Search for "cheap airline ticket from ict to europe phone number 1-800-299-7264"

LDS General Conference in the “Mormon Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…ave asserted the Christianity of Mormon belief for national audiences, the number one reaction has come from Christians who seek to correct my understanding of my faith and remind me that Mormons are not, in their eyes, Christians. Some assert that they’ll be praying for my mistaken soul (and the soul of my Jewish husband too). Others seek to engage in a friendlier conversational exchange about whether Mormons profess the Nicene Creed. (We do not…

Neuroscience Says Evil is “Over”: Not So Fast…

By Paul Wallace

…ogy does not operate this way. Religion does not make sense as a set of strictly empirical claims. It is most definitely not right there on the page. It is not abstract and self-evident; it is concrete and wholly contextual. In this rather academic sense, scientists and priests are dissimilar. But this is often a distinction without a difference. As has been the case with priests in some times and places, there is in society a great faith placed i…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…pass, cursing unto death those who cannot solve it. Sphinxes also populate European art from the Renaissance on. Gustave Moreau’s 1864 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx is a classic of symbolist art, depicting the Theban king assailed by a feminine monster at once seductive and deadly. The surrealists, including Picasso, were known for engaging mythic imagery, and were particularly intrigued by composite beasts such as the sphinx. Argentine painter…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…erican Psychiatric Association and other mental health groups was a major victory for GLBT activists, making it possible for the first time to even imagine the audience Schumacher-Matos presumes; one that would know enough about these issues to know that homosexuality is not a disease, and orientation change is highly unlikely. Overlooking this history makes it easy to depict this controversy as a simple disagreement and to be surprised by an outp…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ebate but it is between the mental health establishment and a much smaller number of traditionally minded religious therapists. However, even if Spiegel had correctly identified the nature and participants in the debate, she still would not have gotten it quite right. To his credit, Schumacher-Matos does a better job when he reviews material given to him by Spiegel and her editor Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice after chatting and posting naked pictures of himself on social media. According to Gulf News, “Lawmakers, wary of the growing number of gays in the country, have been pushing for a crackdown, including the adoption of tougher immigration measures against expatriate homosexuals and their prompt deportation.” Egypt: ‘The Plight of Homosexuals in Egypt’ We reported last week on the prison sentences given to ei…

The Faith Outreach Canard

By Sarah Posner

…ate. At the Monkey Cage, political scientist John Sides observes that GOP victories in swing districts with Democratic incumbents had other causes: GOP gains had much more to do a simpler fact: when the political winds are blowing against a party, it’s the incumbents in the swing districts that are most likely to be blown out of office. And his colleague Eric McGhee notes that 2010 looks like a reverse of 2006 — when Democrats made big congression…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…stigations and prohibiting any report to civil authorities. Will Pope Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of priests will continue to dwindle. Catholic women will assume more and more administrative and other posts, and the hypocrisy of refusing to ordain…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…es—affirming and not—have inquired about holding screenings and hopes that number will continue to grow. He believes that seeing and hearing these stories can change people’s hearts. He says he was changed in the process of making the movie; getting to know some of the missionaries and IHOP staff as people made it harder to think of them as simply “evil fundamentalists.” And, he says, that after spending so much time with missionary Joanna Watson,…