Reading Time: 10 minutes OnlySky · The mating minds of mass shooters | Dr. Hector Garcia This time it happened in Uvalde, Texas. A gunman burst into an elementary school, brandishing a weapon designed for combat, and tore our most precious human treasures to pieces. Some of the 19 corpses of nine, ten, and eleven-year-olds that he left strewn […]
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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 inReproductive rights
Do pregnant women have fewer rights than the dead?
Reading Time: 6 minutes My grandmother had a rare blood type. Every so often, she’d get a phone call from the local hospital: could she please give blood—now? This was in the days before blood could be frozen, so blood of a rare type was rarely on hand when someone needed it. So if a person had a rare […]
Posted inDeath & Dying
Will I go gentle?
Reading Time: 9 minutes OnlySky · Will I go gentle? | Dale McGowan If you haven’t visited The Death Clock, you really must. Enter your date of birth, height, weight and Body Mass Index, and the Death Clock spits out the day and date on which you’ll hear the galloping hooves of the pale horse. Mine is Tuesday, December […]
Posted inEthics
Against perfectionism
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be human is to be a work in progress. Human beings grow, change, and fail. That’s why we need compassion and forgiveness. We ought to give people a break, show some patience, and stop scolding one another. No one is perfect. This goes for other people and ourselves. But we remain strangely wedded to […]
Posted inLaw
How to speak originalist: The constitutional case for abortion rights
Reading Time: 13 minutes I am a cis woman who will probably never have an unplanned pregnancy. I’m asexual (ace). While some ace folk do have sex lives, for me and my body, barring an assault, an unplanned pregnancy is not in the cards. But empathy is something I have in abundance. As a child, I had a well-developed […]
Posted inHealth
In praise of humanity: How I survived my brain tumor without religion
Reading Time: 8 minutes The first sign something was wrong was during lunch with friends in my senior year of high school. I was eating French fries one moment, and the next I heard my friend Mindi saying, “Liz! Liz! Why did you say that?” She looked befuddled and concerned. I had no clue what she was talking about. […]
Posted inGen Z Rising
‘Bo Burnham: Inside’ retains magnetic hold on Gen Z, one year later
Reading Time: 7 minutes Return with me, if you will, to May 2021. Another summer was rounding the corner, and we were still locked inside of our homes. What many assumed at first would be a temporary lifestyle change had proven stubborn beyond our wildest fears. “This was supposed to be two weeks, not two years,” Meg (24) recalls. […]
Posted inPolitics
Government without gods: Where are the nonreligious public servants?
Reading Time: 5 minutes As a digital nomad, I’m currently experiencing life in a country that separates church and state and has no official religion (guaranteed by the Constitution) but still privileges Christianity. No, it’s not the US. It’s Colombia. On a recent trip to the grocery store in Medellín, I picked up a book by Alejandro Gaviria Uribe, […]
Posted inCulture
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes On May 14, 2022 at 2:30 pm local time, a shooter entered a building in an American city and took innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. This time the city was Buffalo, New York, but similar atrocities in a hundred US […]