Raising hope what makes a jew a jew

A series of events led me to where I am today, but the biggest catalyst was likely due to a series of abuse when I was A guy I had grown up with my entire life became infatuated with me and began emotionally and physically abusing me.

This continued for a year-and-a-half, until he finally went to college. In fact, they blamed me for leading him on. They thought I should enter into a courtship with him and were upset that I kept refusing him. This guy hit me in the face—hard enough to leave a mark—right in front of my entire youth group.

No one said a word. It took until my senior year of high school to finally realize that none of this was ok. During this time, I made the mistake of telling a few of my friends that I came to believe in evolution.

I lost all but one of my friends because of that, and soon after I left my faith entirely. Religion is supposed to give you peace. That was never true for me. When I was religious, I lived in constant, internal turmoil. We previously heard from a reader who found religion by reading philosophy, namely the works of Christian apologist William Lane Craig, but the reader eventually turned back to agnosticism.

The following reader, Ryan, seems on more solid religious ground after his reason-based conversion:. I grew up in the South in a nominally Christian household. For awhile, I found hope and optimism in a humanistic view of the world. I thought technology, the right politics, and time would eventually bring about a humanistic utopia. However, by the time I was out of college, I had adopted an angry, nihilistic view of the Universe and a dim view of humanity.

Technology particularly the Internet often seemed to allow humanity to commit the same errors of judgement on a larger scale.

Her parents were Catholic. Her parents also saw no conflict between science and religion. I realized that all the best people I had ever known throughout my life were Christians and that I agreed with the basic tenants of Christianity and its model of humility and kindness towards others. After reading C. After a few weeks of agonizing, I eventually worked up the courage to ask my wife if she would go to church with me.

When we went, I was too nervous to focus much on believing in God. My wife and I are currently attending an Episcopal Church together. I am hoping to be baptized within the next year and praying each day for hope.

Embedded above is the most popular installment on YouTube of C. The book actually followed the broadcasts, which aired between and She presumes that the commitment to baptism is a free one, and that the consequences of breaking the commitment are thus chosen. Or what if your experience of the world is completely filtered through Watchtower-shaped lenses? I am an on-the-books Witness, having taken the plunge at I really had no idea.

My best friend and I used to fervently discuss whether we would be kept out of the Paradise for swearing, listening to Nirvana, or checking out skater boys. This is not an uncommon belief, and it is utterly reasonable for a religion of myriad behavioral restrictions. And when she did get baptized, she seemed so righteous. So I did it, too.

I was terrified of being shunned or otherwise left ungirded in a world that had been described since childhood as a place where Satan walked around invisibly, just waiting to eat you up. I wanted to fit in, please my parents, and do what I thought would save me. I was bright, highly adept at acting as though I believed everything I ought to—so adept that I fooled not only the elders and my parents, but myself.

If I were to become disfellowshipped, I know that my parents and brother would probably stop talking to me, and my mother has said as much. She went through all that process rather than questioning the rule.

Anna and Bill did marry, but that was not the primary purpose for the adultery. Mark's second wife Nancy, who was an anointed Witness one of those few chosen to serve in heaven , left him too for a woman. Anna and Nancy probably did not realize that they were marrying a gay man. Not only were they forbidden from having any sexual intimacy before marriage, Mark was forbidden from admitting his sexuality.

Everyone lost. No one chose this imprisonment. The strictures of the religion are so numerous and invasive that the way they end up playing out in the real world are absurd and incredibly sad.

My own parents told me that they had considered divorcing and were at the point of deciding who would do the cheating-disfellowshipping combo to free them.

Mustachioed gay men who love musical theater and porkpie hats? That was Mark, to a T. Update from one more anonymous reader, who complicates our JW discussion even further:.

I was mostly raised as a Jehovah's Witness. I was baptized at I attended and graduated from an Ivy League university while still an active member.

