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 they […]

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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 […]

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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 to […]

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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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Those few of you who have seen me online know that I have many “available” messages including “Heretic”, “Portable Pagan” (my other computer had me as simply “Pagan”), “Sacralicious”, “2nd person of the Divine Trinity”, and the above, among others less incendiary. I had this particular one up and a friend of mine, who is […]

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I’ve had two major life-changing spiritual experiences. The first, at seventeen, helped propel me into the LDS Church. The second, some seventeen years later, eased me back out. The former was dominated by a sense of beauty, connection and purpose; because I was investigating the LDS Church at the time, I understood […]

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In which an struggling believer stumbles into spiritual darkness.
The most profound spiritual experiences tend to be described in positive, glowing terms. People talk of being saved, of “seeing the light,” of feeling love, or of feeling a deep sense of connection to God, the universe, to humanity. I don’t want to speak about […]

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One of my missionary companions told me that whenever he read the Book of Mormon, he experienced “a dark feeling” inside. As I’ve read about the spiritual experiences of mystics like St. John of the Cross (who gave us the concept of the “dark night of the soul”) and Simone Weil and atheists/agnostics like […]

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So: here’s a question. More than one of my sisters (all very conservative, very Catholic), goes to a chiropractor/nutritionist who I refer to as the Witch Doctor. She has diagnosed many allergies in many of my nieces and nephews and…neph-dogs? She energy tests what she prescribes to make sure it’s what the body needs and […]

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