Search for "cheap airline tickets to north port phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Dieting, Sex, Jesus: The Body as Moral Battleground

By Lynne Gerber

…when those bodies and desires prove resistant to change. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? That religion is both central to and often invisible in many Western bodily projects. It shapes the moral norms and values which fuel projects of bodily change and its practices provide disciplines that are believed to effect change. And, as in many other areas of life and culture, religious hopes and physical realities are often in a…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…udents are white, down from 36 percent in 1980.” Moreover, as noted in a report by ProPublica, there are a growing number of schools whose white population is 1 percent or less (mostly in the Northeast and Midwest), and roughly 12 percent of black students in the South attend such schools. The tragic plight of impoverished and immobile New Orleanians forced to ride out Katrina in 2005 also serves as a poignant metaphor of what has been a much larg…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…mp retweeted a curious meme of himself playing the violin back in March, a number of critics mocked him for acknowledging that he is like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted for Tiberius instead. This is an undeniable historical er…

Good News: Religious Outreach Works On Vaccine Hesitancy. Bad News: We Need It.

By Daniel Schultz

…e nearly four times [sic] as likely as those who say religion is not too important or not important at all in their lives to agree that God always rewards those who have faith with good health and will protect them from being infected with COVID-19 compared to those who say religion is not too important or not important at all in their lives (29% vs. 8%). A highly effective way to move the very religious toward vaccination might be to convince the…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…e priests who molested children who offer mercy to the victims. It’s the reporters who broke the story and got to know them as individuals who offer reconciliation and healing. Mercy is depicted in our media not as divine intervention, but as human instinct. Moral theologian Thomas Massaro, S.J., told RD that American Catholics “rarely think deeply about mercy at all, much less in the refined ways the pope is articulating.” Massaro adds that part…

The Religious Right Goes Global with “Demographic Winter”

By Kathryn Joyce

…lity” for developed nations (and a figure repeated so frequently it becomes a near incantation). The white Christian West, in this telling, is in danger of forfeiting itself through sheer lack of numbers to an onslaught of Muslim immigrants and their purportedly numerous offspring. In other words, Mosher and his colleagues aren’t really concerned about wolves….

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…Humanist or Atheist chaplains approved for military service, though MAAF reports that there are a number of Atheist and Humanist chaplain assistants. The DOD’s ruling this week may, thus, have a meaningful impact on the free expression of religious identity for the reported 3.6% of service members who are Humanists and allow more diverse access to resources for spiritual care and the development of communities of support. While the decision cert…

The Fretting About Whether Democrats Are “Friendly” To Religion

By Sarah Posner

…ged from August 2008 to August 2009 (56% find it “friendly”). But a more important unanswered question is: why should we care? The thing about these “friendly to religion” polls is we don’t know whether respondents think it’s a good or bad thing for political parties to be “friendly” to religion, nor do we know what the definition of “friendly” is. Are you “friendly” to religion if you go to church or take a call from a lobbyist for the U.S Confer…

Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…g Marches at Belfast’s pride parade chanted calls for marriage equality, reports Pink News: Northern Ireland remains the only part of the UK where it is not legal for same-sex couples to marry. The Northern Irish Assembly backed equal marriage by a vote of 53 to 51 last year – but the DUP [Democratic Unionist Party] used peace process powers to override the democratic process and block equality for a fifth time. Earlier this year the DUP released…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…a higher pedestal than they do animals and the created earth. It’s very important to show them that this is an issue that really affects the welfare of people. That sentiment is one shared by some other folks I spoke with in Houston. I imagine that nuance in how you communicate is especially important in a place like Texas, which doesn’t have as much baked-in care for the environment as, say, a Massachusetts. That’s right. With Harvey, did you ob…