Soul Searching is Casper ter Kuile’s new monthly column drawing on ancient wisdom to live a spiritual life in the modern world. Casper is the author of The Power of Ritual, holds master’s degrees in Divinity and Public Policy from Harvard University, and co-founded the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, and Sacred Design Lab.

I wish I could pray.

For religious friends of mine, prayer seems to open a portal to a world that’s beyond my reach. Like there’s some divine VIP area where you can whisper in God’s ear to plead for what you need. Not exactly a holy vending machine that gives you what you want, but certainly a secret language that can lead to ecstatic mystical union and profound peace.

I’ve tried to trick myself into praying. But I don’t believe in a deity that’s listening to my complaints and desires. And many traditional prayers feel too weighed down by patriarchy for my taste. So getting on my knees for God, or swaying back and forth, let alone prostrating myself — it all feels absurd. 

And I’m not alone. A 2020 Gallup survey found that less than half of Americans belong to a church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. And despite recent headlines pointing to religious revival, a 2025 poll from Pew Research Center suggests otherwise: Only 30 percent of young adults born between 1995 and 2002 say they pray every day.

So, it seems, prayer isn’t for me, or for many of us. 

Or is it?

Starting in the 1990s, Dr. Herbert Benson led a decade-long study on the efficacy of prayer. He was an esteemed cardiologist and the founder of the Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His rigorous study confirmed what nonbelievers might have expected: Praying for someone who was sick had no positive impact on their recovery. But during his many years of research, he also found that there was an impact on the person doing the praying.

Even though I didn’t grow up religious, I got a taste of that positive impact as a child. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, I’d often stay over at a friend’s house because I liked him and loved his PlayStation. When it was time for bed, his mother would tuck us in. Standing at the door of his bedroom, she’d turn out the light and say:

Goodnight, goodnight

Far flies the light

But still God’s love

Shall flame above

Making all things…

And, together, we would respond, “bright!” 

It felt good to hear those words before falling asleep. And it felt good, too, saying them out loud, just now, all these years later. So if we know that prayer can improve our psychological well-being, but we don’t believe in God, what can we do? 

It starts with telling the truth.

Psychoanalysts Ann and Barry Ulanov describe prayer as “primary speech.” By this, they mean that it is a basic and fundamental way we say who we are, and we do it with total honesty. That might involve expressing longing and love, yes, but also fear, anger, bitterness, and jealousy — the good, the bad, and the ugly of our human experience. Dive into a sacred text like the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible and you will find examples of people berating the divine, confessing that they’ve lost all hope, or even pleading for the death of their enemies. Prayer is unsanitary. It’s messy. It’s real-talk.

The 20th-century Russian Orthodox teacher of prayer Anthony Bloom would agree with this. In his book Beginning to Pray, published more than 50 years ago, he wrote (using religious language, of course), “As long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.”

I’ve found the best way of practicing this kind of honesty without bringing God into it is writing in my journal. Especially in the dark. There’s a level of ugly honesty that can flow from my pen when my eyes can hardly make out the words I’m writing on the page. 

But saying those words out loud? That still feels difficult. 

So, I considered advice offered by the Rev. Alba Onofrio, a queer, feminist pastor — and someone who isn’t afraid of speaking the truth. She co-founded the Sexual Liberation Collective and her work focuses on eradicating shame and reclaiming sexual pleasure as a way of connecting to the divine. In an episode of her podcast, Onofrio advises those just beginning to pray to start with words they already know.

Is there a song or quote you already know every word of? A piece of text that your mind goes to when you are stressed or scared? Or is there something you’d want to learn? 

I’ve found myself reciting poems by Marie Howe and Lucille Clifton as a form of prayer. I go someplace where nobody can hear me, and I say them out loud to get the prayer juices flowing. I’ve tried singing, too.

But this still doesn’t solve the question of who is listening. For that, Onofrio’s advice is simple: “Who do you want to talk to?” Is there someone who’s loved you who has passed away and who you wish was here to listen? A grandparent, a favorite teacher or mentor, even a pet? Onofrio suggests thinking about who you need to hear from. “The point of prayer is just connection…a spiritual digging the mud and silt out of the channel that connects us to the erotic, to God, to creation” she says in her podcast. Perhaps this is why so many religions have saints or lesser deities to pray to; it gives you a phonebook of options to connect with. 

