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:

• 12/8, Washington, DC: Center for Inquiry lecture
• 1/15, New York, NY: Rubin Museum screening of Miracle of Weebosch
• 2/16, Pasadena, CA: All Saints Church
• 2/22, San Francisco, CA: The Green Arcade
• 2/24, Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University
• 3/1, Seattle, WA: AWP conference panel: “Doubt Is My Revelation”

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!

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.

Over the weekend I had an essay at Religion Dispatches about an elderly Irish woman who proposed just such a protest in order to take a stand for women in the church. While I support her cause, I don’t think that her methods do:

It’s clear that Jennifer Sleeman isn’t proposing to abandon the church altogether. But a protest should always be in the image of its goal, the means in keeping with the ends. When I heard of her plan, I couldn’t help but think of all the conscientious, passionate people who have already gone, leaving Catholic progressives to fend for ourselves, increasingly isolated. What feels like taking action from the outside can seem more like abdication from within. We need progressives, especially progressive women, in the church and speaking up.

A big part of the Catholic story over the last few decades, as the historic reforms of Vatican II have faded into a comparatively reactionary turn, is mass exodus. People disagree with aspects of church teaching, or they suffer at the hands of the clergy, and that’s the end. I don’t mean to minimize the significance of either — for so many people, enough really is enough. It’s too painful to go back. What I’m proposing is a struggle, but a necessary one. But their significance can be exaggerated. When progressives leave their counterparts shape the church more and more as they like it.

According to the Irish bishops, mass attendance held steady on Sunday. Despite my complaint, I think I feel a bit disappointed.

For a more stirring essay with much the same point, see Mary Gordon’s “Why I Stay: A Parable from a Progressive Catholic.”

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.

Religion Dispatches

Imagine this: in the middle of the day, all at once, a sea of suits pours out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. With them come as many somber faces, cast down, but bearing a glint of tranquility not often seen in that neighborhood. No press conference was scheduled, but reporters descend, and something like one materializes out of the crowd, centered around the chief executives of the top investment banks. They, we learn, arranged this together the night before in lieu of their usual cognac and cigars.

It has been a year now since the American people rescued the financial industry with gargantuan loans and benevolent takeovers. The Dow is on the upswing again, and some of the biggest banks have paid back what they borrowed. But the executives know that, even as their fortunes turn, employment nationwide continues to plummet. People all around the globe have fallen into poverty as a result of the crisis that their markets engineered.

Now is the time, they declare, for a change.

Continue reading at RD.

Raised up by parents and teachers of the 1960s, and grandparents who brushed against World War II, I always wondered what crisis and heroism would define my generation after its childhood in the in-between simmer of the ’90s. When my answer came, I was 17, at the start of my last year in high school, and close enough to the Pentagon to see the smoke towering out from it.

What my friends and I did that night, more quiet and focused than ever, was play our usual game of tag in the dark, on the comfortable fields around our school. That night, as on others, a police car came down into the parking lot. I won’t ever forget the image of us standing under a light, talking with the officer in stunted phrases, hushed in deference to the state of exception that had come and left the ordinary rules in question.

He didn’t make us leave, as the cops normally did. He drove away. Perhaps he recognized the mystery at work in us, which we ourselves couldn’t be sure of, by which we were somehow, in playing, planning our next move as a generation, planning the future of the world, and we should not be bothered.

I leave out what has happened since. Too much. So far, my generation has allowed our youth to be defined by two endless wars with little obvious effect at home and spiraling greed unto economic collapse; we have not raised our voices significantly, except for the occasional pop star, aided by microphones. We’ve spent a lot of time on the internet. Maybe my friends and I shouldn’t have been playing that night. Maybe we should have been, really, planning.

Read the other essays over at Happy Days.

What do you get when a Buddhist raconteur, a junior high Jewish messiah, and a transsexual cowboy for Christ walk into a bar?

Find out at Le Poisson Rouge in New York City on June 29th when Killing the Buddha, the award-winning online magazine of god for the godless, releases its new anthology, Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith.

The evening will feature an open bar, door prizes, and stories by Paul Morris of BOMB Magazine, Irina Reyn, author of What Happened to Anna K., and horse wrangler Quince Mountain.

