Search for "cheap airlines tickets to thailand phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Sex Comes For the Archbishop: Rembert Weakland’s Unflinching Memoir

By Mary E. Hunt

…nd who gave Thomas Merton’s still-warm body the last rites when he died in Thailand. Benedictine life obviously agreed with him since it allowed him a long leash and many short ties to a worldwide community of which each individual house is a unique part. Abbott Weakland knew his way around the Vatican under Pope Paul VI, when he had friends in high places and a good rapport with the pontiff. That all changed under Pope John Paul II, and the rest,…

Steve Jobs Reincarnated as Divine Half-Yak

By Andrew Aghapour

…According to Phra Thepyanmahamuni, the abbot of the Wat Phra Dhammakaya in Thailand, Jobs was reincarnated into a divinity “of middle rank – half a Witthayathorn, half yak.” The Thai Buddhist New Religious Movement posted a three-part essay on their website describing the life, death, and reincarnation of Jobs, claiming that he also invented the wind-mill in a previous life to predict natural disasters. The essay is illustrated with enough CGI moc…

Gay Mormons Tie the Knot

By Johnny Townsend

…, the friend I’d gone to the party with said, “Ask the host for that guy’s number. He was really into you.” That was the first inkling I had that Gary was even gay. A week later we had our first date. In discussing our histories, we learned some intriguing facts. We’d both been pre-med students. We’d both earned English degrees. We had both been teachers. We’d both been bank tellers. Oh, and we were both ex-Mormon, having both served missions in R…

Burma Bans Time Magazine’s “Buddhist Terror” Issue

By Alan Senauke

…to the consumers.” And in a new and worrying development, according to the Thailand-based independent news source for Burma, the Irrawaddy, “About 200 senior Buddhist monks convening in Rangoon on Thursday have begun drafting a religious law that would put restrictions on marriages between Buddhist women and Muslim men.” Bearing Witness: A Personal Background My first visit to the Burmese border was with a Buddhist witness delegation in 1992. This…

News Flash: Buddhist-Majority Countries Just as Complicated as Muslim-Majority

By Haroon Moghul

…uslim-majority countries (both after all being populated by humans). While Thailand fights a Muslim—but not “islamist”—insurgency in its south, it is also a top non-OIC destination for Muslim tourism, pulling out all the stops to attract Muslim travelers. (Halal food, prayer spaces, targeted advertising, etc.) As an aside, the majority of Muslims live east of Afghanistan, meaning that the majority of Muslims’ primary experience of other faiths is…

What Penis Theft Tells Us About Belief, Culture, and Our Brains

By Vlad Chituc

…ural pathologies come part and parcel with that. Traveling from Nigeria to Thailand and from Borneo to Hong Kong, Bures investigated various “culture-bound syndromes”—mental illnesses unique to a specific society or culture—to see what they might reveal about human culture and beliefs more broadly. Though our bones don’t break any differently in the United States than in Nigeria, it seems like our minds do. I spoke with Bures to help understand wh…

Morality Police, Jihadists, Religious Competition, Grindr, & Americans Abroad: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nes of arrestees to try to entrap other gay men. In related news, the smartphone app Grindr, which allows gay men to find each other, announced it would permanently disable an option that allowed people to see their distance from other users. There have been reports that police in Egypt and Iran have used Grindr to hunt and arrest gay men. Jamaica: Activist Drops Challenge to Sodomy Law in Face of Threats A Jamaican gay-rights activist dropped his…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…(first as Uttaranchal) in 2000, the region has seen a massive rise in the number of visitors to the region, especially by the growing Indian middle class. Roads widened and hotels and visitor services grew exponentially. Building a new hotel or a restaurant by the side of the road felt like a smart investment—even when the road was near a river. Kedarnath saw the building of new cell phone towers, a railway reservation office, helicopter landing…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…