When I spoke with the theologian Harvey Cox a few months ago, he told me enthusiastically about his experiences with Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organization that he sees as representing the future of the Church and, in turn, of religion in what he calls the coming “age of spirit”:

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.

Before talking with Cox, I had heard about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work before—I walked by their church in Lucca, Italy, countless times, for one. They have been involved in peacemaking efforts in trouble spots around the world, in addition to working with the poor closer to home. But what he said made me eager to talk with Andrea Bartoli, Sant’Egidio’s representative in the U.S. and a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. Our interview, “Religious peacemaking in a secular world,” appears today at The Immanent Frame. In his gracious way, Bartoli took some issue with Cox’s characterization that sets a grassroots lay group like Sant’Egidio in opposition with the hierarchy of the Church. After all, last December, Pope Benedict XVI dined with the poor at a Sant’Egidio house in Rome. Bartoli explains:

I admire Harvey Cox. His book The Secular City captured our attention when we were young, as did his later books that spoke about the liveliness of the spirit. But Benedict, I think, cannot be easily caricatured as a pope who is simply trying to reimpose an outdated kind of Christianity. Benedict is clearly aware that the Church doesn’t have control of the political machinery, especially through the papacy, as it once did. He also speaks about Christians as a creative minority, and Sant’Egidio exemplifies this for him. We have always been careful about being part of the Catholic Church—that is, not inventing a new church, but being an expression of a 2,000-year-old tradition. When Benedict XVI comes to eat at the soup kitchen the Community runs for the poor, he’s saying that the Church actually starts with the poor. In his encyclical Caritas and Veritas, there is a call for a global social policy that is far to the left of any progressive policy. This is something that is difficult to appreciate if you look at the world only from a U.S./Western perspective, but it’s much easier to understand if you’re in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, where the majority of the human family is. The Catholic Church, these days, is one of the most powerful forces for the representation of the poor in the world.

There is lots more about Sant’Egidio’s important work in the full interview.

Lately I’ve been waking up with these terrible cold sweats. Reptilian reflexes bounce me out of bed and to my laptop across the room, where my fingers pull up a familiar spreadsheet. I’ve forgotten a blog! How could I leave that one out? Now I’ve got to spend half the morning revising the whole thing to account for it…

Months in the making, it is finally finished: the Social Science Research Council’s report, “The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere,” of which I was the lead author. It’s a somewhat cumbersome overview of blogging, academic blogging, blogs about religion, and our blogging future.

Part of the process (and hence the cold sweats) was assembling a list of nearly 100 blogs upon which the report is based. Oh, goodness, I wanted so much for everyone to feel included! We’ve already been receiving complains from deserving bloggers who were overlooked. All you bloggers out there: we come in peace.

The purpose at hand is to foster a more self-reflective, collaborative, and mutually-aware religion blogosphere. Ideally, this report will spark discussion among religion bloggers that will take their work further, while also inviting new voices from outside existing networks to join in and take part.

At The Immanent Frame today, ten (all male, unfortunately) religion writers, scholars, and bloggers discuss the report and their experiences with religion in the dirt devil of (can we still call it that?) “new media.” My favorite bit of it comes from Frederick Clarkson of Talk to Action:

First, I invite everyone to consider the possibility that blogs may be one of the greatest gifts to writing and to writers in the history of the world.

Mark Silk of Spiritual Politics also makes a fine point, a reminder that a lot of blogging doesn’t have to be altogether different from forms that came before:

Analytically, what seems to me missing from most accounts of blogging, including this one, is how much it is like serving on the editorial board of a metropolitan newspaper. (There aren’t a lot of people with that experience; I had it for a few years in Atlanta.) What an editorial writer does ranges from short, easy takes—shooting fish in a barrel—to careful, fully researched analyses of public issues. On a good editorial page, the writing ranges from sharp and light to serious and sober. And you’ve always got to feed the beast. It seems to me that what can reasonably be hoped for in the religion blogosphere is more of the carefully reported and nuanced kind of opinion writing—posts that are actually meant to convince, rather than simply snap the wet towel. A good editorial can better and much more quickly orient a reader than an extended take-out by a reporter; but too often, bloggers don’t think they’re accomplishing anything unless they act as hanging judge.

Read the report. Join the discussion. I, for one, am gonna get offline and work on writing my actual, physical book.

