Reading Time: 3 minutes If major religious differences doom a marriage, mine should have been toe-tagged at the altar. Our religious differences were arguably as major as they could get. By the time I approached that altar in a century-old church in San Francisco, I’d identified as an atheist for 15 years. I read the Bible critically at 13 […]
Parenting & Family
Exploring the world of family and parenting from a secular, nonreligious perspective.
Posted inParenting & Family
Don’t ‘be fruitful and multiply’: Group urging people to stop having kids gains public support
Reading Time: 5 minutes Gay bars ain’t what they used to be—exclusively gay. In my hometown, the popular Spanish resort of Benidorm, there are around 30 LGBT+ venues, at least a dozen of which are clustered within a very small area. On any night of the week, you will find heterosexual couples in these intimate bars, happily mingling with […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
The death of a useful monster
Reading Time: 3 minutes High in the Pennines in the north of England, in the gold-brown water of the River Tees, lives a creature named Peg Powler. She’s a mermaid, kind of, but she’s no Ariel. Peg is a river hag, with green hair and skin and a row of jagged teeth. And unlike Ariel, she lives not to make children […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
Sleep tight or die trying
Reading Time: 3 minutes Kids raised in traditional Guarani homes may forget many things about their upbringing, but they never forget Jasy Jateré.
Posted inParenting & Family
Racing against the speed of light
Reading Time: 4 minutes Our family has a longstanding relationship with the speed of light. We take care never to exceed it, for one thing. But there’s more than that. As a kid, I had a lot of light-related fascinations—that light had a speed at all, for starters, and that it was so unimaginably fast, yet also finite and […]
Posted inParenting & Family
My 6-year-old’s best friend invited him to church—and the church paid him to do it
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last weekend, my youngest son invited his best friend to come over and play. They had a great time. They played video games, built some Lego creations, and somehow made enough slamming and banging noises throughout the house to make me think we invited his entire first-grade class over. But when they took a break […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Why I let my son read a children’s book by Rush Limbaugh
Reading Time: 3 minutes First off, I didn’t want to. Let’s get that out of the way right now. If you haven’t heard of it—and I’d be a little jealous if you haven’t—the skid mark on the underwear that is talk radio wrote a book series of children’s historical fiction. The main character is called…wait for it…Rush Revere. Thank […]
Posted inParenting & Family
How my Catholic mother saved me from purity culture
Reading Time: 5 minutes As my mom recounted the day she got her period at her Catholic school, my eyes grew wide and my jaw sunk closer to the floor. I hung on every word as if it were the scariest campfire story I had ever heard. I was around 11 at the time, and absolutely terrified. A lot […]
Posted inParenting & Family
I’m nonreligious, and I kind of hope reincarnation is a real thing
Reading Time: 2 minutes Like a good little Evangelical, I spent much of my childhood worried about going to heaven. Though, it wasn’t all bad. The idea that I’d get to see my little sister who passed away as a baby was comforting. When I left Christianity in my early adult years, I had no trouble ditching the Bible, […]
Posted inParenting & Family
Marriage advice to a half-believing couple: Hang on to each other
Reading Time: 8 minutes Not too long ago, a friend of mine unsubscribed from the Christian faith. His wife did nothing of the sort, however, and now she is worried about how their three small children will turn out. Their extended families are both devoutly evangelical, so you can guess how they feel about my friend’s apostasy. Sometimes the […]