Two missionaries share their histories, experiences, and brushes with sin.

"They could walk together and talk without holding anything back. It had been like that since their third week together in school. They were sitting up on the roof of Oldham-Betts, and Samuel said, 'It’s hard to be up here and not smoke a cigarette,' and when Leslie gave him a sideways look, Samuel said, 'Look, I have a past. It’s pretty apparent, right? I’m a good thirteen years older than everybody here. There’s some things I had to walk away from. Can you handle that?' 'Who am I,' Leslie said, 'to judge you. I’ve got my own things to walk away from.' And Leslie—this kid—began to lay out his confessions, chief among them the lust he held in his heart when he looked upon a woman, this guilt he carried around with him daily, along with images he had seen in the magazines his father had kept behind some Time/Life books about World War II."

A woman attempts to find her own closure following losses on 9/11.

"The Rumson police, the Little Silver police, the Middletown police especially insisted, they’d already had funerals of their own and knew what to expect. The roads were cordoned off from the Sea Bright Bridge to the Avenue of Two Rivers and cars parked for a mile all the way down Rumson Road, women in black sling-backs climbing the rutted grass along the road, made the shortcut through the tennis club across the school yard to the gray shingle church, capacity four hundred, someone said a thousand stood inside and out to hear Father Jim say no words could gather the force he needed to say his prayer, they would all join him in silence. Kathleen in the choir loft, alone, sang “Danny Boy” for her brother, for her father, and the thousand beyond prayer, beyond tears, shook and trembled now."

On leaving New York for Portland.

A meditation on Hell.

On the culture of misogyny and abuse at one of the nation’s largest megachurches.

A Ugandan bill that would threaten homosexuals with imprisonment, or in some cases death, has its roots in the shadowy American evangelical group known as The Family.

A Hanukkah story revolving around anarchists, crooks, and vandals. [Free registration required.]

"'Anyway, what's this talk about roots?' he said and immediately regretted it. He could see the magazine covers already. The Return to Religion: The New Tribalism. He liked it better when Wendy was insolent and yelled 'Death to the pigs!' at a couple of off-duty cops having a cup of coffee at a local diner before Frieda pulled her away."

The next generation of America’s most controversial (and likely most despised) church.

A community says its children are being targeted by a group of pedophiles. But did widespread sexual abuse actually take place?

A young boy deals with mean relatives and religious extremes as he embarks on his first communion.

"Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o'clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart."

Michael Quinn took on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – and lost.

Becoming a priest in Boston amidst a sex abuse scandal and church closings.

A doctor and a rabbi try to find ways to understand the world, and God, and one another.

"The rabbi pulled out some books. She talked about Jacob wrestling the angel. She talked about Heschel and the kernel of wonder as a seedling that could grow into awe. She tugged at her braid and told a Hasidic story about how at the end of one's life, it is said that you will need to apologize to God for the ways you have not lived."

A Javanese shrine where Muslim pilgrims seeking good fortune must peform a ritual: find a stranger, have sex with them.

Scientology’s stronghold on Tom Cruise’s dating life.

On the 1,600-year-old text that suggests that Jesus, long believed to be celibate, was a married man.

In this previously-unpublished Fitzgerald story, a saleswoman wants a cigarette, and perhaps encounters something more profound.

"Smoking meant a lot to her sometimes. She worked very hard and it had some ability to rest and relax her psychologically. She was a widow and she had no close relatives to write to in the evenings, and more than one moving picture a week hurt her eyes, so smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road."

On a former Louisiana preacher who converted to Atheism.

The secretive financial behemoth that is the American Catholic Church.

A Green Beret returns from Haiti and surprises his wife with news of his unusual spiritual "marriage."

"She got it, sort of, how fluid and free your mind might become when life took on the quality of hallucination. How that might blow your coping strategies all to hell? Dirk meditated daily in the middle of the den, which Melissa took for a joke at first—Green Berets, snake-eaters, did not meditate, nor did anyone else she knew except people from Chapel Hill. 'Keeping it real' was how he explained himself; meanwhile Melissa took wary note of her dreams and watched her life fill up with nagging signs and portents."

How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?

A murderer fights off vengeance seekers, including God.

"I sundered Him, and He rejoined Himself. I interrupted Him, and He resumed Himself. I adjourned Him, and He reconvened Himself. I perforated Him, and He performed holy acts of closure. I peeled Him, but He only laughed—the old fox!—and could not be tricked into repealing Himself in order to end up sitting among the superannuated gods."

A personal history of “America’s most misunderstood religion.”

An early investigation into Jim Jones’ cult.

I am gay. I am Mormon. I am married to a woman. I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have a wonderful sex life. And I’ve been married for ten years, and plan to be married for decades more to come to the woman of my dreams.