Subterms
<!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Whether you care about horoscopes or not, you probably know your zodiac sign. You’ve probably known it for most of your life.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –>1. Earth’s wobble<!–> –><!–> [–><!–>The Earth wobbles like a top. A spinning top starts to wobble soon after it […] More
When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing with other people.“I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. (I’m not using her last name because one of the tenets of her 12-step program is anonymity.) “It’s about making a connection with a higher power. It’s about trying to improve that connection with prayer and meditation,” she said.Maggie lost her taste for organized religion, she said, after being disappointed by the way her church handled a situation in which a minister had an affair with an employee. She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members. People talk about “what’s really going on in their lives,” she said. “It’s refreshing and often relatable, and it feeds me.”As I read and listened to the wide range of spiritual stories that readers shared with me over the past few weeks, I thought about the way that nones — the catchall term that describes atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — can imply blankness and almost a kind of nihilism.But as I learn more about the idea and the history of being spiritual but not religious, and the growth of this self-definition over the past few decades, alongside the documented move away from traditional church attendance, I wondered if I hadn’t given enough weight to new expressions of faith. Rather than seeing this moment as reflecting the slow demise of organized religion in America, one that leaves some people bereft of community and meaning, it’s worth asking if we’re in the middle of the birth of a messy new era of spirituality.First, I want to be honest that I’m not going to be able to give a definitive answer through the data here. The polling around questions of spirituality is pretty noisy, because the terms “spiritual” and “religious” are “so amorphous and they overlap so greatly,” said Robert Fuller, a professor of religious studies at Bradley University and the author of “Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America,” when we spoke last week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
In the last month, the planet has figured in new releases by SZA, Kacey Musgraves and Ariana Grande. But for the astrologically inclined, what does a “Saturn return” signify?In two months, Alejandra Herrera will hit a milestone dreaded by many in their late 20s: her 30th birthday. While she has mixed feelings about “adulting,” she at least feels grounded about the whole ordeal — she is, after all, an earth sign.“I’ve been feeling like this whole new rebirth lately,” Ms. Herrera, a Taurus from East Los Angeles, said. “As an ex-people pleaser, I just feel like my 30s are going be, like, a new beginning, where I’ll finally focus on myself.”The last few years were turbulent for Ms. Herrera, marked by a mix of depression and exhaustion that she says arose from her job as an assistant manager at a vegan Mexican restaurant, which she recently quit.“I feel like I have grown so much,” she said, “and I do feel like I’m in that Saturn return because I turned it all around.”Ms. Herrera isn’t alone in looking to the heavens for answers: For a celestial body 887 million miles from the sun, Saturn sure is hot right now. Just last month, the planet supplied the title of SZA’s latest single and was name-checked in the opening lyric (“My Saturn has returned”) of a newly released Kacey Musgraves song. And on Friday, Ariana Grande released an album featuring a track called “Saturn Returns Interlude.”So what is one’s Saturn return? Depending on your openness to celestial fiddle-faddle, it’s a highly personal astrological phenomenon that matters either a whole lot or very, very little. According to the popular astrology app Co-Star, a person’s Saturn return “occurs when the planet Saturn comes back to the same position in the sky that it was at the time of your birth.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