Drawn from the website created by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau in 2000, Believer, Beware is a collection of true confessions, skeptical testimonies, and personal revelations of religion lost, found and then lost again. Library Journal in a starred review, says Believer, Beware is “shocking, exhilarating, and never dull…. Highly recommended.” Publishers Weekly describes it as “smart, candid, and insightful…. The voices are refreshingly honest.”

Just the facts, ma’am…

Where: Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker, New York City [Google map link]
When: Monday, June 29, 2009
Time: 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Cost: Free, with open bar

Memorial Day has never been my favorite. In Arlington, Virginia, where I grew up, it always meant the roar of Vietnam Vets on motorcycles all day. And the occasion can bring out our most jingoistic spirit. As I passed three separate suspension bridges across the Hudson River today, each with a giant American flag hanging from it, I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent. That flag has represented a lot of shame in recent years.

On this day, we celebrate the war dead while too rarely mourning the tragic wars that claimed their lives. We pass over in silence those they may have killed. Honoring the dead is surely a duty for the living, but it should not become the excuse to sanctify what killed them.

Today, though, turned out to be a reminder for me of a few simple reasons to love my country. I went with my friend Jake, soon to move West for medical school, on a bike trip along the Hudson.

We covered about 70 miles in all, from Bear Mountain—an hour north from the city—along the western shore to Poughkeepsie, then back down on the other side.

It is plain that ours is a land made to be traveled. When conditions permit (despite far too few roads safe for it), bicycling competes only with hitchhiking as the way to go. The pace is right for frequent stops and conversations with strangers, and the horrendous, strip mall-infested Interstate system is off-limits. One is required to take the best roads—the small ones. Plus, the exertion of biking is sufficient to compensate for all the junk food we Americans eat.

After going around the military academy at West Point (the through-road has generally been closed to traffic since 9/11 for security), we climbed to divine views of the river and its ancient bridges. The rail bridge at Poughkeepsie, we learned, was once the longest span on Earth. Soon, we found ourselves in quintessential towns, with folk-art holiday festivities, including a priceless one-vehicle parade in Newburgh.

After narrowly surviving the IBM, strip-malled nightmare of Poughkeepsie (with no shoulders on the bike route), it was on to the magnificent Dia:Beacon galleries, an island of young, artsy transplants enjoying works whose primary medium is scale—a thing as American as can be, of course.

All along the way, people helped us find the right roads and made themselves available for conversations. Finally, after Cold Spring and Garrison, it was down to the glorious bridge at Bear Mountain. Looking down from that height onto both sides of the river, thrilled with our accomplishment, the beauty of the scene brought back flashes of the human life we’d seen, self-rhapsodizing just as Whitman described, lives that amount not only to their own poetry, but their own forms of poetry altogether.

On the train ride back, I had a long conversation with two young women who both just finished their freshman year at West Point. One, in fact, is first in her class. Like many military people I meet, they were quite open-minded. We discussed torture, armed drones, “black sites,” the Iraq War, and just-war theory. They thought it a shame that the humanities—which might make more reflective cadets—are so poorly represented at their school. It was a shame to think that these kind souls might be brought to suffer or die for a cause and in a manner beneath their intrinsic and hard-earned dignity. One had a ready answer for that possibility. “What happens will be God’s will,” she said. Oh, God save us.

What could I say to that? After a day like this, how could I not say that I would die for this country, that its holiness might be preserved and its errors corrected? But, please, may my death—should it come to that—not come at the expense of another. For, as the song goes:

Other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

The train arrived in wondrous, horrid Midtown. I walked my bike from Grand Central to 8th Avenue on 42nd Street. This gave me the chance to see Broadway closed off to traffic—beginning this weekend, a new pedestrian area is being built there. People mulled through the open street, seemingly not quite sure what to do. Like curious children or cats in a new environment. They took a lot of pictures, as people often do when not sure how else to experience a wonder. What a glorious thing. Though every muscle in my body ached, I got on my bike and zipped around a little, just to get the feel for it. And, naturally, I also took a few pictures.

A good Memorial Day to all of you. May there be no more war dead to mourn.

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.