Noumenal News

DUXBURY - She doesn’t always wear the robe and the cloak, but the Rev. Kendra Vaughan Hovey is never without her priest’s collar.
As the elder high priestess of the First Church of Wicca in Duxbury, the white collar is more than a symbol of her beliefs. She says it provides an opportunity to educate others […]

Sandie Bershad says she’s always felt different than other kids and generally prefers the company of adults.At age 12, Sandie, now 17, says she went into a deep, two-year depression because she felt that no one understood her.
She was treated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with medication, but as she grew up, she said, she […]

Sunday, July 23, 2006 — One Albemarle church’s self-proclaimed strike at Satan drew its largest crowd ever to unite in “a battle for the soul of the community.”
The recent Sunday gathering at Encounter Christ Church (ECC), off U.S. 52, was billed as an offensive against Satanic worship and drug addiction, problems the church’s evangelical pastor, […]

A letter from an angry reader from Oklahoma chastised me for attempting to explain why the Iraqi people hate America. She wrote, “Tim Giago should realize that America is a Christian nation. Jesus Christ appeared to Black Elk, not to the Muslims.”
I wonder how many Indian nations consider themselves to be “Christian nations.” The […]

Scientists believe they have found a way to probe the mysterious phenomenon of feeling you have witnessed something before - deja vu. Leeds Memory Group researchers say they have gone some way to recreating the sensation in the lab using hypnosis.
New Scientist magazine reports the researchers hope their work will shed light on the […]

STAUNTON, Va. — A pagan religion that some experts say can be interpreted as encouraging violence is gaining popularity among prison inmates, one of whom is scheduled to be executed this week for killing a fellow prisoner at the foot of an altar.
Michael Lenz is scheduled to die Thursday for the death of Brent Parker, […]

So, about 35 years ago, when Anna Volpe Anuzzi, a life-long Manayunk resident, began bringing songs she had written to the recording studio Dana and her husband ran in Manayunk, Dana was drawn to the woman with psychic abilities.
“Jet sang my first song,” reported Anuzzi, during an interview with the two women at Dana’s home. […]

At the end of the last Ice Age, the Sahara Desert was just as dry and uninviting as it is today. But sandwiched between two periods of extreme dryness were a few millennia of plentiful rainfall and lush vegetation.
During these few thousand years, prehistoric humans left the congested Nile Valley and established settlements around rain […]

KEVIN BARRETT, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has now taken his place alongside Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado as a college teacher whose views on 9/11 have led politicians and ordinary citizens to demand that he be fired.
Mr. Barrett, who has a one-semester contract to teach a course titled […]