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I grew up in a home where God was MIA. I don’t remember religion being mentioned except occasional references to some sort of God and a heaven. While my family was proud of their ethnicity, they didn’t practice the religion. Aside from the requisite Bar Mitvahs, they never set foot in a synagogue. My parents did worship at the altar of pleasure. They loved to party; they lived for the times they’d go out with their large, rowdy group, and dance and drink the night away. I’m not sure why my parents were such party animals. It was probably a...

John Travolta may be close to leaving the Church of Scientology, according to a new report. The actor - along with fellow Hollywood heavyweight Tom Cruise - is one of the most high-profile members of the controversial organisation, and has been for 34 years. But his faith in L Ron Hubbard's teachings is said to have been severely shaken by the death of his autistic son Jett following a seizure in January. Those close to Travolta – who only publicly acknowledged his son's autism after the 16-year-old's death – say that the tragedy has prompted the actor to question his...

A former champion surfer, Mary Setterholm suffered sexual abuse and turned to prostitution before finding a new path. Next month, she’ll begin the master’s of divinity program at Columbia University’s Union Theological Seminary. Real life stories of redemption and healing don't get much better than this. How long until Lifetime turns it into a movie? From the Los Angeles Times: It's another beautiful day in paradise and I'm out on the ocean, riding waves with a former national surfing champion and onetime prostitute who's about to join a seminary. Go ahead, try to name one other state where I could...

Do you believe in God? Really? And you're willing to admit it in public? Oops. Sorry, for a moment I slipped back into the arrogant Atheism of my youth. Before my parents had children, they decided to raise their kids in a secular home. We had gifts at Christmas time and chocolate covered matzoh during Passover, but there was no religion and certainly no God. When I was in grade school, God was just a kind of nondescript character who popped up in Little House on the Prairie books from time to time. He seemed like a decent enough fellow,...

People of all ages milled about the lobby of Newington’s Regal Cinemas at 9:30 a.m. on a recent Sunday, sipping coffee, munching doughnuts and chatting amiably. Some guests were in their 20s and arrived with friends, while others were whole families with parents and children. Some wore T-shirts that said “No Perfect People Allowed.” Rock music blasted through the sound system as a couple of hundred guests filed into one of the theaters and took their seats. The atmosphere of anticipation seemed more typical of a rock concert than a church service. And indeed, a six-piece rock band soon took...

The U.S. is a nation of religious drifters, with about half of adults restlessly switching faith affiliation at least once during their lives, a new survey has found. And the reasons behind all the swapping depend greatly on whether one grows up kneeling at Roman Catholic Mass, praying in a Protestant pew or occupied with nonreligious pursuits, according to a report issued Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. While Catholics are more likely to leave the church because they stopped believing its teachings, many Protestants are driven to trade one Protestant denomination or affiliation for another...

Imay be the most prayed-for atheist in America. Since my memoir, “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America — and Found Unexpected Peace,” was released last week, I’ve received scores of emails and phone calls assuring me that God hasn’t given up on me and that I’ve been put on various prayer lists around the world. So far, it’s not working. “Losing My Religion” details my journey from a gung-ho evangelical Christian who became a religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times (I thought God had answered my prayers) to a reluctant atheist because...

It started out as the dream job for a passionate Christian -- reporting about religion for a major newspaper. But writing about other people's religions ended up costing William Lobdell his own. The former Los Angeles Times reporter chronicled his soul-wrenching, emotion-laden journey in the recently released book "Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace," published by Harper Collins. Lobdell's spiritual journey led him from an uninspired Protestant childhood to agnosticism before he attended a weekend Christian men's retreat where he was "born again." Concerned with what he considered...

In 1988, 16-year-old Piyush Jindal totaled his father's new car a few weeks before graduating from Baton Rouge High School. Piyush -- who then and now prefers the nickname "Bobby" he adopted from "The Brady Brunch" sitcom -- had to assess more than fender damage with his parents. "Which God do you have to thank for your safety?" Mr. Jindal, now governor of Louisiana, remembers his mother, Raj, a practicing Hindu, inquiring after he escaped from the wreck. For the child of Punjabi immigrants who had announced his Christian beliefs the previous summer, the question was difficult. Twenty years later,...

The July 1st cover story in Newsweek details the pathway of Barack Obama's journey to faith. You can read the story here. Included in this story are audio clips of Barack Obama describing part of this journey. The audio is very noisy and hard to make out, as the plane is in mid-flight. Below is a transcript of the two passages for your perusal. "It wasn't an epiphany. You know, a bolt of lightning didn't strike me and Sunday, I said, "A-ha!" It was a more gradual process of...maybe that traced back to those times that I had spent in...

