Search for "American Airlines 1800-299-7264 Reservation Phone Number"

Dispatches from the Cutting Edge of Healing: Surgery and Spirit

By Lori Alvord

I am a Native American woman, a member of the Diné (Navajo) nation. I am also a surgeon, and part of my approach to my clinical practice is based on my cultural and spiritual background. Soon after I finished my surgical training, in the early ’90s, I returned home to work in a small hospital on the border of the Navajo reservation. As I cared for native people, I began to notice all the ways that our current medical system was not a good fit the…

Again, Vatican Punishes Gender Equality More Swiftly Than Sexual Abuse

By Patricia Miller

…confirmed in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, that the “reservation of the priesthood to males…is not a question open to discussion.” Writing in The Week, Damon Linker predicts a “mass exodus” from the Catholic Church if it doesn’t revise the “stunningly unpersuasive” ban on women’s ordination: American Catholics have become accustomed to worshipping in a state of cognitive dissonance, with a majority rejecting the church’s sexu…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…ce are said to be different in Black Rock City. No one was talking on cell phones, clocks were largely invisible, and the city’s layout reoriented participants with its semi-circular streets running from A to L. This year the letters marked various rites of passage: Anniversary, Birthday, Coming Out, Divorce, Engagement, Funeral, Graduation, Hajj, Initiation, Journey, Kindergarten, and Liminal. Bisecting the rites of passage streets were cross str…

Sacrifice, Suffering, and Rick Santorum

By Ivan Strenski

…a child is born with Trisomy 18, to accept, and then care for her. Without reservation, I am in awe of those parents who do. But, why would one risk putting oneself in the position where a Trisomy 18 pregnancy would be statistically probable? Why would one choose, in effect, to take the risk of bringing a doomed child into the world? I am not arguing that such was the intention of Rick Santorum and his wife. But, I am arguing that the political an…

The Brutality of the American Eden

By Paul Harvey

…rily a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Beck rants in Twitter-like aphorisms condensing David Barton’s execrable version o…

A Response to Hussein Rashid

By Amjad Mahmood Khan

…rofessor Rashid should not attack the Community for assuming the mantle of American Muslim leadership when other American Muslims have remained timid or silent on these issues. Second, Professor Rashid contends that the American Muslim community is represented by a diverse range of organizations, and it is this very diversity that makes it difficult for any one Muslim organization to speak with any authority. Professor Rashid is correct to point o…

God in the Inauguration: JFK, Bush, and Obama

By Jerome E. Copulsky

….” Like Kennedy and Bush before him, Obama introduced the classic creed of American civil religion, the connection between God and American “liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.” But he did so with an interesting and important shift. Obama abstained from the language of divinely-endowed “rights,” and spoke instead of the “God-given promise,” which is a “precious gift” and “noble idea.” Rights are, of course, endowed, inherent in the cr…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…er of languages, economic classes, ethnicities and cultures represented in American Catholic churches, American Catholics resist singularity. And it follows that they are going to be inconsistent in how they define mercy, as the hierarchy of the American church is often wont to demonstrate. Even the variety of American “Mercy Doors” found online defies comparison to the huge, ornately carved bass doors Francis pushed open at St. Peter’s when he de…

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

By Michael Schulson

…w tweaks, Buddhist practices of mindfulness meditation fit right into this American tradition. Since the 1970s, Americans have used quiet, awareness-based contemplative practices to calm and focus their minds. Much of this is thanks to Jon Kabat-Zinn, the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week course. Kabat-Zinn studied mindfulness meditation under the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, but he has emphasized the psychological a…

W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

By Edward J. Blum

…nd insights probably tell us more about the power and place of religion in American society than any of these others. Second, American historians have written extensively about Du Bois but have basically ignored his interest in religion. I felt shocked to read book after book about The Souls of Black Folk that focused on the word “folk” in the title but not on “souls.” This struck me as a blind spot in the profession. And lastly, in 2002 I was a f…