Search for "airline tickets to san antonio texas cheap phone number 1-800-299-7264"

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e group did not get a private meeting with Pope Francis, but was given VIP tickets to the pope’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s square. Religion News Service reports that several bishops, including “San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone – point man or the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ battle against gay marriage – had written a letter to the Vatican on their behalf.” A group of LGBT Catholics from London who met up with the New Ways…

The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

By Ben Lorber

…igrant caravan. Across the ideological landscape of Trumpism, there roam a number of such specters—not only “socialists” and Soros, but “globalists” and “Cultural Marxists,” among others—painting a picture of rootless, nefarious forces on a mission to subvert traditional American values. We’ve seen this before. Throughout the 20th century, insurgent far-right movements deployed conspiracy theories about shadowy socialists, cosmopolitan financiers,…

Don’t Call It “Prayer Shaming”: Our Moral Failure Exposed

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…prayer in its myriad forms, how many actually thought about the victims—in San Bernardino, as well as in the other 352 mass shootings that have happened in the U.S. this year? The tragically familiar experience in San Bernardino is not about prayer, but the policies in the U.S. that create virtually unrestrained and unregulated access to firearms and the exacerbated culture of death-dealing. Defenses of prayer can be just another guise for the Rig…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

…search of property records show James and Betty Robison live in a “modest” Texas home appraised by Tarrant County tax-assessors at $742,800. They also own one or more multi-million-dollar homes in Silverthorne, Colo., and have access to their large Robison ministry ranch and lodge in East Texas built with donor money. As I wrote last year, despite Trinity’s extensive investigation, the results of which it provided to the Senate Finance Committee,…

A Muslim Reflects on Christian Theologian (and UCLA Coach) John Wooden

By Amir Hussain

…being old and slow and fat, but I used to be somebody. When I moved to the San Fernando Valley in 1997 to start teaching at Cal State Northridge, I sought out Coach Wooden. That was another of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nel…

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rce to crack down on LGBT people. “They will face the law and heavy social sanctions. They will not be accepted by society,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report s…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

…waste American money to buy their expensive oil when we could have our own cheap oil?” “Why is he trying to make rich people poor?” “How is it right to punish rich people for working hard and realizing the American Dream?” It was late on a Friday night and I was tired, so I half-heartedly responded by explaining that there are other factors to consider in every charged question she’d been armed with. But I wondered, “Why the hell was the Salvation…

Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally

By Sarah Posner

…the answers. Only the Lord does.” Joyce Thompson, who came to Houston from San Antonio with a friend, echoed a persistent theme to me over breakfast at our hotel: that Christianity is somehow under siege from enemies. Thompson, who described herself as a 66-year-old Tea Partier, tearfully said, “I can’t understand people who want to destroy our country.” When I asked her who those people might be, she replied, “It’s a Muslim thing. It’s Satan agai…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…hands-off approach to reported apparitions, at least in the U.S. As a diocesan archivist in Sacramento told me, when I telephoned to ask about a vision event in the Mojave Desert, “it’s nothing we’re trained about.” They get a half-dozen letters or emails every year from folks claiming they’ve seen “Christ in a marshmallow,” he added, and as far as he’s concerned, a report of apparitions is a “non-event.” Perhaps Sacramento isn’t keeping up with p…

Who’s to Blame for BP?

By David True

…those of us whose lifestyles are dependent upon a ‘religious’ devotion to cheap oil. The deepest irony of all is that BP, along with the other oil companies, has come to function as a god. The truth, buried beneath all the oil and punditry, is that our devotion to this false god has led to the suffering of innocents, in the oceans and beaches, in the marshes and ecosystems, and in our communities. We have been slow, too slow by far, to realize th…