Truth be told, I still struggle with this. When the going gets tough, an imaginary person at the other end of my prayers still feels too abstract to be compelling. 

Not to worry, the Rev. Micah Bucey tells me. We don’t need someone to be listening to benefit from prayer. 

Bucey is the author of the The Book of Tiny Prayer and has been posting his very short prayers on social media since the pandemic began. In an interview, he explained that the only necessary ingredients for his prayers are attention, intention, time, and quiet.

“Every morning, I take a moment to pay attention to my body and then the news,” Bucey told me. “And then, I set an intention for what is mine to do today.” He follows a simple framework to set that intention:

• Naming: Identify the problem, issue, or thing in need of prayer.
• Going in: Reflect on what I might do differently for myself.
• Going out: Look outward to consider what I might change together with others.

I find that the first step — naming — is really where this version of prayer has its impact. Honoring the hurt I feel, or the anger, the shame or the sadness, is what unlocks something deeper than my everyday thinking can reach.  

Do I sometimes wish there was some supreme being that might then make it all okay? Sure, that would be nice. But prayer, for me at least, has been much less about peace and stillness. Prayer is struggle. It’s the discipline of discovering what I really feel. It’s being honest enough to write or say it aloud. And it’s trusting that this practice will help me do what is mine to do in a world with so much pain and suffering.

So, dear reader, will you pray with me? 

Ticks are one of humanity’s most dastardly adversaries: tiny, at times nigh-invisible arthropods that burrow into your skin, leech your blood, and sometimes transfer debilitating disease before they vanish, without you ever knowing they were there. It can be only months or weeks later, when Lyme disease’s harrowing symptoms begin to take hold, that you realize the stealth attack even occurred.

These days, it seems like there are more reasons than ever to fear ticks. Their range is spreading into cities and entirely new geographic regions in the US. Their arsenal extends beyond Lyme disease: alpha-gal syndrome, a condition caused by tick bites that creates alarming allergies to meat, has become a serious concern for public health authorities this year. 

Nearly half a million people are estimated to contract Lyme disease annually — and those numbers will continue growing. This year’s tick season is off to an especially rough start: Tick bites have been sending the residents of the Northeast to the emergency room at a higher rate than they have in almost a decade. The CDC reported an unusually high number of tick-bite ER visits in late April in almost all regions of the US, and they continued to rise through May and into June.

Ticks are, of course, not a new adversary. They have been around much longer than humans. “Ticks bit dinosaurs,” Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies who studies tick-borne diseases, told me. 

They have, unfortunately, been evolutionarily optimized to transmit diseases: they attach themselves to a host for days at a time, emit analgesics that mean bites might not be felt, deploy anti-inflammatories and antihistamines to escape detection, and secrete proteins that prevent the bacteria that they transfer into a host from being detected by the host’s immune system, allowing an infection to fester for a while before there is an immune response. They are also surprisingly hard to kill, capable of going into a state of suspended animation that allows them to survive in, for example, extremely cold conditions.

Something has changed recently, however. “The ticks are on the move. They are spreading,” Ostfeld said. “They’re entering more populous areas outside the regions where they were just 10 or 20 years ago, 30 years ago.” 

Both the black-legged ticks (which primarily transmit Lyme disease) and lone star ticks (which are responsible for alpha-gal) are heading northward. But scientists only partially understand why. Climate change is clearly a factor: As northern climes warm, the ticks are moving in. But they are also heading south — to the Carolinas and Virginia for example — to areas where it was already warm enough for them to thrive. Researchers aren’t totally sure why: This could be the result of the deer population expanding or more land development in forested areas, leading to more encounters between ticks and humans.

The bottom line is that people who’ve never had to worry about ticks before now have to. But there’s good news. This is a fight we can still win — and everyone, from the scientists in the lab to those of us who live in ever-expanding tick country, all have a part to play.

What scientists are cooking up to win the battle against ticks

Scientists are making real progress in developing powerful new vaccines that could prevent tick-borne diseases in the first place, as well as more effective treatments for the people who do contract an infection. 

In March, Pfizer reported the results of its Phase 3 clinical trials for a Lyme disease vaccine. It had a more than 70 percent success rate in reducing the likelihood of developing the disease, both one day after the final dose was administered and a month later. The company planned to submit the data to the federal government for approval, and the experts I spoke to said the shot would be a powerful new tool, especially for the communities where Lyme disease is endemic.