So much has been made about Barack Obama's religion. But what does he believe, and how did he arrive at those beliefs? In 1981 Barack Obama was 20 years old, a Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and tragedy. He enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school in Hawaii and had just spent two years "enjoying myself," as he puts it, at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In...

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama’s audition for the ultimate establishment job. “If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

Once a Jew and now a Roman Catholic, Roy Schoeman says his spiritual journey follows much the same transition as Christianity’s development from the seeds of Judaism. “I haven’t converted to another religion,” he explains. “The Catholic Church is the continuation of Judaism. They are one and the same religion — the thing is the religion changed with the incarnation (God coming to earth in the human form of Jesus). It was always going to change.” Schoeman, author of “Salvation Is From the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History From Abraham to the Second Coming,” will speak during...

If you can't find a religion that moves you, why not invent one? America has a long history of do-it-yourself spirituality going back at least far as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. And that desire to "roll your own religion" shows no sign of fading away. A September 2005 Newsweek poll found eight in 10 Americans do not believe any one faith is the sole path to salvation. So it's no surprise that some are weaving together strands from a variety of faiths to create their own personal religions. Wendi Moore-Buysee, a 36-year-old motivational speaker and life coach, is...

Pop star Madonna is reportedly close to dumping Kabbalah, a mystical form of Judaism that she has rather publicly embraced recently. Friends say the singer has talked of loosening her red Kabbalah wristband as she wearies of the religion, the Independent reported Sunday. She also is tired of the financial burdens associated with being a devotee and mindful, too, of the stress her interest in the Kabbalah has put on her marriage to Guy Ritchie. "The singer's links to the version of Kabbalah that she follows are so intimate now — personally and financially — that withdrawal would be difficult,...

Thomas Isaak is Muslim; his family is Roman Catholic. Allison McIntosh goes to Jewish temple; she attended a Christian church in high school. Gerda de Klerk is an atheist; she was raised conservative Protestant. These students are among many who change their religious beliefs while in college. "[College] makes someone realize, 'Maybe I need a religious foundation,'" said pre-business freshman Anthony Fierro, who grew up Protestant but was baptized into the Catholic Church in April. According to the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, "Adolescence and young adulthood is ... the life stage when religious conversion is most likely...

FINDING MY RELIGION: Former Christian Brian Flemming has made a documentary arguing that the biblical story of Jesus Christ is a myth In his film "The God Who Wasn't There," Brian Flemming questions the very existence of Jesus Christ, a premise that might leave some hard-core Christians convinced this former Christian is going to hell. In the film, Flemming argues that the biblical Jesus is a myth, a legend based on allegorical stories that were never supposed to be seen as historical accounts. It's a provocative claim but not without precedent. Many scholars have questioned the historicity of the Jesus...

Feminist icon and former Al Gore sartorian guru Naomi Wolf has found Christ "Feminist icon and former Al Gore sartorian guru Naomi Wolf has found Christ. I'm not comfortable commenting on her conversion, except to say I wish her well. But I do want to quote an account from the Glasgow Sunday Herald:" Revered as a feminist icon, then slated for being an intellectual lightweight, Naomi Wolf has experienced highs as well as lows … and then she met Jesus "'I wasn’t myself in this visual experience,” she continues. “I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and...

Wolf first made a name for herself with "The Beauty Myth," a 1991 feminist critique of feminine stereotypes. Admired by some and ridiculed by others, Wolf has since written on everything from motherhood to promiscuity. During the 2000 election campaign, she famously advised Al Gore to work on being an "alpha male," and her most recent book, a folksy memoir about her father, left many erstwhile fans clearing their throats in embarrassment. Maybe that's what pushed Wolf toward Jesus. In an interview published last weekend in Scotland's Glasgow Sunday Herald, Wolf announced that she had been struggling with a midlife...

In the United States a growing number of white people are discovering their Native American roots. Some are doing so for financial gain, but most are just looking for the meaning of life. A few weeks, Betty Baker was still just a white housewife. But now the woman, with her piercing blue eyes, goes by the name "Little Dove" --and has jettisoned her apron for an elaborate deerskin dress. "I am an Indian and I've sensed this my whole life," says the 48-year-old Baker, who lives in a wooden house on the edge of the small town of Pinson, Alabama....