I can’t help but be grateful for the so-called New Atheists. They’ve given me lots of excuses to write articles, for instance. It’s a common trope, one that I’ve been guilty of on occasion, to dismiss them out of hand as, in one way or another, deranged lunatics who don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s true that I wish they appreciated a bit more the fun and maddening complexity of lived religion—what at Killing the Buddha we call “the cacophony choir”—but the same could be said of true believers in pretty much anything. The hard-line position that they take opens up space for lots of yet-unheard views to come to the surface and suddenly seem not so bad (at least they’re not New Atheists!). And my childhood, rapt with wonder at the books of Carl Sagan and the cosmos of Gene Roddenberry, is glad that they insist, at their often-overlooked best moments and against so many who assume otherwise, that a life without God has room for beauty, purpose, and even something resembling soul.

The latest entry for your New Atheist library is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, which I review today at The American Prospect. Thanks to an elaborate marketing campaign, the book has been reviewed just about everywhere by now, yet I’m still ambivalent about its significance. Though I enjoyed it, that’s perhaps only because I happen to be obsessed with arguments for the existence of God—my friend Gordon Haber’s very different review at the Forward has some truth to it too. In any case, Goldstein’s book is one more chance to say, as Darwin did so famously and so eloquently, “There is grandeur in this view of life.”

What is it like to be a New Atheist—one of those irascible preachers of reason, those “militant” purveyors of populist non-belief like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? Most people don’t bother to ask, because they think they already know. Either it’s a depraved and pathetic existence, buoyed (especially in the notorious case of Hitchens) only by excessive drink or else suffused in a nearly mystical state that frees one (as it seemingly does Dawkins) enough from dogmatic noise to revel fully in the grandeur of the scientific imagination. Either way, it’s an inhuman caricature.

Few are better placed to set the record straight than Princeton-trained philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose new novel tells the story of a suddenly rich and famous “atheist with a soul,” a psychologist of religion named Cass Seltzer. In the years since Dawkins’ The God Delusion set the tone for allegedly soulless atheism, writers including Ronald Aronson (Living Without God) and Greg Epstein (Good Without God) have scrambled the epithet Goldstein grants Cass. But Goldstein’s credentials to speak—through her character—for the New Atheist soul are particularly strong. She’s a friend of Dawkins, an advisory board member of Sam Harris’ Reason Project, and the wife of Steven Pinker, the New Atheists’ go-to evolutionary psychologist. Like him, she has a post at Harvard. Best of all, she’s a genius—at least according to the venerable MacArthur Foundation, which awarded her its “genius grant” in 1996. This should be a particularly important distinction among New Atheists, because what drives everyone crazy is how annoyingly brilliant they all seem to think they are.

Continue reading at The American Prospect.

What will it take to prevent the next war? Can’t say I know exactly, but, like how many others in the same boat, I keep writing about it anyway.

I just received in the mail the elegant new second issue of The Point magazine, out of Chicago, which includes my essay “The War at Home.” It’s available only in print currently, so you’ll have to buy the issue, which includes work by Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, and many others. Here’s some of the stuff in my piece:

For the moment, my parents’ lessons and example had caught up with the martial fantasies. The kid who loved his toy rifle gave way to the one who’d channeled Buddha on the playground. I began turning back to the spiritual traditions they had exposed me to as a kid, in the course of their own explorations, and I wandered into some new ones of my own. I read the books of mystics and philosophers. I found friends who would sit around forever and talk about ideas‚ and in those good, late nights the prospect of peace could overwhelm the allure of war. I became enchanted with the notion of truth I found in Gandhi’s writings, a substance of absolute sacredness borne by friend and enemy alike. Reading them offered me new way of seeing the world: a living firmament of people, each with their righteous claims on truth and justice. Destroying any of them is, or should be, tantamount to defeat.

There is no sense pretending, though, that this turning point would last me for life. Such moments of decision repeat themselves perpetually. The transformative logic of weapons and the banality of violence always offer to reinvent the game, to insist that, this time, to kill and be killed is not murder. No: it is defense, it is honor, it is duty, it is right. Gandhi, for one, lived a life of obsessive vigilance against these creeping temptations. In diet, family life, community, and politics, his writings reveal a constant anxiety that violence might weasel its way through. Reading Gandhi’s Experiments with Truth, one can grow exhausted with the endless efforts at self-purgation. His ascetic impulses sometimes do little more than replace harming others with harming himself. But if the answer to violence were simply a feat of deprivation, it would be as much a denial of life as killing. I cannot simply cut off these militant organs, for I’d probably die in the process.

It’s a common refrain that one hears among those of us looking to think responsibly about the world’s religions: at bottom, they all have a common core, and the core is a genuinely good one.