“I think that it should be part of our armament, that it will work for some communities, some areas, some populations,” Ostfeld said.

Other candidates for preventing Lyme disease are also in development: The University of Massachusetts Medical School’s MassBiologics has developed a monoclonal antibody cocktail that could be given to somebody before they are exposed to potentially prevent the disease’s development. That treatment is set to enter clinical trials soon. And for alpha-gal syndrome, researchers are also probing whether existing anti-allergy drugs might be able to stave off its symptoms.

Over the long term, scientists aspire to create a universal anti-tick vaccine that targets the proteins in tick saliva and stops the transmission of any pathogens. The science is hard to crack, given the complexity of tick saliva, but it would represent a genuine breakthrough that could alter our relationship to these creepy-crawlies forever.

“If you want to develop an anti-tick vaccine, that’s the ultimate goal. That’s [stopping] any tick biting you from transmitting anything,” Maria Diuk-Wasser, professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology at Columbia University, who studies the ecological and environmental drivers of tick-borne diseases, told me. “The ticks have a very complex saliva, and it’s very difficult to develop that. But I think that’s the ultimate solution.”

New antibody treatments that could treat Lyme disease are also being studied, combining existing drugs to try to find a more potent therapeutic. Scientists are also working to improve our tests for Lyme disease; blood-based tests can be inaccurate, but antigen-based tests that test for proteins — similar to the rapid Covid-19 tests — could allow us to identify Lyme cases sooner and get people antibiotics that prevent the disease’s development. Diagnosis for alpha-gal also continues to improve: Dr. Scott Commins, an allergist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the syndrome for years, told me that a decade ago, it could be as long as seven years before somebody was properly diagnosed; today, the timeline is more like 18 months.

So the future looks brighter — so long as politics don’t get in the way. Ostfeld was optimistic about the prospects for the new Lyme disease vaccine. His only concern was that the current federal health department has been so anti-vaccine.

“I’m concerned that we have a HHS infrastructure that basically fosters conspiracy theories about vaccines and that the willingness of the public to consider vaccines is crumbling, with huge negative health consequences for Americans,” he said. “So I’m worried that even with vaccines that are shown to be safe and effective, that we may not adopt them because of politicians that are undermining public confidence.”

Likewise, further cuts to federal science funding could slow down progress just as researchers seem to be turning the tide against the ticks.

“There’s not a lot of funding for doing basic tick biology. There really isn’t at the federal level,” Ostfeld said. “And now we’re at risk of curtailing that even further because of the recent attempts to destroy American science by choking it off or having politicians decide what science should be done rather than scientists.”

What you can do to protect yourself from ticks

As we wait for those interventions to actually arrive at scale and as more people are being exposed every year to the risks from ticks, better precautions could still allow us to stop infections from ticks the old-fashioned way.

Here are some quick tips on how to manage the risk of tick bites as the weather warms and many of us start spending more time outdoors:

• Know the tick activity in your local area: Local and state health departments often publish warnings or general guidance.
• If you are camping or hiking or otherwise spending a lot of time outdoors, use an EPA-approved insect repellent.
• Avoid high grass and piles of leaves as much as possible.
• Check your clothes, body, and gear for ticks after you come inside.
• Examine your pets closely, checking in nooks and crannies — even between their toes — when they come in.
• Familiarize yourself with how to remove a tick and consider keeping a pair of tweezers or a tick removal device on you when you’re spending time outside.

You could also pre-treat your clothes with permethrin products, which can disable or kill ticks on contact, Diuk-Wasser said. “It’s a really useful product that almost nobody knows that we can use.”

And you should remember that the ticks that you are looking for change over the course of the year. In spring, it’s the full-bodied adults that you probably imagine when you think of a tick. But as we move into the summer, you should be on the lookout for nymphs, which are much smaller and harder to spot.

“Now the nymphs are out, which are the ones that are so tiny most people miss. That creates a lot of misinformation — maybe you’re like, ‘Oh, I don’t find them. There’s not as much of it,’” said Diuk-Wasser. “But really, June is the month where most people get Lyme disease.”

Her team has actually created a free phone app, The Tick App, which people can use to take a picture of a tick and send it in for identification. That lets someone know if they may need to get tested for something like Lyme disease.

