A person is like a boat, as the song goes:

Row, row, row your boat…

I think that’s about my favorite song in the world, and what it says is the whole goal here. That and facing where you’ve been with your back to what’s ahead; row hard or row gently, and try to steer.

I’m Nathan Schneider, a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Writing articles for a variety of publications—from The New York Times and The Nation to this Row Boat—keeps my notebooks filled. Editing the online religion magazine Killing the Buddha keeps me weird. Waging Nonviolence, a blog I co-founded, keeps me up on struggles for justice around the world. And being a contributing editor at the Social Science Research Council’s religion blog, The Immanent Frame, keeps me in touch with the academy. I’m also writing a book for the University of California Press on the search for proof of the existence of God.

I suppose what I’m after is the chronicling of ideas, of perfect worlds, of ordinary imaginations in practice. My tone and method is precisely speculative: every word is hypothesis—while recognizing fearfully that with even the most casual remark we are building ourselves and our world irrevocably.

Write to me at nathan [@] therowboat.com.