Writing
The recent piece that I am most proud of is my long profile of anti-gay-rights activist Maggie Gallagher, which ran in early 2012 in Salon. I have written many pieces for The New York Times Magazine, including articles about my street, Scientology, New Age diva Louise Hay, an evangelical Christian college’s first dance, and the renunciation of atheism by the philosopher Antony Flew. For the online magazine Slate, I have written many articles, including an evaluation of Christian sex manuals, a discussion of the Catholic utopian vision of Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, a suggestion for atonement not just on Yom Kippur, another piece on Scientology, (one of Slate’s ten most e-mailed pieces of the year), and a reminiscence of the great preacher William Sloane Coffin Jr. I have written about gay priests for Details and about U2 and Madonna for The Wall Street Journal.
I am the biweekly religion columnist for The New York Times, and I enjoy reviewing books of all sorts, includingnovels and books about religion, urban studies, and other stuff.
My latest book, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, was published April 13, 2010. You can buy it here. I am also the author of two other books, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture and Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.
I have also written for The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, Yale Review, and Southwest Review. I think I am the only living writer to have contributed to both The Christian Century and Playboy.