And, as always, be your own advocate. If you see Lyme disease’s telltale bullseye rash or have an unusual reaction after eating meat, talk to a doctor as soon as possible. Commins said that in some parts of the country — like Long Island, where alpha-gal is already common — doctors and nurses are practiced at testing for alpha-gal. But in other parts where the syndrome is new, like the South, it might take multiple trips to the emergency room before they think to check for it. So if you are experiencing a new allergic reaction and have any reason to think you may have been bitten by a tick recently, you can ask for an alpha-gal test, he said.

With a few simple precautions, you can do a lot to mitigate the risks from ticks, despite their penchant for sneak attacks. And it’s never too late to start: Commins told me that preliminary evidence suggests that alpha-gal syndrome is not permanent. If a person can avoid further tick bites, the allergy should also dissipate over time.

“Any amount of tick prevention that you do is not wasted time,” Commins said. “The five minutes you spend spraying and taping…is really time well spent.”

And if vaccine and treatment development continues to progress, we may someday be able to defeat the ticks and the frightening pathogens they carry for good.

Do you like to smoke marijuana? Do you also enjoy firearms? If so, the Supreme Court has great news for you.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court held in United States v. Hemani that the federal government may not categorically forbid an “unlawful user” of marijuana from possessing a gun. Hemani also has fairly broad implications for many drug users. 

As Justice Neil Gorsuch notes in the majority opinion, the federal statute at issue in the case bars unlawful users of any “controlled substance” from possessing firearms. This law, he suggests, is far too broad, because it would rope in relatively innocuous drug users such as “a husband who regularly takes his wife’s prescription Ambien to sleep and a college student who routinely uses a friend’s Adderall to cram for exams.” 

So, under Hemani, it appears that a wide range of people who use prescription medications or other drugs in ways that violate the law may now own guns.

Gorsuch’s majority opinion does suggest that the government may ban some users of some drugs from possessing firearms if it can show that those drug users are likely to behave erratically or to otherwise endanger others. But all nine justices agreed that a categorical ban on gun possession by marijuana users goes too far. The justices split into a few different camps, however, on why the law at issue in Hemani is unconstitutional.

Most notably, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in an opinion joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, calls for her Court to overrule New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), a chaotic decision that, as she writes, “is unworkable,” because it “imposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer ‘contested historical questions.’”

Bruen held that courts should determine whether a modern day gun law violates the Second Amendment by asking whether it is “relevantly similar” to a law that existed at the time when the Constitution was written. Lower courts have struggled to apply this framework, which exists only in Second Amendment cases, in large part because the Supreme Court has never articulated just how similar an old law must be to a new one for the new one to survive.

Indeed, the last time the Supreme Court decided a Second Amendment case, in United States v. Rahimi (2024), Jackson quoted a dozen different lower court opinions begging the justices to explain how, exactly, Bruen is supposed to work.

Gorsuch’s majority opinion in Hemani is unlikely to allay these concerns. Instead of clarifying Bruen, Gorsuch writes that “we have not yet had cause to ‘exhaustive[ly] survey’ the features that may render a modern law ‘relevantly similar’ to historical ones.” The historical analysis in his opinion narrowly focuses on laws governing intoxicants, and is unlikely to offer much guidance to judges hearing unrelated Second Amendment cases.

The Court’s entire approach to the Second Amendment remains a train wreck, in other words. But anyone troubled by that reality can now comfort themselves, legally, by squeezing off a few rounds at their local firing range, and then enjoying a nice fat doobie.

The people who wrote the Constitution drank a whole lot

Under Bruen, government lawyers who seek to defend a modern-day gun law must point to an older law that they think is similar to the new one. Judges — who are, again, operating under minimal guidance from the Supreme Court regarding how similar the two laws must be — must then determine if the new law is similar enough to the old law to allow the new law to be upheld.

In the Hemani case, the Justice Department compared the modern law — a categorical ban on gun possession by any “unlawful user” of marijuana — to founding era laws that imposed certain restrictions on “habitual drunkards.” These laws did not actually target gun ownership directly — few early American laws did, as US states did not even have police forces at the founding and thus lacked the ability to disarm people except in limited circumstances. But DOJ argued that, if the framers recognized that people who use intoxicants can be dangerous and need to have their liberties restricted, then modern-day lawmakers can do the same.

But, as Gorsuch persuasively argues, these habitual drunkard laws were much narrower than the modern-day law at issue in Hemani, which applies broadly to a wide range of drug users who are neither dangerous, nor even particularly impaired, because of their drug use.

