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 Killingth​e​Bud​dah​.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.