For a world very deeply interested in making everything conversible, it's interesting that some things are still quite fraught to discuss.  I am reminded of this by two recent stories.  First, here is a very recent story about looking back on one's teenage beliefs.  It seems a bit undercooked, as if it's not very clear about what it's looking for, but there's good stuff in here.   

Second, behind a paywall alas, is this piece by Jia Tolentino, about being raised as a conservative Protestant and leaving it behind in favor of, well, secular life and some drugs.  It's hard for me to read this empathetically, as it seems to be the case that, for her, the "religious experience" she is looking for was never much more than ecstacy.  I can sympathize with this, from a distance, but I cannot empathize with it.  I have had experiences like that--hallucinatory, un-dimensioned, weirdly temporalized--but not at church.  I had them as a child and occasionally still do.  But that is not my experience of church, or experiences of reflection on church, after church.  It's definitely the case that some churches do that, and legitimately are called churches; but then they have a problem of how to link those experiences up with something larger, like the shape of a life.  After all, "ecstacy" is not what conversion or revival was supposed to mean, traditionally.  Forgive my pedagogical primness, but I think the point of church is not the experience of church; the point of church is what happens because of your experience of church.  You do not celebrate the ritual for the experience of celebrating the ritual.  That is not religion, that is a day at the spa, or a night at the club.  This is an interesting topic for me, and I'll have to come back to it.  It touches on questions of voyeurism, of consumerism, of the nature of evangelical Christianity in America, and especially on the evangelical-entertainment complex.  And many other things.