Search for "cheap one way airline tickets to newark phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Why “Family Values” Defined Conservative Christianity (and Why “Religious Liberty” Has Replaced it)

By Eric C. Miller

…y values: enough Americans (and enough evangelicals) have decided that the way the Christian Right defined them in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is too narrow. The pro-family movement is fragmenting. Family values aren’t going away as long as families exist. What’s at stake is how we conceive of families and their values. The cover of my book depicts a scene at the dinner table of a coal miner in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1971. It’s a visual encapsu…

Make Way for Liberal Pro-Lifers

By Patricia Miller

…the church’s social justice concerns. Bernardin’s “seamless garment” held sway for a time and provided cover to pro-choice Democrats like Mario Cuomo, but faded as he and other progressive bishops retired and were replaced with conservatives elevated by Pope John Paul II. By the time George W. Bush was elected, many influential members of the U.S. hierarchy, from Cardinal Bernard Law to Archbishops Edward Egan, were openly aligned with the Republi…

Knighting Viktor Orbán for ‘Defending Christianity,’ Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Demonstrates That ‘Culture War’ is the Only Theology That Matters to the Global Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…world, to come and impose their values, their view of the world, or their way of life on us. Brothers and sisters, I repeat: we will not [accept this]. Since we do not impose our way of life on anyone, we will not allow anyone to impose on us, his rules, his view of the world and his way of life on us, even if he thinks he is better than us.” If the Patriarch Porfiry’s words seem to echo the sentiments of Patriarch Kirill, that’s because the two…

Espionage Allegations Against Russian Church Raise Religious Freedom Issue in Ukraine

By Katherine Kelaidis

…n if a ban is the expedient thing to do, it feeds the paranoia in too many ways. Perhaps at this point the only way forward that respects the demands of liberal democracy and pluralism and doesn’t give Putin more fodder for his propaganda blitz are safeguards that fall short of a ban. We actually do have a model for this in the involvement of security forces with mosques in the early 2000s. To be clear, some of these efforts went very wrong, hinde…

Has American Conservatism Abandoned the Christian Right?

By Bradley Onishi

…rint—and was born from this movement. “Don’t Say Gay bills follow, in many ways, the template of similar laws over the past century,” writes Michael Bronski at the Boston Review. “In significant ways, ‘Don’t Say Gay’ laws—and obsessions with ‘grooming’ more broadly—are old Christian fears about sin and danger given a new face, and express this by recycling medieval anti-Semitic tropes of the blood libel, simply substituting LGBTQ people for Jews a…

The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain and Michelle Goldberg

…unct of urban, cosmopolitan female life. She sometimes presented yoga as a way for women to deal with the many competing demands that were placed on them, a way to help them sort out their own identities and, if necessary, reinvent themselves. It’s strange and improbable that these techniques associated with medieval Indian ascetics have become a crucial support system for elite 21st century women. In addition to recounting Indra Devi’s wild life,…

By the Way: “Ten Commandments Judge” To Be Alabama’s Next Gov?

By Randall Balmer

…addressing religious right audiences about how the United States is and always has been a “Christian nation” and recounting his exploits in Alabama. In 2006, Moore thought that he could once again parlay his disregard for the Constitution into higher office. He ran for the Republican nomination for governor, but lost badly in the primary. (Several weeks later, in neighboring Georgia, another poster boy for the religious right, Ralph Reed, lost hi…

Is It the Job of Religion Journalists to Define “Religion”?

By Ann Taves

…any set of norms, practices, and beliefs that establishes a comprehensive way of life that is held out as the right or best way of life for those who adhere to it.” The key term is “comprehensive.” CrossFit, football, Star Trek, and dieting fads are insufficiently comprehensive to count as religion. Linker, recognizing that his definition would encompass philosophy, distinguishes between them based on the source of their knowledge regarding the b…

An Atheist Hero is Something to Be

By Carolyn S. Briggs

…figure out it’s redundant, but given what we know about psychology and the way the brain works and the way evolution has taught us not to just battle each other into submission, but to cooperate and help each other, there will come a time when people see it as unnecessary, a philosophical distortion of reality. Does religion make people do bad things? Frequently and far, far worse than we imagine. On the extreme end, you have the motivating forces…

Meet the New Haggards—Same as the Old Haggards?

By Kathryn Joyce

…ncourage people in their relationship with God. So he never turned people away and always was open to everyone. And as is evident in his own struggle—he still believed he belonged in the body of Christ. In the book, you talk about acquaintances and even friendships you made with people in gay and lesbian community, including a classmate at the University of Phoenix. Did this change your thinking in any way? Not at all. The reason I tell that story…