When I was four years old, my parents moved me from Los Angeles to northern Idaho, where I would live for thirteen years—plus a year-long stint in heavily Mormon Utah during first grade—until I moved away to New England for college. During this time, I was exposed to a poor and working-class, white-dominated culture in which evangelical Christianity was the reigning religion, … [Read more...]
How I Lost My Religion — And Temporarily My Empathy as a Judgmental Atheist
The fact that my father never came to mass with the rest of us didn’t bother me as a child. It registered in the same capacity as the fact that he worked night shifts or that Spanish was spoken in my house as often as English — distinctions between my home life and that of my peers, but nothing worth an existential crisis. I was seven or eight when I stood in our garage and … [Read more...]
