A former church girl's search for a new spiritual home

Code Switch

NPR

Society & Culture

4.6 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After leaving the Pentecostal church, reporter Jess Alvarenga has been searching for a new spiritual home. They take us on their journey to find spirituality that includes the dining room dungeon of a dominatrix, buddhist monks taking magic mushrooms, and the pulpit of a Pentecostal church. This episode is a collaboration with our friends at LAist Studios. Special thanks to the Ferriss, UC Berkeley's Psychedelic Journalism program for their support.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.
0:08.5	With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next.
0:14.0	Learn more at concur.com.
0:16.0	Hids up before we get started,
0:18.0	this episode contains explicit language, sexual content, and psychedelics. By the time I was 16 I knew how to pray and I mean pray pray. I had been preparing I had been preparing for the rapture since before I knew how to read.
0:48.4	I was raised Pentecostal in the south and it was a huge part of my identity.
0:54.1	So many of my childhood pictures are of me with a toothless grin
0:58.5	against the brick walls of my Pentecostal Church in Houston, Texas. I still have a scar on my a And I can still taste the enpanade plaano, a Salvadoran sweet dessert dusted with sugar, my dad would buy me from the Salon Sosial, the church cafeteria.
1:21.0	Sometimes he'd even let me take a sip from his coffee.
1:25.0	When I was in high school, I was baptized and received the Holy Ghost.
1:31.0	I went door knocking to spread the word of God. But 10 years ago, when I was in
1:37.4	college, I started to question everything. I'm B.A. Parker and this is Coates witch, the show about race and identity from NPR.
1:54.3	This week's episode is a collaboration with our friends at Elias Studios about finding salvation
1:59.3	and unexpected places, an exploration into spirituality that includes the dining room
2:05.3	dungeon of a dominatrix, Buddhist monks taking magic mushrooms and the pulpit of
2:10.9	a Pentecostal Church.
2:17.5	Jess Alveranga is normally a reporter and documentary filmmaker focusing on the stories of other people.
2:20.0	But for this story, she turned her focus inward.
2:24.4	So hi Jess, hi Parker.
2:27.0	I wanted to talk to you about this because church is something that is also near and dear to my heart.
2:31.0	I grew up Baptist and I still go to church, but I've also had my own
2:36.5	journey with it. So when you were in church, what did you love about it? I mean I love so many things about it of the songs I love the community I love being part of this
	...

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