Search for "cheap airline tickets from sacramento to san diego phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Celebrate Jesus with Weird Merchandise!

By Gwynne Watkins

…tween the bunnies-and-eggs version of Easter, and the church-service version. Merchandisers are wise to define Easter by marshmallow chicks and colorful baskets, rather than bring theology into it. But there are always exceptions. One is the Oriental Trading Company. Founded to create cheap plastic toys for carnivals, OTC is now a leading supplier of cheap plastic stuff for church groups and Christian schools. Their party supply catalog always con…

“Tell Me What You Believe About Ferguson, and I’ll Tell You What You Believe About God”: A Missouri Pilgrimage

By Anita Little

…eone to see it, for someone to look at something outside of themselves.” A San Francisco native who started out as a youth pastor to at-risk children, McBride now devotes much of his time to combating gun violence and police brutality in Oakland. Ferguson is a sort of mecca for the minister, the birthplace of a new way of resistance and the “most transformative” experience of his life. Before 2014, McBride was not an activist, he explained. He was…

Houston’s Pastor Subpoenas: A Meme Made for Fox News

By Sarah Posner

…e radical nature of Mayor Annise Parker’s commitment to imposing the full “San Francisco Style” Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, etc. agenda. … We have a sin-sick city and we need the power of God through Jesus Christ changing lives and changing City Hall! Conservatives have jumped on the issue as evidence of their long-standing claims of government overreach, government hostility to Christians, and the ultimate result of LGBT rights: infrin…

Union Busting for God: Catholic Colleges Invoke “Religious Freedom” to Violate Catholic Teaching

By Kaya Oakes

…rdileone garnered national criticism for attempting to do just that in the San Francisco diocesan schools, which would have also required teachers to follow a “morality clause,” meaning that they would obey church teachings even outside of the classroom. The San Francisco archdiocese eventually dropped the effort, but reclassifying theology faculty and graduate students in this manner means not only that they’ll be blocked from unionizing, but tha…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…ader. What was the culture of the prison? At night, there was one guard for 800 prisoners. In the Rio prison system there’s no real government presence; state control in the prisons is just a façade. The prison gangs are the most powerful presence, but the church exerts a strong influence too. There were about 400 inmates in the gang camp inside the prison, and 40 to 50 in the church camp. The rest were neutral people who kept to themselves in the…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

…w dozen yards of the riders and take pictures of the scene with their cell phone cameras. Traffic on College Avenue begins to pick up. “You’re protesting God!” a motorist hollers when he catches sight of one of the Soulforce banners. Finally a slender young man wearing a “CBC Soccer” jacket ventures all the way to the sidewalk. “I just kind of want to show them I care,” says Jonathan Jacobs, a junior at the college. Jacobs, whose family moved to C…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…m Seder.” In 1969 it was published in Ramparts magazine, where tens of thousands greeted it with joy: a religion they could share! And on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of Dr. King’s murder and the third night of Passover, we held a Freedom Seder in the basement of a Black church in Washington DC, with about 800 people, Jews and Christians, Black and white. It was not only my engagement with the Jewish text, with all the Jewish texts, that “…

Too Hot for Shul: Rabbis Seek Healthy Israel Dialogue After Gaza

By Sarah Posner

…einart, in a Haaretz column, accused the American Jewish establishment of “sanitizing” Netanyahu’s position. The result of that sanitizing, he argued, will be “exactly the reaction American Jews fear most,” Palestinian abandonment of a two-state vision for a one-state solution. That, Beinart wrote, “would likely mean the end of a country dedicated to Jewish self-protection, and even though a binational state, in practical terms, would likely mean…

Hajj Journal: M & M

By Amina Wadud

…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…

The Theology That Inspired the Poway Synagogue Shooting (and New Zealand) Remains Strikingly Commonplace

By Ivan Strenski

…est boasted online of his March arson attack on a mosque in Escondido, San Diego County. So, Earnest wasn’t prepared to leave matters to Providence here, either, but instead nudged it along by seeking to replace the new Muslim replacers all the while making sure that the long-replaced Jews in Poway stayed securely in place. So however sincere the Earnest family may have been in absolving their religious community of any connection to the Poway att…