Search for "airline tickets to st louis cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

‘Imagine Better’: Can Harry Potter Change the World?

By B. Howell Belser

…of being socially aware and engaged. This is at least a very important first step. Battle lines are drawn every day around whose stories get told and how. Whether we are talking about movies and books or the public discourse over morality, it’s a vital issue to conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between. Whoever tells the better story, it seems, owns the discourse. Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff has told that story in a series of publ…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…re and going right. Our generation really wants peace. I think that the first step is to say no to this whole system, to the government, to the people who are trying to separate us by our ethnicities, colors, and I don’t know what. Turkey: Gay Syrian refugee murdered A gay Syrian refugee living in Turkey was kidnapped, raped and beheaded, report AFP and the BBC: Cagil Kasapoglu of the BBC Turkish Service says hate crimes against LGBT individuals i…

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

By Elizabeth Drescher

…hristian service members make up 70% of the population. Currently no Humanist or Atheist chaplains approved for military service, though MAAF reports that there are a number of Atheist and Humanist chaplain assistants. The DOD’s ruling this week may, thus, have a meaningful impact on the free expression of religious identity for the reported 3.6% of service members who are Humanists and allow more diverse access to resources for spiritual care a…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…inists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah Pride that the freedom to strip is far from the pinnacle of women’s liberation. (I much prefer the freedoms to speak and write, to work, to vote, to parent, to own property and the like.) In the end, small-f feminism is as diverse as the women (and men) who participate in it. I…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…cy is not something we discuss very often. Our rates of incarceration, the number of states utilizing the death penalty, our obsessive clinging to the Second Amendment along with its deadly consequences, ICE raids on immigrant families fleeing even worse violence in their home countries, drone strikes, the environmental violence of fracking, deforestation and coal mining, and the daily threats faced by women, LGBTQ people and people of color are a…

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

By Peter Laarman

…credentialed” scholars : T.J. Stiles on Cornelius Vanderbilt and George Armstrong Custer, James Bradley on racialized imperialism, and (most creditably) Douglas A. Blackmon on the significance of black convict labor. The issues that Lehmann takes on here could not be more urgent for people constructed like me who fume and fuss over the near-total absence of a powerful religious critique of the sorry state of our affairs: today’s degraded and degra…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…ple are controlled and not permitted to leave when they choose. Such totalistic institutions range from some unconventional religious or political groups to prisons, concentration camps, and authoritarian governments of nations. Americans generally agree that they’re abusive. Currently it’s fashionable to use the word “cult” to describe all sorts of groups and movements that people don’t like. It’s said that people who support former President Don…

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

…companion animals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine percent—hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.” Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “bless…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…en. Though two recent studies by the Guttmacher Institute found that these statistics were due simply to a higher incidence of unwanted pregnancies among women of color—“No conspiracy theories needed,” remarked Guttmacher—anti-abortion activists continue to claim that providers are targeting black and Latino populations, and have leafleted inner-city neighborhoods with denunciations of “Klan Parenthood,” juxtaposing images of lynchings and aborted…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…that there are good people on both sides of this question. Romans 14 was just staring me in the face, but if you look at the issues there—which most people don’t—you find these are first order moral questions for that time, things like Sabbath observance and eating meat sacrificed to idols. The Sabbath observance is rooted in Genesis 1, so to not observe the Sabbath could easily be regarded as a sin against nature. Of course, then, this issue woul…