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

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…the reckoning. Houses of worship ought to serve as amplifiers, but for the most part they aren’t helping. I’m a preacher and I can say with near certainty that 99% of the sermons preached yesterday morning didn’t get close to the level of truth-telling that’s needed. Nor will the compulsory “thoughts and prayers” pronouncements, nor the words spoken at memorial services over the next days and weeks. Of course as a pastor I’m aware that words of co…

Life as a Game Show: Reading Slumdog Millionaire

By Paul Courtright

…can walk out with a million bucks or nothing. Jamal emerges as a kind of postmodern Everyman. We hurt for him, root for him, and recognize ourselves in him. There is also an important way in which the film may mark a move into a new kind of “global cinema.” Mumbai is a global city with some seventeen million residents—rich and poor. Like other so-called third world cities, it has the contrasts of wealth and poverty, aspiration and corruption, glit…

Catholic Leaders Offer Criticism, Support to Boxer Pacquiao After Anti-Gay Comments…

By Peter Montgomery

…port of equal rights for Indonesia’s LGBT communities at one of the city’s most treasured monuments, Tugu Yogyakarta. Still, writes Widianto, there is hope that the conversation will lead to people hearing from members of the LGBT community who are defending their rights. “Focusing on how unbecoming the first has been distracts us from one important point: that it exists,” Widianto writes. The anti-gay forces were given moral support by Muhammad A…

The Abortion Debate, Texas Style

By Dhawn Martin

…uman Services (HHS) of the Texas Legislature heard more than 13 hours of testimony regarding SB1 (Senate Bill 1), a bill designed to “regulat[e]… abortion procedures, providers, and facilities.” These regulations, which include mandates that abortion providers have hospital admitting privileges and that abortion facilities meet the “standards… for ambulatory surgical centers,” could result in the shutdown of a majority of clinics that offer aborti…

The Fretting About Whether Democrats Are “Friendly” To Religion

By Sarah Posner

…erview with Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston and chair of the bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, appeared in the Houston Chronicle, a Catholic wrote a scathing letter to the editor about his statements about the bishops’ role in lobbying against abortion in health care reform. “I regard the church’s stand as extremely hypocritical and insensitive to women who risk their health bearing the burden o…

Demonized and Demonizing No More.

By Joanna Brooks

…ho felt like their identities and their stories weren’t represented in the most dominant atheist narratives. How would you characterize narrative American atheism has told about itself? If we actually asked atheists to historicize themselves as a movement, to tell a collective story, what would that sound like? Though there is a fascinating history of American atheism, it’s hard to answer that question right now. We’re a small and frequently dem…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…uth Colin B. Chapell University of Alabama Press September 2016 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? Theology and belief matter to how people view not only the world around them, but how adherents view their own identity. I know that this may sound simple, but we so often forget this. Indeed, I would enlarge that statement to say that the values people hold dearest change how they understand their own identity. If academic achi…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…stematic violence. It intends to silence and to destroy from within. While most of us will never be physically attacked by another human being, all of us know we are targets. A Theology of Anti-Gay Bullying Anti-gay bullying is a theological issue because it has a theological base. I find it difficult to believe that even those among us with a vibrant imagination can muster the creative energy to picture a reality in which anti-gay violence and bu…

More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…e Bakker’s Evangelical Empire John Wigger Oxford UP August 2017 What’s the most important take-home message for readers? PTL helps to explain the persistent connections between religion and popular culture in American life, a connection that runs deeper than politics alone. PTL grew so quickly because of its embrace of consumer and celebrity culture, much of it through the prosperity gospel, but along the way the money and fame undermined the reli…

The Only Common Denominator of American Conservatism is Anti-Blackness

By Yannick Marshall

…care, the dominant conservative position has always been whichever was the most anti-Black of the legitimate options. And yet it remains difficult to have it admitted to public consciousness that American conservatism is organized anti-Black politics. American conservatism is, however, well-dressed white nationalism. Racists have put conservatism on like a hat, then disappeared in front of the eyes of those for whom object permanence would prefera…