Reading Time: 3 minutes Craig Gross, pastor of Christian Cannabis, has finally revealed a revenue source, launching a product line featuring joints and edibles.
Spirituality & Ritual
Posted inSexuality
How tantra connects sexuality and spirituality
Reading Time: 3 minutes While most Westerners associate tantra with sex, tantric touching provides a way to delve into your erotic side in a way that’s sensual, though not necessarily sexual in nature. Tantra is a centuries-old, highly refined method for self-realization that originated in Northern India. The type of tantra familiar to most Westerners, however, is closer to […]
Posted inLGBTQ
House of Our Queer: Community organizing for the queer spirit
Reading Time: 6 minutes For too long, spiritual wellness and religious communities have been largely run by institutional leaders who center white, cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous people. Because of this, many LGBTQ+ people like me have experienced pain from our religious backgrounds or have felt cut off from a spiritual or faith-based practice. This is a problem because spirituality—rooted in […]
Posted inResearch
A bridge too far: The failure to capture ‘spiritual fitness’ in the US military
Reading Time: 3 minutes After massive resources have been spent trying to assess spiritual fitness in the military, scholars now admit it is not a meaningful concept.
Posted inCulture
This pastor wants you to get high and find Jesus
Reading Time: 2 minutes Winter solstice, spring equinox, virgin birth, holiday trees, morality—all examples of things that predate Christianity but have been taken over, adopted, or encroached upon by Christians. Guess what… they’re not quite finished yet. Pastor Craig Gross, once known as the “porn pastor” who founded an anti-pornography church called XXX Church, has his sights set on […]
Posted inLGBTQ
Oscar Wilde’s ‘Confraternity of the Faithless’
Reading Time: 6 minutes It is sad – one half of the world does not believe in God and the other half does not believe in me. — OSCAR WILDE On the 7th of July in 1896, Anglo-Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde was incarcerated at Reading Prison for “gross indecency”—what would now be simply described as gay sex. He […]
Posted inDeep Dive
The Allentown ‘Black Mass’ of 1985
Reading Time: 4 minutes When The Satanic Temple (TST) brought its first annual SatanCon to Scottsdale, Arizona last week, many detractors said they were going to perform a black mass and (through whatever supernatural mechanism) bring harm to the city. Black masses aren’t really a thing People have been doing Satanic rituals like the ones done by TST and […]
Posted inCulture
SatanCon 0: The truth laid bare
Reading Time: 3 minutes SatanCon 0 was a historic event. In my vocation, it is exceedingly rare to be a party to such an occasion. Inside the hotel grounds and convention, everything was entirely pleasant and jovial. Many of the attendees were reuniting with good friends they hadn’t seen in almost a decade. Others had been online friends for […]
Posted inSpirituality & Ritual
A Catholic priest resigned in an absurd scandal involving invalid baptisms
Reading Time: 3 minutes Father Andres Arango said “We baptize” instead of “I baptize” when performing the ritual, and that grave mistake cost him his job.
Posted inSpirituality & Ritual
Anxiety and fear fuels religion’s enduring power
Reading Time: 5 minutes In my childhood and youth, I was often reminded that Christianity had nothing whatsoever to do with superstition. In the back of my mind, by my teens at least, I went along with the traditions of my Anglican “tribal” community but found difficulty in identifying a borderline between beliefs accepted in my own, or any […]