Search for "cheap lan airlines december tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Are American Christians “Persecuted”?

By Eric C. Miller

…hey don’t have it as bad as gays in ISIS-held territory. So let’s put that cheap argument to bed. At Patheos, Benjamin Corey shakes that cheap argument awake: Can we stop complaining about this bogus idea that American Christians are persecuted now? I mean, really. Can we stop? The world needs us to turn from ourselves and focus on this real persecution, because it’s evil and must be exposed and stopped. However, our own self-centeredness as Ameri…

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

By Peter Laarman

…cans 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. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhaps of churchly antimodernism. What he fails to consider is that th…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…onemasons in the lodges, called “speculative Freemasonry,” spread from Scotland to England, and then took off as an international movement. Masonic initiations included some amount of mild ritual hazing, intended to disorient the initiate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges…

The Economy is Racism: Ending Race-Based Economic Violence is the Real Challenge of This Moment

By Peter Laarman

…have been kept down at the very bottom in order for the American System of cheap labor to function. Although Henry Clay opposed slavery in theory, the need for this ongoing subjugation was most certainly in the mind of The Great Compromiser who coined the term “American System” during the expansionist years of ‘Indian removal’ and a related Second Middle Passage that took over one million people in shackles from the Chesapeake to the rich bottomla…

When Blasphemy Was a Riot (But Didn’t Cause One)

By Sophie Gherardi

…he Untouchables), which came out almost a year ago and sold twenty million tickets in France (and nearly as many abroad). Intouchables is a funny and moving comedy, but as politically correct a story as you’ll find: a black young man bordering on delinquency is hired by a tetraplegic wealthy man to be his assistant-nurse-chauffeur. They have a ball together doing crazy—and sometimes nasty—things, and save each other from an apparently inexorable f…

Pope Tweeted into Retirement

By Rachel Wagner

…rnet in the early nineties for most people consisted largely of acquiring plane tickets, reading relatively static documents, and emailing acquaintances. By 2004, the year before John Paul died, search engines had become sophisticated and powerful, and the immensely popular online world Second Life was in its third year. MySpace had appeared the year before, and Mark Zuckerberg was feverishly writing the code that would become Facebook. YouTube w…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…s; and of the rising concepts of feudalism and chivalry. They focus on one language or one nation or one empire. By looking instead at one man—whose life spanned many empires, nations, and languages, and who crossed the seeming divides between religion and science, the cloister and the palace—I hope to change readers’ perception of the Dark Ages. Did you have a specific audience in mind? I wrote The Abacus and the Cross for everyone interested i…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…al institutions of which he had been a part. Thus both the tactics and the language used by the participants in Soulforce’s Equality Ride, which was first launched in 2006, bear a strong family resemblance to the culture of the American Civil Rights Movement. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” says Lauren Parke, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. She and another rider compose messages that they hope to give to members of the Bapti…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…made similar million-dollar plus contributions to campaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in adva…