My Parents Suspect I’ve Lost My Faith. Should I Tell Them the Truth?
The author receives a voicemail from his mother suggesting he has stopped praying and hinting that his wife may be responsible. He debates whether to disclose his true religious stance to his parents or to preserve family harmony by withholding the detail. The column examines ethical considerations of honesty, respect for elders, and personal autonomy in matters of faith.
- ▪The author's mother left a long voicemail expressing concern that he no longer prays and implying his wife might be influencing him.
- ▪He is uncertain whether to tell his parents the truth about his spiritual practices or to keep the matter private to avoid conflict.
- ▪The piece explores philosophical arguments about the duty to be truthful versus the desire to protect loved ones from hurtful truths.
- ▪Appiah recommends a compassionate approach that balances honesty with sensitivity to his parents' expectations.
- ▪He notes that religious belief is often a private matter and that cultural expectations can pressure individuals to disclose personal faith matters.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | NYT — Magazine |
| Canonical URL | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/magazine/parents-suspect-ive-lost-my-faith-ethics.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 16:00:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T16:08:01.779Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T16:08:06.699Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Lmq3rm6BT3af |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.NewsletterThe EthicistMy Parents Suspect I’ve Lost My Faith. Should I Tell Them the Truth?My mother sent me a long voicemail saying she believes I no longer pray, and implied that my wife may be to blame.Listen · 10:08 min Share full article507Credit...Illustration by Tomi UmBy Kwame Anthony AppiahKwame Anthony Appiah has been The New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist columnist since 2015 and teaches philosophy at N.Y.U.May 27, 2026 !function(){var e="gps_module_impressions",s="gps_suppress_module",t=new URLSearchParams(window.location.search),o="1"===t.get("gps_debug")?function(e,s){console.log("[gps]",e,void…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at NYT — Magazine.
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