Search for "cheap airline tickets to fl from va phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Rise of Episcopal Village

By Becky Garrison

…K) for decades. As reported by the Rev. Steve Hollinghurst, Researcher in Evangelism to Post-Christian Culture, the Sheffield Centre, Children’s Sunday school attendance, for instance, has drastically plunged over the past century, dropping from 80 percent at the start of the century to 12 percent. In an article I penned for Yale Divinity School’s Reflections magazine, I observed that explorations of alternative worship/emerging church culture hav…

When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…Religious groups on all sides of the issue were especially vocal in their various and conflicting advocacies. But the end result was plain: no State can do what the Federal government says you cannot do to an individual citizen. States rights do not trump individual rights. And there are a lot more people who count as citizens, now. “Due process”… “equal protection”… the Court placed itself in the business of defending these sacrosanct institutio…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…cide episcopal appointments worldwide? Cardinal Rigali also sits on that influential Vatican congregation. If rumors are true, Rigali will soon be replaced and sent to Rome. (He’s 76, one year past the mandatory retirement age.) A credible successor will be key to restoring the trust of Philadelphia Catholics. That appointment will also hold lessons for the wider church, including bishops. The question that remains, then, is what will they learn?…

Obstacles for Secularists

By Sarah Posner

…to become better organized as a political force, even as they increase in number. The major impediment to that kind of organization is the fact that it is very difficult for secularists to conceive of themselves in tribal terms. Most tribes, whether of nations or ethnicities or sports fandom, can easily demarcate their membership—it’s the people who look like us, or talk like us, or dress like us. Tribes organized around religious belief have rit…

The Sacred and the Dead: Truckin’ as a New American Pilgrimage

By Varun Soni

…at detail about the spiritual foundations of the Grateful Dead universe. Reflecting upon the music and message of the 1960s, Garcia said, “For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.” For Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s music could serve as a “signpost to a new consciousness” by challenging the listener to become “an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the uni…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ith assault rifles—you know, the Three Percenters were there in their camouflage and assault rifles. What happened as you were standing at that intersection on Saturday afternoon? It was late-morning, early Saturday afternoon. Rev. Traci Blackmon and I were holding public witness. We had been in the streets, just speaking to people, to everyone. We were in full clergy gear—my stole had a resistance fist on it, and “Black Lives Matter.” Traci’s int…

Missing the Anger for the Shoes

By Hussein Rashid

…disgusting. They don’t appreciate having said feces smeared all over their floors and carpets, although I’m sure a great number of non-Muslims appreciate these artifacts from guests’ shoes. As mentioned previously, shoes are also used to discipline people. Belt-whuppins are difficult when men’s traditional garb does not include belts. Shoes/slippers/etc. are far more common. They are used to help “enlighten” insouciant, arrogant, oblivious, destru…

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

By Ed Simon

…teach us. Caitlin Corning explains in The Celtic and Roman Traditions: Conflict and Consensus in the Early Medieval Church that, even though at one point historians may have had a romantic attachment to the idea, more recently “scholars have abandoned the term Celtic Church believing it to be too closely associated with inaccurate ideas.” However, as her study makes clear, the general public is in no way allergic to this constructed history given…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…vitable that your Aunt Mary who reads Left Behind novels will move to survivalist compounds and begin paramilitary training to battle the UN than that your cousin Mary who likes Avatar will give up her iPod and clothes and move to a rainforest. Still, even if we wonder if Robertson’s scenarios of mutiny are mainly fantasies he won’t enact, and even if we discount his extreme expressions of disloyalty (imagining the president as Satan, praying for…