Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden, a former editor-in-chief of Killing the Buddha, and a contributor to The God Beat: What Journalism Says About Faith and Why It Matters. She received her PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her writing has been featured in The New Republic, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker online, and elsewhere. Follower her on Twitter @modmyth.

Culture, Israel-PalestineJune 3, 2013

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.

CultureJanuary 3, 2013

Finding Noah’s Flood: A Misconception of Biblical Proportions

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

I hate to break it to you, but Noah’s Flood is not a real thing. As geologist David Montgomery wrote in his recent history, The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood, the religious idea that the Flood was real has been to the actual history of geology as a science. But by now, however, science knows better. I can’t say as much for the media.

Books, Science & TechnologySeptember 24, 2012

High Ark: A Geologist on the True Meaning of Noah’s Flood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a place that promotes the idea that all of these layers of rock got created at once through Noah’s Flood—and yet right under their feet is this beautifully vetted stretch of limestone, it’s really too finely laminated and too extensive to possibly be explained by something like that. So you look at these things and you have to ask, what do you make of the world? Can the world tell its own story?

(A)theologies, BooksMay 17, 2012

Religion for Atheists for The Rest of Us

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

I was excited to read Religion for Atheists—really I was. Here’s a confessed atheist, pop philosopher Alain de Botton, who nonetheless actually believes that religion is worth looking at, unlike his more militant friends in the New Atheist camp. .