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

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…

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…

Where Polls and Surveys Fall Short: A Conversation with Robert Wuthnow on “Inventing American Religion”

By Andrew Aghapour

…s pretty much it. Evangelical leaders themselves didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on convert…

Updated with Response: The Black Church is Dead—Long Live the Black Church

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

…s the racial equalizer. • Sympathy, Frustration and Reform by Edward Blum, San Diego State University I had three emotional responses to Professor Glaude’s recent claims about the “black church” being dead. My first was sympathy. It’s been a rough couple of years for the black church. It and its offspring black liberation theology were blamed for almost derailing the presidential campaign of Barack Obama (and black liberation theology got branded…

Quitting Religion, But Not the Practice of Prayer

By Elizabeth Drescher

…much beyond that. “Do I pray? Sure, you could call it that,” a woman from San Diego who described herself as “almost an atheist” told me. She continued: I sit quietly every so often during the week. I try to calm my thinking. Sometimes I’m hoping for something for myself or someone else, but I don’t have to be. I think that’s what most people mean by “prayer.” It’s not so much about “talking to God” or “saving your soul.” It’s just about settling…

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…

By the Way: Fractured Religious Right Endorses McCain

By Randall Balmer

…ition and Focus on the Family, and Jim Garlow, pastor of Skyline Church in San Diego. Also present were Rick Scarborough, founder and president of Vision America, and David Barton, president of WallBuilders; both men have fashioned entire careers out of their denials that the founders ever intended church and state to be separate entities. The meeting (as reported on the website) contained more than the usual over-the-top Religious Right rhetoric…

Baldwin Brother’s Apocalyptic Comic

By Gabriel Mckee

…e most complex thing about his preachy book The Unusual Suspect are his truly nonsensical extended metaphors. (The one about the football field, the pit bull, the steak, and the herd of cattle—that’s a doozy.) BOOM! will be releasing a preview book at Comicon San Diego later this month. In the meantime, they’ve released the preview issue’s cover and a sample page, which suggests that the book will start involve with some heavy Katrinasploitation….

Judge Rules Law Prohibiting Picketing Outside Military Funerals Unconstitutional

By Julie Ingersoll

…e the trip from the Midwest to the west coast to protests to at Comicon in San Diego where they were met with a mocking counter-demonstration. At issue is the right of families of the deceased to mourn in private against what is clearly political speech—although legal efforts to stop the church’s protests were not raised when the target was gays but only now the target is the families of soldiers. Of course, if you watch South Park (or if you are…