish people on whose impossible margin my bloodline lies. (Notwithstanding, “If you’re Jewish enough for Hitler,” a childhood friend used to say, “you’re Jewish enough for me.”) It is a lineage I would like to inhabit and claim for my own, but only on the terms of my marginality, even my apostasy, which implies the denial of its basic categories. Despite Wiesel’s qualification, I shudder at his acceptance of Rashi’s formula: the chosen people, rightful denizens of the Holy Land, the bearers of humanity’s divine burden. The warmth, the imagination, the scholarship, yes. But, thanks to the horrible logic of history, it is all a package deal.

Just as Rashi has only good things to say about the people Israel, Wiesel can bring himself to say nothing ungenerous about Rashi. One must admire the gesture of respect for the teacher, for the elder:

it is incumbent on a student to respect his Teacher. To avoid embarrassing him, the student should withhold questions that the Teacher might not be able to answer, and then seek a new Teacher.

That being the case, out of respect for both author and subject, I wish Nextbook and Schocken had, when publishing this slim hardcover and charging $22 for it, bothered to assemble with something more resilient than glue and perfect binding. Sewn signatures, please. When my children’s children discover the book in some dusty attic of the future, and pages fall out like autumn leaves, I can only hope they’re the ones that divide us along uninhabitable lines.

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.

The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook messages arrived to inform me of the fact (from not-trekkie friends who are sympathetic to my plight). “It raped my childhood” was a popular reaction on the blogs. With each day, more trickles out—scene screenings, rumors, interviews, hints. The movie doesn’t even open till May. We’re given six months to stew in anticipation or dread.

The trailer starts with a young, buck-toothed James Tiberius Kirk on a farm in Iowa. Something’s happening. He jumps into a car—yes, a car, as in a 20th century car, when this is supposed to be the future! Rrrg. He tears off in it, chased by a motorcycle cop, and is about to run over a cliff (in Iowa?) when he jumps out and grabs onto the ledge, narrowly escaping doom, etc. Thank goodness at least the cop’s motorcycle levitates. After that, a bunch of starship action scenes with young Kirk and young Spock flash before our eyes, and then it’s over. Horrible.

Really? What’s so wrong about that? Let me try to explain.

More than anything else quite has, Star Trek dictated the way that I see the world. My metaphysics (resplendent science), anthropology (good and frenetically curious at heart), and eschatology (technology will make everything awesome), are all, in the main, Roddenberrian. Gene Roddenberry was the L.A. cop-turned screenwriter who invented the first Star Trek series and midwifed The Next Generation into being just before his passing. That was the one, with Jean-Luc Picard and the helm, that did me in. Specifically, seasons 3 thru 6 1/2.

It hit at a very formative moment, some lucky sweet-spot between 4th and 6th grade, when puberty must have been all in the brain because nothing had happened yet in the body. But as soon as something did happen in the body, I dropped Captain Picard like a dead cat and picked up the more chick-friendly electric guitar. One day, I actually went to Goodwill and gave away every last bit of my hundreds of dollars in merchandise.

Gene “the Great Bird of the Galaxy” Roddenberry died in 1991. By ’95, his beatific vision of the future had fallen into total disrepair. At first, I liked that fact that with each passing year there were more space battles and more interspecies wars. But then there started to be money. Picard always said humans were beyond that. The third series, Deep Space Nine wore on, it became clear that they came at the cost of everything good and true, in my book. Two other series, Voyager and Enterprise, stunk. The last full-length picture was the worst movie ever made.

For a time, I was hopeful. A few weeks ago, Abrams was quoted saying, “It was important to me that optimism be cool again.” But soon it became clear what that meant. “This is a treatment of Star Trek with action and comedy and romance and adventure, as opposed to a rather talky geekfest.” No, thank you. Spoken like a closet Star Wars fan. Confirmed: “[Abrams] was engaged by the possibility of a Star Trek movie ‘that grabbed me the way Star Wars did.'”

I had to come to a realization: the brand is a lie. Or the franchise, or the saga, or whatever. Probably they all are.

Let me tell you: I’ve been to a few Star Trek conventions in my day. Wander through them, and it is plain to see when each person caught the bug. Why? Because they’re dressed like a character of whatever period makes them feel warm and fuzzy. ’60s Kirk or ’80s Kirk? Data or Spock? We’re all umbrella-ed under this single Star Trek package, but each carrying separate experiences. Now, I want to finally accept that those can never quite come again, whatever the promises of Paramount Pictures or of fan-made episodes.

It’s like Spock once said: “If we were to assume these whales as ours to do with as we please, we would be just as guilty as those who caused their extinction.” (The whales are our experiences, big as whales, in the aquariums of our lives.)

I can’t possess or re-possess what Star Trek has done; it possesses me. I can only let it get worse with equanimity and protect my childhood from the inevitable rapists.

Joel, who has been patient enough to draw me out on these things, has offered a fuller statement of his concerns on his own site. He first frames me as participating in an “anti-narrative,” which “conveys a series of anti-values but no positive values.” Further, he goes after my concept of empathy more specifically:

‘Empathy’ may be the basis for something, but the feeling itself is only useful insofar as action accompanies it. This may be a Christian dogma, but I am prepared to defend it.

