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Year of Sundays

This post is for my wise friend David, who, though he never adopted Judaism, remains my rabbi without a cause. Rabbi Michael Z. Cahana, who makes angsting about the meaning of existence look easy — even downright fun!   People usually join a religion for one primary reason: to find answers to life’s most nagging…

Call us gluttons for punishment. But this weekend, it wasn’t enough to fill up on one church service. We had to go back for seconds. And so, on Friday evening, we shlepped over to the Reformed Jewish synagogue of Congregation Beth Israel in NW Portland for a Shabbat (Sabbath) Service; Sunday morning found us dragging…

Since we’re new to beliefnet.com, I figured it might be a good idea for us to introduce ourselves. So, HI! I’m Amanda P. Westmont. This is the bio Joel wrote for me when we started this project back in January: Amanda has been a professional blogger since 2003, producing content for Disney’s Family.com, as well…

Each week, Amanda and I visit a different church, sitting quietly, taking notes and—if granted permission to do so—discreetly taking a few pictures. As journalists, we tend not to participate in their rituals, maintaining an (ahem) “objective” distance from the service. We’re just flies on the wall. Okay, cynical, atheistic flies who know where all…

This is how it began: over a month ago, I informed Joel that I’d Googled “2011 Jehovah’s Witness Memorial” and that the smackdown was happening on Sunday, April 17th. “Good. But let’s go somewhere well out of the way, so I can partake without anyone seeing me.” I honestly had no idea what the hell…

This was my childhood Kingdom Hall. Originally it had windows through which I could watch airplanes leaving contrails in the sky during the meeting. Since then, Kingdom Halls have been required to seal up their windows, one of dozens of changes they’ve made over the years to isolate their members from society. From an early…

When Amanda and I began our Year of Sundays project, it was inevitable that one day we would visit the Jehovah’s Witnesses, my old religion. Inevitable, that is, in the way jail time inevitably follows sentencing. Seven years, 415 therapy sessions and one major loss of faith later, that dreaded day has come. To describe…

All right. I admit it. I blew the experiment. Normally, Amanda and I try to reach out to church officials to let them know that we’ll be visiting their service. But this time around, we felt that if we wanted to get the people at the Portland chapter of the Church of Scientology to talk…

If Scientology is the religion where nothing is true unless you personally have observed it to be true, then I can say with confidence: THESE PEOPLE ARE BATSHITOODLES. But let me start from the beginning and walk you through our two hours of Scientological insanity. Is it me or does their website say they hold…

Yep, we went there.  Today we took a 75 million year trip to the the Galactic Confederacy just for you. Stop back in a day or two and we’ll tell you all about it. Just as soon as we remove these annoying implants from our brains.
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