A clandestine cult with twenty children to a room, no outside music, movies or books, and no contact beyond the compound. For the first fifteen years of my life, this was my normal. By Flor Edwards. (April 9, 2014)

Touring Israel with 450 Christian Zionists. By Tom Bissell.

It wasn’t until Europeans took over North America that natives adopted the ideas of gender roles. For Native Americans, there was no set of rules that men and women had to abide by in order to be considered a “normal” member of their tribe. By Pearson McKinney.

Using a language-based family tree and statistical methods developed by evolutionary biologists, we were able to model how human sacrifice and social inequality evolved in the prehistory of Austronesia. By Joseph Watts.

Parishioners believed the Catholic hierarchy when they said a much-loved priest had retired. They were happy when he still played a part in their lives. Then, 11 years later, they learnt the truth. By Chris Vedelago, Beau Donelly and Cameron Houston. (May 28, ’16)

War reporting is easy to do but very difficult to do really well... By Patrick Cockburn.

One unintended consequence of the war in Yemen: Al Qaeda now runs its own mini-state, flush with funds from raiding the local central bank and levying taxes. By Yara Bayoumy, Noah Browning and Mohammed Ghobari. (Apr. 8)

An Indianapolis pastor has pleaded guilty to manufacturing nearly 100 tons of ‘synthetic’ drugs in an extraordinary conspiracy that involved his fundamentalist church, a married couple who are crooked cops, a music producer and a school teacher. By Patrick Hilsman.  

I've been on pro-choice marches and protests, but I wanted to see the abortion debate up close from the other side. At least, that's how I ended up at a training day for anti-abortion activists. By Amelia Horgan.

Bitter Lake explores how the realpolitik of the West has converged on a mirror image of itself throughout the Middle-East over the past decades, and how the story of this has become so obfuscating and simplified that we, the public, have been left in a bewildered and confused state. The narrative traverses the United States, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia—but the country at the centre of reflection is Afghanistan. By Adam Curtis. (2015)

Science has a fundamentalism problem. By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.

Who was Saint Bartholomew? By Tom Bissell.

The largest polygamist community in America is run by a madman in jail — who’s started a civil war. by Jesse Hyde. (Feb. 9) [Autoplay video]

And how it could spell disaster for his campaign on Super Tuesday. By Elizabeth Bruenig.

Georgia’s state senate is considering a “religious liberty” bill that would make it easier to discriminate against LGBT people by, as Americans United explains, allowing “any individual or ‘faith-based’ business, non-profit entity, or taxpayer-funded organization to ignore any law that conflicts with their religious beliefs about marriage.” By Miranda Blue. (Feb. 19)

And other tales from Rafael Cruz’s world of extreme Christian fundamentalism. By David Corn.

Tim Parks reviews “Avarizia: Le Carte che Svelano. Ricchezza, Scandali e Segreti della Chiesa di Francesco” by Emiliano Fittipaldi and “Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’s Secret Battle against Corruption in the Vatican” by Gianluigi Nuzzi, translated by Michael Moore.

The poet and journalist who risked everything by challenging Sharia law. By Laura Secor.

“While the influence of institutionalized churches has waned, few sociologists today would claim that science is eliminating belief in the supernatural.” By Joseph Playcock.

“In short, the only way to ensure that the evolutionary interests of men and women become identical, which is the only way that natural selection will favor equality, is a monogamous mating system.” By Janet L Factor.