Search for "cheap airline tickets from san joses costa rica to managua nicaragua phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…reveals a remarkably hopeful community. There was no polling of Muslim Americans in 1967, but historical research on Muslim Americans has revealed something similar. Despite all the negativity surrounding the image of Islam and Muslims and the real prejudice that Muslims faced in the 1960s, Muslim individuals and communities on the whole found the strength to believe in a better future. Muslim Americans also report that the number of non-Muslims…

Creeping Shari’ah… Ahem, Excuse Me… Biblical Law

By Julie Ingersoll

…he 4300 inmates already held within faith based programs by increasing the number of programs from four to six. While inmates in these facilitates choose the faith based programs over other options, it’s not, as proponents like to argue, fair to say that they choose to be there. Opponents of the plans argue that inmates in faith based programs enjoy a number of perks and better facilities than other inmates. But whatever the case, Scott’s plan wou…

The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…ect, because people like Tonéx were interviewed on YouTube, there were thousands—tens of thousands of emails [and other responses]—can you use a curse word on Religion Dispatches? Oh, I think so. When Cadillac Kennedy did that anti-Eddie Long tape: “Dick-sucking Eddie Long! You’re wrong!” She got over a million views. So what’s coming in are a huge number of statements. Many of them are typically homophobic, “God is not mocked,” “you’re going to…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…researchers share the unsurprising finding that “young adults engage in a number of religious practices less often than do older Americans.” What they may mean to say is traditional religious practices: weekly attendance at religious services, weekly scripture reading, daily prayer, and weekly meditation. (My guess is as good as yours on the greater expected frequency of prayer in the survey.) The Pew survey design is problematic—and this is wher…

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…aying that mainline Protestantism is in an extended period of at least numerical, if not spiritual, decline, and many commentators have taken the occasion of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church—still an important symbol of normative American religiosity—to mark the beginning of the End Times for liberal Christianity and perhaps religion in general. Others have strained mightily to see glimmers of hope even in the confusion and controver…

PRRI’s Robert P. Jones Discusses Authoritarianism, Christian Nationalism, and What the 2024 Election is Really About

By Daniel Schultz

…enship? Or should we identify them and deport them? The general population number is about 60-40: a little more than six in 10 Americans [agree with a] path to citizenship and the rest are divided among these other positions. But what we’ve seen are two things. The [second] option has thinned out a little bit and the deportation number [option 3] has gone up. That’s mostly been because Republicans have shifted. They’ve actually followed the lead o…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…tention is that there has been a significant and sustained increase in the number of people who are choosing not to identify with any religion. As reported by the Pew Research Center, in 2007, 16 percent of American adults reported no religious preference or affiliation; by 2014 this statistic had increased to almost 23 percent. And younger adults are more likely to say that they have no religion than their parents or grandparents’ generations. Ma…

Is Torture Utilitarian?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking t…

Special Report: Have Evangelical Colleges Succumbed to “Theological Paranoia”?

By Chrissy Stroop

…students who are being deprived of an authentic liberal arts education (and in some cases bullied), is to let them know that we are paying attention, and that we are not indifferent. These stories of dissent and disagreement complicate any kind of “sea change” narrative about American evangelicalism moving toward moderation and openness. But whatever the future of American evangelicalism, I can’t help but wonder how many of my generational peers w…

Economy Yields Too Few Prophets

By Peter Laarman

…mployed workers for every new job opening. And as of last month the actual number of workers in crisis is not the 14 million who are officially unemployed (as if that number were acceptable), but more like 29 million people, if you count people no longer looking or working at sharply reduced hours or taking big pay and benefit cuts. That is 18 percent of the total workforce and still rising. What’s more, three-fourths of those losing work over the…