A rolled-away stone gathers Moss: from Judaism to CatholicismHow does a Jewish person of faith convert to Catholicism? To judge by Rosalind Moss’s eighteen-year journey into the Church, the answer is . . . very slowly. Raised in Brooklyn, in a conservative Jewish home with one older brother and one younger sister, Moss never even considered that she would ever be anything other than Jewish. “It’s what I was. We were God’s people. That was my identity,” says Moss. “We waited for the Messiah to come,” adds Moss, “but He never did.” As a teenager, her brother David became an...

From First Baptist to the First Century: A Spiritual Journey By Clark Carlton In June of 1986, I attended the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention as a "messenger" from my home church. The temperature in Atlanta was hot, but not nearly as hot as the temperature inside the World Congress Center as Baptist "moderates" tried in vain to prevent a fundamentalist takeover of the Convention. As I sat in the convention center, I became convinced of one thing: the Southern Baptist Convention was in dire need of a reformation. I longed for the advent of a new Martin...

From her longtime political activism to her Oscar-winning acting, Jane Fonda has never done anything halfheartedly, and she brings this characteristic intensity to her faith. When she talks about "feeling the presence of the Almighty," her view of Jesus, and the way she prays, her voice wells from deep within her chest. You may know this voice from her films (among dozens of others: "Barbarella," "Klute," "On Golden Pond," and currently in theaters, "Monster-in-Law"), or from her aerobics videos ("feel the burn!"), or from film reels from the sixties, when she spoke out against the Vietnam War. Fonda, now 67,...

To our mild surprise our daughter has expressed an interest in attending church. Not, as Jerry Seinfeld would say, that there is anything wrong with that. We've just sort of fallen out of the habit and have been spending Sunday mornings sleeping in, going to the dog park and reading the newspaper. But we certainly weren't busy, so we've set off on a small tour of local churches, picking them pretty much at random. We haven't gone to any synagogues or mosques, so we can't say that we are making a comprehensive survey, but the diversity among the Protestant choices...

Okay, so the libs whine and moan about "taking back God" from the Right and how they can be people with faith and liberal at the same time. So what do they look for in a church? Here's some insight from DU (as usual, it's all in their own words): Tux (1000+ posts) Tue Jul-26-05 09:16 AM Original message UU issue I attend a UU church but, lately, I've been hating it. I love UUism however. My church is mostly middle class baby boomers with very few working class people. Each time we have a discussion is Adult Forum or...

New Take on Ancient Jewish Spiritual Teachings Has Drawn Celebrities and Criticism Jun. 17, 2005 - Most people don't have a clue what the spiritual movement Kabbalah is, though they may be aware it has something to do with a parade of stars from Madonna to Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher to Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton wearing red strings on their wrists. Kabbalah has become a multimillion-dollar empire with more than 40 branches all over the world. But is the Kabbalah of the stars the same Kabbalah that Jewish men in Israel have been quietly studying for...

Intersection of identities LBGT community members merge spirituality, sexuality By AMY DAVIS The State News Only two years ago, the thought of stepping into a church was enough to send Christopher Greene-Szmadzinski into a panic attack. With a racing heart and clammy hands, he would often stand outside the church doors unable to breathe and unable to enter. He said he experienced paralyzing fears that people, "acting in the name of God," would hate him because he is gay. "It was horrible," the 2004 MSU graduate said. "That was not my idea of Christianity." It was enough to make him...

Most young Americans strongly believe in having choices, an attitude that is likely to shape their identification with traditional religions, a study says. The big question is how traditional religions will respond to a new generation of Americans who value choice, informality and personal expression, he said.

WASHINGTON -- Today's colleges are hotbeds of religiosity and prayer where compassion may be on its first major campus upswing since the 1960s, according to a survey released yesterday by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. The poll of 112,232 freshmen at 236 colleges and universities found eight in 10 saying they attend religious services, believe in God and care about spirituality. More than two-thirds pray.

Surveys: Young Adults Search Spiritually By JUSTIN POPE AP Education Writer April 13, 2005, 11:42 AM EDT They are often tarnished with labels like "self-absorbed" and "materialistic." But young adults are actively engaged with spiritual questions, two new surveys suggest, even if they are not necessarily exploring them through traditional religious practice. One of the surveys, of more than 100,000 freshmen who started college last fall, found four in five reporting an interest in spirituality, with three in four searching for meaning or purpose in life, and the same fraction discussing the meaning of life with friends. The incoming freshmen...

