AT LEAST 25 Christian music festivals are held each summer in America, but they have never catered for theological liberals. Until this year, that is, when the Wild Goose Festival-named after a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit-kicked off on June 23rd on 72 wooded acres in eastern North Carolina, not so far from the intellectual hub of Raleigh-Durham.

The idea, seven years in the making, was based on Britain's Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, which draws 20,000 people a year. About 1,500 people came to the American version, which explicitly pitched its appeal to artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as the "emergent" church.

Instead of Bible studies, there were labyrinth walks. Instead of praise-and-worship music, there was hymn-singing in a beer garden and a bluegrass liturgy presided over by a tattooed female Lutheran minister. Visitors were greeted with buckets of water in which to baptise themselves, and tubs of mud to remind them that "dust thou art". (In Britain, the mud is usually underfoot.) Lecture topics ranged from sex trafficking and social justice to authority in the church and interfaith relations. Visitors could learn from Tom Prasada-Rao, a singer, how to chant "Om" and "Hallelujah Hare Krishna", or hear Paul Fromberg, a pastor from San Francisco, talking about his 2005 wedding to another man. "God is changing the church through the bodies of gay men," Mr Fromberg told a packed session on human sexuality. Also under discussion was "religious multiple belonging"-in other words, belonging to a clutch of different faiths at once.

"We're a laboratory for justice, spirituality and art in the way of Jesus," explained Gareth Higgins, the festival director and a peace activist from Belfast who has worked with Greenbelt and now lives in North Carolina. He and other organisers managed, miraculously, to recruit 150 musicians and speakers, none of whom charged for their services. They hope that the emergent cohort will rise from the ashes of an evangelicalism ruined by right-wing politics. As 78-year-old Phyllis Tickle, author of several books on emergent Christianity, put it, "We're at the start of a 500-year upheaval in culture and the church."

Mainline Protestants, however, seemed delighted by the festival, and may well latch on to the emergents to shore up their shrinking numbers. Buoyed by their success, Wild Goose's organisers are planning to repeat the festival next year in the same bucolic place.

Ten years after he was ordained, he finally made the pilgrimage to Medjugorje, the place in his mother's book. It is the biggest ongoing apparition site in the world: "Catholic Woodstock," in Calloway's words. In the past three decades, nearly 40 million people have come to experience the reported monthly apparitions of Mary to six residents.

The story is that almost 30 years ago, two teenagers named Mirjana and Ivanka -- they are now 46 and 45, respectively -- were on a rocky hill behind the village when Ivanka noticed a bright light and said, "Look, it's Our Lady."

"I saw in the middle of the hill, one lady in the long dress, with the little baby in the hands. ... She present herself, she said, 'My dear children, don't be afraid of me, I am Queen of Peace,'" Mirjana said.

"We ask her childish question," Mirjana recalled. "We ask her, 'How is possible that you are so beautiful?' And she smile and she said, 'Because I love. If you want to be beautiful, love.'"

"After 25 or 30 years ... the church can have a pretty good idea about whether this is of God, or whether it's of Satan. The message is very sound. The spiritual fruits are undeniable," Miravalle said.

The Vatican has never approved an ongoing apparition for fear that the visionaries might prove themselves frauds or insane. But the Vatican hasn't condemned it, either, so the faithful continue to come. Many believe that Mary called them through signs and miracles.

"I asked the Blessed Mother to show me a sign of whether I should come or not," one woman said. "And my rosary turned gold, so I took that as a sure sign. ... Well, it's gold color anyway."