WaPo requests some marketing information to read their links.
I must also warn you that these two articles may induce severe eye-rolling, so read at your own risk.
A Church Away from Church, on home altars:
"Organized religion . . . gives you the recipe for God, but it overlooks the kitchen and the tools, the onions and the garlic," she said.
In addition to her pantheon of divine females, Lacerda's altar includes candles, incense and a bowl of sand lined with dimes. The sand is from Hawaii and was consecrated by a Native American spiritual leader, she said. As for the dimes, she calls them "my 10-cent miracles" -- coins that fate has dropped in her path at key moments since she immigrated to the United States as a teenager. One of them washed up on a beach at her feet while she was praying.
Sometimes she adds flowers, a rock or a feather to her altar.
"God can be a very personal aspect of who you are every moment," said Lacerda, who lives near Ellicott City. "An altar is a response to that."
By contrast, altars in churches are impersonal, she said: "The altar is for the priests. It's not for you."
Of the four people who were profiled with their home altars for this article, only one, a Buddhist born in Tibet (a real Buddhist, not a fake Hollywood Buddhist) is really working within a faith tradition. The other three were all fallen-away Catholics (though one had returned to Pentecostal Christianity), all doing some kind "do-it-yourself" spirituality (I mean, really, are home altars that common among Pentecostals?)
An Orthodox theologian got a couple of quotes, but no practicing Catholics (Eastern or Western) or Orthodox were profiled for this article. The article does suggest that some Mexican Catholics are recovering their tradition of home altars, but patronizingly treats that trend as an expression of ethnic pride, not as an expression of Christian belief. As is usual for the WaPo, Christians who practice Christian traditions out of actual belief in Christ are not worthy of mention. They just don't seem to understand religion as anything other than a consumer choice or a political statement.
Now for number 2:
Partway Gay? For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept
Social scientists say that 5 percent to 7 percent of young people are gay or lesbian, and that teenagers are starting at younger ages to have same-sex sexual experiences: 13 for boys, 15 for girls.
But those figures don't begin to tell the full story about today's girls because girls, more often than boys, experiment with their sexuality and resist being placed in any particular group.
Chanda Harris, a junior at High Road Upper School in Beltsville, is one of these girls. She's standing outside Union Station on a cold Friday night, waiting for her girlfriend and holding three giant helium balloons in celebration of her friend's birthday.
The girls around her from various high schools -- Bladensburg in Maryland, Anacostia, Ballou, Cardozo and Coolidge in the District -- converge to hear what she has to say.
She started going out with girls when she was 14, following a breakup with her boyfriend.
"At first I thought going out with a girl was nasty," she says. "Then I went to a club and did a big flip-flop. I've been off and on with girls and guys since then."
So are we daring to suggest that not all people who identify themselves as gay were "born that way?" Could it be that there is an element of choice in our sexual behavior? And that perhaps teenagers' sexuality can be... influenced by what they see on the media, who they come in contact with, and what they are presented with as "normal"?
Meanwhile, this article on teen Sapphism ran with a huge photo on page 1 of the Style section. I suppose I will have to redact the newspaper before Hambet reads it, or else read it with him, when he gets old enough to care about anything but the funny papers. But I already know I will have to censor those too.
