Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets from louisville ky to ny phone number 1-800-299-7264

“Giving Godhead”: A Bloody Vision of Religion’s Deepest Influence

…eat scrolls and insist the parchment tastes just like the honey of that many-mansioned heaven in the by-and-by sky. Krieger shows us the bodily as both central to and taboo within that tradition. Something two-faced lurks, these poems suggest, in the way we cry out the word God when we writhe like the damned in hot pits, or how we think of transcending death through the petites morts we tremor through. Our bodies offer both rough bondage and temp…

Read More

After Mumbai: Winning the Global War on Terror

…s clearly a global struggle. The Context This is what happened: an unknown number of gunmen conducted an amphibious invasion of Mumbai and mounted attacks on hotels, cafes, transportation hubs, a police station, and a Jewish cultural center. The ensuing battle lasted more than sixty hours. The gunmen were very well-armed, equipped, and trained, and knew their targets very well. The Hindustan Times quoted an Indian army commando saying: “we found t…

Read More

Recovering From Rejection: The Second Coming of Ted Haggard

…50 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a church in Colorado Springs than the rapid population boom fueled by cheap land that would lead to a new free market Christian…

Read More

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

…ds, and bridges. It is too early to know how many people have died but the number will probably be in the thousands. The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in Uttarakhand right now. Many of the forces that frame daily life in South Asia are suddenly on display like a raw wound: the wages of development and globalization, the power of the natural world, divi…

Read More

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

Read More

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

…lly go on forever, unpredictably. As far as mathematicians can tell, those numbers never settle into any kind of pattern. This numerical lawlessness is quite the thorn in the side of human pattern-loving brains. It’s like peeling back the skin of the universe and finding pure randomness. After the existential surprise dies down, you’re left with confusion. A transcendental number is more unnatural than unicorns or dragons, which are, after all jus…

Read More

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

…fied as AIDS, did not receive ongoing or thorough coverage. By 1982, nearly 800 AIDS cases had been diagnosed. According to one study, infants and children were increasingly infected. Although a threat to the general population was quickly dismissed, the implication was clear: anyone could be infected. The epidemic had exposed social and cultural fault lines that made coverage more than just a medical story. Its initial outbreak in the homosexual…

Read More

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

…s and killings of LGBT people. Uganda: Plight of LGBT refugees examined Tonny Onyulo reported for PRI on the situation of LGBT Ugandans who have sought asylum in Kenya. Homosexuality is also illegal in Kenya, Onyulo notes, “but enforcement of the law has been more sporadic than in Uganda.” Iraq: Activist says anti-LGBT violence sparked by western intervention Amrou Al-Kadhi, an Iraqi living in the United Kingdom, wrote a column this month saying t…

Read More

Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…

Read More

Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…

Read More