Jonathan VanAntwerpen's Blog, page 4

The stories we tell

Jonathan VanAntwerpen (2020)

From “Our Own Stories” — published recently at Thrive Global:

Bouncing back and forth between the curb appeal of life-changing magic and the disturbing durability of the current order of things, I find that I am disposed to overlook the small and seemingly inconsequential movements and happenings that end up remaking life as I know it. Whether or not it is true that our lives can only be understood backwards, the stories we tell about many such shifts often take on fre...

Little Did I Know

Stanley Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory | Photo: Jonathan VanAntwerpen

“How in the world would I at this stage know what ‘complete telling’ means here? Much more interesting is the felt need to tell, and the picture of completion that the need invokes. And haven’t I repeatedly discovered that the writing I care about most can be understood as letting death into the room? — in other words, letting each sentence bear what finitude can bring to it then and there, and await developmen...

In the flow

Jonathan VanAntwerpen | Skiing at Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe, California

Among those things sorely missed in this year plus of pandemic: spring trips to northern California, to spend time with dear family and friends, and — yes — to ski. From The New York Times Magazine, a few years back:

What I love about skiing is that it is nothing if not improvising inside the vanishing moment. At a great speed (say, 50 m.p.h.), in rapidly changing circumstances (snow configuration and texture, trees coming at...

Jonathan VanAntwerpen | Missing the Marathon

https://medium.com/media/5784aee520dda3941365fce83b66cb20/href

When I first moved to New York City almost two decades ago, I would not have expected the annual New York City Marathon to become one of my favorite things about living in the city. But it is, in retrospect, among the most moving civic rituals I have ever witnessed.

The very first New York City Marathon was run the year that I was born. This coming fall — as New York Road Runners confirmed earlier in the week — the marathon’s 50th runn...

Killing the Buddha

Killing the Buddha’s Tin Anniversary Spectacular, Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn (December 2010)

From the archives (2010): Jonathan VanAntwerpen and John D. Boy at Killing the Buddha’s 10th anniversary party in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Established in November 2000 by Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau, Killing the Buddha launched with a manifesto inviting readers “both hostile and drawn to talk of God” to join its editors in “building an electronic Tower of Babel, a Talmudic cathedral of stories about...

In the mail: Who Owns Religion? Scholars and their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century

Laurie L. Patton’s Who Owns Religion? Scholars and their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century

Laurie L. Patton on “a new scholarly imagination”:

“In his book We Scholars, David Damrosch argues for a new dynamism between the scholar and society, in which the relevance of knowledge production is assumed by multiple publics and advocated for in a comprehensive way by the scholar. Such a new scholarly imagination might look something like the partnerships of fools and protagonists — one where the rel...

Jonathan VanAntwerpen on Frequencies: a collaborative genealogy of spirituality

Ten years ago this spring, we were laying plans to produce Frequencies, an experimental digital project that was the result of a partnership between The Immanent Frame and Killing the Buddha. Conceived in connection with the work of the Social Science Research Council’s program on Religion in the Public Sphere, Frequencies was the brainchild of Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, who served as its co-curators and executive editors. It was initially envisioned as “a collaborative genealogy of ...