My oldest daughter doesn’t believe in God anymore, so she says. She told me this recently at Starbucks.Starbucks is the place we go to talk. The house is the place where we do the daddy/daughter thing. I enforce tough boundaries, which is my job, and she pushes hard against them, which is hers. Sometimes we get into passionate arguments about this, which can be a strain. But when I take her to Starbucks, it’s like we become two different people. We sit down and she starts talking. She talks to me about everything at Starbucks.So I like taking her to Starbucks,...

It started with a faxed note to then-Gov. John G. Rowland's office, an invitation to prayer in the days following the December 2003 press conference in which he lied about improvements to his Litchfield cottage. "I just felt really bad for him. ...I hate to see anyone in the public eye under that kind of pressure," recalled the Rev. Will Marotti, pastor of the evangelical New Life Church in Meriden. "So I said, `If you're interested in getting together for prayer, I'm available.' No strings attached. No media. Wasn't looking for a photo op. Just prayer." Rowland accepted, and the...

Most teens embrace traditional path to spirituality FAITH By DAVID CRUMM Knight Ridder Newspapers As soon as I heard the latest news about teenagers and God, I was eager to ask kids whether they think the scholars got it right this time. Here's the news: A national study of teens' religious lives was released this week by scholars at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their key finding is that American kids, far from being rebellious or anti-religion, are quite traditional in their faith. Only 3 percent of the 3,370 randomly selected teenagers in the study said they...

Survey finds spirituality influencing many students' political and social views By the time Laura Conrad arrived at Carnegie Mellon University for her freshman year, she had lost interest "in all that religious stuff" from her Jewish day school background in Newton, Mass. But a funny thing happened to Conrad on her way through college: She became more religious. And she discovered that her self-described "liberal" views on politics and morals were strengthened by her spirituality. "I don't think you can separate those things because they're part of who you are," said Conrad, 22, who graduated this past spring. "If anything,...

Esther, the pop artist formerly known as 'Madonna'Following in the footsteps of Hollywood divas Gwyneth Paltrow, Demi Moore and Winona Ryder, pop-star Madonna has remade herself at London's Kabbalah Centre, home of the trendy crash course in ancient Jewish gnosticism. In fact, the Queen of Pop has changed her name to Esther, she says, in order to rid herself of any 'negative energy.' Carrie Tomko examines what's behind this New Age sucker-religion--and what's not.Kabbalah, cabala, quabala, qabalah--those are some, but not necessarily all of the possible spellings of the new old religion that America pop-artist formerly known as Madonna has...

One on One: Matter of chemistry By RUTHIE BLUMFor Sarah Strikovsky, what began as a career move became a journey to Judaism "You know you're not allowed to ask me about my conversion," says Sarah (Olga) Strikovsky, smiling sweetly. "But I guess I'm allowed to volunteer the information." This, she explains, is because a convert is not supposed to be reminded of his or her past. Advertisement Strikovsky, 36, a chemist at a pharmaceutical company in Rehovot, made aliya from Nizhny Novgorod in the former Soviet Union 12 years ago with her husband and daughter. Since then, her life has...

Judging by most of what you read, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is the most dangerous, disgusting movie of all time. Even if you haven't seen it, you know that it's a gore-filled splatterfest with anti-Semitic overtones, that Mel Gibson's father is a flat-out Holocaust-denier, and that Mel himself is a sinister marketing genius. The movie has been condemned by most reviewers. This paper's Rick Groen said it "comes perilously close to the pornography of violence." Frank Rich, The New York Times cultural writer, has been flaying Mr. Gibson's movie for weeks. "A joy ride for sadomasochists" was...

John Debney is used to writing movie scores for comedies like "Liar, Liar" and "Bruce Almighty," but he admits that composing the score for Mel Gibson's powerful movie "The Passion of the Christ" was the most difficult assignment of his life. For it turned out to be a battle between good and evil that he had never experienced before in some 20 years in Hollywood. "I don't think I will ever be given the opportunity to write again for a movie as powerful as this one," he said during a recent media interview in Beverly Hills. "I was stretched every...

From American Airlines

FORT WORTH - The chief executive of American Airlines has apologized after a pilot suggested that non-Christian passengers on a recent flight discuss the faith with Christians. Gerard Arpey said the airline has grounded the pilot with pay while executives investigate the incident. Arpey said he apologized to anyone who was offended by the pilot's comments on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. "Let me assure you that we take this very seriously and are conducting a thorough investigation," Arpey wrote in a letter to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, an advocacy group that monitors...

