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

Manhattan Declaration Is The New Old Culture War

By Sarah Posner

…blican luminaries have warned us about. (George is also the founder of the American Principles Project, which opposes the appointment of LGBTQ people to positions in government.) The real question, though, is not whether the culture wars are “dead,” as so many would have it; clearly they are not. (As I write this, over 37,000 people have signed the Manhattan Declaration.) As evidenced by many of its signatories, who claimed to sign on behalf of th…

Homosexual Thoughts and Feelings Not a Sin, Says New LDS Handbook

By Joanna Brooks

…eneral Conference Talk, these are incremental but significant changes. The new CHI: 1. Removes the implication that same-sex relationships “distort” love. 2. Removes the imperative that members should repent for having “homosexual thoughts or feelings.” 3. Removes the instruction that Church leaders should refer members to professional counseling. This is especially significant because in times past leaders were encouraged to refer members to prac…

Reality as Revelation: “Hail Caesar!” is the Coen Brothers’ Most Religious Movie Yet

By Elijah Siegler

…I believe this is the first time the brothers have dipped their toes into New Testament waters.” Indeed he is mistaken. The Coens love the New Testament as only secular Jews can. The first shot in Hail, Caesar!, of a wooden statue of Jesus above the altar of a Catholic Church recalls a similar shot near the beginning of The Man Who Wasn’t There, a movie about a man dying for the sins of others. And let us not forget that in Miller’s Crossing, Tom…

Defending the Helpless: New Bible Highlights Poverty and Justice

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…creases as nearly 47.4 million people live in poverty and some 3.5 million Americans are homeless in a given year. My other concerns come from Vest himself, who, in the course of his 700 Club interview made it clear that part of his goal is not just to “give a handout” to the needy, but to proselytize them as well: “That’s why we feel like any kind of charitable organization that is Christian has to be so attached to the Bible. The American Bible…

What Will Orthodox ‘Republicanity’ Look Like?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…

Shutdown is Over, But There Will Be a Next Time

By Diane Winston

…mics gained supporters over the years but for more than three decades, the New Deal shaped American values and set the national vision. But in the 1960s and the 1970s, a series of cultural upheavals—starting with the Civil Rights movement and ending with the Iranian revolution—laid waste to FDR’s notion of a benevolent centralized state. Ronald Reagan began dismantling Roosevelt’s legacy and successive presidents followed suit. Free markets boomed…

Noah, Cosmos Controversies Not About Biblical Literalism

By Dan Mathewson

…o Fosdick, as Christians had always done in the past when they encountered new truths. “The new knowledge and the old faith [have] to be blended in a new combination,” Fosdick argued in his famous 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”—a new combination that for Fosdick demanded a Christianity without a virgin birth or literal second coming of Christ (among other things), which, he argued, were impossible to believe in, in this new scientif…

RDPulpit: Obama Missed the Hope in State of the Union Address

By Daniel Schultz

…onality, we are fated to despair. We know full well the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces. And short of genuine newness life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much. (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 63) This is what Obama seems to have been shooting for—and failed to achieve. Where his rhetoric soared on the campaign trail, in the State of the Union it seemed…

Exodus “Ex-Gay” Ministry Closes Up Shop

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…Secondly, even though the son is welcomed back, no questions asked, it’s understood that he’s not going to go out and do it again. The message to LGBT people is clear: you’re welcome and forgiven, but going back to that “lifestyle” is forbidden. I hope my reservations are unfounded, because so much is at stake in this move. If time reveals this new organization to be nothing more than a shuffling of the Titanic’s deck chairs then it will only rei…

Church of Pain: Religion, Ritual, and the Body in the New Serial Spin-Off, “S-Town”

By Spencer Dew

…isode we learn that the man who so despised tattoos, but had a significant number of them, acquired most of them in a short period of time, and acquired many through a particular practice in the back room of his own clock workshop. Paying one hundred dollars an hour to a tattoo artist, McLemore submitted to the needle, sometimes for a new piece, sometimes merely for more ink on top of old, a tattoo sunk on top of an existing tattoo, turning his bo…