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

Contrary to Claims of Anti-Trans Muslims, LGBTQ+ Acceptance is Widespread in the History of Islam

By Ali Olomi

…ginning. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani’s Kitab al-Aghani records the lives of a number of individuals including one named Tuways who lived during the last years of Muhammad and the reigns of the early Muslim dynasties. Tuways was mukhannathun: those who were born as men, but who presented as female. They are described by al-Isfahani as wearing bangles, decorating their hands with henna, and wearing feminine clothing. One mukhannathun, Hit, was even in…

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

By Michael Schulson

…know all of this? Educated guesswork. I could be wrong. But here’s how the numbers break down: globally, 323 families in the study identified as non-religious. And 219 kids in the study came from China. It is extremely unlikely that more than a handful of the Chinese families identified themselves as Christian or Muslim, and we know for sure that they mostly avoided identifying as Buddhist, because just 18 families in the whole 1,170 kid dataset d…

The Black Church: Institution or Abstraction?

By Anthony B. Pinn

…–to name only a few–that claim the attention and adherence of many African Americans. And what about the three million African Americans who have embraced Sunni Islam? Do you get my point? Much of this nuance, these differences, are lost in sound bites and news reports. Trinity Church, once lead by Rev. Wright, is simply one example: one particular black church. It is not the Black Church, it is one congregation dotting the Christian geography of…

The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill

By Thomas Fabisiak

…the modern concept of Hell is a post-biblical conflation of motifs from a number of sometimes conflicting biblical and apocryphal notions of sheol, gehenna, Hades, judgment in the end-times, etc. More starkly anachronistic are claims that Jesus taught parables about the “free market” (a late-medieval concept at best), and that the Bible includes “later-inserted liberal passages.” In describing the project, Schlafly has repeatedly cited two such “…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…Association for the Sociology of Religion, and the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. Elaine Howard Ecklund examines contemporary American religion and its intersections with science—specifically, how scientists interact with religion and how religious believers make sense of science. She is the author of Science v. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. In her writing, including including Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety…

Stupak Forming Fault Lines in Left-Leaning Faith Groups?

By Sarah Posner

…n of the Capps and Stupak amendments, read this analysis by the Center for American Progress’ Jessica Arons.) Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (which strongly opposes the Stupak amendment), said his understanding was that a condition of participating in that teleconference was agreeing that Capps was a compromise that everyone could live with. The overall tenor of the Faith for Health We…

The Jihadi Revolution is Dead (But Bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Kill It)

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…le of sacred warfare has been an exciting and alluring image among a large number of mostly young and largely male Muslims around the world for over a decade. It is an image that was brought to dramatic attention by the September 11, 2001 attacks, and stimulated by the perception that US military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars against Islam. This jihadi vision of sacred warfare was propagated by the internet, through postings on chat ro…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…iod of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s. They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standardized package of ideas and practices such that, by the late 1…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ble.” But those “moral objections” seem to be of less concern to a growing number of Americans: Just under half of Americans (45%) say they think engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while an equal number says it is not. Those who believe homosexual behavior is a sin overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. Similarly, those who say they personally feel there is a lot of conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality (35% of the public)…

The “Mormon Moment” Yields… Not So Much

By Joanna Brooks

…lves: down from 65% of Americans surveyed to 61%. Some measurable gains have been made among mainline Protestants: 28% surveyed in 2011 said they have “a lot in common” with Mormons; now, that proportion is 42%. And when asked to give a one asked to give a one-word descriptor of Mormonism, the number of respondents offering a positive word like “good,” or “honest,” increased from 18% in 2011 to 24% in 2012. All of these gains were concentrated a…