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American Airlines 1800-299-7264 Flight Reservations Number

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…

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Why the Hell Does Hell Still Matter?

…. The common claim that hell has been on the outs in America since at least 1800 is simply untrue. If anything, 1800 represented a turning point in the other direction. The idea of universal salvation had appealed to both elites like Chauncy and common folk in the late-1700s. The promise that all humans would eventually be saved represented an extreme backlash against the dominant Calvinist notion that God chose only some for heaven. Universal sal…

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Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

…ssues in the broader culture and the long history of oppression of African Americans justified creating this protected space. There is a parallel to be made to the situation on the plane. Women have long been marginalized by men. A man asking a woman to move on a flight may reasonably be interpreted as another chapter in a seemingly never-ending story. I am sympathetic to such a view. But haven’t Orthodox Jews experienced a long history of oppress…

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6 Reservations About U.S. Intervention in Libya

…nce on prosecuting the war in Iraq even after the 2006 elections, when the American people made it clear that they wanted out. Are the American people really that irrelevant, that you can wait a full week to bother to tell us why you got us into another war before we’re even out of Iraq and Afghanistan?   2) I am rightly made uneasy by conflicts with no obvious goal. The United States, like every other institutional body that has interests in the…

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Hajj Journal: The Journey Begins and Ends

…ly swarm to three million persons! But others travel to Jeddah too on this flight, including Muslims and non-Muslims. Jeddah is a port city; and as the major airport hub for Saudi Arabia, this flight has all types. Now, I’ve been on many planes, but this is the first time I’ve been on a plane where 50% of the seats are business- and first-class. Sorta gives you an idea who comes to the Kingdom, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike: big business. Ok…

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Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

…n relegated to living in ghettos. As a result, Rothstein told me, “African American family incomes are about 60% of white family incomes, but African American wealth is about 5% of white family wealth. And that difference is heavily attributable to federal race-based housing policy.” It might be psychologically satisfying to blame unemployment on individual laziness, or segregation on prejudiced white homeowners, but this would miss the forest for…

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AFA: Native Americans Lost their Land for Not Being Christians

…ht of conquest.” Fischer went on to blame poverty and alcoholism on Indian reservations on Native Americans themselves, because they “continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition” and refuse to come into “the light of Christianity” and assimilate “into Christian culture.” How Christianity would have helped Native Americans adapt to confinement on reservations is anybody’s guess. Fischer was apparently propelled into his diatribe by…

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Should Christians Confess to Plants? A Cranky Meditation

…t to participate. If liturgy asks people to pray or sing things that raise reservations, they find themselves in a quandary. It feels wrong to participate, and it feels equally problematic to refrain. Although I very much appreciate innovative worship, I have experienced this situation too many times. To be sure, I feel uncomfortable with worship every week. I’m asked to affirm things I desire to believe when the truth is that I carry doubts and r…

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Denzel’s Profane Preaching: A Religious Movie for the Rest of Us

…d gathering—on his way to a lurching belly-flop in an adjoining field. But Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addit…

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Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

…y, as many of the dioceses in the United States become uninsurable and the number of Catholic churches dwindles. As membership shrinks, the number of ordinations decreases, and the coffers dry up, perhaps the Vatican and its leadership will be forced to look at its decrepit, hierarchical structure, and fix it. I doubt it, however. Like the spider who crawled across Pope Benedict’s robes this weekend in Prague, everyone except the Pope can see the…

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