Search for "cheap airline tickets from new york ny to grand rapids mi phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…us criticism can easily devolve into unthinking prejudice. I can think of any number of examples from atheist conferences I’ve attended, such as the time I watched with dismay as attendees shouted “show us some ankle” at women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance, or when a group of fundamentalist Muslim protesters was encircled by a crowd of hundreds of atheist conference attendees shouting things like “go back to the Middle East, y…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…e Hindus— and the fallout from its withdrawal from India—was ushering in a new and “ominous”* era in which religious advocacy groups were trying to exert influence over the academic study of religion. In the piece, Jerryson cited the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) as one of those groups, noting HAF’s Executive Director Suhag Shukla’s critique of an American Academy of Religions (AAR) statement allowing for any interpretation of religion. Jerryso…

Pious White Reformers and Race, Then and Now

By Peter Laarman

…secondary problem was the likely horrified white response to having a huge number of newly-freed blacks living among them in both the North and the South. The alleged “degradation” of black people ruled out normal social intercourse—widespread emancipation without separation of the races was unthinkable Although “degradation” was first used to describe the condition of enslaved Africans, by 1810 the term was also being applied to Native Americans….

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…everal bloggers and their publishers were similarly hacked to death by Islamist militants in 2015 for promoting secularism. Religious extremist groups have claimed responsibility for murders and even published a hit list of activists and bloggers. The government offered police protection for those on the hit list, but the protection has clearly been inadequate as several on the list have been killed since. Prime Minister Sheik Hasina advised blogg…

Unprecedented Anti-LGBTQ Statement By Orthodox Church in America Should Be Christian Nationalist Warning Sign to US Orthodoxy

By Katherine Kelaidis

…St. Vladimir’s Seminary, the theological school run by the OCA in Yonkers, New York. While it’s important to stress that Eastern Christianity has its own history and debates, it’s impossible to view the movement of the OCA towards fundamentalism without including it in the matrix of the larger narrative concerning the slide of American religion and politics towards Christian nationalism. Before the 1980s, American Orthodoxy was, almost exclusively…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…at discretion brought safety, said Kyle Knight, LGBT rights researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “What we’re seeing now may be unprecedented in terms of its fever pitch,” Knight wrote in an email from Indonesia, where he is documenting human rights abuses related to the rise in anti-LGBT rhetoric. “This time around, government officials have even stoked the cacophony of hatred.” Some officials – including Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjaha…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…reflections on being a clergyperson and an amateur journalist in Ferguson, Missouri following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. Can you talk about your own participation in Black Lives Matter and in Ferguson specifically? I decided to go to Ferguson because I grew up in the ’60s and consider myself a child of the Black Power movement. I’m also a veteran of the United States Army and a mother of a child who was on the gr…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…, the theocratic coalition and the way it carries out its politics has dynamically evolved. “A number of Christian right legal agencies have produced manuals for churches and related institutions, to rewrite such things as job descriptions to extend the legal definition of ‘ministry’ in order to seek exemption from labor standards and civil rights laws, and to inoculate themselves against discrimination lawsuits.” Thus, assumptions most of us have…

Marriage equality and ‘the end of Catholic Ireland’; Gambian Prez vows to slit gays’ throats; Colombian govt affirms support for marriage and adoption; global LGBT recap

By Peter Montgomery

…quality Forum sponsored by Colombia Diversa at Universidad de los Andes. Kenya: Newspaper criticized for naming ‘top gays’ In a move reminiscent of Ugandan tabloids, the Nairobi newspaper Weekly Citizen published a front-page story featuring the names and photographs of “top gays.” Some activists believe the list’s publication is part of a backlash against two recent victories by the LGBT community in Kenya, including successfully securing an apol…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…s about seeing the world as it really is. These thoughts passed through my mind as I sat watching the Dalai Lama talk and smile. it occurred to me how easy the science-religion reconciliation is for him, for his fellow Buddhists, and, in a sense, for myself. It is easy because of the way Buddhists view the world and not because they are able to do any particular mental gymnastics. The Buddhist approach to the science-faith question is not the tort…