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These 5 kid-friendly PNW destinations make learning fun
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...
Black Muslim Women Are Fighting Uphill Battle While Dating
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...
Jehovah's Witnesses, Sikhs, Muslims: New Religious Groups Race to Arctic
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 ...
Orgies, Harassment, Fraud: Satanic Temple Rocked by Accusations, Lawsuit
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...
Evangelical Christian Adoption Movement Hit by "Tsunami" of Mentally Ill Children
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...
Stay off the beaten path this summer at these 8 unique Pacific Northwest locales
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...
The country Trump tried to buy: Greenland markets new ice museum, pristine fjords
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...
The Nez Perce are no longer leaving their story to others. They’ve become tour operators.
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...
The Christian Prophets Who Say Trump Is Coming Again
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...
Appalachian snake handlers put their faith in God—and increasingly, doctors
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...
In Oregon, the passage of millions of years can be seen in unusual fossils and stunning vistas
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...
‘This Is All About Jesus’: A Christian Rocker’s Covid Protest Movement
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 ...
At Idaho's Central Dark Sky Reserve: Socially Distant Stargazing
Travel piece for the Washington Post on socially distant stargazing in Idaho
Seattle-area parents of kids with disabilities share their tips for making travel fun
You’ve seen them at the airport, at the beach or in a restaurant. A child is thrashing or kicking or on the ground while a desperate parent hovers nearby, trying to ignore angry glances from passersby. I know because I’ve been that anguished parent.
On display are “cognitive disabilities,” invisible handicaps related to how children’s brains work. For many kids with cognitive disabilities or developmental disorders, a car can be a prison, a plane or a new hotel room can be sheer terror.
In th...
Radio star Delilah Rene’s story is grounded in religion
AFTER READING PILES of background material to prepare for this story, I was struck by how few reporters concentrated on Delilah Rene’s Christian beliefs.
Yet her writings are full of thoughts on how she interacts with God, why she prays, and how she hangs on after experiencing so much grief and sorrow throughout her 59 years. Delilah, who has been doing her radio show for more than 30 years, is the most-listened-to woman on American radio.
Her religious conversion occurred in the late 1980s, ...