I stopped attending meetings when I was in my mids. I had done nothing that would warrant my disfellowshipping, though I am sure at this point I have. Though I am no longer an active member, my mother is. We maintain a close relationship. She is, objectively, a lovely human being. These facts would seem to make me an anomaly among the voices that have so far been published. I know that I am not. I know many people in similar situations who made the choice to leave the religion, or simply drifted away, and were not shunned by their families.

Some occasionally participate, some never do. Of course, as in any group, there is great social pressure to conform. Then again, social pressure or not, I chose it at the time. Many in my peer group were baptized years after I was, or not at all. Some churches baptize infants. That baptism may become essentially meaningless to that individual, as mine eventually became to me.

It just happened at different times. I was excused from Mass, as were the Muslim students in the school. I had Jehovah;s Witness friends who attended the same college as me. I suppose my point is that while it is a much smaller, and therefore much less well understood religious group, it is no more or less constricting than other religious experiences.

Some people believe fervently, some barely at all but just go with it to keep the peace at home. I am against organized religion entirely. By the time I was 16, my social life was severely impacted by my hesitation to get baptized. My sister was baptized at the same time, although she was only I tried my best to fit into the religion, but gradually fell away from the homophobia, gossip, and informal shunning.

I still believed, but I had no desire for an eternal life with my fellow congregants under any circumstances. A few years later, my sister got married. After this experience, something felt so wrong that I had to resolve it. I kept quiet about all of this, never discussing it with my still-in family. A few years later, my then-fiance became embroiled in a drama within his family that led to his father being disfellowshipped.

I was not involved, but since he was on their radar, so was I. I received a series of certified letters, which I never picked up. Then, one Saturday, as I came in from my run, I saw two elders on my porch.

There was no where to hide. They told me I had been disfellowshipped in absentia. My sister only speaks to me at funerals. My mother is more lenient. My father and brothers have left the religion. But it is as if a bomb went off in my family. We are never in the same room together. We are distant, and rarely have contact. Years have been lost between us. Sometimes I pass by a Kingdom Hall, and I feel so badly for them.

I am overwhelmed and angered by the misinformation being supplied by your readers. Many of them are leaving out vital information. Only if you are baptized can you be disfellowshipped. Baptism is not a requirement in the church nor is it a choice one can frivolously make. I am not baptized, but both my parents were; my mother is baptized but inactive, and my father was disfellowshipped.

I was raised in the Kingdom Hall [the JW term for church building ] until I was a young teen, and then allowed to choose my own path. I have been told that the path to baptism takes around two years.

They chose to make a lifelong vow and broke it, fully aware of the potential consequences. No one forced them to be baptized; it was their own free will and choice. Again, without that choice, they would not have been in a position to be disfellowshipped in the first place. I asked the reader a few followup questions, such as the rough percentage of JW church-goers who are baptized and some key distinctions between members of different commitment levels:.

I am no longer an active member of a congregation admittedly, I now only darken the door for the Memorial. I would guess if you walked into a Kingdom Hall on a Sunday morning the majority of attendees minus children will be baptized or preparing for baptism. I think generally people who make the effort and commitment to go to church regularly are more likely to commit in other ways, such as baptism, whereas those who are not serious about baptism probably drop off and rarely attend because it is not required of them.

There are three ways for baptized members to leave the church but they will forever be considered baptized : disfellowshipment, disassociation, and becoming inactive. Let me interrupt real quick to illustrate the difference between disfellowshipment and disassociation, explained here by a different reader the first of two readers excerpted in our previous note in a followup email:. We disassociated ourselves, which is a technicality of sorts, but also very different.

People are disfellowshipped for moral failings. We disassociated because of their failings. Our leaving was voluntary. An inactive member is someone who does not maintain steady attendance at the Hall nor keeps up with going out in service. However, the only grounds for divorce in the church is adultery.

If a divorce is obtained for any other reason, remarrying another Witness is not possible. It was a long process—interviews with family members, opportunities given to him to repent, etc. He could try to be reinstated now, like most disfellowshipped people, probably by attending all meetings for a year, asking for Bible study, showing repentance and writing a letter to the elders to ask for consideration.

