Search for "American Customer Service 1800-299-7264 Number For Reservations"

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

By Grant Gallicho

…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…

Missing the Anger for the Shoes

By Hussein Rashid

…course, the final proposition is that the man was screened by the Security Service, amongst other security agencies, and only had a shoe to express his hatred of President Bush. The point is that this man was traumatized by the war. He wanted to express his anger. He had a shoe. He threw the shoe. Is this really so hard to understand? Do we as Americans treat having a shoe thrown at us as a sign of happiness or joy? We have become so conditioned t…

Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

By Patricia Miller

…Pope Francis’ relationship to women in the Catholic Church. Writing in the American Prospect, Adele Stan argued that if Francis wants to maintain the church’s relevancy in the developing world he would promote positions that empower women, like lifting the ban on contraception. Yet, she says, “the Church remains intransigent on virtually any vestige of equality for women”: An institution that bars women from leadership conveys the message that wom…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…re so fantastic—brought the idea that the whole thing is static. I think a number of people picked up over the past three hundred years that space is empty, we move things around in space, and there are levers and pulleys and buttons. I think for a number of people, atheism is simply the rejection of somebody sitting on a cloud somewhere with a beard who might intervene from time to time. I think quantum physics, the little I know, it just intuiti…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…hodox Christian territory is, in most cases, as recent or more recent than American chattel slavery. And only the ignorant or ideologically motivated (i.e. racist) would argue that American chattel slavery has no effect today. And the failure of the West to understand this recent history and to take it into account in the analysis of current events is the very opening that Russia is looking for when it seeks to wield influence in places like Serbi…

An Extravagant Welcome For All: Believe Out Loud, a Faith-Based LGBT Campaign, Launches

By Peter Laarman

…administering Believe Out Loud) predicts that the campaign will change the American landscape regarding LGBT equality. He says: Believe Out Loud signals that the effort to achieve LGBT justice within American Christianity has reached movement proportions. By reaching out to those who are still uncertain about homosexuality in the church, we expand the conversation. As individuals begin to move from fear to empathy, from ignorance to understanding,…

A Post-Christian America? Not Quite—Though Devoutly to be Wished

By Peter Laarman

…Jon Meacham’s Newsweek piece on the fairly sharp fall-off in the number of Americans self-identifying as Christian (in the newly-released ARIS survey), this bloghead initially demurred. I mean, the amiable and well-informed Meacham said what I would have said: on balance, it’s a good thing that the various and dangerous forms of grievance associated with “Christian nation” thinking should now recede. It’s a good thing that more have come to apprec…

Exclusive: Christian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

By Frederick Clarkson

…14 of which have passed, according to Blitz Watch. Whether the dip in the number of bills introduced is attributable to Covid-19, the toxicity of the Project Blitz brand, or some other combination of factors is hard to say. In 2020 and 2021, 24 of the bills introduced involved displays of In God We Trust in public buildings or on license plates, while 16 were largely about religious exemptions and state versions of the federal Religious Freedom R…

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…will talk about the deeper roots of these things or attempt to explain why American culture is “exceptional”—exceptional in its toxicity, that is. A growing number of truth telling historians are eager to help us discover these deeper roots if we are willing to listen. Here I’m thinking mainly of scholars like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Gerald Horne who focus on the connections between settler colonialism, white supremacy, and an unparalleled level…

Obama in Copenhagen: From an Embarrassment of Riches to a New Earth Ethic

By Peter Laarman

…r, ’cause I can’t feel at home in this world, any more.” The Bible assured Americans that God created humans “a little lower than the angels,” with European-American humans even more favored than others because (c’mon, look around!) we landed on all this wealth. What eventually happens to energy-rich people—people whose lifestyles are powered, literally, by the earth’s past organic life in the form of petroleum—is that such people grow addicted to…