“It had been an ordinary Wednesday afternoon at my rural Indiana high school until the Journey tribute band appeared. Even though Journey’s popularity was at its zenith in 1983, I wasn’t sure who they were. In my strict Calvinist household, my mother blasted hymns and scolded me for tuning my radio to the local pop station.”
“Women tend to fare poorly in religions created by men. Throughout history, male prophets have claimed divine authority to write laws that perpetuate male power and shunt women aside as intellectual inferiors or evil temptresses who threaten male glory.”
“For the past year, Ryan had heard increasingly alarming reports about Jonestown. The community, established in Guyana by a California preacher named Jim Jones, was engulfed in mystery. ”
“In this country, we celebrate the First Amendment, which prevents the government from interfering with religious beliefs and practices. But what if those beliefs and practices hurt children?”
“I STAND in my brother’s childhood room, looking for a place to hide his seventh-grade class portrait.
The room is the same as I remember it — small, mustard shag, ground-level view of the woods. Now filled with a stranger’s furniture. What, if anything, is left of us here? What mark did we leave? ”
“A lot of people get paid to have sex in the San Fernando Valley. There are the street hustlers and “erotic massage therapists” who compete for johns along the rougher blocks of Van Nuys and Sun Valley. There are the spray-tanned and surgically amplified actors who grope one another in Woodland Hills mansions and Klieg-lit Chatsworth studios.
And then there is Shai Rotem, a 46-year-old Israeli transplant who’s neither prostitute nor porn star, but who also gets paid to have sex with strangers. ”
