Julia Duin

INUKJUAK, Quebec (RNS) — As Canada’s Anglican church dwindles, its most remote (and most expansive) diocese has shown growth. One bishop responsible for that trend is retiring, leaving his successor to find clergy willing to take on the Arctic’s challenges.

When Mariella Aitana Guerrero was born on a Saturday afternoon in early September, she was 6 pounds, 18 inches. She had dark hair and long eyelashes — and her life expectancy was measured in minutes.

The newborn that arrived at St. Luke’s Health-The Woodlands Hospital, just north of Houston, had anencephaly, a neural tube defect. The condition causes the baby to have only a rudimentary brain stem, with parts of the brain and portions of the skull missing.

Wrapped in a white blanket with turqu...

The baby blue evening sky was still bright with translucent white clouds when people began showing up to see the stars.
We were on the shore of the Prineville Reservoir in central Oregon, a lovely spot at 3,257 feet surrounded by sagebrush and juniper hills that form a perfect bowl to block out the light from nearby Bend (population 107,305).
“We don’t see these stars in Oregon City,” said Megan Ruljancic, a tall woman in a white sleeveless top who’d driven in from her home in the Portland su...

Tired of schlepping the family to waterparks and beaches where all they do is eat overpriced junk food and look at their iPhones? Good news: There are places around the Pacific Northwest that are as educational as they are fun; where the kids can learn about the environment, absorb history about the region’s Native tribes, bone up on botany and ecology and dig for their own fossils. If you’re lucky, you may meet a mermaid or two.
1. International Mermaid Museum — Aberdeen, Washington
“A cultu...

They're female. They're Black. They're Muslim. And they are having a tough time getting married.
"In mosques across the country, imams—and other community leaders—are frantically fielding calls from anxious parents asking why their high-achieving, successful and religious daughters can't meet a Muslim man to marry," said Tahirah Nailah Dean, 29, a Black-Latina lawyer based in Oakland, California, who has been collecting data from single Muslim women around the country.
She has created what sh...

From Nunavut to Norilsk to Nome: They're coming.
What was once a slow advance of religious groups into the far north has turned into a gallop to the high latitudes, starting around the 60th parallel, a circle around the Earth just shy of the Arctic Circle and encompassing cities such as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories.
Although Lutherans, Anglicans, Catholics and Russian Orthodox believers have been in the far North for centuries, the newcomers - ranging ...

Can you defame a religion, especially one that doesn't believe in God, Satan or the supernatural?
The answer to that question could cost four former members of The Satanic Temple (TST) more than $140,000 in damages, including "reputation losses," in a civil lawsuit that has dragged on for more than a year and a half.
Satanic Temple leaders readily admit people are free to criticize them, but not to use the organization's own Facebook pages to do it. They claim the quartet commandeered TST's W...

For years, evangelical Christians were enthusiastic supporters of adoption by sponsoring conferences, targeting adoption-friendly Sundays and staging adoption fairs in parish halls.
Thousands of overseas children got new homes. Leading the way were evangelical luminaries such as recording artist Steven Curtis Chapman (three daughters from China) and then-Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore (two sons from Russia). Enthusiastic parents took up the challenge, traveling overseas for one or more...

Looking to stay somewhere in the Pacific Northwest a bit off the beaten track — or just a tad unusual?

These eight unique stays — three of them in national parks — stand out, either for going the extra mile or providing exceptional experiences for the intrepid explorers among us.

Summer Guide 2022

Where to find great mountain biking trails in every direction from Seattle

Try towering layers of cake, pizzacoa and bone marrow shots on a food-filled day trip to Tacoma

How Bellingham became a ho...

NUUK, Greenland – Seated on the second floor of the chic Spanish restaurant Tapasimut, we were waiting to see what it could offer us in terms of tapas.
Greenlandic tapas, that is. Sure enough, the menu listed musk ox, reindeer and tuna as options, washed down with Qajaq, a Greenlandic beer brewed with pure water from local icebergs. There was cilantro accompanying our meal, an herb more at home some 30 degrees in latitude south of this Arctic location.
Outside it was dusk, and I could spot ex...

Stacia Morfin is of medium height, slim, with arched eyebrows and long brown hair separated into two braids, both clasped with panels of red, green, blue and black beads, dressed in regalia that reflects her Native American heritage. She is leading a “Hear the Echoes of Our Ancestors” boat tour on the Snake River between Idaho and Washington state.
“My name is One Who Takes Care of Water,” she tells us as the jet boat pushes away from the dock. “Our ability to hunt, fish and gather across our...

Perched on a cream-colored armchair, Johnny Enlow, a 61-year-old, California-based Pentecostal pastor with short-cropped gray hair, a trim beard and Tom Selleck-style mustache, looked into the camera and prophesied that Donald Trump would become president again.
Not in 2024. In 2021.
“The January 20 inauguration date doesn’t really mean anything,” Enlow said in the January 29 video, which has gotten north of 100,000 views on YouTube. According to Enlow, more than 100 other “credible” Christia...

On a warm summer evening several years ago, congregants jammed the front of the Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, Tennessee. It was homecoming time, and scores of Pentecostals, hailing from throughout Appalachia, had gathered to worship God in a ritual that risked bodily harm.

Dancing around the pulpit, Tyler Evans, whose family has handled serpents for five generations, held a Coke bottle with a flaming wick to his skin, a practice called “handling fire.” The teenager suffered no burns...

Prehistoric Oregon was a lush refuge for a zoo’s worth of exotic animals, which flourished amid tropical fruits, palm trees and a climate much like present-day Panama from 55 million years ago to 39 million years ago. Avocados and bananas were plentiful, and mammals such as oreodonts (piglike creatures); brontotheres, (a combo of horse and rhino) and a kind of mastodon called a zygolophodon had the run of the place because dinosaurs had disappeared from the world more than 15 million years ea...

It was one of those breathtaking late summer afternoons in Seattle, with sunlight splashing over a part of the city that, two months earlier, had been occupied by Black Lives Matter protesters. In Cal Anderson Park, part of the six-block stretch that became known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), volunteers were setting up for very different kind of event.
Pacing about doing sound checks on the sidewalk was a man with a generous mane of curly blond hair wearing Birkenstocks and a ...