LOSING RELIGION AND FINDING ECSTASY IN HOUSTON

This essay by New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino chronicles her de-conversion from Christianity. “I’ve been walking away from institutional religion for half my life, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built,” she writes. As she looks back at her adolescence of drugs, Jesus, church camp, and hip-hop, Tolentino explores the similarities between the ecstatic and the apostatic. To her, ecstasy as a drug and the spiritual state of mind are one and the same.

     Photograph by Emily Assiran