I can’t remember when I first wanted to get a tattoo, but it was sometime in high school. I wanted a yin yang on my ankle. In college, I finally got it, but at the last moment, I changed its placement to my lower back. It was amazing. It was transcendent. It was painful. It [...]

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Two recent news stories impressed upon me the fact that I will always be some kind of Catholic. Even if it’s ex-Catholic. My first step in rejecting religion was exploring my own. This started as what I later knew to be feminist critique of Catholicism. The more I learned, the more it seemed clear to [...]

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said the friend sitting next to me at Christmas Eve dinner, with a vague look of disgust on her face, like I’d just admitted to enjoying self-flagellation. I was in the company of a number of people who had escaped Western religion (all some form of Christianity) and landed firmly in Eastern religion (all some [...]

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WaPo’s On Faith asks its panelists Does religion empower women? This is one of the few On Faiths that I’ll probably read each response to. I’m looking forward to the Christian/Catholic answer, which I’ve found generally centers around “having kids is empowering!!1!” There is some wonderful evidence for non-child-based empowerment which I’ve yet to hear [...]

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This is the trailer for a new movie, a Jihad for Love. I thought it was apropos given Prop 8′s drawing ever nearer. It is a story about the struggle of gay Muslims. I have added it to my Netflix queue, but if it comes out in the greater LA area, I’ll prolly get a [...]

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I did some bad things during my stint as a Mormon missionary in Japan.  I’d like to repent of one of them right now. Some of my Japanese friends confided deep, personal spiritual experiences with me.  In several cases I coopted their experiences for my own ends, and using my words, contorted them so that [...]

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There is a place within atheism for mystical experience.  By this I mean those sublime moments in which we feel a deep awe and a sense of connection to humanity and the universe.  I’ve had a number of such instances throughout my life, and I treasure the lasting sense of inspiration, peace and sense of [...]

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When I was in high school, if I wanted to do anything on a Sunday (missing church), I’d have to go to Saturday evening mass. Since the English Community only had one service a week, and since it was 50k away, I’d walk down to the local Catholic Church and sit in the way back (eventually it did occur to me that I didn’t have to go there, just be gone for the right general amount of time, but I still usually hung out around there). I found it much easier to tune out mass in German, so I often spent the hour or so thinking Deep Thoughts. One of the major Deep Thoughts was of chaos & order.

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by Kathleen McGowan When walking through the airport last year sometime, I ran out of airplane activities (I’m somewhat limited these days) and found myself in an airport bookstore. Two books caught my eye: Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse and the Expected One, by Kathleen McGowan. Both appeared to be (in the little time I had [...]

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The three major monotheistic religions all have holy books that date to a minimum of 1400 years ago. This makes the relevance of these supposed Divine rules somewhat suspect. A Jewish cartoon that I enjoy reading has an interesting take on Jewish bioethics, including links under the cartoon to discussions of same. Among some of [...]

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