Search for "cheap airline tickets to harrisburg pa phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…MS (short message service, i.e. “texting”) technology to send out a “daily papal message” to believers. Pope John Paul also oversaw the creation in 1995 of the Vatican’s Web site, complete with searchable encyclicals proposing, in 1999, that the sixth-century scholar St. Isidore be the patron saint of computers and the internet. After succeeding John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI arranged for SMS messages to be sent to the cell phones of youth attend…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…get where he is coming from. But to me, the most important thing about the papal visit was not the agenda he upheld, but the stance he held up. At the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on September 23, those of us in attendance were reminded, via loudspeaker, that the Roman Catholic Church has made and continues to make mistakes. “Saints are only human,” a voice proclaimed during a pre-Mass program that acknowledged the objections of Na…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…nnot bring himself to practice what he preaches. By not extending the sacrament of matrimony to all Catholics, he denies us the very compassion he extols so highly. For a man whose papacy has focused on the value of mercy, he seems content to rest on his laurels in Amoris Laetitia, saying much but changing nothing….

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…with a religious teacher for a weekend, to one in which mindfulness means participating in a multibillion dollar industry, with everything from mindful diets to mindful Marines. I asked Wilson whether MNDFL was really unusual within this larger mindfulness-and-meditation scene. He pointed out that there are already quite a few nonprofit meditation centers in the area—the Village Zendo is 10 blocks away, and The Interdependence Project, a secular…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…deas in the science classroom, but in a different way. And here is where I part company with most of my colleagues who say, ‘Creationism and intelligent design belong in history or religion class, but in my classroom I only teach science. Besides, I’ve got too much information to cover as it is.’ And there’s the rub: science is taught simply as information, as a collection of facts, and as if these facts exist in an ethical vacuum not connected to…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…time that he was having the better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher wh…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…Barack Obama. Antisemitism is a serious, real thing. When it is used as a cheap shot—as when pro-Palestinian advocates throw around terms like “Nazi” and “concentration camp”—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns a…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…erhaps the politics of religious affiliation, like “all politics,” is local.) As a result, what we now call the Catholic Church looks very different from the church of 1979. Francis will find a fractured church where a significant number of practicing Catholics aren’t receptive to his papacy and its message, and where a large population of those who would presumably be supportive of his papacy and its priorities are politically and doctrinally ali…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…or many Burners, this pilgrimage to the desert is the closest they come to participating in anything like a religious community. They prepare for it all year, gathering costumes and camp decorations, assembling sculptures, planning meals with groups of friends, and scheduling shifts as lamplighters or temple guardians. These are not desert fathers or renunciants seeking a wilderness away from civilization in which they suffer and travail to prove…