Books
"Hallman is an uncommonly insightful and humane guide....His chapter about the Texan Christian Wrestling Federation is a small masterpiece of first-person reportage." The San Francisco Chronicle
“Interview with J.C. Hallman” Spreaker From Heart
"Moral Equivalence and the War in Iraq" Boston Globe
"The Fringe (Attraction To)" Frequencies
"How to Fathom an Emotion" The Second Pass
"The Choice is Yours" Killing the Buddha
"Killing the Thetan" Killing the Buddha
"The Value of Religious Diversity" Quarterly Conversation
"Tasting the Gumbo" Journal of Religion and Society
“BookNotes” Largehearted Boy
“Interview with J.C. Hallman” Bookslut
“Interview with J.C. Hallman” The Wild Hunt
“Interview with J.C. Hallman” EarthGoat
The Devil is a Gentleman
Hallman first read William James’s seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience in college. The book’s adventurous spirit and its compassionate take on the world of believers returned to him years later when, on a whim, he visited the Unarius Academy of Science, a UFO group in California, on the occasion of a failed prophecy. It was the beginning of an intellectual apprenticeship in which Hallman adopted James as patron and took him along on journeys to a variety of modern religious experiences.
The book visits Druids, Christian Wrestlers, Monks, Satanists, Atheists, and more, but is also a treatment of William James, whose combination of liberal thought and sympathy for religious expression makes him an appropriate sounding board for the state of modern spirituality.