I really appreciate you allowing me the opportunity to try and shed more light on this issue. I was bullied horribly in school due to my beliefs, all the way through college mostly by the administration at my state school—I was also an employee. The amount of discrimination Witnesses face is pretty incredible sometimes; people lose their minds over others not celebrating holidays, for instance.

I understand the religion has some issues—all do—but what can be expected from organizations led by imperfect men? As a child and a teenager, I was kind of in and out of church.

My mom is pretty religious but my father is not. But whenever I was in church, I was very involved. I went several times a week to services or Bible studies or events , and I even taught and preached on a regular basis. I was very religious throughout college and intended to become a full-time missionary overseas.

I got engaged to a very smart, very loving, and very Christian young lady. That was 11 years ago, but I vividly remember praying in the hospital room that God would save him. And according to my beliefs at that time and the beliefs of millions of Americans , my best friend was going to go to Hell because he was not a Christian. However, I also still believed that the truth was not contingent on what I wanted to be true.

Yet there was another event that completely sealed my loss of faith. And that was about eight months after my friend died in , the major tsunami hit Indonesia and immediately wiped out like 80, people. There was no way I could any longer believe in that kind of God. So, what happened? My fiancee and I went ahead and went through with the wedding it is really hard to cancel a wedding once the invitations have all been sent out. We argued constantly about religion for two and a half years.

It hurt her knowing that the most important thing in her life, her faith, was no longer shared with me. She constantly pointed out, correctly, that I had changed—not her. So, after two-and-a-half years, we got divorced.

I did initiate it. I did not become a missionary, so I had to go find a job in the real world helping make money for the man. And it took me many years before I really found out what I wanted to do.

I enjoyed doing Christian work and I enjoyed teaching. Decked in gold all the way to her press-on nails, the singer Lizzo addresses the people who have taken umbrage at her confidence as a fat Black woman.

Cardi B, then visibly pregnant with her second child, perches atop a throne, her torso uncovered but for a custom-made gold breastplate. Samiah Rahim, 28, a certified diamontologist in New York, has two golds, commissioned from a jeweler she met at a party in One is a window around her right canine, the other a gap filler between her two front teeth. She figured the best way to honor the gap was to pour gold into it. Without knowing it, Rahim was continuing a tradition that has existed for nearly 3, years.

T he photographs are about the size of a small hand. Her hair is plaited close to her head, and she is naked from the waist up. Her stare seems to penetrate the glass of the frame, peering into the eyes of the viewer. The paper label that accompanies her likeness reads: Delia, country born of African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo. In another frame, her father stands before the camera, his collarbone prominent, and his temples peppered with gray and white hair. The label on his photo says: Renty, Congo, on plantation of B.

Taylor, Columbia, S. In , when these images were captured, the subjects in the daguerreotypes were considered property. Brought from the fields to a photography studio in Columbia, South Carolina, each person was photographed from different angles, in the hopes of finding photographic evidence of physical differences between the Black enslaved and the white masters who owned them.

A daguerreotype took somewhere between three and 15 minutes of exposure time, and the end result was a detailed image imprinted on a small copper-plated sheet, covered with a thin coat of silver.

Yesterday I was smashed with the rush of fresh honeysuckle from the greenway near my house where I walk every day. Black bodies are buried in the stickiness of history every day bodies become the next viral death. And yet, each day I want to write a poem about pleasure. Black pleasure at the root instead of viral death. What name now? What Black litany?

What Black elegy is repeated on the news? This cycle: Daunte Wright. This stanza broke the rules. So, what? Over the course of our work we were drawn again and again to questions of what it means for Black people to reclaim spaces and narratives, to feel seen, to express joy, to experience autonomy. We have also focused on the importance of place as a powerful catalyst for remembrance, particularly for a people whose history has often been suppressed or ignored.

