Search for "dirt cheap airline tickets last minute phone number 1-800-299-7264"

The Battle To Define ‘Avatar Spirituality’

By Bron Taylor

…-fairy volume extolling the virtues of the book, rather than a down-in-the-dirt wrestling match between those who resonate with it versus others who hate it, with many others both troubled and moved by it. I played with other titles that got to the notion of Avatar as Cultural Battlefield, but they all ended up too wordy to make a good title. How do you feel about the cover? I like it. The motion picture industry is very territorial about its imag…

How Merle Haggard Saved My Soul

By Daniel Schultz

…d in redemption, whether that was freedom from booze or release from being dirt poor. I owe a lot to that faith, not least of which was my own salvation, in a way. At a time when I was drinking too much and not finding enough direction in life, a friend slipped me a tape of Haggard—among many other country stars—singing gospel. It finally occurred to me one night while smoking a Lucky Strike that I liked the album not just because the music was so…

Can a Church Split Truly Be Gracious?

By Adam J. Copeland

…ensus, the population of Bathgate is 43. No other churches line the town’s dirt roads, though one rather dilapidated bar still stands. It is the only business in town. Even so, Bathgate Presbyterian Church is a lively congregation. Its Sunday School is thriving. The large kitchen has all the modern conveniences. A few years back when the church building needed renovating, the members built a new one themselves. They did a great job. It’s a warm, i…

Rape-Marriage of Nigerian Girls is ‘Biblical Marriage’

By Wil Gafney

…rs of schoolgirls as American slaveowners were by letters scratched in the dirt by the women and men they claimed to own. Enslaved Africans in the Atlantic basin risked their lives, eyes, hands, feet, and tongues to read, as do girls and women all over the world. Literacy is life and liberation. There’s a war on women’s literacy and the combatants are targeting schoolgirls. Just ask Malala Yousafzai who, not coincidentally, has been vocal in her c…

Hicksters, Stickers, and Affection: Why I Left D.C. for the Family Farm

By Timothy King

…p from a stand of trees that had, some of them, been around since our long dirt driveway was the main thoroughfare to Boston. Two weeks after the sugar shack was complete and my mother had begun making broth out of the Thanksgiving turkey bones, I returned to Washington, D.C., and gave notice at Sojourners, the Christian social justice organization where I’d worked for seven years. Two months later, I began the actual journey back home. Forsaking…

The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Ripple’ Is a Spiritual Manifesto

By Jim Burklo

…ers three stories tall loomed over the 7,000 faithful arrayed on sun-baked dirt one hot autumn day in the early 1980s at Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater. From the veritable wall of sound thundered the roars, riffs, crescendos, and diminuendos of The Grateful Dead’s songs and their long exploratory interstices—sound propagating invisibly through the adobe soil, entering the bones of our feet, crawling up our legs, our spines, and into our…

Could a Real Life Jurassic Park Help with Climate Change?

By Michael Schulson

…Arctic tundra ecosystem, promoting botanical diversity and churning up the dirt. In doing so, they helped the permafrost stay frozen, instead of releasing its enormous stores of trapped CO2 into the air. It’s possible, writes Shapiro, that mammoths would “actually slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, and therefore the rate of global warming.” The considerations go beyond cost-benefit analysis, though, and to questio…

The Martyrdom of Cecil the Lion

By Jacob J. Erickson

…road. He walks calmly three feet away from the rover, stops for a good few minutes, breathes deeply, and keeps walking. A chill runs down your spine at this encounter—there is nothing more awe-inspiring and terrifying than a lion’s confidence. (Some of you may recall the incredible photograph Atif Saeed recently took.) Anything can happen between a wild animal and a human in the Anthropocene—it’s not surprising that gods and kings took the beast a…

The Second Coming of Black Jesus

By Jess Peacock

…e he was whitewashed and scrubbed clean of the grime of his mission amidst dirt roads lined with sinners. Black Jesus‘ savior continually references God (“I’m not in charge of the miracles. That’s Pops, man,” “Me and Pops come through all the time. You all, not so much”), while making it clear that God’s priority is on the here and now, about faith transforming this world as opposed to the next. In opening lines of the first episode Jesus greets L…

What If Animals Believe in God?

By Andrew Aghapour

…members cry out and weep. The group eventually covers her with leaves and dirt and stays there for days. How would a trained scholar of religion make sense of that? Mourning is a very sophisticated thing, and it’s already a religious concept. We have a whole literature reflecting on the nature of mourning. Why do we need to mourn the dead? How does that, for example, preserve society? That moment when the elephants gather perhaps echoes something…