Year of Sundays

A couple of weeks ago, me and my friend went to this show in the student art gallery and then we went and hung out in the coffee shop for a while and then later that night we went to yoga, and I was like, “Does this mean we’re hipsters?”—Kate, 19, student* Well Kate, it…

Every Sunday, Joel and I stay as long as possible after the service to hear more about the church, get a feel for its groupies and talk about our project. And nearly every week, Portland’s pew-huggers have been saying the same two words to us: IMAGO DEI As in, “Have you been to Imago Dei…

They’re hip. They’re Christian. They keep an artist’s loft in the Pearl District. They’re Imago Dei, and they reallyreallyreally want you to know they’re not like other churches. Several alert readers have recommended that we visit this way-cool church in Southeast Portland. Stop back in a couple of days to see what we think of…

It’s been a quiet week in Brush Prairie, Washington. The last of the snow finally disappeared from the shaded North sides of the old barns, leaving the ground spongy and wet and making room for the crocuses and daffodils to poke their heads up tentatively like doughboys rising out of a foxhole. The days are…

This Sunday we trekked out to Brush Prairie in search of a very traditional congregation that seems to have found its home in the wild jungle rolling pastures of rural Washington. I thought we were on our way to a service that would get us as close as possible to Amish territory without being in…

The Wednesday night service was held in the reading room, which felt like a carbon copy of our Grandmother’s living room. The same smell. The same pink walls. The same arm chairs upholstered in a bright flowery pattern. Even the pianist plunked the ivory-keyed upright with the same cheerful determination our grandmother had. I found…

Thanks to a comment and a few e-mails with “Former Bunhead” (who wishes to remain anonymous, but who “left the Old Aps when [she] was 18 (as soon as [she] could without taking to the streets) and has spent the decades since trying to recover), I learned that “Clark County, is home to the largest…

When Mary Baker Eddy was a young girl, farmers used to bring their sick animals to her for healing. Of course, this was New England in the 1820’s, the birthplace of American transcendentalism. In Russia, Madame Blavatsky was soon to begin expounding her occult-philosophical Theosophy theories and, up the road from Mary, Joseph Smith was…

Before braving my first Christian Science service, I called my dad for moral support. I wanted to pick his brain a bit and get the perspective of a long-lapsed member of the church. He had a lot to share and it was almost all obnoxiously positive. Apparently you can take the boy out of the…

This Sunday is a bit of a reconnaissance mission for me. I come from a big family of Christian Scientists whose church membership ended with my father’s generation. I’ve never been to a Christian Science church before, in spite of the fact that my own Grandmother was a reader and she was one of my…

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