W hen Angel Love Miles arrived at Penn State in , she realized she was going to have to fight to finish school. To begin with, Miles was a low-income Black student, and Penn State was mostly white. In addition, she has spina bifida, a condition that affects spinal development in utero.

As a child, she had gone to a school for children with disabilities. Her school had an accessible playground with wheelchair swings, physical and occupational therapists, and a shop where she could get her wheelchair or crutches fixed.

Penn State was different. There was a van for students with disabilities, but waiting for it often made her late for class. She remembers waiting once for the campus bus.

My muses are working-class Black women, like my mom and grandma. My mom, Dana, built tool sets at a tool factory; on the weekends she became a sexy Donna Karan power woman.

My Grandma Hattie was a factory knitter, but she moonlighted as a feline Patrick Kelly—esque dame, particularly on Sundays. I became a fashion designer, and they are my consummate muses, working-class and Black.

But they are a pillar of American fashion, a conduit of sartorial expression. These women took artistic license to write their own beauty narrative, one that refused to be boxed in by the utilitarianism of blue-collar work. In , when it was released, the song spawned a new microeconomy of commentary denouncing it as a distillation of rape culture , or fretting over whether enjoying its jaunty hook was defensible.

In the video, directed by the veteran Diane Martel, three models dressed in transparent thongs peacock and pose with a baffling array of props a lamb, a banjo, a bicycle, a four-foot-long replica of a syringe while Thicke, the producer and one of the co-writers Pharrell Williams, and the rapper T. Polls consistently show that a significant majority of Republican men, and even as many as half of Republican women, believe that amid the reassessment of gender relations sparked by the MeToo movement, men are being unfairly punished and discriminated against.

Dancers' movements seem to bend the laws of physics in Wendy Morgan's video for C2C's latest track featuring Derek Martin. Skip to content. Sign in My Account Subscribe. The Atlantic Crossword.

The Print Edition. Latest Issue Past Issues. Only through November Try subscriber newsletters for free. Show 25 Newer Notes. Chris Bodenner. Louis: I was raised in a Jewish household and went to a Conservative synagogue. Continue Reading. Update from another reader, Jon: There is so much more nuance to Jewish identity than the strawmen and facile explanations of Jewish law that some of your readers are offering. She explains: The Christian homeschooling movement purports to raise strong, upstanding Christians who will, upon adulthood, be ready to communicate the truth of Christianity and the value of the Christian way of life to the world.

A Choice Beyond Logic. God meets us where logic ends. Choosing to Stick With Your Faith. Update from a helpful reader: I have a post on my blog that is specifically aimed at helping people find a new church that is more satisfying and not abusive. Finding Religion Through Reason, Cont'd. Update from one more anonymous reader, who complicates our JW discussion even further: I was mostly raised as a Jehovah's Witness.

I asked the reader a few followup questions, such as the rough percentage of JW church-goers who are baptized and some key distinctions between members of different commitment levels: I am no longer an active member of a congregation admittedly, I now only darken the door for the Memorial. Back to our dissenting reader: An inactive member is someone who does not maintain steady attendance at the Hall nor keeps up with going out in service.

More Notes From The Atlantic. Weinberg uncredited. Sean L. Eyal Gordin. Storyline Edit. When Burt's parents arrive for another uneasy visit, his mother Christine claims to have discovered being a Jewess and having embraced the Hebrew faith, hence demands her son does so by having a belated Bar Mitzhva.

Burts accepts after consulting local Jewish acquaintances, even Virgina learns some kosher cooking. Rabbi Zwerin gives the idiot a crash course, but on the very day his parents admit having invented the whole thing to win back the gifts they gave to others as guests over the years at weddings and such events.

Add content advisory. Did you know Edit. Trivia All entries contain spoilers. User reviews 1 Review. Details Edit. Release date March 28, United States. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 22 minutes. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Edit page. Hollywood Icons, Then and Now. See the gallery. Watch the video. Recently viewed Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.