Spirituality Archives - Public Seminar

Music

God Bless Perverts

The new Ethel Cain album is sexually, romantically, spiritually sick

June 4, 2025 • by Mikayla Emerson

Preacher’s Daughter, Hayden Anhedönia’s debut studio album under her alias Ethel Cain, garnered her critical acclaim and a cult following online. Preacher’s Daughter splayed out the narrative of a young woman reckoning with her abusive father’s death, abandoning her Christian community in Alabama, and running away west. As the album ...

Activism

Misanthropy Is Having a Moment

A self-help guide for pessimists

December 5, 2024 • by Alex Rossen

If you or someone you know is experiencing symptoms of a negative outlook on humanity, then David E. Cooper’s Pessimism, Quietism, and Nature as Refuge (Agenda Publishing, 2024) might be just the book for you. Cooper’s “negative judgement on the moral and spiritual failings of humankind” focuses readers’ attention on our ...

Public Health

A Spiritual Month in the Cloud

Virtual Seder, makeshift matzoh, and finding joy amidst grief

May 1, 2020 • by Carol Edelstein

The Cloud this April hums with virtual Seders, virtual Easters, virtual gatherings for the breaking of the Ramadan fast. Jews world over subtract from their full glass of wine the ritual drops signifying the ten plagues suffered by the Egyptians when they would not release us from servitude. Dom: water becomes blood Tzfardeyah: frogs overrun ...

Feature

The Mystical Expatriates

The invention of Californian spirituality

June 24, 2018 • by Jules Evans

Back in October I went on a 10-day ayahuasca retreat in the Peruvian jungle. While there, I picked up a little novel by Christopher Isherwood called A Single Man. I don’t know why I picked up that particular book. Perhaps because it was slim, so I could finish it while at the ...