A cartoon of Guru Maharaj Ji on the cover of the November 1973 issue of The Rag

The Concert That Promised a Thousand Years of Peace

Guru Maharaj Ji, the teenage leader of the Divine Light Mission, was poised to usher in a new era. His huge Houston gathering proved to do anything but.
Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher’s “Musical Ark”

The first algorithmically generated music came to us in the seventeenth century, courtesy of Kircher and his Arca musarithmica.
Two women throwing hoops circa 1960

Reaching New Spiritual Heights Through Hula Hooping

The post-World War II hula hooping craze is back...and this time it's got religion.
An illustration of Dublin with a fleet of medieval ships above it in the sky

Ireland’s Upper Sea

In medieval Ireland, ships that sailed across the sky were both marvelous and mundane.
Marguerite Agniel, c. 1928

Religion of the Devil, Philosophy of the Coiled Serpent

In yoga’s early days in the United States, skeptics warned it would lead people (e.g., women) of good faith and standing into paganism and ill repute.
The interior of St Anne's Church, Bukit Mertajam, Penang

A Colorful Mix of Cultures at One Malaysian Catholic Shrine

Different—and sometimes competing—uses of sacred space is par for the course at the Church of St Anne in Penang’s Bukit Mertajam.
Antique illustration: Sleeping at sea

The Women Who Preached in Their Sleep

Was sleep-preaching an ingenious way for oppressed women to subvert the social order through somniloquy?
Older woman praying in an almost empty church.

Can Religion Be Helpful for People With Chronic Pain?

A group of researchers asked this question of a group of patients in secularized Western Europe.
Jack Parsons

Sex-Cult Rocket Man

Jack Parsons, one of the “suicide squad” trio of young rocket-boy founders of Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had an improbable extracurricular life.
Christ's Descent into Hell by Hieronymus Bosch

Fire and Brimstone

If our conception of hell was absent from Christianity at the time the religion was born, whence exactly does it hail?