His cause for doing so is one that I am most sympathetic to, and indeed points to a tendency in my own thought that has been a cause for concern in the past.

I postulate that the humanities must, at this point in time, formulate some reason why resources which could be diverted towards other means of production (as this is the fundamental basis of our capitalist society) should be used for the education of humans to become more than means of production. Again, I believe that the distribution of anti-values leaves as the default and only remaining substantial actionable belief that humans are—all ‘religious’ practices are to be performed soley for their utility in optimizing the productive capacity of the individual, close to Rieff’s definition of ‘theraputics.’ [See here some of my own reflections on the work of Philip Rieff. -ns]

My reply, in essence, is this: empathy is action (and not much else), it insists on the value of human beings, and I don’t believe in anti-values.

Last night I heard war correspondent extraordinaire Chris Hedges say something along the lines of, “Empathy is at the heart of all good journalism.” Sounds mundane, but that is exactly where I start, in ordinary habits. These notions of mine of empathy and skepticism are not abstractions to be distributed to the world for universal consumption. They are ideas that have been useful to me in my work, in my action, which happens to be writing about religion, among other things. If I were a construction worker, I would probably be writing about different values on my blog. (I might become a Freemason.)

Point is, though I know “empathy” sounds like such a fuzzy word, I am speaking about very concrete things. It can mean meeting your enemies, or your neighbors, or your friends, and finding the truth that makes it possible to love them. Right now, as circumstances have it for me, this means being the only white guy in the Baptist church next to my apartment, or preparing to go to Turkey to interview a man who everyone I respect thinks is a joke. These are humble things, but they’re a start. In quite concrete, daily ways, empathy means devotion to the opposite of idolatry—breaking out of what we think we know about ourselves and others.

Now of course, I argued for empathy as a political virtue, not as a journalistic one. The expressions of this are concrete as well. A most important extension of this is my opposition to the McCain/Palin mantra of “fight!” in a world that desperately needs understanding rather than self-immolating aggression (see here). Obama’s rhetoric and policies have been somewhat closer to empathic, including his controversial willingness to negotiate with enemies. I would like to see, however, a lot more willingness to close military bases on foreign soil and to prioritize cultural exchange around the world.

Is empathy or skepticism the final word? Should I propose them as the basis for all societies forever? No, of course not. That, precisely, would be idolatry. And I worry that the positive values that Joel is looking for would be exactly that. Nietzsche insisted that Christianity is the real nihilism because it hinges everything, all of life, on an otherworldly idea. I hope that as life goes on and times change, I’ll find other virtues to cling to, and then be ready to put them aside when the time comes. I only hope that what empathy and skepticism teach me will be good preparation for what’s to come.

Both Nietzsche and Jesus suggest, oddly enough, to put aside the tendency to cling to laws and ideas or else everything will explode. Such pillars will fall apart with time and be rebuilt and fall again. Be a person of the moment and the changes of the next moment. When a person is in need, help as you can, whether they be clean or unclean according to your values. “Humanities” themselves are an idol, and in our society what has been named that often demonstrates its irrelevance.

But that doesn’t mean we’re consigned to be means of production, even though, as I have suggested above, what we produce affects how we conceive of ourselves. I can’t think of a more human-oriented value than empathy—this is a concern of Joel’s as well. He says:

One additional parameter missing is the idea of ‘human worth.’ The exponents of these anti-values may believe that they are increasing human worth by postulating greater equality; my contention is that they actually destroy it by postulating nothing as to the reasons or substance of this worth—in other words allowing the triumph of a materialist position by default.

Rather than subjugating human life to the service of ideals, it asks us to look to each other for guidance as well as self-transcendence.

If empathy has taught me anything: there are no anti-values. If all you see in a person or a people is negation, look harder. The problem in this world is not anti-values (some sort of black hole of humanity somewhere) but coming to terms with different values we hold. There is no sense in saying that they’re all “equally valid” or somesuch. Of course, from any one perspective, one’s own are the best. That doesn’t change, even for the most extreme cultural relativism, which is a value onto itself.

Joel is concerned that I am preaching some kind of nihilism, some kind of nothingness. But believe me, these values can keep one plenty busy, and rewardingly so.

To those who protest that they are not understood, not appreciated, not accepted—how many of us ever are?—all I can say is: “Clarify your position.” (p. 396)

What the passage has always told me is, be humble and be attentive with readers. It worked against the temptation in me to declare those who might misunderstand or contradict me as dumb, or worse. No—writing is communication, at least the kind I want to do. Patience, not stubbornness. (Though, at least in his early works, Henry Miller claimed never to revise.)

It occurred to me today, walking down some stairs into the subway, that there are really two meanings in “clarify your position,” particularly with that magic phrase dangling out of context. The first is Miller’s, I think: try harder to clarify that which is your position so others will understand. The second is foreign to Miller’s rock-solid sense of himself: try harder to clarify what position you want to form and communicate.

The two meanings chase each other in circles. Explain something in a new way, and it is no longer the same thing. Nor can two different things can be explained in the same way.

Go to a New York party filled with writers, and you hear two stories—those out to write what they know and those out to write in order to know what they know. Are they really so different? And what, all along, do we mean by clarity?