Search for "cheap business flights airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Pope Praises ‘Complementarity’ & Resists Gay Ambassador; Irish Religious Leaders Spar Over Marriage; Colombian Atty Gen Cites ‘Bogus’ Study Opposing Adoption; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…tened to boycott IKEA, after it provided Family Card holders with discount tickets to his Christian magic show, ‘Vision’. In a statement, the chain said it would not be cutting ties with the pastor. IKEA said: “Dear IKEA fans, thanks for your patience while we took time to come to an informed decision on an issue that has raised sensitivities in our community. “After listening to the questions raised, we decided to do a thorough review. We spoke d…

Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…y orchestrated, along with mesmerizing music, for maximum impact. It’s big business. You point out something important. While people have their home church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second whic…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…self-interrogation boiled, my hand extended to the right. I reached for my phone, but I found nothing. At first I laughed at my instinct, my muscle memory. The phone, with its glowing screen, gave me solace and control. But I was tied to my cushion for another hour, and in this ashram for another day, so email would have to wait. I panicked. My heart raced. Would my editor be asking for me? Would a reply from that politician’s secretary sit unansw…

Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…

How a Pioneer of Branding Invented Christian Fundamentalism

By Daniel Silliman

…tional identity was a normal part of a middle class identity. In Crowell’s business experience, purity is at the foundation of his business success. Quaker Oats became what it was because he was able to make people suspicious of the oatmeal you would shovel out of a barrel, and his sealed box with the picture of a Quaker on it was the pure alternative. In every single advertisement that he created in the first 30 years of the company’s existence,…

What’s More Frightening Than Snakes on a Plane?

By Devin Kuhn-Choi

…than snakes on a plane? Apparently, women on a plane, as recent reports of flights being delayed due to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refusing to sit in their assigned seats next to women, indicate. Here on RD, Kara Loewentheil recently argued that the airplane demonstration but that it “replicates the broader social and political movement strategies we’ve seen on a personal scale,” and highlighted the similarities between these smaller-scale protests…

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men “Stand Up” for “Religious Freedom”… On a Plane

By Kara Loewentheil

…yself. The Economist reports that ultra-orthodox Jews have been disrupting flights when they’re seated next to women, which, they say, their religion forbids.* According to the report, the men will sometimes even attempt to bribe the women to move. Ok, so no huge deal there—it’s annoying, perhaps, but hey, that’s the free market economy at work. The problem is what happens if the woman/women won’t cooperate. As one news source described a recent o…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…self bored by dry, ordinary facts and spicing them up with distortions and flights of fancy, he takes shallow, hackneyed fiction and makes it exciting by adding in the truth. Along the way, he can’t resist including some of the Masons’ absurd legends surrounding their supposed origins, and so allows fact, fiction, and myth to blend into a heady mixture. The book reflects not the fear and suspicion often directed towards the Masonic mysteries but r…

There’s No Business Like the Bible Business: 200 Years of the ABS

By Paul Harvey

…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…