Tag: religion

Poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib reflects on why he still fasts during Ramadan.

A new mother struggles to make sense of intergenerational trauma, biological memory and the guilty privilege of passing as white even though she is Jewish.

Writer Sarah Betancourt explores her connections to Espiritismo and Santeria.

Lessons of race, blackness and power from a self-described nerdy Black girl.

How one woman struggled to make sense of the exorcisms she witnessed as a child.

The African American son of a white mother, Santi Elijah Holley revisits Hannukahs past with his Jewish forebears.

Elizabeth Harper traveled to Bonito, Italy to visit Zio Vincenzo. Long-lost relative? No, miracle-working mummified corpse of a nameless Neapolitan.

At the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, miracles (supposedly) happen every day.

As an 8-year-old with OCD, Howard Lovy hoped his magical thinking might persuade God to end the Yom Kippur War.

A young woman reconnects with her family’s ancestral home.

When a group of Sufis wanted to build a large sanctuary in the California hills, locals pushed back and the town grew divided.

Father James Martin wants to change the relationship between the queer Catholic community and the Church.

To scientologist Elisabeth Moss, The Handmaid’s Tale speaks to the importance of separation of church and state, rather than the dangers of religious extremism.

Although a lot about Donald Trump seemed antithetical to conservative Christianity, he got a larger percentage of the Evangelical vote than Bush, Sr., Reagan, or Carter. Why?

Growing up in the fundamentalist Christian “Quiverfull” movement, Hännah Ettinger saw her own story in Atwood’s vision.

Kelsey Munger shares the story of a childhood spent being vigilant against the demons, witches, and werewolves her parents believed were stalking their family.

A vast range of political, historical, and religious influences went into Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, including one unexpected logo.

Sarah Posner introduces some of the main players in “alt-right Christianity” in her exploration of American Evangelicals’ embrace of Trump.

Mehreen Kasana reveals the many true and beautiful meanings that you’ve never heard of behind “takbir” — the expression of Muslim faith, “Allahu Akbar” — literally, “God is great.”

Andrew Curry’s thorough history of our relationship to and use of alcohol is informative, enlightening, and just plain entertaining.

At The Walrus, Nadim Roberts profiles a Canadian imam who is working to counter radicalization with knowledge.

In the two years since I compiled the first installation of “The Lives of Nuns,” Autostraddle wrote about queer nuns in history, Racked shadowed (fake) nuns growing marijuana, and The Huffington Post reported on a nun’s murder and the students who want the truth. Those stories and more are included below. Seclude yourself and read.

Not everyone buys into a sky-god with a long white beard, a serious and all-knowing mien, capable of rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad. But it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that God, as worshipped in most of the world, is remarkably humanoid, widely perceived as a great, big, scary, wilful, yet nourishing and […]

The radical women of early Christianity.

Jeff Sharlet spends a day with the sexually pure teens of Battlecry Honor Academy, and learns that renouncing your sins doesn’t mean redacting their memories.

Dan Shewan writes about the business of exorcism for Pacific Standard.

Over at The Kernel, Jesse Hicks has put together a fascinating account of the Church of Scientology’s relationship with the Internet. So, how has a notoriously secretive and hierarchical organization dealt with the world’s most “open and radically nonhierarchical platform for communication”? Not well. Scientology’s antagonistic relationship to the Internet dates back to the web’s early days: when an early […]

Here are nine stories about modern-day sex education and our history with bad sex ed classes.

Surprisingly, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and a staunch secularist, opposed pork consumption. He viewed eating pork as a recent Jewish diasporic cultural development that Israelis needed to shed in order to forge a united Israeli identity. In 1962 the Knesset officially outlawed the breeding and selling of pigs, except for in Arab-Christian areas, […]

I admire author Thanaa El-Naggar for staking a place for herself in her faith, despite opposition from conservative adherents and ignorant detractors.