Posted by Naomi Firestone-Teeter

Last year Peter Manseau made a splash as the non-Jewish author sweeping through the Jewish literary community with his work Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter (which happened to win the Jewish Book Council’s own National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). As the son of a priest and a nun, religion was clearly a fascinating subject for Manseau and, to further pursue his interest, he cofounded KillingtheBuddah.com. Killing the Buddah is “a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God.”

Coming this July (July 15th to be exact) is a collection of essays that have sprung from the pages of Killing the Buddah titled Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatched From the Margins of Faith, written and collected by Jeff Sharlet, Peter Manseau, and the editors of Killing the Buddah (published by Beacon Press). With a set of essays that reflect the scope of religious diversity (including Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Zen Buddhism, among others), the contributors examine what it means to believe or not believe in America in the 21st century.

Essays include:

Jew Like Me (Manseau)
Everybody has a Mother, and They All Die (Sharlet)
Sects and the City (Elizabeth Frankenberger)
Please Don’t Feed the Prophet (Daniel S. Brenner)
I Was a Prepubescent Messiah (Irina Reyn)
Dreading the Buzzer (Hasdai Westbrook)
Raised by Jews (Naomi Seidman)
The Only Jew for Miles (Gordon Haber)

This looks like it’s going to be a good one.