Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider
Born	1984
Residence	Brooklyn, New York
Nationality	United States
Education	Brown University, University of California - Santa Barbara
Occupation	writer
Known for	Covering Occupy Wall Street
Religion	Roman Catholic

Nathan Schneider (born 1984) is a journalist and author who covers religion and political movements in the United States.

Writing on religion

Much of Schneider's work concerns the interrelation of religion, science, and politics. He has written investigative articles on the John Templeton Foundation for The Nation^[1] and The Chronicle of Higher Education.^[2][3] With the support of a Knight Grant for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life through USC's Annenberg School,^[4] he did extensive reporting on the evangelical Christian philosopher and debater William Lane Craig, which resulted in articles that appeared in Commonweal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Killing the Buddha.

His first book, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet is a history of proofs for and against the existence of God, as well as a memoir of his own conversion to Catholicism as a teenager. A starred review in Booklist said, "Philosophy is hardly everybody’s cup, but by adding dollops of memoir and first-person reportage to a history of attempts to prove that God exists, Schneider makes an often dry subject quite companionable."^[5] In Religion Dispatches, Gordon Haber wrote, "Schneider defines the next generation of public intellectuals—fiercely articulate, indefatigably curious and Internet-savvy."^[6]

Schneider's writing on religion often deals with neglected traditions of political radicalism. Schneider's profile of literary critic Elaine Scarry for The Chronicle of Higher Education,^[7][8] for instance, compared her scholarship with the religious anti-nuclear movement. In 2014 Al Jazeera America published his story of a Catholic nun with a secret ministry to the transgender community, which was applauded by Buzzfeed^[9] and The Advocate.^[10]

In 2014, he was named a columnist for America, a national Catholic weekly.^[11]

Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

Schneider was among the first journalists to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement during its planning stages and wrote about it for Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, and other publications, as well as in his 2013 book Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse, published by University of California Press. He claims that his coverage of Occupy Wall Street served as the basis for a scene about Occupy Wall Street in HBO's The Newsroom.^[12] His early articles about the movement appeared in a briefing sent to analysts at the security company Stratfor, which was released by WikiLeaks as part of its "Global Intelligence Files."^[13] Democracy Now! regularly turned to him as a correspondent about the movement,^[14] and he also appeared on NPR's The Brian Lehrer Show,^[15] Al Jazeera's Inside Story,^[16] and an oral history of the movement by Vanity Fair,^[17] and Ezra Klein of The Washington Post referred to one of his articles as "the single best place to start" learning about the movement.^[18] Interviews with Schneider appear in two of the feature films made about the movement, American Autumn^[19] and 99%.

Writer Rebecca Solnit wrote the foreword to Thank You, Anarchy, which was adapted into an article for the Los Angeles Times.^[20] In it, she wrote, "Thanks to this meticulous and elegant book, we know what one witness-participant was thinking all through the first year of Occupy, and what many of the sparks and some of the tinder were thinking, and what it was like to be warmed by that beautiful conflagration that spread across the world."

Religion continued to feature prominently in how Schneider covered the Occupy movement. According to Nick Pinto of Al Jazeera America, "Schneider's education and much of his writing are concerned with religion, and he relies heavily on Christian vocabulary to describe his experience in Occupy Wall Street."^[21] He personally became involved in the movement as an early member of the group Occupy Catholics.^[22] An article on the book at Religious Left Law referred to Schneider as "is clearly a brilliant young thinker in the heart of what we might call the revitalization of the religious left."^[23]

Thank You, Anarchy's cover bears a quotation from a New York Observer article—"objective journalism, this is not"—referring not actually to the book but to the ambiguity of Schneider's role in the movement as a journalist and activist.^[24] In a later interview with Malcolm Harris of The New New Inquiry, Schneider confessed, "I agonized a lot about the participant-reporter thing, probably more than I should have."^[25]

Editorial roles

Schneider serves as an editor for two online publications: Waging Nonviolence, "a source for original news and analysis about struggles for justice and peace,"^[26] and Killing the Buddha, "an online magazine of religion, culture, and politics."^[27] He is also an editor-at-large for the Social Science Research Council's online forum The Immanent Frame^[28] and a contributing editor for the news website Religion Dispatches.^[29]

Books

• Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse (University of California Press, September 2013)
• God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet (University of California Press, June 2013)

References

Additional sources

• The New Inquiry article
• Boston Globe article

External links

External audio

Nathan Schneider — The Fabric of Our Identity Krista Tippett's public radio show On Being

• The Row Boat, Nathan Schneider's official website
• Articles in The Nation