Search for "cheap airline tickets from memphis tennesee to chicago illinois phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the nondenominational and evangelical churches that began to flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, could not boast the h…

Burning Man: Religious Event or Sheer Hedonism?

By Lee Gilmore

…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Spiritual McCarthyism and the Catholic Vote

By Bill Berkowitz

…ion (she is a rabid defender of abortion). At about the same time, radical Chicago priest Rev. Michael Pfleger bailed on Obama by withdrawing his name from the Advisory Council. Now we find that there is no listing for the group on the Obama website. As of this writing, the status of Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council is unclear. (Phone calls to Obama headquarters were not returned.) However, the dust-up between the always vociferous Donoh…

‘Don’t Call Me Black No More, I’m an Israelite’: Kendrick Lamar, Black Hebrew Religion, and Black Suffering

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…hosted a “Seder in the Streets” this past Passover in which members of the Chicago Jewish and African American community took part in the yearly ritual together—not in shining banquet hall but in the heart of the South side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood. Rather than inviting prominent African American preachers and Jewish rabbis for an interfaith photo-op, Manasseh hosted everyday people to share their communal “bread of affliction.” Rather th…

Why the World Needs Religious Studies

By Nathan Schneider

…h for various kinds of capital is one instance of a more general rule. The Chicago Div School’s Jonathan Z. Smith once wrote a book whose title references Alfred Korzybski’s dictum that “the map is not the territory.” I’d consider this a vital lesson of my religious studies education: don’t mistake the names and categories we assign to things for the things themselves. Christians, one quickly learns, are different from Muslims, until you notice th…

Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads

By Deborah Jian Lee

…00 members and formed local chapters. Soong-Chan Rah helped host the first Chicago meeting, which I attended as a reporter. Two dozen people gathered in a classroom to discuss launching a new movement, which included addressing racism within and toward Asian communities; coalition building with justice movements like Black Lives Matter; planting progressive Asian American churches; and approaching justice work with a lens of intersectionality, whi…

Life After ‘Roe’: Clergy Consider Handing Out Morning-After Pill in Church

By Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons

…S and Judson’s role pre-Roe? I was involved in CCS as a seminary intern in Chicago. I got arrested for counseling women about how to get on an airplane to New York to have a legal abortion. We don’t know why we were busted in the University of Chicago Divinity School Chapel basement. The whole idea of CCS was to remove the stigma of having an abortion and to bless it with the moral agency it deserves. We wanted to change the story from “you’re a b…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…2) and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Esalen Institute, a retreat center formed in 1962 near Big Sur, California, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized practices such as yoga, meditation, reiki, and past-life regression, and the success of Esalen encouraged invited the d…