Search for "cheap airline ticket one way phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Mormon Leaders Slam ‘Counterfeit’ Gay Families; Vatican Resists Gay Ambassador; ISIS Executes Man for Homosexuality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…‘family shame’ and violence Reuters’ Alisa Tang reported this week on the number of LGBT people in “largely patriarachal and conservative” Asian countries who are flocking to cities and increasingly leaving their home countries to escape the “family shame factor” and live more freely. Activists say including sexual orientation and gender identity in laws, policies and programs to prevent violence against women and children would reduce family vio…

Who Would the Buddha Bomb?

By Danny Fisher

…ling—with no ifs, ands or buts—it would force us to focus our ingenuity on ways of stopping enemies from harming us without our intentionally killing them.” This letter set off a series of missives that, disappointingly, grow less and less helpful as they increase in number and length. When I spoke to Bhikkhu Bodhi about the fracas in an interview last fall, he cautioned against interpreting his statements as a blanket endorsement of military solu…

Updated: G-O-D Plays a Bit Part in First GOP Debate

By Daniel Schultz

…en for thinking that Reagan was God, or at least a patron saint, given the number of times he was name-checked in the debate. Mostly it went like this. The candidates did talk about hot-button social issues, but they held back from claiming religious sponsorship of their ideas. It’s not clear if they’d gotten the memo about not antagonizing religiously unaffiliated voters, or if they simply didn’t see much advantage in differentiating themselves a…

“That Guy In Rome”: A Catholic Town in Idaho Where The Pope is a Heretic

By Jason Wilson

…se people were just holdouts, who would soon give up or die off. The large number of young families I saw at St. Joan of Arc—around a third of the parish—suggest to me what others must have by now have realized: that this constituency is not going anywhere soon. Perhaps mistakes were made by those bishops whose “reformist zeal won over their pastoral sense,” as Doherty puts it. Wherever the commitment to the new Mass led to an overenthusiastic att…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…m’s overall impact in the late 19th century pales in comparison to the runaway impact of Russell Conway’s “acres of diamonds” preaching. He demonstrates in a similar way how the postwar flowering of a potent culture of anti-union conservatism among Southern California’s evangelical and parachurch movements was entirely self-created and not simply the result of solicitation or manipulation by that era’s business leaders. Say it again: religion did…

What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…ecycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant to renovate the playground of a preschool owned and operated by the church. While it ranked highly, Trinity Lutheran was denied the grant because of a department poli…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…a difference between healing and curing. And there needs to be alternative ways of living with these body issues—ways that don’t require us to go to war with our bodies by fighting, conquering, or triumphing over whatever somatic issue eludes our control. Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about good health is that you have to be thin in order to have it. Of all the topics Shameful Bodies addresses, the chapter on weight is likely to elicit…

Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

By Daniel Schultz

…looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations put us firmly in “Holy shit” territory. Even assuming a generous 50-50 split of black, Asian, and other Cath…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ounseling and gathering spaces for Humanist groups. It also means that the numbers and distribution of Humanists in the military can be tracked along with those of other religious groups, potentially inviting a reshaping of the military chaplaincy, which critics complain is inappropriately weighted in favor of Christian, and specifically Evangelical Christian, denominations. A study by the Military Association of Atheist and Freethinkers (MAAF)—t…

Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…driving some of the result. That’s important. But it’s not clear from the numbers provided in the study that non-religious kids, globally, share fewer stickers in a way that’s separable from other ethnic markers. A divergence In the past few decades, there has been a sharp divergence between those who study religion from within sociology and the humanities, and those who approach it from the side of social and evolutionary psychology. The humanis…