Search for "cheap airline tickets tucson phone number 1-800-299-7264"

How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…hile that corner of the night sky near NGC 6809 is still pulsing out prime numbers. –Rome, December, 2055 _________ The article that may one day be written about religious responses to E.T. will of course bear little resemblance to the fiction above. But, religion aside, the possibility of confirming alien life is less remote than you might think. On May 21, 2014, Dan Werthimer, scientific director of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Life) at…

AFA: Native Americans Lost their Land for Not Being Christians

By Daniel Schultz

…into his diatribe by the Native American blessing at the memorial for the Tucson shooting victims in January – a blessing that drew mocking commentary from others in the conservative media as well. “The continued presence of native American superstition was on full display” at the service, Fischer wrote. The invocation – “such as it was,” in Fischer’s words – was offered by Carlos Gonzales, a Pascua Yacqui Indian. Fischer complained that Gonzales…

This is not a Religion Column: Sarah Palin, American

By Jeff Sharlet

…a small town were his last years, when he moved into the desert outside of Tucson. Much of what he wrote was no longer publishable, but he sat in his empty, pure, American landscape pounding out more and more of it, trying to get at the monster he couldn’t name. Nearly 40 years after his death, Palin has dragged Pegler into the spotlight again and resurrected his blinking words. In his mind, they were hate, but in her speech, they were theology. P…

Pope Francis vs. the Bishops: An “Overblown” Narrative?

By Patricia Miller

…ction since conservatives elevated Dolan as head of the USCCB in 2010 over Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas, a moderate who was next in line for the job. As Michael Sean Winters notes in the National Catholic Reporter, “since the 2011 USCCB elections, a stunning number of very talented people have left the USCCB” and many of their replacements have little experience with social justice policy but “a string of associations with different conservative o…

Not Cause, But Effect: Jared Loughner and Tea Party Rhetoric

By Finbarr Curtis

In the hours of confusion following the recent murders in Tucson, commentators speculated about the political sympathies of Jared Lee Loughner. Because Representative Giffords was the previous target of heated Tea Party rhetoric, many wondered whether the shooter was driven by anti-government sentiment. But the gunman proved to be an enigmatic thinker and many reported that his bizarre ramblings reflected no discernible politics. Lost in the deba…

RDGenerations: Youth and Liberal Religion

By Lucia Hulsether

…the week we were stopped at a border patrol checkpoint on our way back to Tucson. We drove up thinking that nobody would harass us, but the agents reached for their guns. They questioned us rather aggressively—even implying that we might not be citizens—although we had not left the country. M: Sounds extremely stressful—I was worried about you, but also proud. Why did you leave? Does it have anything to do with how churches work with youth? L: Ye…

Guns and the Wyoming Legislator Proposing the Shari’ah Law Ban

By Sarah Posner

…is not unlike those being promoted by far right Christian groups after the Tucson shootings. When the group’s founder, Aaron Zelman, died in December, he was praised by one-time Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin (who I interviewed here) as a “tireless defender of the Second Amendment.” And the New American, the magazine of the John Birch Society, recalled an interview with Zelman in which he declared, “We’re not interested in…

Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

By Kathryn Joyce

…abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which are still active. The protests so shaped the city that, 22 years later, both sides recall the fight vividly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied…

Why Crux‘s Knights of Columbus “Partnership” is Problematic

By Kaya Oakes

…mpaigns in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington. In 2005, they printed 800,000 postcards in Canada “in a campaign that [argued] that the redefinition of marriage to include gay and lesbian couples would promote pedophilia, pornography and unsafe sex.” As Marianne Duddy-Burke of the LGBTQ Catholic organization Dignity USA commented in a press release, “The Knights are deeply invested in advancing a particular brand of Catholicism, and I am con…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…