At the confluence of Christian Lent, Muslim Ramadan, Lunar New Year, the sun in Pisces, a solar eclipse with the Ring of Fire, and the Year of the Fire Horse, it seems preordained that we should talk about longtime Alamedan Don Lattin this month. Lattin, author of several non-fiction books about religion and all things spiritual, was the full-time religion writer for the San Francisco Examiner and then the Chronicle, and he has delved deeply into the many facets of spirit and quest along the way. He’s been living in Alameda for some 30 years.
“True believers have always fascinated me, but I am most definitely not one,” he said in a recent interview. “Religion, broadly defined, is a great beat. It’s a chance to write about how people find meaning, connection, and community in their lives, but also to write about politics, with the ongoing rise of [the] religious right and culture wars over abortion, sexuality, gender.”
A teen in the 1960s, Lattin studied sociology at UC Berkeley, but despite experimentation, he was more a writer than a hippie and was hired as an Examiner reporter at 23. “I may have turned on and tuned in, but I never really dropped out,” he said. “I never joined a cult or new religious movement, but I’ve been writing about them since the 1970s.”
Those books include The Harvard Psychedelic Club, a national bestseller, and its prequel, Distilled Spirits: Getting High, then Sober with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk; Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge; and Following Our Bliss: How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today. He is also the co-author of Shopping For Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium, and numerous essays in encyclopedias of religion.
The first question that comes to mind is whether all that religious research affected Lattin’s own spiritual path.
“In doing the research for my last book, God on Psychedelics, I briefly joined an East Bay church that uses mind-altering plants, fungi, and chemicals as part of its spiritual practice, partaking in those rites with the Sacred Garden Church,” the author said. “In my previous book, Changing Our Minds, I took MDMA, ayahuasca, and other powerful psychedelic drugs under the supervision of trained therapists or neo-shamans. The goal there was to understand psychedelic therapy and sacred plant medicines from the inside out.”
The Harvard Psychedelic Club also won the prestigious California Book Award, while Distilled Spirits won the Religion Book of the Year from the Religion News Service. Suffice it to say that Lattin knows his subject and writes about it very well.
Lattin said he’s not what one would call a true believer in any one tradition, despite engaging in this interview while on his way to India with his wife. “I’m a skeptical universalist, meaning I look to find rays of truth in all the world’s religions, but I am also on the lookout for the corruption and hypocrisy that seems to infect them all.”
So no, they’re not going to India for enlightenment. “I’ll probably write something for Substack, perhaps on our visit to Varanasi, the major pilgrimage site on the Ganges River, or on our visit to the spectacular Ajanta and Elora caves. Most of the time we will be touring around Rajasthan, in the north, along with a few days in Mumbai, Delhi, and the obligatory swing by the Taj Mahal,” he said.
And yet, seeking some grain of truth in the universe is a regular practice. “For about a dozen years, I’ve been part of a small Zen meditation group that meets every other Saturday morning,” Lattin explained. “On alternate Saturdays, we practice a kind of contemplative prayer practice, or lectio divina, that focuses on a reading that could be from Rumi, a Christian mystic, Sufism, or a poem by Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver. I also practice T’ai Chi and have long felt drawn to Taoism and Advaita, the non-dual Vedic philosophy. Our Saturday gatherings are at Lenox House, a Roman Catholic retreat center near Lake Merritt, further evidence that it’s all pretty eclectic.”
Lattin is not working on a new book these days, and isn’t sure if another book is in his future, but he has been crafting a weekly series on Substack called Messiahs I Have Known.
“It’s about some of my misadventures as a religion reporter on the cult beat. It’s been a chance to publish some old work that, for various reasons, never saw the light of day, and to recast some published material in a new light,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t resist including the 600-pound gorilla in the room, so I wrote a few posts about MAGA and the messianic cult around Donald J. Trump.”
“I may be done with [writing] books,” he added, although Harvard Psychedelic Club has recently been optioned for a possible feature film or streaming series. But there’s always hope that his inquisitive mind will find a new topic to dive into.
Meanwhile, Lattin stays busy in midtown with a new obsession: “The most exciting thing in our lives is our new granddaughter, who is approaching the terrible twos.” His wife, Laura Thomas, is a local affordable housing activist and puts out a podcast about Alameda called Island City Beat.
“If you see a big, bearded guy walking a Golden Retriever down Chestnut Street toward the Estuary, it’s probably me,” Lattin said. “Stella [the dog] loves the new waterfront park across from Coast Guard Island. You might also see me riding my e-bike along the Bay on my way to play pickleball at Leydecker Park. That’s my real cult these days. I’m there three times a week getting love-bombed.”
Julia Park Tracey is an award-winning journalist, poet and author of nine books. Julia writes about books and other delicious things from her mountain hideaway, a restored 1880 Victorian, with her cats, chickens, bees, and emotional support husband. Find her on social media as @juliaparktracey, all platforms.
