Search for "cheap round trip airline tickets pdx to springfield mo phone number 1-800-299-7264"

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

By Varun Soni

…as the lyrics recount the band’s trials and tribulations on the road. The most famous of these incidents—their 1970 drug bust in New Orleans—is forever memorialized in the studio version: “Sittin’ and starin’ out of the hotel window. Got a tip they’re gonna kick the door in again. I’d like to get some sleep before I travel, But if you got a warrant, I guess you’re gonna come in. Busted, down on Bourbon Street, Set up, like a bowlin’ pin. Knocked…

London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

By Elizabeth Drescher

…going back at least to the Poll Tax Revolt of 1377, which fed into to the more extensive and more violent Peasants Rising of 1381. As literary historian Steven Justice has shown us, the Rising had everything to do with how ordinary people were using the new media of the day (vernacular spiritual texts for common education and political broadsides for common expression) to “assert the rights of the laity to the intellectual, as to the material, go…

Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…ecause condoms make baby Jesus sad. In Utah, 45% of homeless teenagers are Mormons. Female genital mutilation. A famous comic book artist she knows was told that he wouldn’t be able to draw in heaven. “I’ve touched on 1/100 of the things about religion that piss me off,” Christina says. (I wonder if she’s pissed off to have the last name Christina; that would make me very angry if I were her.) “The things that make religion unique are the things…

The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

By Kaya Oakes

…she isn’t real. She’s a projection of the imagination of her time—an earth mother moving through an idealized natural world. In another era, this might be a poem by Shelly or Keats. And that’s where the layers of criticism come up against the thing about the Dead that makes picking them apart often a losing challenge. The Dead were a fantasy. They were an escape from the harsher realities of their time. They kept playing through the ugly parts of…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…el Lavers: Javier Soto, a pastor from the resort city of Viña del Mar, is among the most outspoken critics of the expansion of relationship recognition and other rights to LGBT Chileans. He said God sparked a massive forest fire in the coastal city of Valparaíso last April because lawmakers were considering the civil unions measure. Soto frequently confronts Rolando Jiménez, president of the Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation. The…

Bad News for LGBT Anglicans, Mormons, Adventists, Norwegians, Russians, Georgians, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Saudis…

By Peter Montgomery

…he brutal new criminal penalties imposed on gay people in those countries. Mormons: Apostle Affirms Commitment to One Man-One Woman Marriage Mormon Apostle Neil Andersen, speaking at a biannual national conference in Salt Lake City, affirmed the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage. “While many governments and well-meaning individuals have redefined marriage, the Lord has not,” said Andersen, an Apostle of the Quorum of the Twelve, the sec…

What Does the ‘Traditional Family’ Have To Do with Pussy Riot?

By Gillian Kane

…behind many legal objections levied against Obama administration projects; most famously during the health care reform debate, which was framed as attacks against traditional values in violation of First Amendment rights. A Strategic Pro-Family Alliance Last year, as the UN debated the traditional values resolution, and litigation against the health care reform bill was in full swing, Patriarch Kirill’s proxy, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, head o…

Why Did the Pope Choose Cuba?

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…. Even she seems to be forgotten in the shuffle about the politics of this trip. And yet she, the patroness of the island, is perhaps the most appropriate symbol of the ambiguities and tensions that mark Cuba’s religious, racial, and political history. La Caridad is where Cubans negotiate their religious and national identity: the Catholic colonial legacy of slavery, Afro-Cuban religious appropriations of her, and the increasing presence of Protes…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…lly dies, there’s little reference to it; its presence in the film seems almost accidental. Oscar-in-the-bardo spends much more time reliving past traumas (also terrifyingly depicted) than plying the inner spaceways. Is There an Afterlife? Hope Not. Personally, I’ve always recoiled from the notion of an afterlife. It seems too convenient, of too much solace—and radically anti-humanist. To me, it’s a short step from the bromides of Hereafter to the…

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

By Kathryn Joyce

…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…