Search for "Delta Airlines 800-299-7264 Phone Number To Book A Flight"

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…cognize same-sex couples who have been legally married in other countries. Aaron Day at Pink News reports that a marriage equality bill in New South Wales failed last year on a 19-21 vote. Anthony Fisher, recently installed as Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, said he has a “consciousness” of “the struggles of people with same-sex attraction,” saying, “Our concern should be there to help them rather than to be adding to their problems…” Bangladesh: H…

“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…thing for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not considered flawed. (emphasis mine, again. I am very emphatic.) And we have a meme! But let’s consider this claim more closely. I don’t mean for this…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…avor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is much to criticize in the story, and much to attend to in the responses to it. Warren Throckmorton, Candace Chellew-Hodge, and Joanna Brooks have all rai…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…o. What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the recumbent sphinx you have to approach the piece not from the front, but from behind and to the…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ain. Here’s the storyline as reported in the media: “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (USA Today) “Study suggests ‘born again’ believers have smaller brains” (Beliefnet) “Born-again Christians have smaller brains” (Houston Chronicle) In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume o…

To Get Through This Time We’ll Have to Shred the ‘Racial Contract’ and Choose Solidarity Over Sacrifice

By Christophe D Ringer

…my. The road to this moral and spiritual cul-de-sac began with Trump’s declaration that the “cure cannot be worse than the disease.” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick and conservative radio host Glenn Beck quickly rallied behind the idea and boldly claimed that, as older Americans, they were willing to sacrifice their lives instead of the country. The moral outrage was swift and it seemed as if the idea would only last a news cycle. But then m…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…surrecting and playing with the dead. While I have a predilection for the macabre generally, and tend to be a little too preoccupied with the dead specifically, I am not opposed to the celebratory, harmless Halloween activities associated with dressing up in outlandish costumes, knocking on strangers’ doors, and consuming lots and lots and lots of candy. Perhaps at some subterranean, unconscious societal level, as we get closer to the day of elect…

Do iPads Cause Religious Experiences?

By Andrew Aghapour

…mostly at the periphery of the crowd, shooting sarcastic looks to the camera and lobbing one-liners about the seemingly religious ecstasy of the “glassy-eyed” consumers being ushered in by a team of Apple’s blue-shirted “preachers.” Entertaining as these loose comparisons might be, it was what Riley did next that caused a brief media flurry and garnered coverage by MSNBC, Business Insider, and over two hundred blogs, news sites, and forums within…

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…o be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threat…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…dering who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days reflect the primary religious affiliations of Pales…