Sasha sits down with author and adventurer JEDIDIAH JENKINS to explore a human custom that can be fun and games—or life and death. We’ll also hear from historian JORDAN GIRARDIN about the surprising origins of the custom, and the ways we’re still not getting it quite right after 500 years of trying.
Travel
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The Breaking of Bread.
Reading Time: 10 minutes I’ve always been fascinated with how people construct communities for themselves. Certainly many atheists have wrestled with how to create communities without the trappings and shackles of untrue supernatural claims. Well, this past weekend I got to enjoy one way that people are finding to connect with each other without religion.
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Flexibility, as Measured on Horseback.
Reading Time: 9 minutes I wanted to mention one thing that happened during those horse-riding lessons before we draw back the curtain on them for a while, and that is the value of being flexible about your plans. It came to pass, near the end of the lessons, that it was a very hot day. I’d arrived for my […]
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Horses are Bastards.
Reading Time: 9 minutes This story is about how I learned to ford a river and finally came to some truths about my old religious indoctrination–and finally figured out that horses are bastards. This was oh, about twelve years ago. I’d just moved to this mountainous state full of ranches and by wild serendipity happened to run across a […]
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The Dirk Gently Method of Navigation.
Reading Time: 7 minutes This is a short story about getting lost and found again. A long time ago, I was driving through Omaha, Nebraska (as opposed to Omaha, Colorado, I guess) for the very first time. I was trying to find a particular Japanese restaurant there that I’d been told was very good, but roadwork had made mincemeat […]
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Exiting Far East: Falling Apart.
Reading Time: 13 minutes As I look back at my experience living abroad, brief as it was, one thing that really springs out at me is how secular Japan was. It might have Shinto shrines in its shopping arcades and monasteries sprinkled around its urban residential neighborhoods, its television might have the occasional spiritual anime character, but essentially its […]
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Exiting Far East: The Standards of Beauty (Really Aren’t).
Reading Time: 9 minutes Jazz played on the stereo, the notes mingling with nickel-sized snowflakes blowing in through the open windows. I was at a party, one of the first I’d ever attended. I knelt at the coffee table, an unexpected orange in my hands, while a Japanese girl I didn’t know knelt beside me. She was gazing at […]
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Exiting Far East: The Outsider Test.
Reading Time: 14 minutes Today we’re going to talk about that startling moment when I realized that I applied very different standards of critical evaluation to my own religion compared to other religions–a moment that, ironically, could only happen for me when plunked down in a culture that totally didn’t care about Christianity. John Loftus, a well-educated and experienced […]
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Exiting Far East: A Mother’s Love.
Reading Time: 6 minutes Today, on Mother’s Day, let me show you what real love feels like to experience. And let me show you how it differs from what toxic Christians have redefined as love.
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Exiting Far East: Food, Glorious Food.
Reading Time: 10 minutes When I was younger, I always had a very complicated relationship with food, and moving to a very foreign country brought that relationship into sharp focus. It’s very true that the last place in an immigrant’s house to assimilate is the pantry, and this old saying applies equally to an emigrant’s house. I was surprised […]