Killing the Buddha

22/02/2023

"It’s Ash Wednesday, and I’m excited. Not because I like to dwell on death. I just love ashes ..."

It's Ash Wednesday, which means it's time to read a beautiful Ash Wednesday blessing from Ashley Makar.

No need to profess a thing.

14/12/2022

Today is the tenth anniversary of the Sandy Hook school shooting. A few years later, our editor Emily Mace wrote "Silver Bells," an essay about hearing about Sandy Hook while reading _The Polar Express_ to her daughter while on a train racing north, and how she held her daughter close as the news of that horror unfolded.

After surviving the mass shooting in Highland Park this past summer, Emily reflects, "The message I ended with in that essay still holds true today, even more now than years ago: 'I want to believe—not in Santa’s sleigh, but in a world where I can still hear the ringing bell of hope ... I don’t want the bell to fall silent for me. I don’t want to be like the boy’s parents, friends, or even his sister: deadened to the possibility of hope in the darkness.'

"Those bells are indeed harder to hear this year, here in Highland Park and in so many fraught and violence-torn places across the nation and the world. Yet what rings just as true for me now as then is that it's not just about listening for bells. We have to be the bells. We have to be the hope. We have to be the light. If you do anything today, sign a petition, call Congressional leaders (state and federal) and take action to end gun violence. Please, be the bells we all need to hear."

Reading The Polar Express in the wake of mass shootings.

07/11/2022

New on KtB! An interview with writer and astrologer Jeanna Kadlec, author of the just-released HERETIC: A MEMOIR!

Restorative, q***r, unf**kablewith.

07/09/2022

New at KtB from Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson, a gorgeous essay on the margins of holy places:

If a religious building is in itself a threshold…what possibilities are uniquely latent in the threshold’s threshold…what wisdom lies on the church steps, in the side alley, in the far corner of the graveyard, on the margins, and nowhere else?

05/09/2022

Barbara Ehrenreich’s death has us remembering her 2014 conversation with KtB co-founder Jeff Sharlet about her memoir “Living with a Wild God.” I hesitate to describe the book as “spiritual” because Ehrenreich hated the “coziness” of that term. But in it & in this talk she grapples with death, metaphysics, and why we should keep writing about things we can’t explain. Read the edited transcript in Killing the Buddha.

Barbara Ehrenreich talks to Jeff Sharlet about her new book, mysticism, secrecy, and science.

11/07/2022

ICYM: "It is hard to believe that just a few days ago my family and I went to a Fourth of July parade and found ourselves fleeing gunfire. It feels like a lifetime ago."
https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dispatch/flowers-for-fireworks/

It is hard to believe that just a few days ago my family and I went to a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, IL, and found ourselves fleeing gunfire. It feels like a lifetime ago.

08/07/2022

"I can’t look down this street without seeing all that I cannot unsee." A haunting account of the Highland Park shooting and its aftermath by KtB editor Emily Mace

It is hard to believe that just a few days ago my family and I went to a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, IL, and found ourselves fleeing gunfire. It feels like a lifetime ago.

27/04/2022

New at KtB from Rebecca Ramdhan:

"double-edged, your blade
dug into my flesh
into my bones
in the name of
Jesus,"

https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/on-gratitude/

But there was love, love, love, dripping from our hands. We both gripped the sharp edge, and it was painful

23/04/2022

New at KtB from Joe Gross:

"a forsaken saint
in a shop-rite uniform
is begging alms
on the overpass..."

https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/psalm/two-poems-by-joe-gross/

Part of our spring poetry series!

Sometimes multiplication of loaves just means splitting one loaf between two people.

22/04/2022

Celebrate the chaos of April with poetry! A new series edited by Francesca Hyatt is bursting into bloom!
https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/poems-for-the-cruelest-month/

19/04/2022

From Francesca Hyatt on spring and KtB's April poetry series: "All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all."

https://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/poems-for-the-cruelest-month/

All of the intensity and unpredictability of this season, the surges of hope and terror, the stirring of memory and desire—word images, symbols, and sounds arranged in rhythm, engaged in elegy and mystery may be our best bet for helping us hold it all.

21/03/2022

KtBniks! Tomorrow Tuesday 3/22 at 7pm! Demons! Please register and join KtB editor Brook Wilensky-Lanford and contributor extraordinaire Ed Simon to celebrate Ed's phenomenal (infernal?) new book PANDEMONIUM: A Visual History of Demonology, hosted by the excellent Pittsburgh bookstore White Whale. Az**el, Baphomet, Lucifer, Moloch, who knows who might make an appearance?

Join us for Ed Simon's book party celebrating his latest, PANDEMONIUM, with Brook Wilensky-Landford, author of PARADISE LUST!

21/03/2022

New on KtB: The religious profiteers who run the multibillion dollar Troubled Teen Industry, and the survivors who are trying to shut them down. Reporting by Lydia Joy Launderville, with insight from activist and survivor Gabriel Joseph González.

All across our country, there are “homes” for wayward and rebellious children and teens. I was one of the fortunate who didn’t get sent away, but countless others can’t say the same.

02/03/2022

A cherished Killing the Buddha tradition: annual Ash Wednesday essays by Ashley Makar. Start your Lent right by reading this meditation on fire and grief.

What to do with this grief over what happened to you? I don’t know, so I’m making a ritual.

14/12/2021

New at KtB! Francesca Hyatt writes about Christmas trees: https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/five-foot-fifty-dollar-green-beauty/

13/11/2021

Today is the day! Join us for a KtBirthday Celebration at 7pm Eastern on Zoom. We’ll toast to the magazine’s 21 years of life and hear readings from some favorite KtBniks, plus reflect on religion writing past, present, and future. See you there!

https://killingthebuddha.com/ktblog/a-ktbirthday-celebration/

As legend has it, Killing the Buddha was founded on November 13, 2000, in the earliest days of the internet.

20/10/2021

20/10/2021

11/10/2021

His story: Within days of getting a fever and a COVID diagnosis, the man came to believe a religious rapture was imminent and thought he was speaking with dead relatives.

In one of the hottest areas of coronavirus research, scientists want to unlock the...

13/09/2021

A New York classic, and especially meaningful in the wake of 9/11 remembrances.

31/08/2021

https://apple.news/AjRcI8ZMFS96daURbYl23Ig

Nothing in the Bible says you can’t wear a mask. But religious objectors know that.

16/06/2021

Can literature be a religion? Serena Alagappan went to Dublin to find out!

Happy ! Celebrate by reading this reverent and irreverent piece on literary pilgrimage by new Buddha-killer Serena Alagappan. Link in comments.

12/05/2021

Killing the Buddha editor and contributor Ashley Makar writes about an unforgettable pilgrimage for the Christian Century.

We began to understand why James Baldwin called US history “more beautiful and more terrible than anyone has ever said about it.”

04/05/2021

New from KtB! "Days Like Dominoes" is a gorgeous essay by Jessica Kirzane on writing and motherhood in the pandemic. https://killingthebuddha.com/mag/days-like-dominoes/

17/04/2021

This was such a great day!

KtB’s co-editor Briallen Hopper in action in Chicago yesterday, talking about her book _Hard to Love_!

03/04/2021

Start with Small Gatherings.

At this stage, with shouts of “crucify him” still ringing in your ears, it’s natural to fear crowds, noise, and touch. Start small: appear to three women in a garden. If they freak out, don’t worry. Break the ice by asking them why they’re crying.

Give Yourself a Break Start by naming and acknowledging the trauma: you’ve suffered, been crucified, died, been buried, and descended to hell. Now ...

02/04/2021