Search for "Alaska Airlines 800-299-7264 Customer Service Toll-Free Number"

Women’s Equality in the Church is No Longer Negotiable

By Mary E. Hunt

…especially regular churchgoers, to redirect their giving. There are untold numbers of religious/spiritual non-profits, including women’s religious orders that are good alternatives to the local parish for providing services in the community. If one is conscience stricken about worshipping in a building one does not pay to heat, I suggest either worshipping elsewhere for a while and/or placing a check in the collection made out to the power company…

Ben Carson’s Flat Tax Gets the Bible Wrong

By Sarah Posner

…roposal is based on biblical tithing is a “radical oversimplification in a number of ways,” says a tax lawyer and expert on the tithing concepts described in the Old Testament. Adam Chodorow, a professor of law at Arizona State University, has written extensively on whether flat tax proposals that purport to be based on the biblical system of tithing accurately reflect the systems described in the text—and, significantly, rabbinical interpretation…

Sympathy for the Devils: I Was a Pastor to Trump Supporters

By Daniel Schultz

…or, who resigned suddenly from burnout after years of dedication to social service ministry throughout the city. It left a hole in their faith that nothing could ever quite fill, and cemented their resolve to stamp out change wherever they found it. They were literally not interested in learning to sing a new song. It provoked too much anxiety. None of this is to excuse their behavior, which was often sour, mean-spirited, or entitled. But I knew w…

Irish Vote Reflects Diminished Moral Authority of Catholic Church

By Peter Montgomery

…address the concerns voters on the No side have about the implications for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.” NOM’s Brian Brown praised the Catholic Iona Institute, which took the lead in the “no” campaign, and blamed the outcome on “the increasingly secularized nature of Ireland, together with the utter abandonment of principle by every political party in the nation, all of whom endorsed the referendum.”At Frontiers, Karen Ocamb cast…

Amazing Grace: Obama Hits a Blue Note in Charleston

By Peter Manseau

…very single syllable!” The “Amazing Grace” heard last week at the memorial service of Reverend Clementa Pinckney in Charleston was clearly part of the black church tradition. Barack Obama is no Al Green, but in the words of Questlove from the hiphop soul band The Roots, the president’s rendition included “the blackest blues note ever,” an echo of both the enduring significance of this English hymn to African American culture, and its apocryphal hi…

The Question is: What Kind of Football Does God Fancy?

By Jeffrey Scholes

…the rest of us), all of the Packers effort for 90% of the game was in the service of an 11th hour drama—just as the holy screenwriter drew it up. Two days after the NFC Championship, Rodgers countered Wilson’s theology by quipping, “I don’t think God cares a whole lot about the outcome. He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.” We can read this rejoinder as a classic minimization of the opposing teams’ skill…

#WhoIsBurningBlackChurches: Is It Freedom Summer Again?

By Anthea Butler

…rs of 1995-1998, 670 churches burned, according to the Community Relations Service, and in 1996, the Church Arson Prevention Act was signed by then-President Clinton. In light of the shooting at Emanuel AME and the church burnings, the White House, FEMA and Homeland Security recently held a conference call to help clergy members protect their churches and acquaint them with various governmental resources that churches can use to be “at the ready”…

“I Was a Wild Man”: How to Decode Evangelical Testimony

By Eric C. Miller

…upon which the faithful may project their lives. Common practice in church services, youth groups, camps, and conferences, the sharing of testimony is second nature to life-long evangelicals, and quickly becomes so for new additions to the fold. In almost every case, testimony is modeled on one of two patterns: the story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, or the parable of the Prodigal Son. Either way, the stories depend on a three-part…

Justice v. Revenge: The Question Beneath the Question of Prison Reform

By Xarissa Holdaway

…ion doesn’t sound so different from today’s correctional institutions. The number of mentally ill inmates is on the rise, as public psychiatric institutions lose funding. Buildings are overcrowded and under-maintained. Rehabilitation and substance-abuse programs are chronically underfunded. Debt imprisonment no longer exists, but the burden still falls disproportionately on the marginalized: discriminatory policies throughout the justice system me…

Strangest Hot Take of the Day: Why Evangelicals Like Trump

By Sarah Posner

…ti-immigrant diatribe, but at his weak stances on their key issues. In the service of explaining what there is of an evangelical attraction to Trump (and, as I wrote earlier this week, it is there, although by no means a majority), Brody portrays Trump as a no-holds-barred honest broker and, therefore, victim of the media. That’s why, he says, evangelicals can relate. “Donald Trump operates in a world of absolutes,” Brody writes. “A world of right…