That would be nice, but I’ve never really bought it. To be honest, I don’t even think it would be nice. All we’d have to do is follow the correct kernel of our religions and we’d be golden forever, end of story. So much of the interesting, complex, and messy stuff that makes learning about religions and about people so engrossing might peel away in the name of unity. And often, when such universal perennialism gets wheeled out, it turns out to be in fact a surreptitious assertion of a particular tradition, to which all the others become subservient.

But when Karen Armstrong, the British dean of comparative-religion-for-the-people, claims that all religions are really about compassion, when she goes on to promulgate a “Charter for Compassion,” and when TED throws its connections and tech savvy behind her, it’s hard to be too much of a curmudgeon. Sure, such things have come and gone again and again in history—how often have we heard calls for World Peace in Our Time?—but no less are we probably still responsible for giving it another go. And if a bit of fascinating religious mayhem has to be quieted in the process, so be it. There will still be science fiction.

That said, I’m glad to have had the chance to interview Karen Armstrong at The Immanent Frame. What she proposes is certainly a brave effort to mobilize her years of studying and writing into action, into a movement. It also represents an important example of activism and organizing from precisely the spiritual-but-not-religious vantage point that is supposedly able to do neither.

NS: Do you anticipate that the Charter will eventually translate into meaningful social change?

KA: All religious teaching must issue in practical action. This is something that has become very clear to me during the last twenty years, which I have devoted to the study of world religions. The doctrines and stories of faith make no sense at all unless they are translated into action. This is one of the essential themes of my latest book, The Case for God, which was being written at the same time as we were composing the Charter. We were all convinced that somehow the Charter must be a call to action. There was no point in us all embracing one another on the day of the launch if there would be no practical follow up. We need compassion—the ability to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, to “experience with” the other—in politics, social policy, finance, education, and media. Unless we can learn to treat all nations and all peoples as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we are unlikely, in these days of global terror, to have a viable world to hand on to the next generation.

Read more at The Immanent Frame.

At the Guardian today, I’ve got a short bit about secular, mainly Continental philosophers who, in recent years, have turned to theology:

[Slavoj Zizek] is one of several leading thinkers in recent years who, though coming out of a deeply secular and often-Marxist bent, have made a turn toward theology. In 1997, Alain Badiou published a study of the apostle Paul, whom he took as an exemplar of his own influential philosophy of the “event”. Three years later, Giorgio Agamben responded in Italian with The Time That Remains, a painstaking exegesis of the first ten words of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The purpose of both was not a more enlightened piety, but an inquiry into the texture of revolution. Paul is significant to them because he ushered in, and in the process described, a genuinely transformational social movement.

When I arrived at UC Santa Barbara for my graduate work in 2006, I had some horrible, vague idea about wanting to study issues of interreligious dialog(ue)—it was a mess. I’d just finished an undergraduate thesis about evolution debates and wasn’t sure where to go next. Fortunately, the professor I found myself paired with, Ann Taves, knew better. Already an accomplished historian, she had lately become taken by all the research going on in the brain and mind sciences about religious experience. Since my head had long been in the religion and science stuff, we had fantastic conversations and, before long, I cooked up a master’s thesis with her about the theoretical models at play in the latest scientific research on religion. And now, she’s got a whole book about it: Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things.

Today at The Immanent Frame, I have the pleasure of sharing a conversation I had with Ann about her new book, as well as her distinguished new role as president of the American Academy of Religion.

NS: Like your plans for the AAR, Religious Experience Reconsidered attempts to expose humanists and social scientists to new approaches in the study of religion. What obstacles need to be overcome?AT: There have been certain problems in the study of religion that we keep coming back to and gnawing on without being able to solve very well. One is the relationship between experience and what we call religion; another is whether, when you’re defining religion, it is a unique—or sui generis—thing apart from other things; and a third is the threat of reductionism. All of these have been inhibiting our ability to bring scientific approaches to bear on the study of religion. What I try to do in this book is to open up pathways that will make it easier to engage the scientific literature on the study of the mind without simplifying the conceptual framework in ways that would frustrate scholars of religion. What I’m working on is just one possible avenue for doing this, but however we do it, we have to responsibly connect the study of religion to other disciplines. Humans are biological beings; we’re cultural animals, as one psychologist puts it. We therefore have to take our biology into account, as well as culture, and the way the two have interacted over the course of human history.

A couple weeks ago I was riding my usual route from home in Clinton Hill to the Williamsburg Bridge when I saw that the ground had shifted beneath my bicycle gears. As I crossed Flushing along Bedford Avenue, into the heart of Hasidic Williamsburg, Brooklyn, my bike lane was gone. Only a faint, sandblasted remnant remained.

