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American Airlines Customer Service 1800-299-7264 Online Flight Reservations

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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Blame Series Bonus: Why We Want That Dish For Free, an Uncut Interview with Bertram Malle

…and don’t know to whom we can direct our displeasure. That’s why you have customer service institutions, so people know to whom to send their email or letter of complaint. (Well, you don’t even know who receives this stuff.) All of this, to me, again, is a result of the difficulties of dealing with amorphous institutions that don’t have clear boundaries. And then, of course, you have that same difficulty with blaming (or praising, for that matter…

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Our Failure To Understand Ferguson: A Cognitive Explanation

…d have to buy new, full-price tickets to Iran. On the phone with JetBlue’s customer service line that night, my righteous fury dissipated quickly. Could JetBlue really be to blame for bad weather, or a mechanical problem, or whatever system error had made our flight impossible? Don’t I benefit regularly from this massive travel infrastructure that, like Lady Justice, doles its punishments out blindly? I accepted $100 in travel vouchers from a frie…

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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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Dreaming Cyborg Dreams: Virtual Identity and Religious Experience

…depends on the extent that one’s religious worldview is imported into the online world. Second Life In the online world of Second Life, “residents” design their own avatars and engage in unscripted encounters, making real religious dialogue a possibility. Rita King (and her avatar Eureka Dejavu), engaged in some tough discussions about cultural differences with Muslims, as reported in Dispatches From the Imagination Age. Eureka describes a time w…

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Is Refusal to Write Anti-Gay Cake Message a Violation of Religious Freedom?

…Cake — Caroline Mala Corbin (@CarolineMCorbin) January 21, 2015 But if the customer tells the baker they want the (undecorated) cake for religious reasons or a religious event, like the hypothetical Church prayer group in my example above, I’m not sure that the fact that the baker has a political objection to the customer’s religious beliefs means that refusing to bake the cake isn’t arguably religious discrimination. There’s an ongoing question i…

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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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