Pilots learn to speak with care, but still be themselves By KIRSTEN TAGAMI The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Published on: 02/11/04 When he was hired as a Delta Air Lines pilot 18 years ago, Bob Morus got some basic advice about talking on the intercom: speak slowly and avoid jargon or words that might upset passengers, such as "thunderstorm." No one told him not to talk about Jesus. They didn't have to. "That's just common sense," said the 47-year-old Morus. Passengers on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York were alarmed last weekend when the pilot asked all passengers...

Guess who scored the interview with the Christian airline pilot? On his first flight after a short-term missions trip to Costa Rica, American Airlines captain Roger Findiesen flipped on the Public Address system in the cabin and explained that flight 34 was second in line for takeoff. Then he continued on a personal note. "I just got back from a mission," he said. "You know, they say about half of Americans are Christians. I'd just like the Christians on board to raise their hands." After a pause, he went on. "I want everyone else on board to look around at...

NEW YORK (Talon News) -- A pilot asked passengers on an American Airlines flight to raise their hands if they were Christians, telling them they were "crazy" if they weren't, some of the passengers said Monday. Passenger Jen Dorsey told CNN, "We were just at the beginning of our flight. The pilot came on to greet everyone and give his comments for the morning, and he said he'd recently been on a mission trip, and he'd like all the Christians to please raise their hands." Also speaking on CNN, passenger Karla Austin said the pilot commented, "'If you are a...

Fort Worth-based American Airlines is investigating an unorthodox speech to passengers by an on-duty pilot over the weekend. Many passengers felt the pilot crossed a line when asking Christians on board the flight to identify themselves before the plane took off. Passengers on the cross-country flight from Los Angeles to New York certainly got more than a movie and meal. The pilot, who had just returned from a mission trip to Central America, asked Christians to raise their hands. "I thought (it) was very bizarre," passenger Jen Dorsey said. "And then he said, 'look around and everyone who doesn't have...

<p>NEW YORK — An American Airlines (search) pilot asked Christians on his flight to identify themselves and suggested the non-Christians discuss the faith with them, the airline said.</p> <p>The case was handed over to the airline's personnel department for an investigation, spokesman Tim Wagner (search) said Sunday.</p>

New York-AP -- American Airlines says one of its pilots asked Christians on his flight to identify themselves and discuss their faith with non-Christian passengers. Airline Spokesman Tim Wagner says American Flight 34 was headed from Los Angeles to New York on Friday when the pilot asked Christians on board to raise their hands. The pilot told the airline that he then suggested that other passengers use the flight time to talk to the Christians about their faith, and added that he'd be available for discussion at the end of the flight. While the pilot had just returned to work...

George W. Bush was born into an Episcopal family and raised as a Presbyterian, but he is now a Methodist. Howard Dean was baptized Catholic, and raised as an Episcopalian. He left the church after it opposed a bike trail he was championing, and now he is a Congregationalist, though his kids consider themselves Jewish. Wesley Clark's father was Jewish. As a boy he was Methodist, then decided to become a Baptist. In adulthood he converted to Catholicism, but he recently told Beliefnet .com, "I'm a Catholic, but I go to a Presbyterian church." What other country on earth would...

I read with interest Gregory Korgeski's Dec. 13 counterpoint decrying creationism and fundamentalism. After learning that no "reputable" scientists endorse creationism, I learned that fundamentalists who take their sacred texts literally are dangerous to the well-being of society. These arguments are self-serving in that they admit no evidence to the contrary. In Korgeski's thought, being a creationist makes you disreputable and being a fundamentalist makes you a likely menace to society. I was raised in a church that taught that the Bible was mostly mythology, that there were no miracles, and that evolution was true. Seeing no need for religion,...

After analyzing more than 10,000 personal interviews conducted during 2003, researcher George Barna identified four critical outcomes that emerged from those interactions regarding faith and lifestyle. Millions of Americans Are Spiritually Satisfied – and Confused Contradictions and confusion permeate the spiritual condition of the nation. Studies conducted during 2003 indicate, for instance, that while 84% of adults say their religious faith is very important in their own life, 66% also say that religion is losing influence in the nation. While people are clearly spending less time involved in religious practices such as Bible reading, prayer, and participating in church activities,...

WASHINGTON Forty years ago today, as the world mourned the assassination of an American president, the passing of the 20th century's most influential Christian writer was hardly noticed: Clive Staples Lewis, professor of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, died on Nov. 22, 1963. In his ability to nurture the faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer. Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult life, an experience that may have helped immunize him from the religious cliché, the reluctance to ask hard questions, the self-righteousness of the zealot. "Mr. Lewis possesses the...