Search for "cheap airline tickets .com phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…robably why there’s a such clean break between the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schoo…

Memo to David Brooks: Francis Is Not Naïve For Criticizing Capitalism

By Peter Laarman

…s not. He cheekily gives us a defense of fracking as a very good public outcome flowing from individual greed. You have to give him credit: the man has balls to say this. Yes, fracking gives Americans more cheap carbon energy—for a while. And then we’re left with ruined landscapes, ruined aquifers, and our same old dependence on foreign energy sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins…

“Reconciliation” With Indigenous People is Comforting For Many Canadians, But is a Christian Concept Up To The Task?

By Pamela Klassen and Joseph Wiebe

…rnment promises of “free land” which they turned into tightly-knit farming communities shaped by commitments to pacifism, adult baptism, and family. As Gina Starblanket and Dallas Hunt showed in their own Globe and Mail essay, however, the land that settlers imagined as free wilderness was neither free nor empty. And, they write, the deadly effects of the myths of settler masculinity persist today, as the trial of Colten Boushie’s killer showed. E…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…ing his time in office—in order to “get things done.” If one is relatively comfortable with the status quo, then such calls for reconciliation, unity, or “bipartisanship” will sound like common sense. Simply tone down the rhetoric, resist “extremism,” and stress “pragmatic” solutions, and everything will work out. President Obama’s recent memoir is a good example of the rhetorical power of such appeals to “unity,” at least for a certain segment of…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…tual community,” linking alienated elements of the Muslim diaspora through cheap communications technology and easy air travel. Islamist military tactics (Web sites as command centers, commercial airplanes as weapons) developed not simply from Hollywood movies, as was so often claimed following the 2001 attacks, but from the experience that constitutes the Muslim sacred community. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is therefore at least partly right in insist…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…ver the body and the physical world, and so to ascend toward God—even to become god-like. Masons were encouraged to build confidence in their own intellects, and to form new commercial, religious, and educational institutions. The lodges also acted as little schools of government, training new, local elites in elections and legislative procedures. The influence of Masonry was part of the process that democratized and liberalized Europe and North A…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…o cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize that the oil industry is an incorrigable profit center that cares little fo…

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…e drink-ware. (This rather than a boycott, apparently.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti629wLy4vU The so-called “War on Christmas” has been a staple of right-wing culture warriors for generations now, seemingly so incensed over people saying “Happy Holidays” that they can’t help but resort to hyperbole so bizarre that you can’t tell if it’s parody or not. It’s this perennially aggrieved attitude that allows a writer at Breitbart.com to claim tha…

But What Did We Learn? Hate-Watching the First Clinton/Trump Debate

By Candace E. West

…ll. It was followed by 90 minutes of Trump trying to bully… https://twitter.com/elisamaza76/status/780578328352874496 and lie his way through the debate: https://twitter.com/AbbyHiggs/status/780580619025780737 Par for the course on a night that saw Clinton interrupted repeatedly by an increasingly belligerent opponent. https://twitter.com/sarahkliff/status/780603407996510208 Clinton stayed mostly on message while Trump devolved into incoherent ram…

“Japan Gave Us Pokemon, God Gave Them an Earthquake”

By Anthea Butler

…an, let’s acknowledge God’s signs. Turn to HIM and pray. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAGYqrANnAw http://www.gamespot.com/forums/topic/27876648/could-the-japan-earthquake-be-gods-punish-for-them-killing-whales?page=0 Tinasongbird73‎ Prayers up 4 the people in japan who’ve experience great loss & heartache frm the earthquakes & Tsunami. God is trying 2tell us something! smitefulsinner‎ RT @rachydivanerd: Re: Japan: the 1st person to say that the…