Search Results for:

Delta Airlines 1800-299-7264 Flight New Booking Number

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

…l inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote about the greying mainline, their internecine squabbles and financial woes. But thirty years later, they’re still standing. Did we get it wrong or did we just forget to lo…

Read More

55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

A new poll released today by the Salt Lake Tribune shows that among Utah Mormons surveyed, 55% believe it is possible for people who are attracted to members of the same sex to change their sexual orientation. Twenty-five percent of Utah Mormons reported being “unsure,” and 15% believed gay people could not voluntarily “change” their own sexual orientation. Among non-Mormon Utahns surveyed, 66% believed it was not possible for gay people to “chan…

Read More

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

…ver in Newsweek’s estimation.) The advent of the 1960s, and the magazine’s new status as subsidiary of the Post, led Newsweek to take a different approach. With the 1963 cover story “Catholicism in America” and 1967’s “How Do Catholics View Their Church?” it seemed coverage of the Church in national newsweeklies had moved away from the top-down approach. When Time began to tell similar stories of fracturing faiths and tested authority, it may have…

Read More

The Devil is in the Details

…if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…

Read More

Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet

…internet as a result of the inexorable working out of Moore’s Law. As the number of transistors on a chip grew exponentially, computers became smaller, and then they became “personal,” and then they fit in our pockets as a phone. “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing,” at the Computer History Museum In this telling, the internet was not a unique “Columbus” event, but an evolution dependent on the shrinking size and growing capacity of co…

Read More

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

…ncient principle that where God says before you were formed in the womb I knew you. … So for me, my faith informs my life. I try and spend a little time on my knees every day. But it all for me begins with cherishing the dignity, the worth, the value of every human life. After attacking Kaine for being on a ticket that supports “partial-birth” and publicly funded abortions—and slyly suggesting that he compromised his faith principles to do so—Penc…

Read More

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

…ith every outward step, as our universe and our ignorance grows, so do the number of potential space alien hideouts. So does the belief that there must be someone out there. So every time I read about the discovery of a new Earth-like planet or read about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out ther…

Read More

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

…ately he has nothing else to fall back on, no compelling ideology, no good news for anyone who hasn’t been following his worn-out shtick for thirty years. So, good if they’re afraid of the religious left. It means we’re doing our job. And just in case anyone missed the number of religious progressive groups endorsing the rally, here’s a list culled from One Nation site. Their list of endorsers is pretty long, so I apologize if I missed somebody: R…

Read More

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

…on. A small group of evangelical academics, including the noted scholar of new religions Gordon Melton, are calling for a more informed and sympathetic understanding of the broader Western esoteric tradition in the Sacred Tribes evangelical academic journal. Also, new books are being produced that draw upon scholarly historical and ethnographic approaches to the study of forms of paganism, and critique has been brought to popular evangelical books…

Read More

We Were Here Before September 11th

…is week, a film produced and directed by a young African-American (whom I knew when he was a toddler), is opening up in Chicago. It opened last week in New York to grave reviews and a few awards. If you are near by I hope you check it out: “Mooz-lum”, the movie. It is not the story of every African-American Muslim but it is a story about African-American Islam, in one of its many reflections. We are here. We were here before September 11, 2001. Si…

Read More