That’s an excerpt from a new essay of mine in The Huffington Post, one of two pieces I published today on the controversy about the lane’s removal. Since it’s a corridor I bike along regularly, and since I’ve long been curious about the religiosity of those who live along it, I did what I could to understand what happened and why. Most of my fellow cyclists believed that religious prudishness was mostly to blame, but what I learned from conversations with Hasidic men on Bedford convinced me that we cyclists have to share some of the blame for the lane’s removal as well. I write in my piece for Religion Dispatches:

That’s what nearly everybody walking up and down Hasidic Bedford in daytime says as well. When asked directly about it, they concede that they believe many cyclists to be inappropriately dressed, even while insisting that that alone was not reason enough to remove the lane.

An ambulance driver said that there had been a lot of accidents with children, though he had never personally seen with one. A man named Moshe, however, said he did once see a child hit by a bike. “It’s terrible,” he said. A yeshiva school bus driver complained, in an extended conversation aboard his bus, “bikes don’t obey any laws.” He doesn’t think religious concerns about clothing were the motivating force at all. “It is a free country,” he said.

“The problem is how they ride on it,” added a Hasidic man named Abraham while checking his mailbox on Bedford. “They don’t care about the kids.” Both a bicyclist and a school bus driver, he enjoyed using the bike lane but now is glad, for the sake of safety, that it is gone.

I go on to call for a new sense of responsibility among bicyclists for their own behavior, especially where neighborhoods provide lanes for us on their streets—both for myself and my fellow cyclists. Again, in HuffPo:

The city has added hundreds of miles of bike lanes in recent years, and bicycle commuting has more than doubled since 2000 as a result. I see new lanes being added all the time and feel grateful every time I do. Each one lowers my chances of getting whacked by a taxi.

As the city finally starts investing in keeping us safe, it is time for cyclists to do our part. “There is not a single community board meeting about bike lanes where cyclist behavior is not an issue,” says Wiley Norvell of Transportation Alternatives. His organization has launched Biking Rules!–a program to encourage more responsible riding in New York City.

The rules are simple and, from now on, I’m going to do my best to follow them: Pedestrians come first. Stop at red lights, and don’t ride against traffic. Obey the laws. Wear a helmet, and use a light in the dark.

Read the rest of these at Religion Dispatches and The Huffington Post.

I’ve got a zany new essay at Religion Dispatches today about a lecture earlier this week in Brooklyn, “A Philosophical Proof of Santa Claus.” Jamie Hook, the evening’s presenter, did a masterful job of miming some of the issues at play in debates about God—though in the guise of a fellow whose existence, this season at least, is for many people a somewhat more urgent question.

Mr. Hook, who describes himself as a “socially omnivorous urban dandy,” began this “passion play for the non-believer” with a story of loss of faith: the memory of telling a seven-year-old boy that Santa Claus doesn’t exist and subsequently watching him fall into a two-week depression. “We had made his world smaller,” Hook remembers. He devised this lecture, following the suggestion of Rainer Maria Rilke, to “restore enchantment to the world.”

Hook promptly proceeded to a Wikipedia-style historical sketch of the origin of the idea of Santa Claus, followed by a 12-minute original anthropological video of actual, believing children articulating the substance of their Christmastime convictions. These two accounts were utterly at odds. The children didn’t hesitate to delve into amazing speculations about how Santa may have once been an ordinary man, or preceded the evolution of the human race, or came from a supernova-ed star long ago. None of them, significantly, were willing to either question their belief in Santa or to prove it—aside from the testimony of having seen him at school or the remains of his nocturnal deliveries at home. As Hook pressed them from behind the camera to explain, the children only became firmer in their self-assurance.

Read the rest at RD.

What concerns me about the coming literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the full or partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves but the assortments in which they find themselves. Specifically, I am concerned about what’s going to happen to my own library. For public and academic libraries, however vital, I think I’ll leave the fretting to the experts and hope that a deal can be struck between Google’s armada of scanners and well-meaning librarians. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives: our memory theaters.

It is time to defend, tooth and nail, the spirit of our precious bookshelves. I think of the work of historian Frances Yates (which now sits on my shelf), who chronicled the the great “memory theaters” of ancient orators and Renaissance humanists—spaces they would conjure in their minds in order to help them memorize all the precious accoutrements of civilized knowledge. In the age of the book, our memory theaters have become externalized; we have entrusted them to our bookshelves. As I look over my own shelf, I see my life pass before my eyes. The memories grafted onto each volume become stirred and awakened, presenting themselves to ready access. Such libraries are particular to their possessors, the manifest remainder from years of thinking. Without the bookshelf’s landscape to turn to, I don’t know how I would think or write. […]