It began with the advice of a federal judge in 1949. If you’re not going to follow United States law and register for the draft, he told the group of Alabaman Quaker farmers before him, “get out of this country and stay out.” So they did. In 1951, along with several dozen family members and fellow Friends, they sold what they had in the States and flew down to a remote mountaintop in Costa Rica. Only a few years before, the country had abolished its military, so there was no threat of conscription. They didn’t know the language or how to farm in a tropical climate. The early years weren’t easy, and the community splintered several times; some moved to Canada, and others became Seventh-day Adventists. But when longtime peace activist John Trostle came to visit their town of Monteverde in 1962, he tells me, “I thought I’d discovered Shangri-La.” There was a school, a cheese factory, and an arts scene on the verge of flourishing. By 1974, he and his wife Sue moved to the community themselves.

The Quakers inadvertently gave rise to an ecotourism mecca. From the beginning, they set aside a large portion of rainforest in order to protect their watershed from pollution—a purely practical decision for a town of farmers. But a few decades later, as biologists learned of it and came to study wildlife living there, the community took up the cause of conservation. Wolf Guindon, one of the original settlers who had spent time in federal prison for resisting the draft, led the charge to build their watershed into the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, which keeps a sizeable chunk of Costa Rican rainforest in perpetuity for visitors and researchers. […]

What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity.

Soldiers stake their lives on a cosmic wager that what they undertake is equal to the ante. Commanders must orchestrate performances more compelling than theater and more sacred than peace, all the while inflicting as much damage as possible. The sum resources of a culture—its science, its religion, its poetry, its prejudice—mobilize in the service of that cause. These are as much the technologies of war as the weapons themselves.

While Bousquet’s analysis focuses on the uses of scientific knowledge, my essay explores how his approach could expand to include the religious.

It is common to think of religion as a primitive form of science, one that asks virtually the same questions and plays a commensurate role in the life of societies. To be sure, there is a vast religious prehistory to be written that would carry The Cosmic Way of Warfare farther back than Newton. But Newton—an alchemist obsessed with decoding prophecy—hardly spelled a definite break in which the religious transmuted into the scientific. And religious ways of warfare hardly disappeared as scientific ones arose. A fuller cosmology of warfare would embrace both. Religion and science each provide resources for thinking through the chaos of combat.

Keep reading over at Religion Dispatches.

“Hemingway, remarks are not literature.” —Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Going off into the wilderness for some unknown days—unknown in length, unknown in content, unknown in consequence—I’m taking the opportunity to wrest myself from the vicious habits of blogging, into the naked, unpublishable chaos of experience, quiet as long as need be for its tell-tale order to arise.

My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our work here more under the auspices of the art than plain reporting—to the point that we ultimately thought more about the press corps gazing upon the performances than the content of the acts themselves, whose Spanish we couldn’t fully understand anyway. […]

Recently I had the pleasure to talk with journalist and bloggingheads.tv founder Robert Wright about his new book, The Evolution of God. Hear our conversation today at Killing the Buddha, in addition to a short essay of mine on the subject:

It’s easy to focus, as many reviews have, on Wright’s theology of nonexistent god and triumphant moral progress that comes mainly in the concluding chapters. But the real meat and potatoes of the book is its meat and potatoes: a Wagnerian act of gnostic expose, slogging through verse after verse of ancient, holy writ, telling the story of Western religion as a political thriller—albeit enacted by deluded nothing-worshippers. The hefty 500-pager starts to feel like a breezy, concise charge through the most titillatingly inversionary historical-critical readings of Hebrew and Christian and Muslim scripture. It’s stuff that many people don’t know is out there and available for hanging one’s cosmic hat on: a vast anti-narrative provided by the wonders of modern scholarship.

Listen closely, and you’ll learn what non-zero-sum means!

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. […]