Gorsuch writes that 18th- and 19th-century habitual drunkard laws applied only to people who drink so often that they become a burden on society and are often unable to manage their own affairs. Among other arguments, Gorsuch quotes Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, who said that if he were an habitual drunkard, it would mean that “‘were a keg of rum in one corner of a room, and were a cannon constantly discharging balls between me and it, I could not refrain from passing before that cannon, in order to get at the rum.’” 

Gorsuch also quotes 19th-century laws such as an Arkansas law defining an habitual drunkard as someone who is “incapable of conducting [his] own affairs,” and a Connecticut law that describes these individuals as someone who has “lost the power of self-control.” And he notes that the framers were unlikely to have supported more expansive restrictions on drinkers because many of them consumed copious amounts of alcohol. “Some say James Madison ‘consumed a pint of whiskey daily,’” Gorsuch writes.

An habitual drunkard, in other words, was someone with a very serious addiction that makes them potentially dangerous to themselves and others. That’s quite different from an occasional marijuana user who quietly smokes a joint in the comfort of their own home. As Gorsuch writes, the federal law in Hemani is so broad it may even apply to someone who uses “a mild gummy as a sleep aid a few times a week.”

So the gun law at issue in Hemani is pretty dissimilar to the “habitual drunkard” laws that the government pointed to in order to defend that law. Fair enough.

What Hemani does not do, however, is provide any framework explaining how similar modern-day gun laws generally must be to their 18th- or 19th-century counterparts in order to survive Second Amendment review. Bruen is likely to continue to baffle lower court judges, in large part because every single one of the Court’s Second Amendment cases rely on ad hoc reasoning about whether one law is sufficiently similar to another. There are few broader legal principles to be extracted from the Court’s historical analysis in any of these cases.

That said, Gorsuch’s opinion does contain one sentence that may give lower courts some guidance in future gun cases. Near the end of the opinion, he suggests that historical laws “usually provided some form of process before an individual lost any of his liberties, even temporarily.” So that does suggest that the government must provide individuals with a hearing before they can be stripped of their gun rights. The law at issue in Hemani fails this test, because it purports to remove someone’s right to own a gun the minute they become an illegal user of certain drugs.

This one line aside, however, Hemani contributes little to the broader project of clarifying which gun laws are permissible and which ones are forbidden. It is good news for people who enjoy both guns and marijuana. But it is terrible news for judges struggling to apply Bruen.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: We finally have some more details on Donald Trump’s Iran deal, and the reviews are not positive. 

What do we know? The text of the deal, or MOU — memorandum of understanding — was released yesterday through news outlets, following several days of confusion after Trump announced the peace agreement, sans specifics, on Sunday. 

It’s a fairly brisk 14 points ending the immediate conflict everywhere — including Lebanon, which as my colleague Joshua Keating reports, could be an ongoing problem — and setting out a path to continued negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. 

The US, for its part, gets the Strait of Hormuz open again, or at least opening — but after 60 days, Iran’s commitment to let vessels pass through free of charge expires. Once it does, Iran has suggested it may begin charging unspecified fees to traverse the strait. (The US naval blockade on Iran was also lifted on Thursday.) 

Some of the other particulars have not gone over well — including with Republican senators.

Among them: 

• Iran gets at least $300 billion in a fund for “reconstruction and economic development,” possibly as a largely or entirely private sector investment. 
• The US will lift “all types of sanctions” on Iran.
• And Iranian funds abroad will be unfrozen.

The fund and sanctions relief are contingent on a final deal being reached, according to the MOU — but Iran will have new income pouring in sooner than that: The MOU also says that the US will issue export waivers for Iranian oil immediately upon its signing, allowing the country to sell its oil more broadly and at higher prices.

As Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) put it on Thursday, “It’s tough to say that that the agreement is one that leaves Iran in a worse place, and the United States in a better place.”

Also, some bad news for Vice President JD Vance: In remarks Wednesday, Trump joked that “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy fake Friday! The Logoff will be off tomorrow for Juneteenth, so we’re going to wrap up with one good thing (and one World Cup thing) and send you into the weekend. Today, that’s this terrific speech from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at the Knicks championship parade in Manhattan. 

Plus, from the world of the World Cup: Merlin the duck, who’s cheering for Mexico.

Have a great long weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!