Search for "cheap airline tickets from new york ny to grand rapids mi phone number 1-800-299-7264"

American Jewish Leaders Get Gaza Wrong

By Sarah Posner

…me. The current president of the URJ, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, treated what the New York Times calls a “ferocious assault” with less bellicosity, but still without more than a pro forma empathy for Palestinians (emphasis mine): We have long made clear our distress at the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza targeting Israelis, and just a few weeks ago called on the international community to pressure Hamas to bring an end to the attacks. Instead, the rocke…

What’s So Troubling About Funding a Playground? How Trinity Lutheran Undermines the First Amendment

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…t a brief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the…

Boo! Trump’s Lead With Religious Voters Not As Bigly As You Might Think

By Daniel Schultz

…and his weakest from Hispanics and African-Americans. We’ll talk about the minorities in a minute. Here, let us notice that while Evangelical support for Trump is overwhelming, he’s actually running quite a bit behind Mitt Romney’s 79% and even John McCain’s 73%. He’ll still win the demographic handily, but it won’t do him much good. Trump needs to improve on Romney’s scores with white voters in order to keep up with demographic changes in the US….

Death Without Religion

By Gordon Haber

…er problem is the criteria themselves, which don’t account for states that mimic brain death, like “persistent vegetative state, minimally conscious state, locked-in syndrome, and coma” (thus “the undead” of the book’s title). This is frightening stuff, and it should make us reconsider the trust that we put in the medical community—especially if doctors are harvesting organs from living people. But Teresi’s arguments can be remarkably weak. He rem…

Is Abortion No Longer Significant for Evangelicals — or Has it Just Become Like Water?

By Bradley Onishi

…day send the Roe v. Wade decision to the “ash heap of history.” Now that a new administration and congress are in office, the rise in state laws trying to restrict abortion access seems to reflect fish flailing about in shallow tide pools all of a sudden cognizant of their situation—and fighting to re-enter the water they once took for granted. Burge concludes his article by observing that “The votes of white evangelicals do not turn solely on a w…

Catholic Sex Teaching is No Laughing Matter

By Marian Ronan

…yrocketing. As Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports in the May 28th issue of the New Yorker, more than two-thirds of African countries criminalize consensual acts between persons of the same sex. Even in South Africa, the first country in the world to constitutionally ban discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, anti-LGBT violence is a major problem, with “corrective rape” and murder of lesbians on the upsurge. At the same time that anti-gay…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…essive war against Serbia over Kosovo.” And two weeks ago, International Family News, a right-wing website run by National Organization for Marriage president Brian Brown, ran a piece entitled “Spread the word, resist the ideological colonization” praising Serbia’s violent rejection of EuroPride and framing the Serbian people as heroically standing against the West and its dangerous, sinful worldview. A new Russia, if you will, but made sympatheti…

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

By Daniel Schultz

…ders to say they’ve been vaccinated or intend to be. This could stem from any number of sources: more skepticism of authority, less familiarity with the medical system and particularly the importance of vaccination (today’s twenty-somethings aren’t old enough to remember whooping cough, measles or polio), or because the threat of Covid doesn’t seem as relevant to them as it does other generations. There are other surprises in the study. One of the…

The Religious Right and the Tea Party on “Education Choice”

By Julie Ingersoll

…the must be open to anyone who wishes to attend, though there will be a limit on the number of schools (no more than ten in the next decade) and the number of students enrolled. Opponents see charter schools as quasi-privatized schools (and also fear that this is a first step toward further privatization). They see even these limited charter schools as a threat to funding for public education—especially in these difficult budget years where publi…

LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call For Kindness, Understanding

By Mike Greer

…thern Baptists aren’t quite sure how to relate to gay people. Moore also admitted that Southern Baptists have failed miserably at sustaining and demonstrating healthy marriages and thus are as prone to divorce as the rest of the culture, which may be seen as a nod to critics who question Southern Baptists’ right to make judgments about the legitimacy of gay marriages. Moore also called for all Southern Baptists to “relate to lesbians and gays in a…